Well, it’s David Whitaker again, so I
expect the unexpected. Can he do for the Cybermen what he did for the Daleks
last season? Well, possibly so, but then again possibly not. Maybe I’m wrong,
but of the Hartnell and Troughton Cyberman stories, this one alone doesn’t seem
to have any great fan following at all. I enjoyed “The Tenth Planet” “The
Moonbase” and “Tomb of the Cybermen” very much – I’ll say more about watching
“The Invasion” as a very young child when we get to it. All three of those
stories have their admirers and defenders, though, as well as their critics.
The poor old “The Wheel In Space” doesn’t seem to be much of a magnet for
positive comment at all, though.
Well, some stories come into fashion and
then go out of fashion again, some stories with a lowly reputation deserve a
better one, and some stories have a lowly reputation because that’s all that
they deserve. Which one this turns out
to be we’ll find out over the course of the next couple of evenings.
After Watching
You know, I got quite nostalgic when the
mercury fluid links in the TARDIS started going tonto at the start of this one.
It made me quite nostalgic for the first season, when those pesky fluid links
were always seeming to cause trouble for the crew. David Whitaker, who wrote
this story, based on Kit Pedler’s outlines, was the script editor for the first
season, so that’s probably why he chose to use this malarkey to explain the
TARDIS making an emergency materialisation on the Silver Carrier, an abandoned
and drifting spaceship.
Right, on board the carrier there is a
servo robot. This is a very curious looking thing. It has a pair of stubby,
articulated legs, a huge stubby, well, fat, body, a head and arms. Now, I know
I’m picking unnecessary holes, but the thing is, any good cyberneticist would
tell you that it is extremely difficult to make any robot ‘walk’ on articulated
legs like a human (unless it’s a costume with a little man inside) so if they
could do that, why couldn’t they put all of its gubbins into a smaller and
neater body? It just looks odd. Mind you, the tubby one is a murderous little
imp too. It nearly does for the Doctor and Jamie and they need to be rescued by
astronauts from the Wheel.
Okay, the Wheel. We’re back into fairly
familiar territory here. The Wheel – a space station shaped like a wheel, hence
the name – is the base which is going to undergo siege. For the first couple of
episodes at least this proved to be quite a leisurely story. The Commander,
named Jarvis Bennett in this one, I think, is similarly hardboiled to all the
others we’ve seen since “The Tenth Planet”. Right, I don’t like to be nasty to
actors who are doing the best job that they can in circumstances where
rehearsal time was probably extremely limited, and the opportunity for retakes
even more so. But I have to say this, the guy who plays Jarvis Bennett is
noticeably bad. He starts off at full shriek, and never takes it down even half
a notch. This means he has nowhere to go, and indeed his characterisation
doesn’t. Just a little soft pedalling in just one or two scenes would create
light and shade in his performance, which would make such a difference. There
is none, which means that although he certainly isn’t wooden, he comes across
as rather hammy and trying too hard. As a digression, purely for pleasure I
recently watched Sylvester McCoy’s “Dragonfire”, the last story to feature
Bonnie Langford. (Incidentally, that is probably the first time I have written
a sentence containing the words- Bonnie – Langford – and – pleasure – without
also containing the word – isn’t.) Now, poor old Bonnie Langford, she does get
some stick for her acting, but then when you watch a show she’s in, you can see
why. It’s not that she isn’t trying – it’s that she is trying too hard. She is
acting,and that’s the problem, because you can actually see and hear that she’s
acting. Compare her to Sophie Aldred, a proper actress, in the scenes with just
Mel and Ace, and it’s all the more obvious. Well, it’s like this for me with
Bennett. He has obviously latched onto the idea that his character is a
vicious, bullying bore, and by crikey he’s never going to let you forget it in
any line that he says.
It’s highlighted too by the fact that
there is actually some good acting surrounding the ham that Bennett is
providing. Gemma Corwin, played by Anne Ridler particularly shines. She might
not be a sultry siren like Tanya Lernov, nor have the pixieish cuteness of Zoe,
but she’s strong, intelligent and resourceful, and it’s a tragedy that she gets
killed by the Cybermen, and to add insult to injury, at the end of the story
control of the base is assumed by brainless Zoe-hating surfer boy Leo Ryan.
