Episode 205: The Wheel in Space (2)

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...

Data:

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)

Critique:

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.

Trivia:

• 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:

Q is for... Quarks

Diminutive but powerful robot servants of the Dominators, a war-like race of people who claimed to be the Masters of the Ten Galaxies.

Quarks were squat box-like bipedal machines, with spiked, spherical heads. Their arms folded into their bodies and were designed to hold a variety of tools and weapons. They could communicate verbally, having a shrill, child-like voice.

One drawback to the robots was that they had limited energy levels and had to recharge frequently. Quarks could distribute power between themselves to equalise their energy levels.

The Doctor and his companions encountered a party of Quarks when a lone Dominator spaceship landed on the tranquil world of Dulkis, determined to assess its population as suitable for slave labour. Probationer Toba used them to kill a party of young thrill-seekers who had wandered too close to the island where their ship - and the TARDIS - had landed. This angered his commander, Rago, as it used up valuable power and deprived them of natives to interrogate. Toba repeatedly went against Rago's orders to further kill prisoners and destroy infrastructure on the island - to the point that the Quarks' energy levels were threatened. When it became clear that the pacifist Dulcians were unfit to be enslaved, it was decided to destroy the planet by transforming it into a radioactive mass - fuel for the Dominator war fleet. Quarks were instructed to prepare drill sites around a central borehole. They were also used to oversee Dulcian prisoners who were forced to assist this work.

Jamie and a rebellious young Dulcian named Cully were able to use a laser weapon from a war museum to destroy a Quark, whilst others could be easily overcome by blinding them - throwing a cover over their head - or tripping them up - tying a rope round their legs. Clearly they did not have all-round vision.

Later, the Doctor developed an explosive which was used to deplete the Quark force further. Those remaining were called off search-and-destroy work to finish the drilling - the plan being to trigger a volcanic eruption into which an atomic seed capsule would be dropped.

The Doctor was able to slip this capsule onto the Dominator spaceship just before it took off - destroying it along with the remaining Quarks and their Dominator masters.

Played by: John Hicks, Gary Smith, Freddie Wilson. Voiced by: Sheila Grant.

Appearances: The Dominators (1968)

• It was an argument over the commercial exploitation of the Quarks which led to writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln finally falling out with the Doctor Who production office, after the BBC had allowed them to feature in TV Comic without consulting them. They had created the robots specifically with the intention of exploiting them financially themselves, having seen what Terry Nation had earned through the Daleks.
• In these comic strips, the Quarks are a fully autonomous force of aggressive invaders, no longer under the control of the Dominators.
• The Quark performers were all schoolboys.
• Voice artist Sheila Grant would later be seen on screen as Jane Leeson in Colony in Space.
• We see two different techniques used for the Quark weapons. The first is when they kill Cully's friends, where the flesh appears to burn and melt momentarily. This sequence was achievable as on film, but in studio the simpler and quicker method of pumping smoke through the victim's costume was used. At one point Cully is wounded by a Quark, but only suffers a temporary paralysis. 
• A Quark featured as one of the cards that came with Weetabix packs as part of their first Doctor Who promotion:

• The replica Quark which featured in the Doctor Who exhibition at Peterborough Museum in 2025:

P is for... Pyroviles

Huge rock-based creatures with a molten magma core, who formed a bridgehead in the Campania region during the height of the Roman Empire, following the loss of their home planet Pyrovilia. They could kill with an incinerating blast from their mouths.

Their intention was to boil away the Earth's oceans and make the planet more habitable for them as a new home. They were susceptible to the cold water, and sufficient quantities could cause their exoskeleton to solidify and shatter.

On first arriving on Earth, they crash-landed their escape capsule and were reduced to dust.

The earthquake of 62AD in the Pompeii area triggered their awakening.

Their dust could infect human beings, causing them to slowly turn to stone themselves after first becoming their mental servants. They had the ability to psychically affect certain individuals with latent abilities in this area. Through a human agent named Lucius Petrus Dextrus who was a powerful local official in the city of Pompeii, they commissioned rock-based circuitry which would help them harness the energies of Mount Vesuvius in order to further their plans. 

The High Priestess of the Sibylline Sisterhood was also infected with their rock dust, and was now almost fully composed of stone.

In order to stop the Pyroviles, the Doctor was forced to trigger the devastating eruption of the volcano in 79AD, knowing it would kill thousands of men, women and children - their deaths being the price to pay to save the entire planet. This was a fixed point in time, which he could not alter.

