Chapter The 250th, thank goodness the Cybermen are ruthlessly logical or else their plan here would be even more ridiculous.
Plot:
The Future. The Cybermen want to take over the world, as ever, and believe that an Earth Space station, nicknamed the Wheel, will be useful as a navigational beacon to guide their fleet. They take over an Earth rocket and pilot it to near the wheel, far off its original course, so that it will intrigue the Wheel crew. They fire space-balls (yes, really) at the Wheel from the rocket that are small enough to get through its shielding. These contain Cybermats who then destroy the Wheel's supply of a metal vital for the operation of its laser cannon. The Cybs cause a meteorite shower that will collide with the Wheel. They believe that, under threat, the crew will be curious enough to check out the rocket and see if it has any of the metal onboard to fix the cannon to blow up the meteorites. Two of the Wheel crew spacewalk over, are taken over by the Cybermen, and then go back with a crate of the metal that has a Cyberman inside in a hidden bottom section, smuggling it into the Wheel. It then starts taking over other crew members. Now, I think they probably could have simplified that plan a bit, but they have a Cyber-Control device in charge that likes to say things like "Phase 3 complete" and has obviously created too many phases in the plan because of this.
Earlier, during the early phases of the Cyber-plan, the TARDIS malfunctioned causing - because this is a script by David Whittaker - mercury vapour to fill the console room, so the Doctor and Jamie materialised and escaped to take shelter in the rocket. Brought over with the Doctor to the Wheel after managing to signal to the space station, Jamie sabotages the cannon to avoid the Wheel crew blowing up the rocket with the TARDIS still onboard. This is lucky for the Cybermen as the Wheel's commander Jarvis Bennett (who's having a nervous breakdown, by the by) had ordered for it to be blown up, which would have stopped the Cyber-plan as early as phase 2. Anyway, the Doctor and Jamie help the crew, including brainy Wheel librarian Zoe, to repel the Cybermen, but alas many of the crew - including Jarvis - are killed. Zoe stows away on the TARDIS with the TARDIS team, to broaden her rigid outlook (instilled by the education methods of her time). The Doctor tries to put her off by telling her all about the dangers of creatures like the Daleks.
Context:
As a treat for reaching the 250th story blogged, I thought I would override the randomiser and pick a story from the remaining (and now quite small) pile of stories yet to be done. My first thought was to watch The Krotons. A Patrick Troughton story is always a treat, and it was the first full Doctor Who story I ever saw, when it was repeated in the UK in 1981. I then realised - such is my progress through the black and white stories, and the progress of the animation teams in creating new visuals for stories with lost episodes - that 2022 was shaping up to be the first full year since the blog began that I wouldn't cover a story comprising an audio and slide show affair. I'd watched wholly extant monochrome stories all year, plus one new animation. Long before animation was an affordable option, reconstructions were made by talented people used the surviving soundtracks matched with off-air photographs to recreate as closely as possible the original viewing experience of episodes no longer in the archives. I remembered when watching The Edge of Destruction that I'd seen a reconstruction of The Wheel in Space on Britbox, so decided to watch that instead. I also tried something that I'd never done with a classic series story for the blog before, and watched each episode a week apart, just as it was originally broadcast. The experience of watching The Wheel in Space over six weeks is much more rewarding than watching it all in one go, but I'll get onto that in a moment.
First Time Round:
I first saw the surviving episodes (three and six) on a VHS compilation of orphaned 1960s episodes featuring the Cybs called Cybermen - The Early Years, when it came out in July 1992. These compilations never made any effort to explain the missing narrative between the existing parts, but - purely by the whims of the archive gods - it happened that of the two stories represented on the tape (the others episodes were two and four of The Moonbase) had a bit present from the middle and the denouement. As such, it was possible - just about - to construct a plausible plot from these sections. A full audio release of all six episodes' soundtracks came out on CD in May 2004, and I can't remember a thing about that first listen. I'm clearly a visual learner; even with three times as much material, I still remember the pictures more than just the words.
