 |
| Up to 75% less screaming involved. |
Season Five, Serial Seven (production code SS)
Starring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
with Frazer Hines (Jamie) and introducing Wendy Padbury (Zoe)
Written by David Whitaker from a story by Kit Pedler
Directed by Tristan de Vere Cole
Produced by Peter Bryant
Script Editor – Derrick Sherwin
Broadcast Dates, Viewership, Appreciation Figures
- Episode 1 – 27 Apr 1968 (7.2m, 57%) **MISSING**
- Episode 2 – 4 May 1968 (6.9m, 60%) **MISSING**
- Episode 3 – 11 May 1968 (7.5m, 55%)
- Episode 4 – 18 May 1968 (8.6m, 56%) **MISSING**
- Episode 5 – 25 May 1968 (6.8m, 57%) **MISSING**
- Episode 6 – 1 Jun 1968 (6.5m, 62%)
Over the next seven weeks, 8 June–20 July, the BBC re-ran "Evil of the Daleks," weaving it into the narrative as the Doctor replays the events of the story for Zoe to give her an idea of what to expect as a member of the TARDIS crew. After only a two-week break, season six would begin on 10 August with episode one of "The Dominators."
How To Watch
- Streaming on-demand on Britbox, with the four missing episodes re-created using Loose Cannon style reconstructions and extant audio
- Episodes 3 and 6, plus censor clips from missing episodes, are included on the 2004 Lost In Time DVD
- The Loose Cannon reconstructions of the four missing episodes are available here. Please support official BBC releases.
- Not yet released on DVD or BluRay as of October 2025.
- An impressive fan-created CGI animation of the missing episodes was created by Youtuber TardisTimegirl last year
Synopsis
After landing, the Doctor is forced to deactivate the TARDIS when the fluid link fails, removing the time-vector generator and turning the TARDIS into an ordinary Police Box until they can find some replacement mercury. The Doctor and Jamie find themselves on a seemingly empty spaceship, floating derelict. A lone Servo Robot patrols the corridors, unseen, and seals the chamber containing the TARDIS, trapping our heroes on the ship. It then opens the airlock and sends a number of small spheres floating into space. The Doctor is knocked unconscious when the robot activates the engines, leaving Jamie to fend for himself.
The ship is observed by an isolated space station, known as The Wheel. The spheres attach themselves to the exterior of the Wheel and are absorbed. Fearing a collision with the ship, which they identify as the Silver Carrier, the crew of the Wheel are preparing to destroy it when Jamie manages to signal them. They are brought on board, but Wheel commander Jarvis still intends to destroy the ship. Jamie sabotages the Wheel's x-ray laser to save the TARDIS from destruction, but now they are at risk of meteor collisions and any other hostile forces.
The crew encounter Cybermats (which came over via the spheres) which have devoured the Wheel's supply of bernalium, necessary to its function. There is, however, a supply of bernalium on the Silver Carrier, which they bring over, but the crew are subdued by Cybermen who hide inside the shipping container and are brought on board the Wheel. They mind-control several crewmembers to sabotage the Wheel's air supply, to prepare the way for a full occupation of the Wheel by a larger force; a prelude to a full-scale invasion of Earth. Jamie and Zoe, a hyper-intelligent young lady working on the Wheel, risk a meteor shower to space-walk to the Silver Carrier to retrieve the TARDIS's time-vector generator. The Doctor adapts the generator to the x-ray laser, and they destroy the approaching Cybership. The remaining Cybermen are jettisoned into deep space. Zoe sneaks on board the TARDIS, eager for adventure. The Doctor warns her about the dangers she may face.
Blather
This is a dreary slog of a story, though some have a nostalgic fondness for it. It does no credit to the Cybermen, who now apparently hatch out of freakin' eggs (?!!), let the Cybermats do most of the dirty work, focus on mind control over assimilation, and have a ridiculously convoluted Evil Plan that written out makes not one lick of goddamn sense. Swap out the Cybermen for any other hulking alien baddie and nobody would notice. There is nothing intrinsically "cyber" about this story, despite the story being conceived by their co-creator Kit Pedler. David Whitaker stretches the thin plot across six episodes, but even he can't fix this.
Unlike the comparatively careful plotting of a story like "Power of the Daleks" or Wheel's predecessor "Fury From the Deep," where the tension builds over five episodes to deliver a powerhouse finale, one or two episodes' worth of plot happen over five episodes, and a whole lot of plot gets compressed into a final episode. There are only two Cybermen on the Wheel, and apart from a handful more doing a laughable spacewalk toward the airlock doors near the end, there's... not much of a threat, is there? There just isn't much to this story at all. Some Cybermen attempt to overtake a space station, and the Doctor (eventually) stops them.
 |
| Cyber-Mormons want to leave some pamphlets |
The first episode, which is 90% just the Doctor and Jamie on the Silver Carrier, is one of the most pointless moments in the history of Doctor Who. They walk down corridors, they talk about Victoria, they eat from a food machine. And with very little incidental music, it's quiet and contemplative at best, mind-numbingly tedious at worst. This also put a lot of strain on Troughton and Hines as actors, having 95% of the action and dialogue at a time when they were rehearsing and taping one episode a week. Things came to a boil near the end of the production block when episode one of "Mind Robber" similarly was almost entirely the TARDIS trio. Troughton would demand, and get, a less aggressive schedule for the season six production block ("Invasion" to "War Games"), a comparatively breezy 34 weeks compared to the previous block's 46.
