Synopsis:
On the Silver Carrier two huge bipedal figures stir to life within a pair of egg-like pods, and a metal fist punches its way out...
Jamie has returned to the Wheel's Power House, determined to stop its crew from destroying the rocket as the TARDIS is still on board. He looks for a way of sabotaging the X-ray laser and sees a cannister of quick-setting plastic. He is spraying this into the machine's innards when Bennett and Duggan arrive to stop him.
Duggan informs his commander that they are too late and the damage is done. The unit affected will have to be stripped out for repairs, which could take hours. In the meantime, the Wheel is defenceless.
Zoe is speaking to Gemma about Jamie when they are alarmed to hear Bennett announce a security alert, and for crew to arm themselves.
The two figures which have appeared on the rocket are Cybermen. In the control cabin they report to a cybernetic creature on a monitor - their Planner - that the first stage of their scheme has been accomplished.
On learning what Jamie has done, Zoe warns that another issue is developing in Messier 13 which could have a serious impact on them. A star is about to go nova.
Jamie has been escorted to the medical bay where the Doctor has recovered from his injury, though still confined to bed. He is a little annoyed that his companion took the action he did as it has put them both under suspicion.
The blow to his head means that he cannot recall what happened on the rocket, except that he detected some threat...
In the communications centre, Zoe is telling everyone about Messier 13, but Leo Ryan is annoyed at her seeming lack of concern about the implications - simply reeling off facts and statistics like a computer.
In the Power House, a pair of technicians take away the damaged component and Duggan is left alone when he spots movement. A small metallic creature appears, scuttling across the floor. He opens the cupboard it came from and finds pieces of corroded metal on the floor - a substance called Bernalium - and wonders if the creature did this. Bernalium rods are used to power the X-ray laser.
Just then radio operator Rudkin appears, returning to duty. He has been sent to help out, and Duggan asks him to go to the stores and check on their Bernalium supplies.
He fails to notice that there is a second Cybermat lurking in the corner.
Gemma is checking on the Doctor, who assures her that he and Jamie never intended any harm towards the station, which she accepts.
Zoe then arrives, with questions as to how they were able to pilot the Silver Carrier here with insufficient fuel to manage the distance. As far as she is concerned, logic dictates that the rocket must have been refuelled at some point.
On the rocket, the Cybermen continue to consult their Planner. A star has been ionised, sending a meteorite shower towards the Wheel. The Cybermats will destroy the station's Bernalium stocks but it will be discovered that there is a supply on board this vessel. The control overriding the Cybermats is switched off, so they will now act independently.
Duggan goes to speak with Gemma and tell her about his discovery of the metal creature, and the damage it has done to the Bernalium.
Rudkin has returned to the Power House, where he is confronted by a group of Cybermats. They attack him. He is able to use the quick-setting plastic to smother one before being killed.
Gemma and Duggan hear his screams as they come along the corridor. They are also heard in the medical bay, but crewman Flannigan refuses to let anyone leave as the Doctor and Jamie are under guard.
A short time later, Zoe has brought the lump of plastic to the Doctor to see what he makes of it. The crew had to cut away a floor plate to remove it.
Whilst Zoe thinks it impossible to see what is inside as the material cannot be cut, the Doctor points out that they have an X-ray machine handy. He is curious to learn that the Bernalium had been destroyed - the one thing which the laser depends upon to power it.
Duggan, meanwhile, is being disciplined by Bennett for not having reported the corrosion of the Bernalium immediately. There has been no evidence found of his metal "space bug", and he is disbelieved about ever having seen it. He will be sent back to Earth on the next relief ship and is confined to quarters until then - with Ryan given his duties to perform.
Gemma meets with Bennett to discuss what is going on. She sees a pattern forming, with all of the recent incidents such as the pressure drops, increased meteorite activity and the arrival of the rocket with its two strangers onboard being somehow connected. Bennett refuses to accept this, dismissing it as imagination and fantasy. He tells her that he is sending two men across to the Silver Carrier to investigate it properly.
In the medical bay, the X-ray scan of the plastic lump has been completed - and the Doctor recognises the form of a Cybermat within. The Cybermen must be near - and the only place they could be is on the rocket.
Crewmen Laleham and Vallance have just reached the vessel and find a large box of Bernalium. They are confronted by the two Cybermen who emit a hypnotic ray which puts them into a trance.
The Cybermen instruct that they will take them to the Wheel...
Written by David Whitaker (from a story by Kit Pedler)
Recorded: Friday 19th April 1968 - Television Centre TC1
First broadcast: 5.15pm, Saturday 11th May 1968
Ratings: 7.5 million / AI 55
VFX: Bill King & Trading Post
Designer: Derek Dodd
Director: Tristan De Vere Cole
Additional cast: Gordon Stothard (Cyberman), Peter Hawkins, Roy Skelton (Cyberman voices)
In his original treatment, David Whitaker had the Wheel crew travel between the station and the Silver Carrier in a "space buggy".