Reaction:
The Wheel in Space marked the end of the "base under siege" era of Doctor Who. A couple of years earlier, the production team of the time had hit upon this formula, which allowed budgets to be used cleverly to set up tight and claustrophobic horror-inflicted tales. The base would usually be a futuristic one, usually crewed by an international group of spacemen (and more rarely one or two spacewomen too) with a boss who would generally disbelieve the Doctor's warnings about aliens, and complicate his efforts. The base would have one large area (in this case, the wheel operations room) that would look impressive and allow for different camera angles, plus a little studio space would be left for smaller rooms where the monsters of the week could creep in and loom over people and whatnot. It was an efficient way to structure scripts to get a lot out of a little, but it did become overused. In season 5, the 1967/1968 run for which Wheel is the finale, there's only one story that doesn't conform to the template. This is also the second time in the run that the Cybermen have terrorised a group of people locked in a particular location; in fact, all four of the Cybermen stories in Doctor Who up to this point have seen the silver giants, surreptitiously or otherwise, taking over a futuristic base. Other stories in season 5 had tweaked the formula a bit - what if the base was a monastery, or the tunnels of the London Underground? Even The Tomb of the Cybermen, the previous effort for these monsters at the start of the season, innovates - it is the Cyber-base that's the setting, with the humans infiltrating as they think the metal meanies are long dead. The Wheel in Space though, is strictly made to the formula. It's set in space rather than the South Pole, and the monsters arrive on an intriguing rocket rather than an intriguing planet, but otherwise it's essentially the same story shape as the very first Cyberman story, The Tenth Planet.
Does the story have anything that raises it above the level of generic? Is it a selling point that the villainous plot is one of the most illogical these supposedly logical creatures have come up with in Doctor Who's long history? Wheel's story has to fill up two more episodes of running time than The Tenth Planet, so the Cybs can't just walk in and take the space station by force. Instead, there's a lot of activity to gradually move them into position, and it doesn't make any sense when you look back on it as a whole. The Cybermen deliberately create a meteorite shower that might destroy the place that's strategically important to them - this seems risky. They sabotage the Wheel's laser cannon, then have to repair it again for the latter stages of their plan. Everything hinges of the humans being curious enough to search for laser cannon parts on a mysterious craft that they were within seconds of blowing up earlier in the story. Why can't the Cybermats that the Cybermen successfully get onboard just kill everyone (it's shown to be a possibility when Rudkin is killed), then they could just walk aboard. The Cybermen aren't the only people behaving with hard to explain motivations, of course: their plan hinges on a crewmember of the Wheel not raising the alarm when he finds a Cybermat, but instead keeping it as a pet. The curious thing, though, is that none of this mattered to me on this watch, as I was viewing it as it was intended to be seen, one episode a week. In 25-minute chunks, the absurdities of the plot don't show up as they would if watching the story all in one go. I can't really complain if the story works as originally intended (home video releases of Doctor Who were as unlikely as laser cannons in 1968). In the gaps between, I was no word of a lie eager to watch each next episode, not something I've ever experienced with The Wheel in Space before. It was only at the end that it fell apart just a little - all the silly ins and outs of the ludicrous plot are just to allow the Cybermen to use the Wheel as a navigational beacon; a stronger motivation might have sold the whole plot better.
The plot isn't the only reason, and perhaps not even the main reason, that The Wheel in Space exists, of course. The big deal is the introduction of the new female companion. Wendy Padbury as Zoe fits right into the existing team, and is brilliant from the off. These three are instantly what they remained until they all left together a year later: one of the very best TARDIS teams to watch. The pattern of the Doctor with one male and one female companion had worked for many years, so a replacement was obviously going to come in immediately. The production team going the opposite way to last companion Victoria, though, creating someone from the future rather than the past, means Zoe can still be naive but allows for a more sparky relationship, particularly with Jamie. This is better than the somewhat cloying protectiveness he displayed to her predecessor; they are friendly rivals - her book smarts versus his street smarts. Like many stories around this time (The Dominators and The Krotons, for example) programmatic rote learning - that Zoe has been put through - is a plot point, but that's soon forgotten when she's a regular and she just becomes the bright brainy one without any angst. Apart from the new girl, the performances of the actors playing the rest of the Wheel's crew are all fine, with some nice character touches (like Leo and Tanya's flirting), but the international nature of the crew is achieved by everyone putting on accents, of varying degrees of accuracy. This is either a bit naff or insensitive and insulting, depending on how forgiving one feels. Michael Turner as Jarvis Bennett has a good stab at showing someone undergoing a mental breakdown in a stressful situation, doing some heavy lifting as the script doesn't do much to help him to justify such extremes. The new design of Cybermen and their new voices are good developments, and would be further finessed in their next appearance.
