By Jessica Holmes

Here we are at the end of another serial and another series of Doctor Who. For sure, it’s had its ups and downs, but does the series end on a high note? Let’s look at the ending of Doctor Who: The Wheel In Space.

EPISODE FOUR

With the astronauts mind controlled, the next stage of the Cybermen’s operation can go ahead. Inadvertently helping them is Jarvis, whose reluctance to listen to reason has turned into pathological denial. Even when confronted with incontrovertible evidence of the threat, he simply refuses to see it. This comes in handy when the Cybermen try to Trojan-horse their way aboard the Wheel in a crate of bernalium.

When things immediately start going very badly aboard the Wheel he sinks into a catatonic state and ceases to have any bearing on the plot, leaving it to Corwyn to pick up the slack. She has the good sense to listen to the Doctor when he suggests putting up a force-field around the operations room to protect it from the Cybermen.

The Cybermen waste little time killing some of the crew and mind-controlling others. They take over the workshop and see to it that the engineers restore the laser to full working order, before ordering one of them to go up to the operations room, infiltrate it, and wreck the outbound communications equipment—killing himself in the process.

Zoe, meanwhile, realises that the meteorite storm will hit them sooner than anticipated, reporting to Corwyn in her usual matter-of-fact manner. Corwyn questions her on her seeming coldness, but it seems it’s really just a case of a miscommunication. Zoe was trained to prioritise the cold hard facts of a situation over her emotional reaction to it. For space exploration it makes perfect sense. You want someone who can work the problem, not someone who runs around like a headless chicken the moment things go wrong.

There’s a parallel being drawn here between Zoe, who has had the emotions trained out of her, and the Cybermen, who have had theirs programmed out. Unfortunately the serial doesn’t really do anything with it. As of the end of the serial, her rationality has been neither a help nor a hindrance. It’s just a trait that people around her are treating as inherently bad. So, she’s a little different. So what?

Upon learning that the astronauts have brought a cache of bernalium back to the Wheel, the Doctor is quick to realise that the Cybermen are on board the station. It’s too late for the chaps down in the workshop, but as for the others the Doctor gets everyone to make small shields to wear on the back of the neck. They’ll block the mind control waves.

I’m not entirely clear on why they had to go and check that yes, the Cybermen did indeed come aboard in the bernalium crate, but the Doctor and Jamie head down to the cargo bay all the same. They find the false-bottomed crate the Cybermen smuggled themselves in. And then they hear the heavy footsteps of an approaching Cyberman…

EPISODE FIVE

The handy thing about not being able to move their necks is that this generation of Cybermen are really easy to sneak past. The Doctor and Jamie do just that. They get back to the operations room to discover that the meteorite storm is heading for them a lot faster than previously anticipated.

Fortunately, the Cybermen are kindly supervising the effort to repair the laser. By this point the Doctor is pretty sure that the Cybermen are after something more than destroying the Wheel, but can’t figure out what.

Zoe starts fretting over her lack of ability to think on her feet, feeling rather useless. Her training emphasised rote memorisation of facts and figures over developing critical problem-solving skills; another Cybermen parallel, and this one feels deserved. This whole time, the Cybermen we see on screen haven’t actually been coming up with their own plans. They aren’t programmed for that. A Cyber-Planner has been feeding them instructions.

This is a pretty interesting facet of the Cybermen, this emphasis on conformity and following orders. They don’t seem capable of creative thought. In a way it serves as a strength, enabling them to cooperate without butting heads over differing opinions or succumbing to infighting. On the other hand, it’s probably also their greatest weakness, and the thing that lets the Doctor defeat them time and time again. It’s pretty troubling to think that apparently back on Earth, young minds are being trained to behave in this way. What kind of society does Zoe come from?

The Doctor has an idea for stopping the Cybermen, but he needs the Time Vector Generator, which he seems to have dropped at some point. Jamie is going to have to go back to the rocket ship with Zoe in order to fetch it. I don’t know, has he tried having a rummage through the lost and found?

With the laser back in working order, the Cybermen have no further need for the station’s crew. Well, except for a stooge, whom they order to poison the ship’s oxygen supply. However, Corwyn happens to be in the right place at the right time to overhear them, and she uses the video comms to warn the Doctor. Sadly for Corwyn, the Cybermen catch her, and the Doctor gets a front-row seat to her death.

EPISODE SIX

Despite the kids still being out in the vacuum of space, the Wheel goes ahead and starts blasting away the incoming asteroids. The Doctor is of course horrified, but as one of the crew points out, he’s the one who sent Jamie out there. Luckily, they only hit the space rocks and not our favourite Scot.

The Doctor informs the crew about Corwyn and warns them to swap to the backup oxygen supply, thwarting the Cybermen’s plans.

Oh, and Jarvis is dead. He decided to go walkabout and walked right into a Cyberman.

With their plot gone to pot, the Cybermen realise that someone on the station must have advance knowledge of their methods, and start investigating the personnel on board the station. They soon know the source of their difficulties: the Doctor. They need to deal with him.