It would later transpire that Pyrovilia had been taken by Davros to power his Reality Bomb, and the Doctor and Donna Noble were able to return it to its proper place and time.

Appearances: The Fires of Pompeii (2008).

• The design of the adult Pyroviles was based on that of a Roman soldier, whilst that of the Sisterhood priestess was based on the plaster casts of the victims of the volcanic eruption which destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum.
• If Pyrovilia was put back where it came from, then these Pyroviles would never have fled from it and so come to Earth and tried to conquer it - so there would have been no reason for the Doctor to deliberately trigger the eruption of Vesuvius and destroy Pompeii. As it is historic fact, however, this must surely mean that it was simply a natural disaster.

P is for... Pye, Reginald

Projectionist at the Palazzo Movie Theatre in Miami, Florida, in 1952. He alone had survived the sudden disappearance of 15 audience members during the screening of a Mr Ring-a-Ding cartoon short.

Though the cinema had now been boarded up by the police, the Doctor and Belinda Chandra discovered that Reg remained inside, playing movies to an empty auditorium.

When they broke in, he tried to warn them into leaving. The reason he stayed to run the features was because he was enslaved by Lux, God of Light, who fed on the projections. He had taken on the form of the cartoon character, and sought to gain corporeal form in order to leave this place.

Reg had lost his wife Helen in a car accident a short time ago, though she was preserved on celluloid, captured from his old home movies. Lux threatened to destroy these memories of her if he failed to obey, but would be rewarded by him recreating Helen in 3-D form from the images.

He attempted to help the Doctor and Belinda by running the cartoon, knowing that Lux was compelled to sing along - distracting him long enough to allow them to escape. However, they were caught and turned into celluloid figures themselves. After escaping, Belinda encouraged Reg to help destroy Lux and, inspired by Helen, he agreed - sacrificing himself to set light to the mass of flammable film stock. This blew out one of the walls, which allowed Lux to be swamped by sunlight - eventually drawing him away from Earth towards the sun.

Played by Linus Roache. Appearances: Lux (2025).

• Linus is the son of Coronation Street icon William Roache, who has played the character Ken Barlow in the soap since its very first episode in December 1960.
• Between 1972 and 1975 Linus played Ken Barlow's son Peter in the series, before returning in 2010 as a different character.
• His first big film role was as the conflicted title character in Priest, in 1994, who struggles with his sexuality.
• Genre appearances include Batman Begins (as Bruce Wayne's father) and The Chronicles of Riddick.
• On screen he has played Vincent Van Gogh (Omnibus), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Pandaemonium) and Robert F Kennedy (in Oliver Stone's JFK).

P is for... Purcell

Jim Purcell was the bullying and obnoxious landlord of Alex and Claire, who lived with their son George in a high rise flat. Purcell lived alone with only bulldog Bernard for company. George was really an alien child who possessed remarkable abilities. Terrified of rejection, he was constantly afraid and could banish the objects of his fears - containing them within an old dolls house in his bedroom cupboard. Purcell represented one of these terrors for the boy, and he found himself suddenly sucked down into his carpet one evening, as though into quicksand. He then found himself in the dolls house where he was attacked by the wooden Peg Dolls which inhabited it. He was transformed into one of the creatures.

Once George overcame his fears, everyone was returned to normal, including Purcell. The experience would hopefully have made him a less unpleasant individual.

Played by: Andrew Tiernan. Appearances: Night Terrors (2011).

• An early film role for Tiernan was as Piers Gaveston in Derek Jarman's 1991 film of Marlowe's Edward II.
• He played doomed astronaut Victor Carroon in 2005's live remake of The Quatermass Experiment.
• Other film roles include 300 and its sequel, Interview with the Vampire and The Pianist, whilst TV appearances include Jonathan Creek, Midsomer Murders, Foyle's War and Dalziel & Pascoe.

Time Museum Bookazine

The next bookazine from DWM, due in June, is The Time Museum, which considers the history of the series in 100 objects. It promises many rare photographs.

What's Wrong With... Battlefield

When a story's own author - Ben Aaronovitch - says there's a big issue with it then you really can't argue about the problems of Battlefield. (He even struggled with the novelisation and someone else had to step in and write it).

