Synopsis:
On the Wheel, Commander Jarvis Bennett tells his crew that they are about to witness a rare event - the destruction of a vessel in space...
The X-ray laser is ordered to be made ready as attempts to contact the drifting rocket continue to prove negative.
Dr Gemma Corwyn wishes to have a private word with Bennett first, urging caution - but he is determined to proceed.
Unaware of this threat, Jamie attempts to signal with a light - but pulls the cable too far and the crew cabin is plunged into darkness. He then notices a glow beside the comatose Doctor and realises that the Time Vector Generator may be able to attract the attention of those on the nearby space station instead. He aims it out of a porthole in the direction of the Wheel.
He is unaware of its power, however, and this is received as a burst of deafening radio static interference by the communications crew. One radio operator - Rudkin - is rendered unconscious by it.
However, as Jamie covers and uncovers the device, they see a man-made pattern emerging and realise that there may be someone alive on the Silver Carrier after all.
Two crewmen are sent to investigate the rocket, spacewalking over to it. Jamie welcomes them and tells them of the injured Doctor.
A short time later Jamie is being examined by Gemma whilst the Doctor lies in the medical bay. Crewman Chang reports to Leo Ryan that there have been a number of small magnetic anomalies detected along the Wheel's hull, followed by momentary drops in air pressure. Leo discusses these with Tanya Lernov, telling her that Bennett has dismissed them out of hand.
They then speculate about the two strangers.
After giving Jamie a full medical check-up, Gemma offers to let him look around the Wheel. She sends him to the Parapsychology Library where he will find someone named Zoe. After he leaves, she contacts Zoe and lets her know he is on his way, and that she should study him discreetly. She has concerns about him which she will take to Bennett.
Jamie finds the library and meets Zoe, a diminutive girl with dark hair. She is just completing a report about a star going nova in the Messier 13 group, following a similar event in the Perseus cluster the week before. She calculates the effect this will have in terms of radiation and other factors.
She finds Jamie's outfit amusing.
They begin their tour, starting with the Power House which is presided over by Bill Duggan. He has an interest in flora, and has plants grown from seeds which have floated through space from Venus.
A glass dome covers a complex piece of equipment and Duggan explains that this is their X-ray laser, without which the Wheel would be relatively defenceless. Anti-magnetic field generators can repel small items of space debris, but anything larger would smash through.
Gemma explains her concerns to Bennett. Jamie gave a false name for his companion - read off a piece of medical equipment, she noted. He also declined a glass of water - something a trained astronaut would never do as they always took advantage of any air and water offered to them. Additionally, his blood chemistry does not support that of someone who has been in space for any length of time.
She suspects he may be a stowaway, but Bennett thinks more likely an agent or saboteur. There exists a "Pull Back to Earth" faction, opposed to space travel and exploration. He dislikes any sort of mystery and this fits with his own ideas about how the Silver Carrier came to be so far off course.
Jamie's tour takes them next to the main communications room, where he learns that the rocket is scheduled for destruction by the laser as soon as the Commander gives the order. Concerned at this news, he slips out of the room before Bennett arrives looking for him. On learning he had just visited the Power House, he has Duggan follow him there.
Tanya tells Leo of a strange intuition she has about the rocket - there is something sinister about it...
On the Silver Carrier, reacting to a prearranged signal, two large egg-like pods begin to glow with energy and huge bipedal figures begin to stir within each.
A three-fingered metal hand smashes out of one...
Written by David Whitaker (from a story by Kit Pedler)
Recorded: Friday 12th April 1968 - Television Centre Studio TC3
First broadcast: 5.15pm, Saturday 4th May 1968
Ratings: 6.9 million / AI 60
VFX: Bill King & Trading Post
Designer: Derek Dodd
Director: Tristan De Vere Cole
Additional Cast: Kenneth Watson (Bill Duggan), Michael Goldie (Elton Laleham), Derrick Gilbert (Armand Vallance), James Mellor (Sean Flannigan), Kevork Malikyan (Kemel Rudkin), Peter Laird (Chang), Jerry Holmes (Cyberman)
When it came to creating the new female companion, Peter Bryant and Derrick Sherwin looked to have her as different from Victoria Waterfield as possible. The new companion would be from the future rather than the past, and have considerable scientific knowledge. Despite this, she would still be young and inexperienced. As mentioned last time, it was writer Peter Ling - then developing The Mind Robber - who suggested the name Zoe, which Sherwin accepted.
Work to find the next companion began in January 1968. Frazer Hines attempted to get his then girlfriend Susan George the part, but Peter Bryant was attempting to get Pauline Collins back into the series in a regular role. She had previously played Samantha Briggs in The Faceless Ones. However, she still wasn't interested in a long-running TV role at this time.