The choices in the first episode intrigue me. For a start, David Whittaker plays his Greatest Hits in the first few minutes (use of the fault locater, random images appearing on the TARDIS scanner as a warning, mention of fluid links and mercury). Thereafter, it's almost a bottle-ish episode (see here for more details of what I mean by that) or prologue, with the Doctor and Jamie exploring the rocket and tussling with a cute servo robot. The Wheel crew turn up only towards the end, which is odd - I would expect either for the focus to stay with the Doctor and Jamie for the whole episode, or to get them on to the Wheel sooner. It's something different at least. There's a bit of contrivance to engineer Jamie and Zoe to be out space-walking during a meteorite shower (Jamie has to drop a vital component on the rocket that they must go back for because it's somehow important to defeat the Cybermen) but I'll forgive that because the space-walking scenes are done most effectively (it's luckily a sequence that falls within an existing episode). There's no music, but Brian Hodgson's special sounds make up for this and fit the spacey locale of the story. There's also some nice dialogue too: "Proper little brainchild - all brain and no heart!", "Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority", and a nice exchange between a sceptical Zoe and Jamie about the Doctor: "Well, is he a physicist, biochemist, astronomer, biometrician?" "Yes, he is". Overall, it's not perfect, and unlikely to be anyone's favourite story of all time, but it's still very enjoyable (particularly when watched an episode a week). It was also a good thing, whether it was intended or not, to kill off the 'base under siege' format and let Doctor Who explore a bit more - season 6 might not be as popular as season 5, but it's much more varied in terms of setting and story structures.
Connectivity:
The Wheel in Space, like The Ghost Monument, begins with the TARDIS team escaping imminent danger to end up on a spaceship (or two in the Jodie Whittaker story); they also both feature non-speaking robots.
Deeper Thoughts:
Meaningless Milestones. Having reached the 250th story mark, and it being towards the end of 2022, it feels like the right time to do my annual stock take. I have already randomly chosen one of the remaining Doctor Who Christmas special episodes to watch next, as there won't be such a thing on TV. (I know that technically there has been a festive special in 2022, on the very first day of the year, but this coming festive season, i.e. 12 days of Christmas / Double-length Radio Times period, will be the first without a new Who offering since December 2004 / January 2005, and that makes me feel a little melancholy; luckily, it looks from recent announcements like it'll be the last Christmas for a while to be so bereft.) I have also run the random number generator to select a story to watch in the Chrimbo limbo period when I'll be off work (and it's a cracker). Assuming that I post both of these before year end, my total blogged this year will be 36 stories. This isn't my highest annual total ever, but it's up there. At this rate of blogging, anticipating only four stories to be shown next year, and the promised full series of eight episodes plus a festive special the year after, I will catch up with ongoing production by the end of 2024. If so, then I can still blog new episodes as they come up thereafter, of course, but it will trash the random order concept. I may soon have to start looking for some 'extended universe' offerings to drop in occasionally. Be ready for my feelings on Scream of the Shalka any day now, you lucky things! Anyway, examining the stories covered this year, I see that there was a three-way tie for the most blogged per Doctor between Tom Baker, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker. It's all random, of course, but this makes sense to me. The Doctors with more episodes left are more likely to get picked more often. The two recent Doctors are those who've accumulated stories produced after the blog started, and Tom Baker started with a large number as he was in the role for a record-breaking seven years.
As I blew a number of Jodie Whittaker episodes in one go last year by covering Flux as one serial, I decided at the start of the year not to override the randomiser to blog any of the three 2022 specials as they went out. One did come up randomly, though, albeit my least favoured of the year, but that's the way the random numbers go. I managed to cover a spread of Capaldi's stories including his first and last (well, if you don't count Twice Upon a Time, and I try not to). The next highest Doctors in terms of stories covered this year were Matt Smith and David Tennant, jointly on four stories blogged each. Again, this is understandable, as they have relatively high totals (mostly because the majority of their stories are only one episode long). The 1960s black-and-white Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) were both on three stories blogged. For Troughton, with a little bit of fixing as mentioned above, I covered pretty much all the myriad ways one can experience one of his episodes: one story - The Dominators - was fully intact as originally broadcast, another - The Abominable Snowmen - was wholly animated (though one episode exists), and Wheel in Space was a mixture of full episodes and reconstructions using audio plus stills. For Hartnell, amazingly, I got three full stories (12 whole episodes) in their original format, with no gaps having to be plugged. Next, on two stories apiece, were Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison. Again, it's all random: if I had a choice in the matter, I might have held off on covering more than one of the latter's, as there are very few left; in fact, only three now. Neatly, though, there is one left in each of his seasons. On the subject of seasons / series, I have completed a couple more this year, bringing the total to seven so far. Many more, like all three of Davison's, only have one story left to do, so I expect some more to get completed in 2023.
