Who Reviews The Wheel in Space by Matt Rabjohns

 
The Wheel in Space always seems to be left overshadowed by the three other Cyberman stories of the Patrick Troughton era. One can expect this with the quality of Tomb of the Cybermen and the epic Invasion, but that doesn't mean that The Wheel in Space is a story to forget and pass over. In my book, you want to do the exact opposite with this story. 

The Wheel in Space contains everything that makes a story a classic. First it has an extremely distinctive use of soundscapes and effects that at times are really creepy and they add a huge amount of atmosphere to a claustrophobic story. The moments when the Cybermat pods begin to float away from the Silver Carrier towards the Wheel is enhanced by some great use of space age sound clips that truly gives the feel that this story is set in deep space, where no one can hear you scream! It's a very effective use of sound within this story. 

Secondly The Wheel In Space can't just be overlooked because it is the introductory story of one of the best companions to ever grace the show. Wendy Padbury's Zoe just clicked into place with Pat Troughton and Frazer Hines like she had already been playing the character for a couple of years! She has an amusing cheekiness, but also, she gives her somewhat know all character a streak of pathos in that she has scenes where she admits she wants to feel things to and not stay like a programmed machine. It makes her a believable and really likeable character, despite her sometimes hot-headedness when becoming smug with her advanced knowledge of other things in space. 

Thirdly the rest of the cast of this story is superbly placed. Every character is excellent and they all make the brew heady and engaging. 

In particular, Anne Ridler as Dr Gemma Corwyn is sensitively portrayed. She is a woman displayed with a good sensible head on her shoulders and it is sad that she has to fall victim to the Cybermen later in the story. Her interaction with Michael Turner's Jarvis Bennett too makes you think maybe there could be a relationship there underneath all the uneasy bickering and Jarvis's nervous and reckless state of mind. Michael's performance is never less than credible and believable, so much so that it is also sad to see him finally break and go to find the body of Gemma and he loses his life to a Cyberman whom he tries to tackle with his bare hands! 

There is also a lot of great and playful interaction between Eric Flynn's Leo Ryan and Clare Jenkins' Tanya Lernov. And Tanya also has her head screwed on as she is quick to sense something very very wrong with the situation of when the Wheel locates the Silver Carrier rocket ship. All the main characters seem to be fully formed and work so well together to make it totally believable they are the crew of an advanced space wheel. 

There are frequent superb scenes with the Cybermats too. In Tomb of the Cybermen they were perhaps just a tad cute, but here their eyes are set up to flash, and they look creepy as they home in on the terrified Kemel Rudkin in a brilliantly directed and acted scene where the man is cornered by several of the Mind attacking metal rodents. Honestly Kevork Malikyan's role is very small, but he gives a superb performance of open fear at his dilemma when faced with the nasty metal freaks. It's enough of a brilliant performance to ensure that this is a classic scene if ever there was one. 

The other superb scene is the Doctor's showdown with the two Cybermen in the power room. This is absolutely one of the most awesome scenes of Doctor Who I’ve ever seen, where the Doctor is actually skilfully devious is wheedling out the Cyberman's plan whilst knowing they will soon fall into his electric trap. This scene always will be one of my very favourite scenes of Pat Troughton's Doctor. 

In this story too there is one aspect that makes this story, at least for me, the finest Cyberman story ever on TV in the show. And the reason why is simple. The Cybermen here are mostly silent, they don't talk all the time. For me, the fearful height and look of a blank faced Cybernetic Horror is all the more unsettling when they do not talk much. And in The Wheel In Space there are several scenes where the massive Cybermen slip silently into view and don't speak a word before striking some poor man down. This for me makes the Cybermen far more chilling. Not that their voices in this story too aren't excellent, because they are really brilliant in this story. It's just the tower of a shadowy leviathan with a strange metal parody of a human face is even more freaksville when it is silent and looming. And The Wheel in Space utilised this aspect of creepiness of the Mondasians to perfection. No other Cyberman story ever has them being as downright menacing and formidable as they are here. 