Bryant saw more than a hundred actresses, some of whom were then invited to Lime Grove to give readings. Wendy Padbury was finally offered the role on Tuesday 27th February. She had been up for another part at the same time - as a schoolgirl in the film adaptation of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - but turned that down as she wanted to work with Patrick Troughton, after seeing him play Mr Quilp in the 1962/3 BBC TV adaptation of The Old Curiosity Shop. (Coincidentally, her first TV appearance had been playing Little Nell in the arts series Monitor).
She had previously appeared in a stage production with Deborah Watling and, at only 5 foot tall, was often called upon to play children. She was 20 when cast as Zoe.
Padbury was announced to the press on Thursday 14th March, with a photocall arranged in Hammersmith Park. These images were to be used by the press to advertise her debut in this episode.
As far as the original script was concerned, Bill Duggan was described as the big, amiable security officer - though he comes across more as a technical expert from what we can see and hear. Laleham and Vallance were listed as technicians, and Rudkin and Casali were specified as communications officers.
The two Cyberman pods were to have been seen to be connected by leads to the control panel in the rocket's control cabin, and were activated when the countdown clock reached a certain point. (On screen, there will be no sense of scale or location).
Jamie got the Doctor's made-up name from an electronic stethoscope box in Dr Corwyn's office. This had a label of "John Smith & Associates". The name 'John Smith' will come to be adopted as an alias by the Doctor himself on numerous occasions from Spearhead From Space onwards, though here we see that it was originally given to him by someone else.
Jamie gave his full name for the very first time as James Robert McCrimmon - his middle name presumably honouring Robert I of Scotland - Robert the Bruce.
This episode was structured to omit the Doctor as it was known that Patrick Troughton would be on holiday during the week of production. Being unconscious in the medical bay, there had been no need for him to record any filmed material at Ealing that could be edited in, as was often the case with regulars taking breaks.
The actor would be spending a week in Norfolk where he had bought a riverside cabin. He informed his family during this break that he was now finding the scripts predictable.
The scene in the Power House was rewritten by Sherwin on Wednesday 6th March. The story editor was now assisted by Terrance Dicks, an old friend from their days writing scripts for the Midlands motel soap Crossroads. Sherwin did not intend to stay on Doctor Who for long, and Dicks was being lined up as his successor.
Filming for this episode included more model work in the Puppet Theatre at TV Centre. This included the deployment of the X-ray laser extending from the Wheel's hull. Model work took place on Thursday 21st March. More shots of the small globes touching the space station's hull, were filmed this day.
Earlier in the week, at Ealing, Jerry Holmes had filmed the sequence involving the gloved hand of a Cyberman breaking trough the pod. These were initially weather balloons, with Holmes then punching up through a curved wax panel.
For this episode, studio recording returned to Television Centre once again, for the first time since The Gunfighters (on which director Tristan De Vere Cole had worked as Production Assistant). This specific studio - TC3 - had last been used by the programme for The Daleks' Master Plan.
Padbury's costume was a jumpsuit made from a jersey material, in pink and white. Her hair was quite short, so she wore a hairpiece to give Zoe her distinctive bob.
With Troughton away, Chris Jeffries acted as stand-in for the unconscious Doctor in the rocket crew cabin scenes.
During the afternoon a photo session was conducted for the new Cybermats, even though they do not feature in this episode. Similar in design to the ones previously seen in The Tomb of the Cybermen, they no longer sported antennae and had no pupil or patterning in the eye.
An extra 15 minutes recording was allocated for the episode.
A new effect was used for the opening credits for this instalment - where captions were fragmented (though fragmentised may be a more apposite epithet, considering this is a Cyberman story) over one of the establishing model shots of the Wheel.
Peter Laird's Chang is rather too obviously a Caucasian playing an Asian character with eye makeup.
Both the communications room and Dr Corwyn's office had TV monitors which could act as "visi-phones".
The X-ray laser prop was our old friend known as the Morok Freezing Machine - its first ever appearance in the show being in The Space Museum. It had been used again since - as can be seen in the recently recovered Devil's Planet, third episode of The Daleks' Master Plan, as well as in The War Machines. It had originally been constructed for the 1965 British sci-fi film Curse of the Fly.
On hurriedly leaving the set at the end of one of her scenes Anne Ridler (playing Gemma) felt a sharp pain. The next day she had difficulty walking and discovered that she had trapped a nerve in her leg. This resulted in her being on strong painkillers for the next few weeks - the duration of her performance in this story.