I've still not completed any Doctor's whole era, unless you count Paul McGann (I covered his single TV outing as lead actor in the blog's first year, but now he's appeared in another Doctor Who story as a guest actor, of course). The ones likely to be completed first, apart from Davison, are the three for whom I did one story blog post each this year: Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Christopher Eccleston. McCoy has three stories left to do (again, one per season - I don't plan it this way, honest), Baker and Eccleston, just two apiece. The other Doctors have a healthy handful to half a dozen left each; nobody's in double figures now. There are 53 stories left in all (not including any new stories expected to be broadcast in 2023), split pretty evenly between classic and new series (26 and 27 remaining, respectively), with no particular decade or producer / showrunner tenure favoured. There are nine monochrome stories remaining, five for Hartnell, four for Troughton. Of those, only two are wholly missing (one each - Marco Polo and The Highlanders) with no known plans for either to be animated anytime soon. Nothing is necessarily getting animated soon as things are, but both stories have challenges that mean they'd be amongst the last ones to be tackled ever anyway - I will most likely cover both for the blog before any new pictures are drawn for them. The remainder either are fully intact or have animated episodes to plug gaps. Marco Polo is also now the earliest story I have yet to watch, and the most recent is the Power of the Doctor. Little did I ever imagine when I first started this endeavour that the earliest and most recent stories remaining would share a cast member; Doctor Who still has the ability to surprise me.
In Summary:
It's Wheel-y good (if you watch an episode a week, and don't think too hard about it!).
Plot:
The Future. The Cybermen want to take over the world, as ever, and believe that an Earth Space station, nicknamed the Wheel, will be useful as a navigational beacon to guide their fleet. They take over an Earth rocket and pilot it to near the wheel, far off its original course, so that it will intrigue the Wheel crew. They fire space-balls (yes, really) at the Wheel from the rocket that are small enough to get through its shielding. These contain Cybermats who then destroy the Wheel's supply of a metal vital for the operation of its laser cannon. The Cybs cause a meteorite shower that will collide with the Wheel. They believe that, under threat, the crew will be curious enough to check out the rocket and see if it has any of the metal onboard to fix the cannon to blow up the meteorites. Two of the Wheel crew spacewalk over, are taken over by the Cybermen, and then go back with a crate of the metal that has a Cyberman inside in a hidden bottom section, smuggling it into the Wheel. It then starts taking over other crew members. Now, I think they probably could have simplified that plan a bit, but they have a Cyber-Control device in charge that likes to say things like "Phase 3 complete" and has obviously created too many phases in the plan because of this.
Earlier, during the early phases of the Cyber-plan, the TARDIS malfunctioned causing - because this is a script by David Whittaker - mercury vapour to fill the console room, so the Doctor and Jamie materialised and escaped to take shelter in the rocket. Brought over with the Doctor to the Wheel after managing to signal to the space station, Jamie sabotages the cannon to avoid the Wheel crew blowing up the rocket with the TARDIS still onboard. This is lucky for the Cybermen as the Wheel's commander Jarvis Bennett (who's having a nervous breakdown, by the by) had ordered for it to be blown up, which would have stopped the Cyber-plan as early as phase 2. Anyway, the Doctor and Jamie help the crew, including brainy Wheel librarian Zoe, to repel the Cybermen, but alas many of the crew - including Jarvis - are killed. Zoe stows away on the TARDIS with the TARDIS team, to broaden her rigid outlook (instilled by the education methods of her time). The Doctor tries to put her off by telling her all about the dangers of creatures like the Daleks.
