Doctor Who: "The Edge of Destruction"

Barbara: Do you think something could have got into the ship? The doors were open.
Ian (laughing): What do you mean? An animal or a man or something?
Barbara: Yes. Or ... another intelligence.

"The Edge of Destruction" directed by Richard Martin, 8 February 1964
"The Brink of Disaster" directed by Frank Cox, 15 February 1964

Susan confronts Ian with the scissors

Written by David Whitaker
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

I don't really remember "The Edge of Destruction" as anything special. I think experience shows us that it's much more difficult to put a strong Doctor Who story in 45 minutes than in ninety--particularly during the classic series. But watching again, it's wonderfully, effectively creepy.

As the TARDIS is departing Skaro, a sudden disturbance knocks everyone aboard unconscious. Slowly, they start to recover--Barbara first, then Susan, then Ian. But they're confused; at first, they don't recognise each other. The Doctor has cut his head as he fell and remains unconscious. Susan goes into a back room to cut him a bandage that looks disconcertingly like a ribbon of condom wrappers.

There's something odd going on in the TARDIS. Ian sees that the doors have opened, but whenever he walks toward them, they close; when he steps back, they open again. The impossibility of the doors opening in flight drives Susan to a fit of hysterics. Finally the Doctor comes to, but not before Susan, adjusting controls on the control console, cries out in pain and faints.

While Barbara tends to the Doctor, Ian carries Susan to bed. She wakes, and she's changed--guarded, paranoid. She threatens Ian with a pair of scissors. He attempts to talk her down, but she cannot stop herself from stabbing at him--at the last instant, she manages to shift her aim, instead slicing into the mattress.

Barbara is now convinced that something entered the TARDIS when the doors opened--if not a man or animal, then "an intelligence"; Ian and the Doctor laugh at her concerns. While the two men try to locate a technical fault in the TARDIS's workings, Barbara visits Susan, who has taken to her bed after Ian disarmed her of the scissors. But she's snuck back out and retrieved them, keeping them clutched in her hands as she and Barbara talk. Susan suggests that the intelligence Barbara is scared of might have taken up residence in one of the TARDIS crew. And indeed, Susan herself is very much coming across as if she's under alien possession--a hawkish, predatory stare; a quiet menace in her voice.

Susan's paranoia seems to have spread to the Doctor. He accuses Ian and Barbara of engineering the crisis, of knocking he and Susan out from behind and tampering with the TARDIS console. But his accusations come suddenly to a halt when Barbara makes a terrifying discovery: the TARDIS's clock has physically melted, like The Persistence of Memory. The crew's wristwatches have also melted.

In an effort to restore calm, the Doctor passes out a cup of tea to each of his companions; no one drinks. Some time later, after everyone else has fallen asleep, the Doctor is working at the TARDIS's controls when Ian attempts to strangle him. The Doctor knocks him to the ground, stunning him.

When Ian comes out of his daze, he claims he was only trying to protect the Doctor by knocking him away from the control console, as both the Doctor and Susan had previously found that trying to operate the controls had caused them to pass out. The Doctor, though, is having none of it, and, despite Susan's entreaties for mercy, determines to put Ian and Barbara off the ship permanently--even if the TARDIS doors open to reveal uninhabitable surroundings.

Everyone is thoroughly unhinged by now. Ian, after protesting his innocence, actually sneaks up behind Barbara and attempts to strangle her. But before a final climax can be reached, the fault locator--which up until had stubbornly refused to respond--suddenly goes off, and now it's indicating that everything in the TARDIS is faulty. The fault locator's alarm keeps going off steadily every fifteen seconds.

The Doctor acts like this is a major brainstorm, giving him the information he needs to fix the problem, and excitedly he tells Susan and Barbara to wait at the door; if it opens, they are to tell him exactly what they see outside. But as soon as they're out of earshot, he confesses the truth to Ian: he is merely giving the women false hope, so that when the end comes, they won't know about it. The TARDIS is doomed--it will disintegrate within five minutes. (He mashes up the titles of this story's two episodes when he describes the TARDIS as being on "the brink of destruction".) The control column attempts to veritably leap out of the console, which the Doctor says is the TARDIS's power source, contained beneath the console, attempting to escape.

