The Wheel in Space

The Doctor and his companions arrive on an isolated base to find that the Cybermen are back. The villainous cyborgs plan to use a human invention to destroy the world. Yes, those are the exact same two sentences I used to start my review of The Moonbase. We have another base-under-siege story, but this time it is written by David Whitaker. Not all of Whitaker’s stories have been successful, but I always considered him to be too good a writer to produce something truly awful. Then I saw this story.

The Cybermen enact yet another dastardly plan. Are you ready? The cybermats infiltrate the Wheel, and then two Cybermen awake on the rocket (called Silver Carrier, geddit?). A star is destroyed, sending meteorites towards the Wheel. The cybermats eat the bernalium used to power the ‘X-ray laser’. The Cybermen stow away in crates of bernalium and are taken on board the Wheel. The Cybermen use the Wheel to guide their fleet to Earth.

Why are the Cybermen able to locate a space station, but not a planet? Why do they not just take the Wheel by force, rather than enacting a ludicrously complicated plan that can only succeed if the laser is sabotaged? I don’t point out every scientific error in the programme, but the ones in this story are just too stupid to ignore, in particular the Cybermen causing a supernova to shower the Wheel with meteorites, which is one of the most jaw-droppingly stupid things the programme has ever done, both scientifically and plotwise. If the Wheel is in the Solar System (as is implied) it will take years for the light from the supernova to reach the station. Any meteorites will take millennia to reach the Wheel, that is, presuming it is in exactly the right position, anyway. It’s like planning to kill someone on Hampstead Heath not by going up to them and stabbing them, or using a sniper, but by blowing up Ibiza the previous week and hoping a piece of it hits the target. Why not just shuttle some large rocks around and shoot them at the station if they want to be sneaky about it?

Apart from the idiocy of the Cyber-plan, the story itself is a demonstration on how not to plot a Doctor Who adventure. The pacing is terrible- episode 1 is basically a set of longueurs stitched together with some arresting images, and no attempt is made to build tension or make character react to plot (or vice versa). In places, the dialogue has a touch of the Whitaker magic, but is mostly awful. The characterisation is sloppy- only Tanya and Leo are believable as people. It consistently insults the viewers’ intelligence time and time again. The only thing that convinced me that Whitaker had anything to do with it was the fact that his bizarre obsession with mercury cropped up again.

On the plus side, it is nice to look at. The sets, costumes and model shots are great and Tristan de Vere Cole sets up some nice shots. The scene of the Cybermen hatching from eggs is memorable and the lost scene showing cybermat spheres infiltrating the Wheel certainly sounds impressive. He fails in directing the actors in some scenes - Kevork Malikyan seems to be doing a crab impression when his character dies- and the Cybermen don’t so much space walk as space mince. However, the performances are far better than the script deserves, with special credit to Anne Ridler, who manages to retain her dignity throughout. The Cybermen have had another makeover, being marginally more effective, visually, than in their previous two stories. Their new voices are, however, rubbish, and there are only two of them for most of the story.

Troughton and Hines work their usual magic and Zoe makes a very memorable début- in fact it is for Wendy Padbury’s performance that this story is worth sitting through at all, making her a fascinatingly sparky character, just the socially functional side of autistic. This is the worst Cyberman story so far which, considering that none have actually been good, is really saying something.

NEXT: The Dominators