First things first: holy cow, the treadmill kicked my butt today. I didn't even make it the full 55 minutes like usual, I barely staggered through the first two episodes of The Wheel in Space and then I had to bail. I must be getting old. But skinnier. Anyway, at the end of the last story Victoria left. By the second episode of this new story Zoe is introduced, although she isn't all companion-y yet.

Let's talk about that.

The Wheel in Space - Episodes 1 & 2

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

The gist of this story is that the TARDIS materializes on an empty spaceship, and during the landing the fluid link springs a leak and all of the mercury vaporizes. Clearly they aren't going anywhere until they can find some replacement mercury, but the ship they are on is missing its crew and is drifting in space. Meanwhile, a nearby space station called The Wheel sees the drifting ship and the commander decides to just blow it up since it is clearly adrift and might collide with the station. Somewhere in there the Doctor hits his head and passes out (mostly because Patrick Troughton was taking a vacation week during the second episode). Fortunately, Jamie is able to alert the station to their presence, and he and the unconscious Doctor are brought over to The Wheel. Unnoticed by everyone are  several floating spheres that leave the spaceship and infiltrate the station, with the big shocking reveal at the end of the second episode that the spheres contain Cybermen. Dun dun dun!

So far this one feels a bit padded. I am a third of the way through the story and the antagonists have only just shown up. Interestingly, the story originally pitched for this slot was a Dalek/Cybermen faceoff, but that was scuttled when Terry Nation didn't want to play. That particular confrontation wouldn't happen until the Battle of Canary Wharf during the Tenth Doctor's era.

One cool bit of historical significance is the scene where Jamie is being interviewed by the station commander, and when asked for the Doctor's name he glances over at a piece of medical equipment with a "John Smith Industries" label on it. He then proceeds to say the Doctor's name is Doctor John Smith, thus introducing the long-running alias. Not long after that Jamie is given a tour of the space station by Zoe Heriot, who is shown to be a super-smart scientist but not much of a historian. It seems pretty clear that the writers wanted to bring on a companion who could offload some of the technical jargon from the Doctor.

These first two episodes were Loose Cannon recaps, but tomorrow's third episode still exists so I'll be watching it on DVD. Hopefully the action will pick up a bit.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Second
Companion(s): Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot
Episode(s): The Wheel in Space - Episodes 1 & 2
Steps Walked: 5,739 today, 702,583 total
Distance Walked: 2.89 miles today, 337.57 miles total
Weight: 275.62 lbs (five day moving average), net change -31.68 lbs