Context:
As a treat for reaching the 250th story blogged, I thought I would override the randomiser and pick a story from the remaining (and now quite small) pile of stories yet to be done. My first thought was to watch The Krotons. A Patrick Troughton story is always a treat, and it was the first full Doctor Who story I ever saw, when it was repeated in the UK in 1981. I then realised - such is my progress through the black and white stories, and the progress of the animation teams in creating new visuals for stories with lost episodes - that 2022 was shaping up to be the first full year since the blog began that I wouldn't cover a story comprising an audio and slide show affair. I'd watched wholly extant monochrome stories all year, plus one new animation. Long before animation was an affordable option, reconstructions were made by talented people used the surviving soundtracks matched with off-air photographs to recreate as closely as possible the original viewing experience of episodes no longer in the archives. I remembered when watching The Edge of Destruction that I'd seen a reconstruction of The Wheel in Space on Britbox, so decided to watch that instead. I also tried something that I'd never done with a classic series story for the blog before, and watched each episode a week apart, just as it was originally broadcast. The experience of watching The Wheel in Space over six weeks is much more rewarding than watching it all in one go, but I'll get onto that in a moment.
First Time Round:
I first saw the surviving episodes (three and six) on a VHS compilation of orphaned 1960s episodes featuring the Cybs called Cybermen - The Early Years, when it came out in July 1992. These compilations never made any effort to explain the missing narrative between the existing parts, but - purely by the whims of the archive gods - it happened that of the two stories represented on the tape (the others episodes were two and four of The Moonbase) had a bit present from the middle and the denouement. As such, it was possible - just about - to construct a plausible plot from these sections. A full audio release of all six episodes' soundtracks came out on CD in May 2004, and I can't remember a thing about that first listen. I'm clearly a visual learner; even with three times as much material, I still remember the pictures more than just the words.
Reaction:
The Wheel in Space marked the end of the "base under siege" era of Doctor Who. A couple of years earlier, the production team of the time had hit upon this formula, which allowed budgets to be used cleverly to set up tight and claustrophobic horror-inflicted tales. The base would usually be a futuristic one, usually crewed by an international group of spacemen (and more rarely one or two spacewomen too) with a boss who would generally disbelieve the Doctor's warnings about aliens, and complicate his efforts. The base would have one large area (in this case, the wheel operations room) that would look impressive and allow for different camera angles, plus a little studio space would be left for smaller rooms where the monsters of the week could creep in and loom over people and whatnot. It was an efficient way to structure scripts to get a lot out of a little, but it did become overused. In season 5, the 1967/1968 run for which Wheel is the finale, there's only one story that doesn't conform to the template. This is also the second time in the run that the Cybermen have terrorised a group of people locked in a particular location; in fact, all four of the Cybermen stories in Doctor Who up to this point have seen the silver giants, surreptitiously or otherwise, taking over a futuristic base. Other stories in season 5 had tweaked the formula a bit - what if the base was a monastery, or the tunnels of the London Underground? Even The Tomb of the Cybermen, the previous effort for these monsters at the start of the season, innovates - it is the Cyber-base that's the setting, with the humans infiltrating as they think the metal meanies are long dead. The Wheel in Space though, is strictly made to the formula. It's set in space rather than the South Pole, and the monsters arrive on an intriguing rocket rather than an intriguing planet, but otherwise it's essentially the same story shape as the very first Cyberman story, The Tenth Planet.
Does the story have anything that raises it above the level of generic? Is it a selling point that the villainous plot is one of the most illogical these supposedly logical creatures have come up with in Doctor Who's long history? Wheel's story has to fill up two more episodes of running time than The Tenth Planet, so the Cybs can't just walk in and take the space station by force. Instead, there's a lot of activity to gradually move them into position, and it doesn't make any sense when you look back on it as a whole. The Cybermen deliberately create a meteorite shower that might destroy the place that's strategically important to them - this seems risky. They sabotage the Wheel's laser cannon, then have to repair it again for the latter stages of their plan. Everything hinges of the humans being curious enough to search for laser cannon parts on a mysterious craft that they were within seconds of blowing up earlier in the story. Why can't the Cybermats that the Cybermen successfully get onboard just kill everyone (it's shown to be a possibility when Rudkin is killed), then they could just walk aboard. The Cybermen aren't the only people behaving with hard to explain motivations, of course: their plan hinges on a crewmember of the Wheel not raising the alarm when he finds a Cybermat, but instead keeping it as a pet. The curious thing, though, is that none of this mattered to me on this watch, as I was viewing it as it was intended to be seen, one episode a week. In 25-minute chunks, the absurdities of the plot don't show up as they would if watching the story all in one go. I can't really complain if the story works as originally intended (home video releases of Doctor Who were as unlikely as laser cannons in 1968). In the gaps between, I was no word of a lie eager to watch each next episode, not something I've ever experienced with The Wheel in Space before. It was only at the end that it fell apart just a little - all the silly ins and outs of the ludicrous plot are just to allow the Cybermen to use the Wheel as a navigational beacon; a stronger motivation might have sold the whole plot better.