But it's Barbara who realises the truth--all these strange things that have been happening are in fact the TARDIS defence mechanisms, trying to convey to the human crew that something they are doing is causing harm to the ship. (This is why the fault locator wasn't showing any faults earlier--the TARDIS isn't at fault; the crew are.)

This is a fairly important moment in Doctor Who continuity. Barbara is making the first suggestion here that the TARDIS is alive and sentient--though the Doctor dismisses the idea derisively. But despite his objection, Barbara's theories lead him to a revelation, and he realises that the TARDIS is rushing toward the birth of the solar system: outside right now, atoms are rushing together, and the Sun is being born in a burst of nuclear fusion. The stresses of it are about to pull the TARDIS apart. And it's all happening because when the Doctor pressed the switch that sent the ship spinning back in time from Skaro, the spring inside the switch failed to work, and the switch failed to release. In effect, the TARDIS console thinks that someone has been pressing that switch continuously, sending the ship further and further back in time.

Ian and the Doctor take the switch apart and fix the problem, and the TARDIS crew have been saved. The greatest damage done is probably to the Doctor's relationship with Barbara--she's deeply resentful of his earlier insistence that he was going to strand Ian and her wherever the TARDIS next landed, regardless of where that was. But she's mollified somewhat when the Doctor provides her with a heavy coat from the TARDIS's wardrobe for her to wear outside, as they've landed in an icy, snowy landscape.

What Lisa thought: I said to her, "What did you think?", and without missing a beat she said, "Still don't like Barbara. She's so pissy." On the story itself, she largely agreed with me--the first episode was exceptionally creepy and atmospheric, though the second episode was a letdown. (I think it very much comes across that this story was filler, a bottle show with two different directors.)

The next story was "Marco Polo", but that one's unfortunately lost. We'll therefore pick up with "The Keys of Marinus" in our next post.

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Doctor Who: "The Daleks"

Oh, there's a reason. Or "explanation" might be better. It's stupid and ridiculous, but it's the only one that fits. A dislike for the unlike. They're afraid of you because you're different from them, and whatever you do, it doesn't matter.--Ian Chesterton

"The Dead Planet" directed by Christopher Barry, 21 December 1963
"The Survivors" directed by Christopher Barry, 28 December 1963
"The Escape" directed by Richard Martin, 4 January 1964
"The Ambush" directed by Christopher Barry, 11 January 1964
"The Expedition" directed by Christopher Barry, 18 January 1964
"The Ordeal" directed by Richard Martin, 25 January 1964
"The Rescue" directed by Richard Martin, 1 February 1964

Viewers get their first look at the Daleks

Written by Terry Nation
Script editor: David Whitaker
Produced by Verity Lambert
Associate producer: Mervyn Pinfield

William Hartnell as the Doctor
William Russell as Ian Chesterton
Jacqueline Hill as Barbara Wright
Carole Ann Ford as Susan Foreman

The TARDIS has landed in a petrified forest. Everything--trees, shrubs, even blossoming flowers--has been suddenly turned to a powdery stone that crumbles at a gentle touch. Something happened here that destroyed all life in the blink of an eye. Barbara and Ian nevertheless hold out hope that they're somewhere on Earth, until Barbara discovers the carcass of a wild animal whose skin is actually made of metal--clearly, no such animal could exist on Earth. (The Doctor theorises that the animal was held together by an internal magnetic field, and that it might have actually been able to draw its prey toward it through magnetism. I think that's pretty cool.)

Beyond the lifeless forest is a lifeless, abandoned city. We can tell it's the product of an advanced civilisation because every building looks like the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. The Doctor wants to explore the city, but Ian and Barbara object; they want to get back to the TARDIS so the Doctor can try to return them to Earth. Plus, it's getting spooky. Susan is convinced a stranger came up and tapped her on the back in the forest, though she ran away screaming rather than turn and see them. No one believes her until they're all back at the TARDIS and hear some activity going on outside. They don't see whoever's there, but when they head back outside, they find that someone has left them a case of glass vials containing clear liquid--several doses of some sort of drug.

