The Wheel in Space

After leaving Victoria, the Doctor and Jamie find themselves in trouble as the TARDIS breaks down in space. The Doctor averts disaster by removing the time vector generator from the ship while it repairs itself, and he and Jamie find themselves on a rocket in deep space. The rocket has drifted towards one of Earth's outer defence stations, where a crew of scientists are constantly on guard against meteor showers that threaten the solar system. Once on board, though, the Doctor and Jamie discover Cybermats have infested the Wheel, and the Cybermen are not too far behind in another attempt to invade the Earth.

Again, another 6 part adventure but with a very simple plot. And not that many Cybermen, really; an advance party of two is all it takes to get the Cybermats into action and begin the subversion of order on the Wheel by taking control of the minds of the technicians. The advance party are in contact with their new leader, the Cyber Planner, which is not even a Cyberman but a brain in the middle of a mechanical apparatus - another example of the evolution of the Cybermen. The Cybermen themselves have changed again since their last appearance in Tomb of the Cybermen, their heads are redesigned and their hands still have only three fingers but they are more mechanical looking. A new sort of Cyberman war cruiser is seen in episode 6 as well. This makes the third time the second Doctor encounters them, and the fourth in the series as a whole; their appearance rate is something like twice a season now, which is something even the Daleks never had. Perhaps with Terry Nation having taken away his creations the big push was on to create a new menace in their place, and they do quite well.

A new companion named Zoe Herriot joins the TARDIS crew at the end of the adventure after helping deal with the Cybermen. Zoe is a computer programmer and analyst but somewhere in her training a bit of her humanity has been repressed. She is not completely without emotions like the Cybermen themselves, but she does have a tendancy to spit out the facts regardless of how disturbing the people around her may find them. By her own admission she does want to feel things and experience emotions, and attempting to stow away on board the TARDIS seems like just the ticket. Jamie immediately forms a bond with her based on teasing her when her knowledge does not cover everything she encounters, and she in turn is condescending towards him when his own lack of smarts gets him in trouble. The Doctor is patient with Zoe when she rambles about logic, teling her that logic is just a way to be wrong with authority, but he takes her along willingly at the end, perhaps seeing the real person within trying to get out. And to brace her for what is to come, he re-tells the events of The Evil of the Daleks, which would be the first ever rerun on BBC 1 of Doctor Who.

The Wheel in Space is another of the incomplete stories, with episodes 3 and 6 restored on the Lost in Time DVD collection. The rest makes for entertaining audio on a BBC Radio Collection CD, but this time the narration is provided by Wendy Padbury, who played Zoe herself.

With the TARDIS crew back up to capacity, season five closes, and mere weeks away would be the start of season six, and a series of events that would drag a lot of the Doctor's past out into the open...

NEXT EPISODE : THE DOMINATORS