But they’ll need to lure him out first. They have a mind-controlled minion give the operations room a call. He claims that he’s managed to trap the Cybermen in the workshop and is heading up to the operations room. This will give the Doctor the opening he needs to fetch the spare radio components from storage so as to repair the Wheel’s outgoing communications.

Yes, the plots in this serial are rather convoluted, aren’t they?

Jamie and Zoe overhear this from the control room of the wheel, which for some reason is still receiving communications from the Cyber Planner. Don’t they know you should turn off your appliances before heading out? Going to have an electrical fire if you’re not careful.

However, the Doctor is a smart cookie, noticing the stooge’s monotone delivery and dead-behind-the-eyes expression, and warns the others to grab him when he gets to the forcefield and put a shield on him. At least someone’s paying attention.

The Doctor makes it down to the storage room all right, and finds some convenient mercury for the TARDIS before grabbing some equipment for his plan. He had better hurry. Another ship has appeared: a massive Cyberman invasion ship carrying a fleet of smaller vessels.

Jamie and Zoe return to the Wheel, coming across Corwyn’s body on their way back to the operations room.

The Doctor gets in contact with the crew, very relieved to see that Jamie is alive and well. Mostly because he likes Jamie, but also because Jamie has the TVG and the Doctor really needs it right now.

While Jamie heads down to meet the Doctor, the Cybermen pay a visit to their old friend.

The Doctor greets his guests quite civilly, and over the course of the conversation pieces together the entirety of the Cybermen’s plan.

Are you ready? Here we go.

Step One: Commandeer a rocket ship, set it adrift, use it to deliver cybermats to the Wheel, wait while they destroy the Wheel’s laser and bernalium supply. Get lucky when Jamie wrecks the laser for you.

Step Two: Blow up a distant star to create a tsunami of asteroids, despite the fact that space is definitely far, far too big for this to actually work. (If you have the technology to blow up a star, why in the world are you bothering with all this other faff?)

Step Three: Assume that rather than evacuate, the crew of the wheel will recklessly board your rocketship to look for bernalium to repair their laser.

Step Four: Smuggle yourselves on board in a crate, then hypnotise some crew to repair the laser so that the Wheel doesn’t actually get destroyed.

Step Five: Hypnotise one guy into destroying the Wheel’s outbound communications. He did it in a pretty haphazard way, so you’re lucky that the inbound comms still work.

Step Six: Kill the crew via a method that is quite easily averted by switching to the supplementary oxygen supply.

All this, so that the incoming invasion fleet can follow the radio signals from Earth, without which they can’t enter Earth’s atmosphere for…reasons. You mean to tell me that these supposedly ‘superior’ beings somehow have the ability to blow up distant stars but can’t calculate their own orbital trajectories and re-entry angles? We have people on Earth right now who can do that by hand!

So yes, this excessively convoluted plan serves more or less to turn the Wheel into a big signpost so the invasion fleet doesn't get lost.

Still, Troughton is really great in this scene. I love when he gets to come face to face with a villain. He has this air of being scared but trying very hard not to show it, with a slightly trickster-ish undercurrent of having a card hidden up his sleeve. The scripts may disappoint me, but Troughton never does.

And the Doctor does indeed have a trick up his sleeve, as he invites the Cybermen to destroy him…only to activate a trap. The first Cyberman steps right into an energy field, electrocuting it. The other stays back, but cannot get near the Doctor, and so leaves to await reinforcements. It’s the best bit of the serial.

Jamie then arrives with the TVG, and the Doctor can finally save the day. He plugs it into the ship’s laser in order to amplify the beam from the TVG, while Jamie goes to head off the incoming army of Cybermen approaching the cargo bay. He subdues the one Cyberman still on board with quick-set plastic, but the others are attempting to breach the cargo bay doors.

The Doctor finishes augmenting the laser, which fires on the Cybermen’s ship, blasting it to smithereens. As for the invading Cybermen, the crew of the Wheel activate a forcefield, repelling them from the cargo bay doors and out into the void.

I wonder how long they can survive out there?

Another enemy defeated, the Doctor and Jamie head back to the TARDIS, but they have a stowaway. Zoe wants to go with them. However, the last teenage girl the Doctor took with him ended up traumatised from her experiences. Is Zoe sure she can handle it?

To test her, the Doctor plugs himself into a device that displays his memories on a screen. He decides to start by showing her the Daleks…

Final Thoughts

Dear, dear, dear. This is not the ending I hoped for for this episode, nor for the current series as a whole. It’s proved to be a prime example of the mortal sins that have plagued this serial: it is badly paced, uninspired, and frankly boring. It doesn’t even use the Cybermen to their full potential, instead flattening them down into generic alien invaders. So, two stars for this one.

Zoe has some potential as a companion, I think. It might be interesting to have a girl around who can keep up with the Doctor’s wits. I like her, at any rate.

Perhaps after a little break the team behind Doctor Who will be able to come up with some fresh stories, but if they can’t, then I have real worries about the longevity of the programme. Doctor Who has a unique opportunity to be potentially unending—as long as there are always new stories to tell.