When Tanya entwines her hand around his towards the end I almost threw up.
Leaving aside performances, then, there certainly
seems to be a bit of a bullying culture all round on board the Wheel. Which
brings me to Zoe Heriot, played by Wendy Padbury. Right, I need to be careful
what I say here. I fully appreciate a couple of facts: -
One) - The ladies who played the
companions in the 60s are all old enough now to be my mother (although only
just about old enough in Deborah Watling’s and Wendy Padbury’s cases)
Two) In the shows themselves, they were
all in their early 20s (apart from Barbara – special case), which means that I
am certainly old enough now to be their father.
So any comments I make about their attractiveness
or otherwise can get very icky.
Fact is though, that Wendy Padbury’s Zoe
is extremely cute.
Not that any of the blokes on the base
seem to think so. In fact, the men certainly, and also some of the women on the
Wheel, seem to have it in for Zoe and bully her because she has the brains of a
supercomputer, with all of the social sophistication of one too. In particular
there’s the afore mentioned Leo Ryan, a blonde haired bloke who only has eyes
for Tanya, the Russian crew member, who is, to be frank, a complete jerk
towards her. I’d love to tell him one of my favourite quotes, from no less an
authority than Bill Gates “Remember to be nice to geeks. Chances are that
you’ll end up working for one.” She makes for an interesting character, since this
is the first attempt at a companion who is supposedly as intelligent as the
Doctor himself. Bet she’s screaming with the rest of them before the end of
episode 4 – I told myself within a couple of minutes of her first appearance.
The Cybermen, then. As for design the
baggy suits are gone, being replaced by a costume which is pretty much just one
step away from the classic “Invasion” Cybermen design. The main difference is
that the helmets look pretty much the same as in “The Moonbase” and “The Tomb
Of The Cybermen” apart from the fact that tear drop holes have been added to
the eves, and a dribble hole to the bottom of the mouth. Their physically
impressive appearance is emphasized by the fact that there are some seriously
tall actors inside these costumes. Personally, I found the reconstructed scene
where Cybermen were hatching from eggs (yes, honestly) visually intriguing,
although extremely difficult to understand in the context of what Cybermen are
actually supposed to be – that is, humans who have replaced their bodies with
mechanical bodies.
I do think that the Cybermen are wasted in
this story though. For one thing some of their menace is detracted from by the
way that they tend to rock back and forward while they are talking. I don’t get
that, apart from the fact that it gives the actors something to do. The strange
device which is giving them orders looks as if it has been built from a couple
of coat hangers and a water balloon. Then there is the party of Cybermen who
walk across space – and I don’t mean spacewalk either – to the Wheel, flapping
movements with their arms being their only concession to the fact that they are
in space.
Their purpose it turns out is to take over
the Wheel and use the radio transmitter to direct the Cyber fleet to the Earth.
OK – that’s simple enough, and there’s no way that it was a story that should
have taken 6 episodes to tell. So you get the whole convoluted Trojan Horse
story of the Cybermen sending cybermats in spheres which melt into the hull of
the Wheel – good trick if you can do that – and the cybermats, which are larger
and more impressive than those in Tomb, destroy the Bernalium which is used to
power the Wheel’s laser cannon. Thus the crew on the Wheel send a couple of men
to bring bernalium from the silver carrier, and they get hypnotised into
carrying the Cybermen over in the bernalium box etc. etc. It’s all so
unnecessary. The Cybermen have all this power and hardware – it just doesn’t
compute that they wouldn’t have their own sat nav.
Also the same problem that dogged the
other Cyberman stories is evident in this one. At the climax, they are just so
easy to defeat. The Doctor boosts the repaired laser cannons – bye bye
cyberships. Effective, but not very uplifting.
So all in all, something of a disappointing
end to Season Five – a story which for me is only really at all memorable for
the introduction of Zoe.
What Have We Learned
Quick setting plastic is the latest addition to the every growing list of
things that can kill Cybermen
Nerd baiting will be just as popular in the future as it is today
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