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
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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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