The Wheel In Space
After leaving Victoria on Earth, the Doctor and Jamie find themselves aboard a drifting spacecraft. A fault in the TARDIS’ mercury fluid link creates a dangerous malfunction, which the Doctor resorts to drastic measures to stop, removing the timeship’s time vector generator and folding down its internal dimensions until it literally is a police box. The Doctor is knocked out as the spacecraft lurches suddenly, leaving Jamie on his own. When the ship comes dangerously close to space station W3, the station’s commander prepares to blast the ship out of the sky, over his crew’s objections. Jamie manages to signal the space station, which sends astronauts across to retrieve the two time travelers, who find themselves hard-pressed to explain their presence. The ship is millions of miles off course and shouldn’t have been anywhere near W3 at all. When a Cybermat appears, the Doctor realizes that the Cybermen can’t be far behind – and they’ve used the ship to smuggle themselves aboard the wheel. But what is the Cybermen’s real goal?
written by David Whitaker
from a story by Kit Pedler
directed by Tristan de Vere Cole
music by Brian Hodgson and the BBC Radiophonic WorkshopGuest Cast: Freddie Foote (Servo-Robot), Eric Flynn (Ryan), Anne Ridler (Dr. Corwyn), Clare Jenkins (Tanya Lernov), Michael Turner (Bennett), Donald Sumpter (Enrico Casali), Kenneth Watson (Duggan), Michael Goldie (Laleham), Derrick Gilbert (Vallance), Kevork Malikyan (Rudkin), Peter Laird (Chang), James Mellor (Flannigan), Jerry Holmes, Gordon Stothard (Cybermen), Peter Hawkins, Roy Skelton (Cybermen voices)
Notes: Portions of this episode were destroyed by the BBC in the early 1970’s; the two surviving episodes appear on the Lost In Time DVD set. This episode marks the first appearance of the Doctor’s nom de plume, “John Smith”, which would be used more frequently in the Pertwee era and would reappear in everything from the 1996 TV movie through David Tennant’s tenure. Jamie coined the name in a bit of a pinch, and perhaps as a payback, the tenth Doctor instead uses the alias “James McCrimmon” during a visit to Scotland in Tooth And Claw. Zoe joins the TARDIS crew in this story, and the end of episode six the Doctor sets up a device to replay a recent adventure with the Daleks to her, which was an inspired way to lead into a rare rerun (in this case, The Evil Of The Daleks). This marked the final appearance of the Moonbase-style Cybermen; in their next appearance, in The Invasion, they would undergo a major redesign.
Broadcast from April 27 through June 1, 1968
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green
Long after her travels with the Doctor and Jamie ended, and after the Time Lords wiped her memory and returned her to her own timeline, Zoe Herriot experiences disturbing memories of meeting the Doctor. She also remembers him showing her one of his terrifying adventures with the Daleks, and his subsequent reassurances that he had rendered the metal monsters extinct. But in her first trip in the TARDIS, Zoe and her friends find themselves embroiled in interplanetary politics, captured and used as pawns in a conspiracy to sabotage a peace conference. But as if that wasn’t bad enough, Zoe comes face to face with the very terrors that the Doctor said were no more.
The Doctor’s worst fears are confirmed when he and Jamie are accosted by white robots: they are once again trapped in the Land of Fiction, where fictional characters come to life, but very real damage can be inflicted on visitors fromo outside Fiction. The Artful Dodger comes to the time travelers’ aid, but only when they encounter this character’s cohort do they realize who the real enemy is: Oliver Twist has been converted by Cybermen. The metal giants, trapped in the Land of Fiction by an intelligence that has yet to reveal itself, are laying siege to this dimension and converting the characters inhabiting it. Alice in Wonderland and Dracula have been drafted into service as soldiers, and Captain Nemo and the Nautilus are joining in the fight when it’s convenient to them. But none of them are fighting to defend any kind of real space. Another of the Doctor’s former companions – Zoe – appears and reveals that she is behind the Cyber-war over the Land of Fiction. But when she tells the Doctor how both the Cybermen and the Time Lord were drawn into the Land of Fiction, the Doctor realizes that the turf being fought for so viciously is the mind and soul of his companion.
