Doctor Who A-Z #43: The Wheel in Space (1968)

The idea that Doctor Who is primarily a show about monsters has its discontents, but the story of 1960s Doctor Who is, inarguably, the story of the show becoming more monster-obsessed. At its inception, co-creator Sydney Newman insisted that the show should not be about monsters at all; by Season Five it’s about very little else. The person who started the ball rolling was the show’s first script editor, David Whitaker, who overrode Newman’s objections to commission Terry Nation to write The Daleks. Four years later, Nation would temporarily suspend the show’s right to use his creation, and Whitaker was tasked with writing a script designed to conclude their story.

It didn’t work, but it could have. Nation felt the Daleks had outgrown the show, but in a purely narrative sense the show had outgrown the Daleks. Part of the Daleks’ function in the Hartnell years was to display a kind of unrelenting evil that forced the Doctor to become less of a wanderer and more of a hero; by the time Patrick Troughton took on the role, that transformation was complete, so they were no longer needed. The fannish part of me wishes Troughton had faced the Daleks more often, if only because the two stories in which he did were so good. At the same time, it’s not heretical to argue that, at this point in the show’s history, they wouldn’t have offered anything that couldn’t have been supplied by the throng of other monsters jockeying to replace them.

Presumably Whitaker was hired to write The Wheel in Space because of symmetry: the man who wrote out the Daleks last season now returns to anoint the Cybermen as the show’s new primary villain. This is superfluous, because the audience have already embraced the Cybermen, thanks in large part to the first story of this season. It’s true that The Wheel in Space is the least essential of the 1960s Cyberman stories, and all the reasons you’ve heard are correct: too long, too slow, and for a supposedly logical race the Cybermen’s plan is full of holes. I suspect it would be more well-regarded if more of its episodes were rediscovered, because Tristan de Vere Cole does a fantastic job directing the ones we do have. The first episode, which is mostly told without dialogue, is a particularly fascinating experiment. Equally, though, the guest cast includes quite the most bewildering array of accents ever heard on the series, to the extent where I’m unsure what several actors were even aiming for. The decision to schedule Patrick Troughton’s holiday in the second episode is also a problem; it means we’re not introduced to the Wheel’s crew through the Doctor’s eyes, and as a result they never quite feel like part of the same story.

Let’s take that as read, and try to concentrate instead on what Whitaker sees in the Cybermen that makes them worthy of being the show’s new principal monsters. The narrative function of a monster is to show the hero an attitude, emotion, or belief system in such a concentrated way that the hero must display their own values by coming out against it. In the Daleks’ case, this was hate. For the Cybermen, it’s logic, which is an unusual thing for a science fiction serial to argue against. But what is the main difference between William Hartnell’s Doctor and Patrick Troughton’s? The simplest answer is that Troughton reads as less of an authority figure; for all Hartnell could be mischievous, subversive or anti-authoritarian, his successor took that elements and made it the core of his characterisation. If your aim is to establish this attitude in a hero, the Cybermen are an excellent monster to pit him against.

Admittedly this doesn’t come through as well as it should, for the aforementioned reason that the Cybermen are the coldly logical race most likely to act like complete idiots. But seen through this lens, a lot of the serial’s decisions make sense. There aren’t many Doctor Who serials where the guest cast spend this much time flirting with each other; even the Doctor seems rather taken with Anne Ridler’s Dr. Corwyn. In this context, the Cybermen come through less like the militaristic force they’re often reduced to and more like the Horny Police. Frankly, it’s a good job the Doctor doesn’t get many scenes with them. If he tried to make an Earthshock-like defence of human pleasures to them in this company, he certainly wouldn’t be talking about sunsets and well-cooked meals.

And, more seriously, the serial doesn’t reject reason when it’s tempered with compassion. We hear idle chatter of how rare it is to see a spaceship explode nowadays, implying that the Wheel’s crew live in a time when humanity has found better, more reasonable ways to solve problems than war. And there is, of course, the small matter of the ship’s astrophysicist Zoe Herriot. Her crewmates dismiss her as an emotionless human computer, in terms that explicitly parallel how the Doctor describes the Cybermen. But that’s not what we see; we see a sweet, sensitive, baby-faced young woman who worries about how other people see her, and in the end proves more than human enough to earn her place on board the TARDIS. The classic series’ writers famously often struggled with clever companions, but Zoe manages to maintain her intelligence throughout her tenure, and part of that is because Whitaker sets up such a good template for future writers here. You have Jamie representing experience, Zoe representing education, and the Doctor mediating between the two.

Next: The Dominators (1968)

Graham’s Archive – The Wheel In Space

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