The end credits ran over the image of the Cyberman hand breaking through the pod, which then faded to black.
So the Cybermen finally make themselves seen this week - though it's only a hand smashing through the egg-like pod, after first catching a glimpse of their glowing figures within these spheres. The general silhouette is unmistakable.
I have to admit that I always found this sequence somewhat confusing, as it always looked like they came out of small balloons which then grew...
We'll talk about the Mark III redesign next time, once they feature more prominently.
As mentioned above, the Doctor doesn't feature at all in this episode and so it concentrates mainly on Jamie and the introduction of Zoe, and Whitaker sensibly pairs the two as she gives him a guided tour of the space station. Thus, they are brought together and their relationship can start to build - though it is an uneasy one to begin with. She is bemused by his appearance and behaviour, and initially he seems to see her as a bit of an annoying little miss know-it-all. (A view which will be seen to be shared with some of the Wheel's crew, like Leo, who know her a lot better). It's a different sort of relationship to the protective big brother dynamic which existed between him and Victoria.
One of the first things Jamie says to Zoe, after she has offended his national pride, is: "... watch your lip or I'll put you across my knee and larrup you" - to which she gleefully responds: "Oh this is going to be fun. I shall learn a lot from you". That's quite an introduction between the pair...
As well as the companion and companion-to-be, the episode also introduces a few new crew members and we get to know the ones we've already met a little better. Tanya and Leo are already destined for romance, if they make it to the end, though at the moment she seems to be keeping him very much at arms length. The characters are rather stereotypically drawn. She's Russian, so is a bit of an ice queen, whilst he's Australian and is more outgoing and is a bit of a charmer.
And Bennett is already shaping up to be yet another of those leaders who should never have been allowed anywhere near the command of a vitally important base, be it at the South Pole, on the North Sea coast, or in outer space. His problem lies in his very disciplined nature. He forms an idea and sticks rigidly to it, ignoring the advice of Dr Corwyn who is as much a doctor of the mind as of the body. He simply can't countenance anything which doesn't fit with his view of events - including facts. Corwyn points out the obvious that if the rocket was simply on autopilot, then it would have gone on to its intended destination - station W5 - and not here, but Bennett has already decided on what has happened and won't let logic get in its way.
- The ratings see a small dip this week, but the appreciation figure rises out of the 50's for the first time since Flashpoint, the final episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth.
- Zoe is said to be working in the Parapsychology Library. That's the scientific study of (alleged) psychic phenomena, which might include extra-sensory perception, telekinesis, precognition, or mind reading. The suggestion is that she is a "hot house" child, mentally conditioned and possibly genetically modified in some way, to either develop such abilities or to enhance existing talents in this area. If this is indeed the case, it's a great shame they never developed this background further. (Oddly, it is Tanya rather than Zoe who exhibits some precognitive skills as "her nose" tells her there is something sinister about the rocket).
- Whilst Zoe claims not to know anything about "pre-century history" - giving us a 21st Century date for this story - she thinks Jamie may be Scandinavian, rather than the more obvious Scottish. "Kiltie" is an Americanism.
- Bad Science: Zoe talks about meteorites in space. Pieces of rock in space are meteoroids. They become meteors when seen as "shooting stars" passing through the atmosphere. It's what's left after it hits the ground which is the meteorite. The size of the objects Zoe describes would also classify them as asteroids.
- Tuesday 16th April saw Padbury interviewed by the Daily Express at her home, which was published the following day. In this she stated that she played a "Space Age super-girl" who is a "human computer". The Mirror and the Mail carried similar pieces, seemingly cribbed from the Express article.
- This episode was discussed at the BBC's weekly programme review meeting on Wednesday 8th May, in which it was praised - as usual - by fan Huw Wheldon, whilst a colleague highlighted the emergence of the Cybermen as "superb".
- Still fresh in the public's mind as a Doctor Who companion, Debbie Watling had appeared on Junior Points of View the evening before broadcast of this episode, answering viewers' questions alongside her sister Dilys.
- Two cast members introduced this week share something Dalek-related in common. Michael Goldie had appeared in the series before, playing Craddock in the aforementioned The Dalek Invasion of Earth. When this was adapted for the big screen as Daleks - Invasion Earth: 2150AD, the same role was played by Kenneth Watson, here playing Duggan.
- James Mellor will return to the series as the warlord Varan in The Mutants.
- Some of the scripts for The Wheel in Space have an umlaut above the "e" in Zoe's name.
- Radio Times included a photo of Wendy Padbury from the Hammersmith Park press call to accompany the programme listing for this episode:
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