The Wheel in Space vs. A Town Called Mercy
Still isolating from the rest of the household due to Covid (my second bout), I’m pressing on with my randomised Doctor Who watching. This time it’s The Wheel in Space, broadcast 27 April to 1 June 1968, written by David Whitaker, and A Town Called Mercy, broadcast 15 September 2012, by Toby Whithouse.
The Wheel in Space
The Wheel in Space is the third Second Doctor story that I’ve watched for the Randomiser, and has some obvious similarities to the other two, The Seeds of Death (a late 1960s vision of an aspect of ‘space age’ civilisation) and Fury From the Deep (a ‘base under siege’ story in which the Doctor and co. help solve some unsettling mysteries that are precursors to a takeover of Earth). In fact, it’s a direct sequel to FFTD, which was a nice little gift of the Randomiser because it allowed me to see what Jamie and the Doctor did immediately after leaving Victoria at the end of the previous story.
(For the record, I watched TWIS as it’s presented on Britbox – the telesnaps combined with soundtrack for episodes one, two, four and five, and the proper surviving film for three and six.)
The adventure is clearly intended to jolt the chaps out of their despondency over Victoria, by throwing them straight into the action as the TARDIS malfunctions. Writer David Whitaker lifts a trick from the past by blaming the breakdown on a fluid link that has run out of mercury, but I reckon the time machine was sulking and/or had damp in its circuits after having been left floating on top of the North Sea for the entirety of the previous story.
Jamie is also still feeling a little creaky – thirsty, hungry and sleepy in the opening episodes – presumably as a result of all the seaweed gas he inhaled in FFTD. Another link to the story just told is in the Doctor’s warning to Gemma Corwyn over the unstable behaviour of the Wheel’s controller Jarvis Bennett: ‘One does wonder what a man like that will do when faced with a problem for which he has no solution.’ It seems likely that he would have had FFTD’s Robson in mind here, having just witnessed the oil refinery chief descend into psychological trauma in response to the attacks on his base.
I found Jarvis an odd character. It’s not really explained what actually happens to him in this story, other than that he is unable to accept phenomena outside the laws of physics and goes into an almost zombie-like trance (to such a state that Gemma and the Doctor discuss administering electroconvulsive therapy) when he thinks he has encountered them. One has to agree with the Doctor’s concerns, and it’s a little weird that Gemma, who otherwise seems quite wise to what makes each member of the Wheel’s crew tick, hasn’t really thought him a liability. Perhaps there is an unexplained reason she has a blind spot concerning him. It’s also quite a surprise that the Wheel under Jarvis’s leadership has a Parapsychology Library – parapsychology by definition being the study of phenomena outside the laws of physics. Is the presence of such (to his mind) seditious literature contributing to his vulnerability? There’s a background story to pre-Cyber attack life on the Wheel that needs to be told, I think.
The Wheel has a bit of a Star Trekky feel (although I notice that Star Trek wouldn’t appear on British TV for more than a year after TWIS’s broadcast in 1968), with its multinational crew suggestive of a united Earth in the late 21st Century. The international flavour is achieved with some fairly dodgy non-British accents, it must be said. In addition to Gemma and Jarvis, two of the principal other characters are Tanya and Leo, who seem designed to give an audience-friendly commentary on all that is going on, while flirting openly with each other in front of the rest of the crowded control room. Love in space? Hanky-panky on the Wheel? Just another irrational outrage to nudge poor Jarvis closer to the edge.
And then there is Zoe Heriot, astrophysicist and astrometricist, first class. Before watching TWIS I didn’t know too much about Zoe, other than she was something of a child prodigy with a talent for logic and mathematics to rival even the Doctor. I didn’t realise that she was introduced to the series as someone worried that she was lacking in the ability to feel emotion. ‘Just like a robot. All brain and no heart!’, snaps Leo, incredibly viciously, and retrogressively for this futuristic civilization. Zoe is clearly disturbed by the accusation, and it seems to prompt her desire to broaden her horizons by stowing away with the Doctor and Jamie at the end of the story – a quest to find a heart, like the tin man, which I imagine is an intended parallel to the Cybermen of this story.