The Cyberman Planner was described as being an ordinary Cyberman but with various leads and cables attached to its head. It was seated in a chair.
Having no sense of scale or context, what we actually see on screen is difficult to interpret. It could be the head of some totally new design of Cyberman, or it could equally be some sort of communications device. It has a sort of heart-shaped core, surrounded by a rectangular metal bracket, behind which sits a circular frame of coiled wires. For all we know there could be a pair of shoulders just below camera level - or it might only be a few inches in height. Something which fulfils a similar function will appear in The Invasion - the Cyber-Director - and that is simply a machine, though with organic components. As that was written by this story's script editor, I will hazard a guess and say that the Planner is more likely just a device of some sort.
It wasn't just the Cybermats' eyes which were to glow - their whole bodies were to have done so when they attacked.
Filming for this episode included the dramatic sequence of the attack by Cybermats on crewman Rudkin. This was filmed during the week commencing Monday 18th March at Ealing. There were four Cybermat props constructed, only slightly modified from the versions seen in Tomb of the Cybermen as mentioned last time. All were radio-controlled.
Friday 22nd March then saw the spacewalk by Laleham and Vallance, wearing RAF Windak pressure suits - see below - which had been adapted for the movie First Men in the Moon in 1963. (There's a whole post on these and their various appearances in both Doctor Who and Star Wars elsewhere on this blog, back when I covered The Tenth Planet episodes). The actors were suspended against a black backdrop on kirby wires.
New model work for this episode was a shot of the Cyberman spaceship, seen only briefly before the Planner appeared on the rocket's monitor screen. Unlike the saucers seen before, this had a longer, segmented appearance, with a radar dish on top. Model filming took place on Thursday 21st March in the Puppet Theatre at TV Centre.
It's the third episode, and we are in our third different studio - this time the main one at Television Centre.
The two new Cyberman costumes made for this story appear in studio for the first time. Playing them, as well as Jerry Holmes - whose hand had been filmed punching through the surface of the pod at Ealing - we have Gordon Stothard, who had previously played a Yeti in The Web of Fear. He is best known to fans as King's Champion Grun in The Curse of Peladon, under his other name of Gordon St Clair.
During the afternoon rehearsals, publicity images were taken of Wendy Padbury with Frazer Hines, and with the Cybermen. These depict encounters between Zoe and the monsters on the rocket, which never occur in the programme.
Producer Peter Bryant arranged for one young viewer to visit the studio that day to help alleviate his dread of the Cybermen - with one of the actors unmasking himself to show they weren't real.
Michael Turner (Bennett) pre-recorded his tannoy announcement about the security alert, and a monitor was added to the rocket control cabin set for the Cybermen to consult with their Planner.
Joining Peter Hawkins on Cyberman voices was Roy Skelton, who had last been heard as the Base computer in The Ice Warriors, but who had previously voiced Cybermen and Daleks. Skelton also provided a tannoy voice.
There were problems with the sound box used to distort their voices so a normal microphone was used instead, but this proved unsuccessful. It was decided to remount the final scene during recording of the next episode because of this. In the event, this would not take place until the making of the fifth instalment due to time constraints.
One recording break was arranged to set up the Cybermats on the Power House set. An oscilloscope wave was overlaid to represent the Cyberman hypnotic ray used on Laleham and Vallance - a technique that had been used in the previous Cyberman story.
The episode ended with a fade to black over the two Cybermen confronting the astronauts.
During editing, the opening of a communications centre scene was cut - Casali picking up radio signals from the Hercules Cluster. Also cut was a whole scene after Rudkin first arrived back in the Power House to find Duggan gone. He answered an intercom call from Vallance about the current state of the Bernalium stocks, confirming the only supply was that which had been transferred to the Power House, which Duggan should have known about.
The new design of Cybermen make their debut, generally known as the Mark III version. A collaboration between the costume designer and Jack and John Lovell, they are based on a two-piece diving suit, sprayed silver. The masks were created from the same moulds as the Moonbase / Tomb versions, but had the metallic trimming around the eyes and mouth removed. These have instead a "teardrop" slot added. This was to aid ventilation for the performers but have since become iconic, having been retained for the eyes ever since. Though designed purely for practical purposes, they have come to symbolise the tragic fate of those converted.
The chest unit is more compact, and the flexible corrugated tubing along the arms and legs has been replaced with rigid rod-like structures - suggestive of hydraulic pistons - which fit into junction boxes.
The hands have three fingers, with the performers having to pair their fingers together to fit into gloves ending with thimble-like tips.
The Lovells later pointed out that the BBC dressers had put the chest units on upside down. The lamp-like weapon was supposed to be at the bottom, as with the original Mondasian Cybermen (parts of whose costume they had also built).
As far as the body of the costume is concerned, this was not the intended design, however - as we'll discuss when we get to the sixth and final episode...
