The Wheel in Space

Dear Gary—

The first few minutes of The Wheel in Space have some interesting echoes from the Hartnell years, but with definite Troughton twists. Something is not quite right in the TARDIS, a familiar theme.  The Doctor tells Jamie to look at the Fault Indicator which is located on the control panel. The TARDIS scanner has been showing pleasant places on the screen and not what is truly outside. The Doctor realizes that this is the TARDIS’ way of tempting them away; of warning them to the dangers that await.  

All of this, Gary, sends me back to Edge of Destruction. In that early Hartnell story the TARDIS, too, was warning the crew of the danger they were in. The scanner was showing scenes that were not of the present. And the Doctor and Susan turned to the Faulticator, which at that time was located behind a panel in the TARDIS wall.

Next we have the Fluid Link. This brings us back to The Daleks.  In this story, though, the Doctor is not pretending that the Fluid Link is out of mercury, it really is. Somehow the mercury begins vaporizing. This leads the Doctor to remove the Time Vector Generator which has the effect of shrinking the TARDIS down to the size of an ordinary police box (shades of The Time Meddler when the Doctor shrinks the Monk’s TARDIS). If he didn’t, the Doctor tells Jamie by way of explanation, the mercury vapors would have overwhelmed them. He then offers Jamie a lemon sorbet from a bag he takes out of his pocket. Hartnell was known on occasion to pull chocolate from his pocket, and of course this links forward as well, but let’s not digress too much.

Now the Doctor and Jamie are in search of mercury (you’d think the Doctor would have learned by now to carry an extra store of mercury on board the TARDIS). This leads them eventually to the wheel in space of our title, a space station observing phenomena in deep space. And it leads them smack into—not Daleks this time—Cybermen.

 The Cybermen and Daleks have been in heavy rotation during these Patrick Troughton years. What I find curious, though, is the inconsistent knowledge humans seem to have of the Cybermen. Their first appearance in Doctor Who takes place in the year 1986. The next few times they appear, the humans the Doctor meets know of the Cybermen but state that they have been extinct for hundreds of years. Now here we are in the 21^st Century and the humans have no knowledge at all of Cybermen—never even heard of them. Curious.

Zoe, at least, is well informed on cybernetics and can readily understand and believe the Doctor when the others can’t comprehend.  Zoe, a fitting new companion for the Doctor and a fitting story in which to introduce her.

Zoe doesn’t want to be a robot. She gets accused of it throughout The Wheel in Space and she doesn’t like it. “I don’t want to be thought of as a freak.  . . . My head’s been pumped full of facts and figures which I reel out automatically when needed, but, well, I want to feel things as well.” Later she states, “I’ve been created for some false kind of existence where only known kinds of emergencies are catered for.”  She doesn’t like this “blind reliance on facts and logic.”

Zoe is almost like a Cyberman in training, but she rebels against it, and lucky for her she meets up with the Doctor. “Logic, my dear Zoe,” he tells her, “only enables one to be wrong with authority.” “Simple common sense” can work wonders. Common sense, independent thought, an open mind—all things counter to the cyber brain and all things the Doctor celebrates.

“Are there any ordinary circumstances in space?” the Doctor queries.  It is the extraordinary that must be accounted for, and it is the extraordinary that a cyber brain can’t comprehend. In discussing Controller Jarvis, a man showing distinct signs of rigidity of thought, a man “who can’t accept phenomena outside the laws of physics,” the Doctor states, “One does wonder what a man like that will do when faced with a problem for which he has no solution.” The Doctor always has a solution. The Doctor can accept phenomena outside of physics; he can abandon logic for common sense.

The Doctor is an anti-Cyberman, and he is just the one to pull Zoe out of the “all brain and no heart” rut she finds herself in.

At the beginning of The Wheel in Space Jamie was despondent over the loss of Victoria. He “couldn’t care less” where they went. Zoe should shake him out of this lethargy.

Hopefully, Gary, this next story will shake me out of my lethargy of reconstructions. At last I have a full story to look forward to. I know there are still reconstructions to come, but the end is in sight. And while I’ll be sad to see the end of Troughton, I’m sure the upcoming Doctors will shake me up sufficiently.

But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, Gary.