Season 26 suffered from a particular problem throughout - and that was poor work on the part of Andrew Cartmel. A good script editor knows how many characters to have, how many sets / locations are needed, and that the story then has to fit into the allotted time slot on the day, ensuring that all the salient plot points needed to satisfy the viewer are present and correct. Robert Holmes and Terrence Dicks understood this, as did most of Cartmel's predecessors. (They also knew not to use the exact same plot twice in the same short season, less than a month apart).

Just about every episode of Season 26 over-ran in terms of the scripts and rather drastic cuts had to be make to ensure the episodes fitted their evening time-slot. (We've now seen a lot of this material as "Special Editions" of the stories).

This had been going on since Cartmel arrived. At a DWAS convention following Season 24, one writer answered almost every question put to him by telling the audience to read the novelisation. If the episodes as broadcast can't tell you what you need to know, and you have to rely on buying a book to understand the plot, then there's something very wrong with how the story was structured and presented.

And a lot of that is down to the script being edited efficiently in the first place.

Battlefield's main issue was that it just about worked as a three-parter, but Aaronovitch had to stretch it to four. It's not just a case of dragging out or padding the plot, this upsets the whole story structure.

As for that plot...

There are far too many characters included for a start. As well as incorporating Brigadier Lethbridge Stewart we have to introduce a second Brigadier, an archaeologist, the archaeologist's assistant, a pub landlord, the pub landlord's wife, various UNIT underlings, a demon, a heroic knight from another dimension, a villainous knight from another dimension... and his mum.

There's so many characters but we can't have them all meeting at once, so some can only appear in the first half then be shunted out of the plot, and the more significant characters have to wander about a bit so that they don't meet up too early, because they're needed for the climax.

It is high summer by the looks of it, yet a scenic location with lake, forest and ruined castle isn't teeming with tourists.

We visit the pub a couple of times and yet it doesn't appear to get many visitors - local or tourist. Warmsley and Shou Yuing appear to be about the only customers. 

Whilst the landlady, Elizabeth, gets a small part to play in the plot - a bit of character development for Morgaine - there is absolutely no point of including husband Pat in the story.

We know how Morgaine and her knights get through to our world, but how exactly did Ancelyn manage it, and why didn't he bring any support with him?

Attempts to discuss the concept of military honour are another inconsistency. The scene between Morgaine and the Brigadier at the war memorial is very good, but she kills the unarmed Laval, before then restoring Elizabeth's sight just to pay for a round of drinks. 

Brigadier Bambera fails to have the Doctor and Ace instantly locked up when they try to access a restricted area with outdated UNIT passes. It's only afterwards that she's told about the mysterious scientific adviser from Lethbridge Stewart's time. How did she ever achieve that rank without knowing about the Doctor anyway? Why are UNIT doing mundane military work when they were set up to deal with alien threats in the first place?

Being a great fan of Time Team, the archaeological dig bears little resemblance to fact. The idea that a single individual, with just one assistant, would undertake a site of such a scale (and supposed importance) is unrealistic. The site really ought to be crawling with student volunteers, or at least a few local ones. There are groups all over the country.

Vortigern does not necessarily mean "High King". Vortigern was a king who, according to Bede and other early chroniclers, invited the Saxons into Britain to help repel attacks by the Picts and Scots, rewarding them with land in Kent.

The Doctor deduces that the spaceship will open at his command as his future self would have programmed it to obey his voice - and yet he doesn't think to tell the automated defences to stop attacking him. And what exactly do these snake-like defences do, apart from bumping into people?

And if he arranges all this in the future, why doesn't he remember then to make sure not to do something silly like endanger his earlier self who is going to blunder into this?

You can see the notorious crack in the glass when Ace almost drowns.

The script is inconsistent on the effectiveness of the knight's armour. Bullets bounce off when the script needs them to, but the knights die from ordinary gunfire when it doesn't. 

And just how does 1980's UNIT manage to defeat a warrior class of knights, armed with futuristic weapons, anyway?

Does the Doctor know that he's going to meet a demon who is susceptible to silver? How does Ace know about the bullets' significance?

The Destroyer is one of the most impressive monsters ever seen in the series, yet he doesn't get to do a lot. Maybe a bit of destroying might have come in handy to make his inclusion more worthwhile.

One of the biggest issues for me was what happens to Morgaine at the end. She can summon demons, traverse dimensions, teleport around, and bring down helicopters with her fingers, so I hardly think Holloway Prison is going to hold her for long. Was it too much to ask to see her and Mordred banished back to their own dimension at the end, instead of that painful sit-com walkdown at the Brig's house? They could have been honour-bound not to return to this dimension, just to draw a line under their involvement.