It should be noted that Jamie ends up carrying the majority of the action in the first half of the story, given that the Doctor is knocked out midway through episode one, is not in episode two at all (Troughton got a week off while the Doctor was knocked out), and is largely bedridden in episode three. It's Jamie that destroys the Servo Robot, improvises a solution to contact the Wheel, sabotages the laser, and faces the repercussions; he handles it better than most Jacobites from 1745 ever could. Though the question might be raised why he didn't just say, "Hang on a sec, lassie, can ye not take that big blue box outta the Silver Carrier first before ye blow it tae bits?"
The character of Zoe was created specifically to contrast with Jamie, and it's quite inspired. She's as smart as the Doctor, just not particularly worldly, can handle herself in a crisis, rarely needs rescuing, and the two make a cracking pair, even if the next season's batch of scripts aren't all the best. Maybe Victoria was what Jamie wanted (i.e. a damsel to rescue), but Zoe was what he needed.
Director Tristan de Vere Cole took a few liberties with the script, changing character names to give the Wheel a more diverse crew. But diversity at the BBC in the 60's meant, per usual, an uncredited black extra in the background, white guest actors with various specific or generic European accents, and regrettably a white actor with a bit of makeup and a dreadful accent playing a Chinese character (who, incidentally, gets one of the more gruesome fates in Who-dom). Armenian-born actor Kevork Malikyan gets a memorably campy death scene, yet it's another case of the Ethnic Character Dying Early trope that plagued early Doctor Who.
 |
| diverse, but not too diverse... |
Overall, this ranks with "Revenge of the Cybermen" and "Silver Nemesis" as the worst Cyber-stories of Classic Who.
Tidbits
As the script was being developed, the character that would become Zoe was designed to be the new companion. They reached out to Pauline Collins (Samantha from "Faceless Ones") but she declined once again. After a casting call where hundreds of young women auditioned (including Frazer Hines' then-girlfriend Susan George), Wendy Padbury was cast in late February – she turned down a role in the Oscar-winning film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
The original concept involved a collaboration between the Daleks and Cybermen, but Terry Nation declined to let them use the Daleks, while not ruling out a potential return in the future provided he had the right of first refusal in the writing. We would not see an onscreen Dalek/Cyberman adventure until 2006.
And it's all subjective, but I'll never not hear the Doctor say "sexual air supply" instead of "sectional" in episode six.
"The Wheel in Space," while not the last story in the production block, marked the end of Doctor Who's fifth season. The Cybermen supplanted the retired (for the moment) Daleks as the most popular baddies, the Yeti and the Great Intelligence made two memorable appearances, the Ice Warriors made their debut... yet unlike past seasons, this felt like a bit of retrenchment. With some exceptions, this season had a sense of sameness to it. With historicals firmly out of the picture, the fast-paced and low-budgeted production team had to focus on what it could deliver, and there seemed to be much less innovation, imagination, daring and risk-taking (i.e. no Fish People Ballets). Base-Under-Siege stories could rely on fewer sets and smaller casts, and with the slightly less arduous production schedule (studio taping three weeks ahead of broadcast) there was much more location shooting and pre-filming.
Haven't I Seen You...
- Clare Jenkins (Tanya Lernov) also appeared as Nanina in "The Savages," and would briefly reprise Tanya in the final episode of "The War Games"
- Donald Sumpter (Enrico Casali) would later appear as Ridgeway in "The Sea Devils" and Rassilon in "Hell Bent," as well as Erasmus in the Sarah Jane Adventures episode "The Eternity Trap"
- Michael Goldie (Elton Laleham) also appeared as Craddock in "The Dalek Invasion of Earth"
- Kenneth Watson (Bill Duggan) also also appeared as Craddock in the film adaptation, Daleks: Invasion Earth 2150 AD
- Kevork Malikyan (Kemel Rudkin) is also known for his appearance as Kazim in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
- James Mellor (Sean Flannigan) would later appear as Varan in "The Mutants"
- Gordon Stothard (Cyberman) appeared uncredited as a Yeti in "The Web of Fear" and would later appear as Grun in "Curse of Peladon" (credited as Gordon St Clair)
Does the BIPOC Character survive? No (Kemel, if you count him, dies in episode three; Chang in episode four)
Sausage Factor: 82.4% – 14 male actors out of 17 credited guest characters (including Wendy Padbury)
Rating: One and a Half Bernalium Rods out of Four
---
John Geoffrion is a semi-retired semi-professional thespian, a professional data guy, and a Dad. He usually falls asleep to the Classic Doctor Who channel on Pluto.tv
I have Lost in Time and watched the 2 episodes there, but that wasn't enough to really ascertain much about the story.
ReplyDeleteRevenge of the Cybermen was such an odd mess, that I wasn't surprised to find out it was rewritten and had multiple writers working on it. The whole silly vulnerability to gold thing started there, and I am so glad new Who dropped that nonsense, which I felt reached its nadir in 'Silver Nemesis' and the gold arrow nonsense in that story.
Silver Nemesis felt far too Borg-like, and the similarities between the 2 baddies was already too close at times. Smith's dual role was pretty cool, but the rest was dross.
It's too bad this one sounds like a stinker as well. Since Zoe starts here, and Zoe is awesome, I was hoping her debut story would be better. I also loved the servo robot from seeing it in my Doctor Who Technical Manual that I bought so many years ago!