So, in summation, the Wheel in Space is a superb piece of Doctor Who storytelling. It made meander sometimes and get a tad confusing in its scripting in places, but overall, it is extremely strong and a really decent season closer. To me the fifth season of the show couldn't have been ended any finer than it was with The Wheel in Space. 

Top this all off with a phenomenal performance by lead man and best Doctor ever Patrick Troughton and you have all the ingredients of yet another corker of a Cyberman story. Brilliant and wonderful space age stuff.

Big Finish Reviews+ Short Trips: Year of the Drex Olympics by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s a born Olympian…

The Tardis has been stolen and used as the prize in a sporting event. No, it’s not Series 11, and we’re not schlepping across poisonous oceans to win a Ghost Monument, we’re back in the black and white days for the latest Short Trip from Big Finish, Year of the Drex Olympics. With the Second Doctor, Jamie and Victoria visiting Venus, ostensibly so the Doctor can get the hang of the planet’s fiendishly tricky aikido, it’s only a matter of time before Stuff Starts Kicking Off.

Specifically, as mentioned, the box of delights we know as the Tardis gets impounded and put up as a prize for the combatants in the Drex Olympics. The complication to which is that it’s put up as the Third prize (infernal cheek!), so Time Lord chicanery and outright winning first prize won’t get the blue box back.

When Victoria and Jamie both start…well, there’s not really any other way of saying this…when they start spontaneously mutating into hulking great athletic monsters, on the one hand, Team Tardis stands at least some chance of winning something in the games. But when you have two newly superpowered, historically raised and rather boisterous humans on your team, the chances are they’ll do rather better than third. And that suits somebody somewhere right down to the ground.

Needless to say, there are Alien Shenanigans at work at the Drex Olympics, but when you finally find out what they are, there’s every chance they’ll seem quite down to earth compared to some of the more esoteric alien plots the Doctor and his friends have encountered. Along the way to the revelation though, there’s quite a lot of sporting fun, with the whiff of a satirical undercurrent in the notion of Jamie and Victoria having unwittingly taken the sci-fi equivalent of performance enhancing drugs at the Olympics (perish the very thought). The feel of Year of the Drex Olympics is that there’s a deep deep backstory, which gets mostly uncovered towards the end, when the foregrounded plot is unravelled, Scooby Doo style, by a Doctor more or less sick of being made to be everybody’s fool, and not playing around any more. Threaten to take his home away from him, and the easygoing clown persona of the Second Doctor doesn’t exactly fall away, but it does frown and freeze into something as dark and powerful as Patrick Troughton on a really good day could be.

Of course, technically, this isn’t Patrick Troughton, it’s his long-time travel-pal, Frazer Hines, but the point is that Frazer’s portrayal of Troughton, while never a straight impersonation, carries the waveform of the Troughton-Doctor’s persona, so you can absolutely get away with writing stories that rely on the moods and shifts and tonal changes that were intrinsic to Troughton’s incarnation of the Doctor. Frazer Hines, in short, has you covered, and here, his Troughton is very much the star of the show, despite both Jamie and Victoria having more conspicuously active parts in the story. Year of the Drex Olympics is the kind of story you can certainly imagine this Tardis team getting mixed up in, between dealing with Daleks and running away from Ice Warriors – it has the ring of this team’s truth to it, while at the same time being the kind of story that the Short Trips were invented to be, adding detail to the lives of the Tardis crew when they’re faced with less melodramatic threats than those into which we the audience ‘tuned’ for their on-screen adventures. Wednesday adventures, if you like. Year of the Drex Olympics is a highly competent, well thought-out, stunningly delivered Wednesday adventure, that shows not only the lengths to which the Doctor’s friends are sometimes forced to go even when their home world is not in danger of being invaded or blown to smithereens. This is the kind of thing that could happen to them on any given day – but writer Paul ebbs works hard enough to make sure it’s a very good given day, with layers and layers of Stuff underneath the surface of the Olympic plot.

Sign yourself up for the Drex Olympics – see if you can work out what’s going on and who’s behind it all before the stone-faced, ‘give me back my ship’ Doctor gets there, and unravels the pretences that put himself and his companions through the wringer. You probably won’t – and that’s the mark of an engaging story: finding out the solution more or less on the last page, while enjoying every inch of the ride. That, Year of the Drex Olympics can promise you faithfully, earning itself a solid podium place in your Short Trips collection.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Wreck of the World by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling wrecked.

The Early Adventures are intended to be stories that deepen our understanding of the First two Doctors and their friends, telling stories that feel right for the black and white period of the show’s history, but often taking the character development forward in a 21^st century style to bridge the gap between worlds. That makes them an inherently risky project. Go too far towards the sixties and you end up with stories that add in the results of TV budget restrictions of that era when they’re not needed. Stray too far into the 21^st century style of storytelling and you risk telling stories which don’t feel like they’re enough ‘of the period’ to sit alongside the actual sixties stories we know and for the most part love. Getting the balance right has resulted in some amazing additions to our library of early Doctor Who stories. Getting the balance wrong has occasionally led to stories we’d rather forget.

We mention all this because The Wreck of the World is a story that feels a little too sixties for its own good.

Writer Timothy X Atack sets his story after the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe have escaped the Land of Fiction. There’s repair work to do to the Tardis, and the three of them…erm…do it. For what probably isn’t, but which certainly feels like a solid fifteen minutes.

Then they get separated and face a whole new sequence of annoying engineering problems on ‘The World,’ a giant colony ship that seems (at least at first) remarkably lacking in colonists.

Zoe meets a solidly comical robot that goes by the enigmatic name of Gnostic and appears to have a loud, irritating nervous breakdown when asked particular questions, while the Doctor and Jamie join forces with a motley crew of treasure-hunters who’ve come to The World with a mission to loot the historical artefacts of many Earth ages and stock their museums to the gills.

There’s always something to do in The Wreck of the World, but there’s also the sense that the story is little more than ‘one damned thing after another’ in terms of the problems the crew face, which can test even an ardent fan’s patience – Zoe has to rebuild a whole roomful of technological equipment just to turn the lights on. Jamie has to run on a treadmill to deliver motive power to the ship. The Doctor spends quite some time in a tunnel with tools, doing some properly complicated jiggery-pokery. The crew spend more time wandering through an archive of Earth historical artefacts looking for a thing they’re fairly sure they won’t recognise when they see it…

These set pieces seem to exist to allow the crew to be Doing Something to burn minutes of run time, but for all that, The Wreck of  The World has more going on underneath its skin – and if you can tear yourself away from what amounts to Doctor Who Does Scrapheap Challenge, that’s an interesting dimension, which breaks it out of slavish adherence to the sixties vibe and puts it squarely in Fifth Doctor Series Three territory, with a dark secret behind the ‘wreck,’ a touch of arch social commentary, quite a bit of comedy (if you’ve ever wanted to hear Jamie punched clean across a corridor, you’re in luck here), a conceptually interesting alien threat, a very large number of zombies, and a body-count that would never have been allowed in 1968, when this story is theoretically supposed to have ‘aired.’

In other words, The Wreck of The World is a good story, overly consumed with annoying physical problems. There’s an entirely decent alien story in here, explaining the wreck and delivering quite a solid and troubling lesson for our society. But it’s all rather buried beneath the mechanical and engineering challenges that Atack throws in the way so we don’t guess the solution ahead of time, leaving The Wreck of The World much harder work to listen to than it should have been. By the end of it, you’ll feel like a member of the Tardis crew, having had to mine for the nuggets of gold that are certainly there, through miles and miles of steel, encountering mechanical problems every inch of the way.