The plot isn't the only reason, and perhaps not even the main reason, that The Wheel in Space exists, of course. The big deal is the introduction of the new female companion. Wendy Padbury as Zoe fits right into the existing team, and is brilliant from the off. These three are instantly what they remained until they all left together a year later: one of the very best TARDIS teams to watch. The pattern of the Doctor with one male and one female companion had worked for many years, so a replacement was obviously going to come in immediately. The production team going the opposite way to last companion Victoria, though, creating someone from the future rather than the past, means Zoe can still be naive but allows for a more sparky relationship, particularly with Jamie. This is better than the somewhat cloying protectiveness he displayed to her predecessor; they are friendly rivals - her book smarts versus his street smarts. Like many stories around this time (The Dominators and The Krotons, for example) programmatic rote learning - that Zoe has been put through - is a plot point, but that's soon forgotten when she's a regular and she just becomes the bright brainy one without any angst. Apart from the new girl, the performances of the actors playing the rest of the Wheel's crew are all fine, with some nice character touches (like Leo and Tanya's flirting), but the international nature of the crew is achieved by everyone putting on accents, of varying degrees of accuracy. This is either a bit naff or insensitive and insulting, depending on how forgiving one feels. Michael Turner as Jarvis Bennett has a good stab at showing someone undergoing a mental breakdown in a stressful situation, doing some heavy lifting as the script doesn't do much to help him to justify such extremes. The new design of Cybermen and their new voices are good developments, and would be further finessed in their next appearance.
The choices in the first episode intrigue me. For a start, David Whittaker plays his Greatest Hits in the first few minutes (use of the fault locater, random images appearing on the TARDIS scanner as a warning, mention of fluid links and mercury). Thereafter, it's almost a bottle-ish episode (see here for more details of what I mean by that) or prologue, with the Doctor and Jamie exploring the rocket and tussling with a cute servo robot. The Wheel crew turn up only towards the end, which is odd - I would expect either for the focus to stay with the Doctor and Jamie for the whole episode, or to get them on to the Wheel sooner. It's something different at least. There's a bit of contrivance to engineer Jamie and Zoe to be out space-walking during a meteorite shower (Jamie has to drop a vital component on the rocket that they must go back for because it's somehow important to defeat the Cybermen) but I'll forgive that because the space-walking scenes are done most effectively (it's luckily a sequence that falls within an existing episode). There's no music, but Brian Hodgson's special sounds make up for this and fit the spacey locale of the story. There's also some nice dialogue too: "Proper little brainchild - all brain and no heart!", "Logic, my dear Zoe, merely enables one to be wrong with authority", and a nice exchange between a sceptical Zoe and Jamie about the Doctor: "Well, is he a physicist, biochemist, astronomer, biometrician?" "Yes, he is". Overall, it's not perfect, and unlikely to be anyone's favourite story of all time, but it's still very enjoyable (particularly when watched an episode a week). It was also a good thing, whether it was intended or not, to kill off the 'base under siege' format and let Doctor Who explore a bit more - season 6 might not be as popular as season 5, but it's much more varied in terms of setting and story structures.
Connectivity:
The Wheel in Space, like The Ghost Monument, begins with the TARDIS team escaping imminent danger to end up on a spaceship (or two in the Jodie Whittaker story); they also both feature non-speaking robots.