Ian, Barbara and Susan are now all desperate to leave, so the Doctor agrees. When he starts the TARDIS going, however, the engine starts, and then grinds to a halt. A component called the fluid link has lost its fluid and needs to be refilled. But the fluid it needs is mercury, and the Doctor doesn't have any mercury. There's nothing for it but to head over to the city. (It's pretty obvious even at this point that the Doctor has deliberately sabotaged the TARDIS so that he can explore the city.)

There's a vignette inside the TARDIS at this point, where Susan and the Doctor introduce Ian and Barbara to the TARDIS's food machine. You input what you want, and the machine gives you a biscuit that, when you eat it, tastes just like what you ordered. It's one of those twentieth-century sci fi cliches that ignores that texture and consistency are key to taste.

In their explorations of the silent city, they come across a lab filled with scientific apparatus. The lab contains a Geiger counter, which is indicating that the radiation level is fatally high. The Doctor theorises that the whole area must have been subjected to a neutron bomb--destroying all life instantly, but leaving the city's physical infrastructure intact. At any rate, it doesn't really matter right now; the important thing is to get back to the TARDIS as quickly as possible. It's now that the Doctor tells Ian that he made up the deficiency in the fluid link, and the TARDIS will actually function perfectly fine.

During their explorations, the Doctor, Ian and Susan have become separated from Barbara, and the Doctor has another of those "morally ambiguous" moments here (a term we use when wishing to obscure that the early Hartnell Doctor is actually immoral), being perfectly willing to leave the two schoolteachers behind in the city while he and Susan head back to the TARDIS and leave the dead planet. But Ian grabs the fluid link off him, forcing him to stay and search for Barbara.

Not that it matters, as the city's inhabitants now make their appearance, emerging from the tunnels deep underground where they live--the Daleks, dome-shaped mechanical creatures that glide about along the floor, peering at things with their long, disquieting cyclopean eyestalk. Their first reveal, screencapped above, is really well done, starting with a tight shot on the Doctor, Ian and Susan as we see them jump with fright and horror, then pulling rapidly out to show the forest of Daleks they suddenly find themselves amongst.

The Daleks imprison the Doctor, Susan, Ian and Barbara and keep them in a cell in their underground tunnels. It's here that I feel really glad I'm doing this rewatch, seeing the programme in order from the beginning. Because that way, I can appreciate that the Daleks aren't the monster of the week--because Doctor Who has never before had a monster of the week. The TARDIS crew--including the Doctor--don't simply take the Daleks in their stride; they're all terrified of what might happen. That terror increases when Barbara realises that they might not be robots as they appear; perhaps there is some alien creature inside them.

We learn a little about the history of this planet, Skaro, when the Daleks bring the Doctor to their control room to interrogate him. The Daleks are the survivors of the "Neutronic War", which they fought against a race called the Thals. After the war, the Daleks withdrew into the tunnels beneath their city, and also withdrew into their domed travel machines, while the Thals disappeared to somewhere else on the planet and haven't been seen since. Fallout from the neutron bombs that ended the war have caused the Daleks (and presumably the Thals) to mutate significantly, into the present small creatures that live inside the Dalek shells. The Doctor realises it must have been Thals who spooked Susan and left behind the vials of clear liquid in the petrified forest--and that the clear liquid must have been anti-radiation drugs.

Meanwhile, radiation sickness is taking a serious toll on the TARDIS crew. The Doctor and Barbara in particular are soon hard hit. They manage to persuade the Daleks to allow Susan to leave, returning to the TARDIS so she can retrieve the Thals' anti-radiation drugs. What they don't know is that the Daleks have no intention of actually allowing them to take the drugs; when Susan returns, they will confiscate the drugs from her so that they can perform research on them.

Susan has a harrowing run back through the forest, and when she gets back to the TARDIS, she's confronted by a Thal. But he's not a hideous mutant--at least, not by human standards. The descendants of the Thal survivors of the Neutronic War are physically perfect human beings, tall, strapping, fond of not wearing all that much clothing.

(When Susan enters the TARDIS, the viewer can see the dead forest through the TARDIS doors, an effect the show would only attempt to achieve once or twice more over the entire run of the classic programme. Oddly, though, when the view comes from inside the TARDIS, even the outside of the TARDIS doors are covered in roundels, rather than looking like the doors of a police call box.)

The Thal, Alydon, tells Susan that after the war, his people retired to a distant plateau, where they have transformed themselves from a warrior race to a society of pacifist farmers. But now the rains have failed, and after being subjected to a long drought, the Thals have migrated back to the vicinity of the Dalek city. They're hoping to make contact with the Daleks and establish a lasting peace with them.

Alydon realises that the Daleks might mean to confiscate the drugs Susan is carrying, so he gives her a second supply. When she returns to the Dalek city, she's allowed to keep the second set and uses it to treat the TARDIS crew, who are all soon feeling much better. Susan tells the Daleks of the Thals' hopes for peace, and they dictate to her a message for the Thals, offering them an exchange--the Daleks will provide the Thals with synthetic food from their labs, if the Thals will work to bring the soils around the Dalek city back to life. But it's a trap; when the Thals arrive to collect the Dalek food, the Daleks intend to the final remainder of the whole Thal race.

Meanwhile, the prisoners from the TARDIS have realised the Daleks are monitoring their conversation by means of closed-circuit cameras on the walls. There's an unintentionally hilarious moment when the prisoners concoct an elaborate sham, in which Ian and the Doctor get in an argument that leads to Susan physically attacking Ian, in an attempt to make it look as if the cameras got accidentally destroyed in the struggle. The camera then cuts to a pair of Daleks, watching the whole thing from their control room.

"Do you think the destruction of the camera was an accident?" one of them asks.

"No," the other replies.

Shortly after this, the TARDIS team mount an escape from Dalek captivity. They've realised that the Daleks draw their power from static electricity in the city's metal floors--this is why they can't leave the city, to pursue the Thals into the forest. They're able to cut power to one of their captors by dragging him onto a large cloak (given to Susan by Alydon to keep her warm), thus separating him from the floor.

(They first capture the Dalek by smearing mud over its eyepiece, blinding it. The Dalek repeatedly screams, "Keep away from me!" rather than, "My vision is impaired!")

Ian and the Doctor remove the mutant creature from within the Dalek--their reactions make it clear that the thing looks hideous, through all we see is a single grasping claw--and Ian climbs inside, masquerading as a Dalek who's taking the Doctor, Barbara and Susan for questioning.

The other Daleks see through the subterfuge, but the four of them are nevertheless able to make their escape to the top of one of the city's tall spires. At one point, Ian has to be left behind while the rest of the team head upwards in an elevator, because he can't get himself free from the Dalek shell he's been pilot; Susan and Barbara alternate hysterical fits at the prospect of leaving him behind.

He's able to get free, though, and joins the others at the top of the tower, from where they're able to make their way down to ground level and escape into the forest. But from the top of the spire, they spot the Thals arriving for the massacre the Daleks have planned. While the others head back to the TARDIS, Ian stays behind, trying to contact the Thals and warn them. His warning comes too late to save Temmosus, the Thal leader, but it does allow the rest of the Thals to escape.

Once the Thals and the TARDIS crew have gathered together back in the woods, Ian and Barbara expect the Thals to mount an attack on the Daleks, since their people face extinction if they can't get access to Daleks' synthetic food. But Alydon, who has succeeded Temmosus as leader of the Thals, declines. The Neutronic War has turned the Thals into an utterly pacifist people, unwilling to bring another Armageddon upon their planet. If the Daleks will not make peace with them, then the Thals will simply return to their plateau and wait to die.

The Doctor is utterly uninterested in what's to become of the Thals; now that the four of them have escaped, he wants only to depart in the TARDIS. But that plan gets disrupted when Ian realises that the Daleks still have the fluid link, taken from him when they were first imprisoned. Without it, the TARDIS cannot leave Skaro.

There's no way the main characters can take on the Daleks unless the Thals will fight alongside them. A debate follows amongst the TARDIS crew over the morality of persuading the Thals to join their cause--and inevitably persuading some of them to die--just to get back a small piece of electronic equipment. Barbara and the Doctor are all for it, because not doing so would mean spending the rest of their lives on Skaro; Ian and Susan insist that, regardless of the consequences, enlisting the Thals would be wrong.

It's a fascinating moment, and one where we can't help but be aware that we're not looking at "the Doctor and his companion(s)", as we will be once Susan, Ian and Barbara have all left the programme. Instead what we're looking at is an ensemble cast. The Doctor isn't presented as the most experienced, most natural leader of the group; his opinion carries no more weight than anyone else's.

At last Ian agrees to the idea of enlisting Thal aid, but only if the Thals will agree of their own accord to attack the Daleks. He goes back to the Thals to put the TARDIS crew's case before them, but just as before, his call to action falls on deaf ears. So Ian decides to put the Thals' insistence that they would rather die than fight to the test. He takes hold of Dyoni, the daughter of the dead Temmosus and betrothed to the new leader Alydon, and declares that he will offer her to the Daleks in trade for the fluid link. As he's leading her out of the Thal camp, though, Alydon comes after him and punches him across the face, knocking him to the ground.

"So there is something you'll fight for," Ian points out.

Back at the city, the Daleks have been experiment with the Thals' anti-radiation drugs by giving them to some of their own number. The Daleks who have taken the drugs soon start dying, and the Dalek command come to a realisation--the Dalek race have mutated in such a way that they now need the radiation to survive. They begin considering ways to preserve Skaro's irradiated state, and soon decide to detonate another neutron bomb. This would, of course, have the effect of destroying the Thals, but Daleks aren't really the sort who'd be concerned about that.

Meanwhile, Ian's demonstration has persuaded Alydon to face the Daleks, and through a stirring speech he's able to convince the rest of the Thals to follow him. They realise, though, that to attack the Dalek city from the front would be pointless; it's too well defended. To the rear, though, the city is nestled against an imposing mountain range, and the mountains are themselves guarded by a swamp full of fearsome, mutated predators that have already claimed the lives of a Thal scouting party sent to investigate. The Thals realise that the mountains are their best shot at entering the Dalek city--the Daleks will have left that approach unguarded, as they will have assumed that the dangers of the swamp will be enough to keep any attacker from approaching from that direction.

An expedition enters the swamp, led jointly by Ian and a Thal named Ganatus, who spends most of his time flirting with Barbara. The monsters who inhabit the swamp are really well done, I think--much of black and white Who seems to have more convincing special effects than the first decade of colour Who that followed. On the far side of the swamp, the expedition discovers pipes from the Dalek city, drawing water. The pipes are cut through the mountains, and Ian and Ganatus realise that they can reach the Dalek city by following the pipes through the caves, rather than having to scale the mountains.

The Thals who have remained back in the petrified forest have the task of trying to knock out the Daleks' radio surveillance tower before the expedition arrive from the mountains. Alydon, the Doctor and Susan sneak into the city, but as they reach the tower's controls, they're ambushed by Daleks. Alydon escapes, but the Doctor and Susan are captured.

During the passage through the caves, Ganatus's brother dies when he falls down a chasm. He sacrifices himself, cutting his safety rope so that he doesn't drag Ian down the chasm with him when he falls. The remainder of the expedition reach the Dalek city and start sneaking their way to the Dalek control room, but what they don't know is that they're racing against time: the Daleks have started the countdown for the detonation of another neutron bomb.

A battle ensues between the Thals, the TARDIS crew and the Daleks in the control room. The Thals manage to smash the Daleks' power centre. This stops the bomb countdown, and also cuts the static electricity to the metal floor, through which the Daleks power their travel machines. The machines all power down, and the mutants inside them die--five hundred years after the Neutronic War, the Thals have finally achieved the extinction of the Dalek race.

It's a lovely touch that they're not happy at this; instead, the Thals are wistful that they weren't able to find a solution other than fighting. But with the death of the Daleks, the Thals now have access to the Dalek methods of synthesising food, and their survival is assured.

What Lisa thought: She definitely felt more engaged with the narrative than she had with "An Unearthly Child". Lisa is no fan of the Daleks, but she liked them here--she liked them because they weren't The Daleks, the greatest menace to all life in the universe; they were simply a new menace the TARDIS team were facing. Though she did laugh at the idea of the Dalek raise facing extinction at the story's end.

The next story is "The Edge of Destruction".

Doctor Who Rewatch Index

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