Gemma tells Zoe that she is how she is because of how she was ‘brainwashed’ in the parapsychology unit (there’s that word again – I don’t think they know what it really means) at university. It seems a shame, though, to suggest Zoe’s emotions have somehow been driven out of her by artificial means. What would be wrong with this just being how she is, her more rational, less emotion-driven mind a form of neurodivergency that offers a valuable complement to Jamie’s more impulsive character in the TARDIS crew?
I felt that Jamie and the Doctor were given an incredibly easy ride by the crew of the Wheel in this story. I understand that the basic format of Doctor Who requires the Time Lord to be accepted and trusted remarkably quickly by the imperilled inhabitants of whichever scenario they land in, but it seems even more remarkable in TWIS. One of their first actions upon arriving on the Wheel is to sabotage their giant space laser, leaving the space station completely vulnerable to meteors and the subsequent Cybermen assault, yet they refuse to offer any explanation other than it being something they had to do. Jamie’s act of destruction (coating the inside of the layer with some sort of glue spray) made me think of the sort of direct action we might see from Extinction Rebellion, so it made sense that Jarvis accused him of being a member of the Pull Back to Earth activists – who sound not too bad, to be honest.
But somehow Jamie and the Doctor are given free run of the Wheel and it’s not long before the Doctor is telling everyone else what to do. This rather illogical turn of events is addressed by the script, to be fair – ‘I’m not sure why I trust the Doctor, but I do,’ says Gemma in episode five – and I feel there is an implication here that this is some sort of Gallifreyan-Jedi mind trick of the Doctor’s. As an inherent Time Lord gift, it explains a lot, not just in TWIS but across the entirety of the series.
Another, much less savoury, aspect of the Doctor’s character that we see in TWIS is his using of his companions to achieve his victories. This was explored more deeply in the Seventh Doctor and Ace era of the show, and one thinks also of Davros’ charge to the Tenth Doctor in Journey’s End that he treats ordinary people as weapons. The scene in episode five where the Doctor makes Jamie and Zoe risk their lives to retrieve his Time Vector Generator from the Cybermen-occupied rocket is quite shocking, especially as Jamie really doesn’t want to go; it makes the Doctor look incredibly heartless – as if ultimately he doesn’t consider Jamie a friend as much as a hired hand. Leo castigates the Doctor for doing this later, and he appears contrite in that flustered manner of Two, but clearly this isn’t the last time in his lives that he behaves so callously.
I haven’t said much about the Cybermen. It’s difficult to get the measure of them from a story in which only two of the episodes are live action, especially as what we do see of them in episodes three and six suggests that part of what makes them so effective and inhumane is their silence. When I first saw them as a child, in Revenge of the Cybermen, I think that was an important part of what made them scary – the way that they would just march quietly forward, inscrutable. It’s an aspect lacking in the various new series incarnations of clanky metal men.
A Town Called Mercy
A Town Called Mercy skips back a couple of hundred years from the events of The Wheel in Space, to another isolated human community under cyborg besiegement. This story is a rare Western televised adventure for the Doctor – the only other one being 1966’s The Gunfighters, I think – which surprises me a little as the show does love to ape popular genres.
It’s a story about war crimes, vengeance, redemption and justice, and it’s packed with quotable lines along these themes. There’s some good writing here by Toby Whithouse, and strong, engaging performances by Matt Smith (as a Doctor still haunted by the part he played in the Time War) and Adrian Scarborough (as Kahler-Jex):
Jex: ‘War is another world. You can’t apply the politics of peace to what I did.’
The Doctor (to young Mercy resident Walter): ‘Violence doesn’t end violence, it extends it.’
Jex: ‘It would be so much simpler if I was just one thing, wouldn’t it? The mad scientist who made that killing machine, or the physician who’s dedicated his life to serving this town. The fact that I’m both bewilders you.’
The Doctor: ‘Justice doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to decide when and how your debt is paid.’
Jex: ‘We all carry our prisons with us. Mine is my past. Yours is your morality.’
It’s emotive stuff, which might make one think of Nazi war crime trials, the truth and reconciliation processes in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Rwanda and other post-conflict situations around the world; and perhaps it can be applied to personal circumstances too – survivors of abuse and other crimes trying to address their feelings towards and responses to the perpetrators.