Episode Three of The Wheel in Space is the first of only two instalments of this story which we are able to watch, thanks to it having been found by a film collector and returned to the archives. At the time of its discovery, this was the only episode known to survive featuring the Troughton era Cybermats.
The sequence wherein Rudkin (Kevork Malikyan) is attacked and killed by them has taken on some notoriety after featuring as an example of surrealism - or just plain old oddness - in the series, after its inclusion in the 30th anniversary documentary (More Than) 30 Years In The TARDIS. This is mainly due to the rather exaggerated body and facial movements he makes. He is a very good actor, as anyone who has seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and many other TV programmes and movies can testify, but presumably being attacked by Cybermats just wasn't on the curriculum at drama school when he attended.
We can't put it off any longer. It's time to discuss the Cyberman plan, I'm afraid, as it really is a most convoluted scheme and one which makes little scientific sense.
The plan is roughly as follows:
- Hijack the Silver Carrier and secrete a couple of Cybermen and some Cybermats aboard.
- Pilot it in the direction of the Wheel.
- Send over the Cybermats to infiltrate the station and destroy the Bernalium.
- Ionise a star.
- This will direct a shower of big meteorites towards the Wheel, thus forcing the crew to look for another supply of Bernalium.
- Crew will therefore visit the rocket and find a box of it there.
- Hypnotise them into smuggling the Cybermen onto the Wheel hidden in the box.
- Make sure that the laser, which they have taken great pains to disable, is actually working - as they need it to stop the meteorites they caused in the first place from destroying the Wheel.
- Kill the crew and take over the station.
- Use it to guide in their invasion force towards Earth.
Basically, the whole of the first part of this plan is a complicated way to get two Cybermen onto the Wheel unnoticed. However, what if Bennett had simply blown up the rocket when it first approached the Wheel, as he intended? The Cybermen couldn't possibly have foreseen the arrival of the Doctor and Jamie, who would prevent the rocket being blown up, first by being found on it and then by sabotaging the X-ray laser. What if they had disabled the Servo Robot before it had the chance to despatch the Cybermats?
Then there's the whole issue of the ionisation of stars. In order for a supernova to have an impact on local Earth space, the explosion would have to have occurred in the very distant past - assuming its effects could even travel that far. These stars Zoe mentions are light years away. (Messier 13 is nearly 25,000 light years from Earth). A supernova occurring last week could not possibly have any impact on meteorites in the Wheel's vicinity this week. The Cybermen would have had to initiate this scheme in prehistoric times, even if it was scientifically possible.
(See also last week's trivia about the definition of what a meteorite is. I'm using the term here only as that's what the dialogue repeatedly calls them).
David Whitaker seems to think that all these stars are very close to each other - and that a spaceship can manage to find its way to a small space station but not to a great big planet. Story consultant Kit Pedler was a scientist, but he specialised in ophthalmology rather than astrophysics.
The relationship between Jamie and Zoe continues to be slightly argumentative, with her determined not to allow the young Scot to go one better on her. She's very glad that he didn't think of x-raying the lump of hyperoxide plastic, as that would have been really annoying. The recovered Doctor also indulges in a little verbal sparring with her, gently questioning her reliance on scientific fact and logic. As he tells her: "Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority". However, even he has to accept her opinion that the rocket could not possibly have travelled the distance it did without having been deliberately refuelled at some point - though interestingly he does so only grudgingly: "Well, it might have done".
Ryan also has a go at the girl for her lack of empathy, describing her as "a little brainbox" when she enthusiastically tells everyone about the effects of the star going nova, without thinking about the human implications.
Bennett's complete lack of imagination is more noticeable, as he dismisses Duggan's claim to have seen a metal space creature and refuses to accept Gemma's linking together of the various recent incidents. This one's heading for a nervous breakdown...
One thing which is never properly explained is the Doctor's recollection of some threat he perceived whilst on the rocket. It wasn't the Servo Robot, as he specifically tells Jamie he doesn't remember it. So what was it? In the first episode, he is simply standing by the closed control cabin door, listening to some electronic bleeps. Was he able to interpret these, or did he see the two pods in the corner and know what they represented? We never do find out.
- The ratings are in a state of flux for this story. We have a significant increase in viewers, of more than half a million, yet the appreciation figure dips to the mid 50's again.
- This episode was found in response to a newspaper advert placed by David Stead in September 1983, asking if anyone had any old films they wished to sell. A collector in Southampton provided him with this 16mm film copy, and it was returned to the BBC archives in May 1984.
- Bernalium is spelt with a capital 'B' throughout the script - suggesting it is less a new chemical element or alloy but a trade name for the substance.
- Frazer Hines featured on the front cover of pop magazine Fabulous 208 on the day of broadcast. It had a feature on Sheila White, who had been a contemporary of his at stage school. (Her career ranged from playing Messalina in I, Claudius, to the Confessions of a... sex comedies):
- The replica of the Mark III Cyberman on display at the Peterborough Museum exhibition in 2025:
- And finally for this week, the Windak pressure suit which is on display at the Science Museum in London:
