I want to say one word to you, Jamie. Just one word. Plastics.

Another lost story. Two of the six episodes remain but it has not been given the animation treatment so I read the novelization.

I got some Ark in Space vibes early on as the Doctor and Jamie land on a seemingly abandoned rocket ship. Would a dead Zarbi fall out of a closet as the Doctor opens the door?

Wait.

I am getting ahead of myself.

The story opens with our time travelers in the TARDIS. (Recall that Victoria left at the end of the last TV story, Fury From the Deep.) The ship lands and the scanner briefly shows metal, metal everywhere before switching to a series of idyllic scenes that may be from the Eye of Orion or perhaps the most beautiful parts of Bethselamin.

It turns out these bucolic sights are the TARDIS' attempts to get our heroes to go elsewhere for safety's sake a la Edge of Destruction which, like this tale, was also written by David Whittaker, I see here. I rather like these early instances where the ship is shown to be sentient.

Alas, the fluid link bursts into flames compelling the Doctor and Jamie to abandon ship as the console room fills with mercury vapors but not before they grab the vector generator rod hoolie. Scrambling out of the TARDIS doors, they find themselves on that seemingly abandoned rocket ship.

Only it isn't. Abandoned, that is.

There's a little droid roaming the joint doing this and that and just whatever it needs to do to carry out its mission. The Doctor and Jamie are a bit peckish and they fortuitously happen upon a food dispenser. After placing his order for roast beef with all the trimmings, Jamie is appalled to be given a plate of gelatinous cubes. This reminded me of the TV dinner trays of colored paste eaten by Dave and Frank in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

At one point, the droid cranks up the thrusters to move the rocket which catches the Doctor off guard and he bangs his melon on a metal truss or whatever it is. The upshot is that the Doctor, after being all woozy for a bit, goes unconscious and MIA for an episode or so. Presumably Patrick Troughton went on vacation.

The rocket heads towards the titular wheel that again brought 2001 to mind with its own round space station. The Wheel is manned by a multinational crew which seemed to mirror Star Trek. They don't need a rogue rocket in their backyard so they prepare to destroy it. Aboard the rocket, Jamie notices a big cannon pointed at him. A little quick thinking later, he brandishes the vector generator and uses it to basically send an SOS which saves the day. He and the Doctor are rescued and brought to the Wheel.

There the Doctor recuperates for a spell as Jamie is interrogated. They also meet Zoe, the elfin savant whose training has left her short on emotion. Our Scottish hero learns that the rocket ship is to be destroyed and again he leaps into action. This time he sprays quick seal plastic into the guts of the x-ray laser thusly rendering it inoperable.

Meanwhile the Cybermen are executing their cunning plan. Ha! I really mean one of the most convoluted, Rube Goldbergian stratagems ever devised for television, Doctor Who or otherwise. The Cybermen on the ground, so to speak, consult with a Cyber Planner who is bravely out of range dispensing strategy. I figured he was simply a regular Cyber Joe who was a good illustration of the Peter Principle. He killed a bunch of Cryons and was promoted until he was completely out of his depth.

But I watched the remaining episodes and it turns out the Cyber Planner isn't humanoid at all and is more of a ChatGPT installed into this oval thing that looks like the body of a wood tick with Cyber head handles and is mounted onto a frame.

It devises a plan that goes something like this: they commandeer a rocket, stow a platoon of Cybermen and a smattering of Cybermats aboard, and send it to the Wheel. Then a crack team of Cyber engineers force a star to go supernova which sends debris towards the Wheel. At about the same time, Cybermats are sent from the rocket to the Wheel where they eat all of the bernalium which is needed by the x-ray laser that would otherwise be used to destroy the incoming rocks and whatever other debris you get when your local star explodes. This shortage would force the Wheel's crew to zip over to the rocket to scrounge where they'd miraculously find a supply of bernalium in crates. But, those crates have a false bottom that conceal Cybermen. These Trojan crates would be taken back to the Wheel and voila! The Cybermen would commandeer the space station so that it can be used to direct a Cyber invasion fleet to Earth. Or something like that, anyway.

Why they can't just go to Earth without some kind of radio beam as a guide as they've done before (see Moonbase) is never explained. Also, why the Trojan horse ploy? We see Cybermen floating through space to the Wheel later in the story so why the subterfuge? Why not just zip over, rip open an airlock, and take the Wheel as if they were a horde of marauding Vikings at Lindisfarne? Oh, and the scene where they float over has survived and it's a doozy. They awkwardly wave their arms like a group of ballerinas who've just plundered a stash of Quaaludes found in one of their mother's dresser drawers.

Outside of the convoluted Cyber scheme, I rather liked The Wheel in Space. It marks the debut of referring to the Doctor as "John Smith". At one point, Jamie is being questioned while the Doctor is out cold. When asked his companion's name, he does a bit of quick thinking and seizes upon the name on a nearby container and blurts it out. There is a scene at the end of the story where the Cyber Planner is reading the mind of a crew member as images of the other people on the Wheel cycle through the man's mind's eye. We hear their names and ranks and get, "Tanya Lernov. Astrologer, second class." I chuckled. I also noticed the the Wheel's computers are giant lava lamps, a nice late 60s quirk.

Watching the surviving episodes, you see that the Cybermen are very tall which adds more than a bit of menace to their appearance and helps solidify their status as being scarier than and superior to Daleks.

Highly imperfect but Jamie really earns his keep here and I think that he and the Doctor are now a classic pairing. They work very well together. Zoe joins the TARDIS crew and I am looking forward to seeing how she fits with the burgeoning bromance.

And thus ends season 5, a.k.a. - Patrick Troughton's second season.