It’s complex; possibly too complex for a standalone 45-minute episode of Doctor Who to address adequately? I say this because ultimately I found the conclusion to the story unsatisfying. Jex takes his own life, which brings to an end the cycle of violence extending violence, but has justice really been served? As the Doctor said, Jex should not be allowed to choose when and how his debt was paid, but ultimately he did – cheating those millions who would have wanted (needed?) justice properly served. Maybe that’s the point of the story, but the residual sense is that his suicide was brave and just, which I don’t think is the right message. That’s the danger of setting up unsolvable moral quandaries in a programme such as this, I suppose.
I didn’t find too much else to take away from this story. The Doctor being rapidly accepted by the townsfolk as Mercy’s new Marshall following the death of Isaac seemed convenient, but perhaps this relates to the ‘trust me’ mind trick that I mentioned in the TWIS review above.
His hacking into Jex’s ship computer and reading his personal files felt uncomfortable, like stealing someone’s diary or checking their browser history. Okay, what he discovered there was important but he doesn’t seem to have had any reason to check up on Jex other than nosiness. The Doctor really doesn’t do boundaries.
I didn’t like the gag about the horse being named Susan and wanting its owner to respect its life choices. That just feels like a scornful gag about self-identification.
ATCM drops several hints that Amy and Rory are approaching the end of their journey with the Doctor. They’re joining him these days just for occasional excursions from their normal people life, and the story makes it clear that Amy has matured – perhaps as a result of becoming a mother (not that she has had anything like the normal experience of motherhood but, as Jex says, he can see the marks of it in her eyes: kindness, sadness, ferocity) – in her steadfast rejection of the Doctor’s initial willingness to hand Jex over to the Gunslinger. She is growing tired of the Doctor’s games, his adventures, childish stuff; Rory was never that into them in the first place. There’s a desire to settle down. This is something different than Victoria’s wish to leave the Doctor that I watched last week in Fury from the Deep. Amy and Rory haven’t had enough of the danger and the fear so much as they have had enough of the insecurity, of the being not normal. There’s only so much of the Doctor that any mortal can take.
Connections
I’ve already mentioned that both The Wheel in Space and A Town Called Mercy have elements of the ‘community under siege’ story template, and that the sieging is being done by one or several cybernetically-enhanced creatures. The Doctor’s description of the cyborg Kahler-Tek and his kind’s origin is: ‘He [Jex] and his team took volunteers, told them they’d been selected for special training, then experimented on them, fused their bodies with weaponry, and programmed them to kill.’ Which sounds not dissimilar to what we know of the creation of the Cybermen. The Doctor in TWIS: ‘Their entire bodies are mechanical and their brains have been treated neuro-surgically to remove all human emotions, all sense of pain. They’re ruthless, inhuman killers!’ The absence of emotion is the key difference here, of course.
The place that is under siege, rather than the nature of the threat, provides the title of both stories, which I think is fairly unusual for Doctor Who. Only one other Second Doctor story (The Moonbase) and one other Eleventh Doctor story (Asylum of the Daleks) are named after the story’s setting.
Both adventures feature a small robot in its opening scenes. The floating machine in the pre-credits sequence of ATCM seems to be connected to the Kahler fugitive being hunted by the Gunslinger, and is quickly dispatched. The Servo-Robot that attacks the Doctor on the drifting rocket seems to be some sort device belonging to the Cybermen (as it releases the Cybermen’s pods into space) but this is never properly explained.
Those pods are like sinister space eggs, from which Cybermen hatch. Kahler-Jex also travels through space in an egg-shaped ship. Don’t trust eggs from space!
For every cyber-threat, there’s a more sinister Dalek one waiting in the wings. ‘Frightened people. Give me a Dalek any day,’ says the Doctor of the Mercy townsfolk in ATCM – rather unfairly in the circumstances. He also references the Daleks – and their victims – in his rant to Amy about wanting Jex to face justice. In TWIS, the Doctor projects an image of a Dalek exterminating a man on to the TARDIS scanner, as an illustration to Zoe of the dangers she might face travelling with him (this precedes a repeat showing of Evil of the Daleks) in the weeks following TWIS, bridging the gap until the start of Season 6. No matter how many times the Daleks fail – and they always do, in adventures on television, audio, stage, written or drawn – they are always Doctor Who’s shorthand for the ultimate in danger and threat.
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