Deeper Thoughts:
Meaningless Milestones. Having reached the 250th story mark, and it being towards the end of 2022, it feels like the right time to do my annual stock take. I have already randomly chosen one of the remaining Doctor Who Christmas special episodes to watch next, as there won't be such a thing on TV. (I know that technically there has been a festive special in 2022, on the very first day of the year, but this coming festive season, i.e. 12 days of Christmas / Double-length Radio Times period, will be the first without a new Who offering since December 2004 / January 2005, and that makes me feel a little melancholy; luckily, it looks from recent announcements like it'll be the last Christmas for a while to be so bereft.) I have also run the random number generator to select a story to watch in the Chrimbo limbo period when I'll be off work (and it's a cracker). Assuming that I post both of these before year end, my total blogged this year will be 36 stories. This isn't my highest annual total ever, but it's up there. At this rate of blogging, anticipating only four stories to be shown next year, and the promised full series of eight episodes plus a festive special the year after, I will catch up with ongoing production by the end of 2024. If so, then I can still blog new episodes as they come up thereafter, of course, but it will trash the random order concept. I may soon have to start looking for some 'extended universe' offerings to drop in occasionally. Be ready for my feelings on Scream of the Shalka any day now, you lucky things! Anyway, examining the stories covered this year, I see that there was a three-way tie for the most blogged per Doctor between Tom Baker, Peter Capaldi and Jodie Whittaker. It's all random, of course, but this makes sense to me. The Doctors with more episodes left are more likely to get picked more often. The two recent Doctors are those who've accumulated stories produced after the blog started, and Tom Baker started with a large number as he was in the role for a record-breaking seven years.
As I blew a number of Jodie Whittaker episodes in one go last year by covering Flux as one serial, I decided at the start of the year not to override the randomiser to blog any of the three 2022 specials as they went out. One did come up randomly, though, albeit my least favoured of the year, but that's the way the random numbers go. I managed to cover a spread of Capaldi's stories including his first and last (well, if you don't count Twice Upon a Time, and I try not to). The next highest Doctors in terms of stories covered this year were Matt Smith and David Tennant, jointly on four stories blogged each. Again, this is understandable, as they have relatively high totals (mostly because the majority of their stories are only one episode long). The 1960s black-and-white Doctors (William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton) were both on three stories blogged. For Troughton, with a little bit of fixing as mentioned above, I covered pretty much all the myriad ways one can experience one of his episodes: one story - The Dominators - was fully intact as originally broadcast, another - The Abominable Snowmen - was wholly animated (though one episode exists), and Wheel in Space was a mixture of full episodes and reconstructions using audio plus stills. For Hartnell, amazingly, I got three full stories (12 whole episodes) in their original format, with no gaps having to be plugged. Next, on two stories apiece, were Jon Pertwee and Peter Davison. Again, it's all random: if I had a choice in the matter, I might have held off on covering more than one of the latter's, as there are very few left; in fact, only three now. Neatly, though, there is one left in each of his seasons. On the subject of seasons / series, I have completed a couple more this year, bringing the total to seven so far. Many more, like all three of Davison's, only have one story left to do, so I expect some more to get completed in 2023.
I've still not completed any Doctor's whole era, unless you count Paul McGann (I covered his single TV outing as lead actor in the blog's first year, but now he's appeared in another Doctor Who story as a guest actor, of course). The ones likely to be completed first, apart from Davison, are the three for whom I did one story blog post each this year: Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy and Christopher Eccleston. McCoy has three stories left to do (again, one per season - I don't plan it this way, honest), Baker and Eccleston, just two apiece. The other Doctors have a healthy handful to half a dozen left each; nobody's in double figures now. There are 53 stories left in all (not including any new stories expected to be broadcast in 2023), split pretty evenly between classic and new series (26 and 27 remaining, respectively), with no particular decade or producer / showrunner tenure favoured. There are nine monochrome stories remaining, five for Hartnell, four for Troughton. Of those, only two are wholly missing (one each - Marco Polo and The Highlanders) with no known plans for either to be animated anytime soon. Nothing is necessarily getting animated soon as things are, but both stories have challenges that mean they'd be amongst the last ones to be tackled ever anyway - I will most likely cover both for the blog before any new pictures are drawn for them. The remainder either are fully intact or have animated episodes to plug gaps. Marco Polo is also now the earliest story I have yet to watch, and the most recent is the Power of the Doctor. Little did I ever imagine when I first started this endeavour that the earliest and most recent stories remaining would share a cast member; Doctor Who still has the ability to surprise me.
In Summary:
It's Wheel-y good (if you watch an episode a week, and don't think too hard about it!).
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