Written by David Whitaker | Durected by Frank Cox | Produced by Verity Lambert | Original air date 02/15/64
I'm sure I'm not the first, and won't be the last, person to claim the two part serial commonly called "The Edge of Destruction" by fandom is both good and actually makes sense. But I am going to plant my flag here. I love these two episodes. They are at times scary, and at times absolutely barmy. Making sense of them both requires huge leaps of logic. The actors strain to make the plot work. Hartnell in particular struggles throughout, both because he has a ton of lines, most of which certainly aren't straightforward, and contain plenty of technobabble (which he famously hated, and I can't really blame him). But, here in 2017, after "The Doctor's Wife," I view these two episodes as the TARDIS finally reaching out and trying to communicate with the Time Lord she stole (I love a good retcon, you see). Here, the Doctor begins to realize that the ship he thinks he stole has a mind of it's own. Here, with the group noticing that the doors only open when it's safe for the occupants of the TARDIS to venture out, we find out that the ship is, in fact, in control of where the Doctor is going. It's alive. And while David Whitaker certainly didn't have all of this in mind when he wrote these episodes, I believe the general idea may be something he was gesturing at. Whether that's the case or not... it fits.
The hands around the Doctor's neck at the end of the last episode are quickly revealed to be Ian's. Before he can do any damage, he faints. This reinforces the Doctor's belief that Ian and Barbara are trying to kill him and Susan. He wants to kick them off the ship, a punishment Susan finds too strict, saying they might die if the Doctor follows through with it. He shrugs her off. The Doctor, for the first few minutes of this episode, is scary and alien in a way we really haven't seen him. He is a coldhearted bastard here. But the fault locator goes off right when he reaches this conclusion - and he finds out everything he thought the situation was about was incorrect. As he comes to this realization, Ian tries to choke Barbara, as if to reinforce the point for the Doctor. When he stops attacking her, he says "I pulled you away. The controls are alive," by which he means, likely, live with electricity (since we've seen the controls shock someone when they touch them in the last episode). But I take it to mean the controls are actually alive. The TARDIS, being bombarded with faults, is screwing with the minds of it's occupants. This is what has been going on the whole time - and stick with me, I know it's a stretch - the TARDIS is altering the minds of it's occupants to try to get a message through to all of them to help fix her problem. The Doctor realizes that he's not being attacked by Ian and Barbara, and that instead the ship is "on the point of disintegration." We then get the most baffling line of the series to date:
Barbara: "We had time taken away from us, and now it's being given back to us because it's running out."
This line may actually make sense. Now, hear me out - at the beginning of the last episode, Ian, Barbara, and Susan all acted as though they barely knew each other. Barbara and Ian were very professional with each other, calling each other "Mr. Chesteron" and "Ms. Wright." Susan seemed to recognize Barbara, but not as a friend or fellow traveler, but clearly as her history teacher, someone she didn't expect to see in the TARDIS. And the Doctor, delirious on the floor, says "I can't take you back, Susan, I can't!" All of this, to me, points to the TARDIS having mucked around with the personal timelines of the occupants, to try to get their attention that something was wrong with their time machine. So, to pick apart the above line - "We had time taken away from us" means the TARDIS sent the consciousness of its occupants back in time, but quickly brought their minds back forward in time so they can hopefully figure out that something is wrong with time - meaning "and now it's being given back to us." The last bit, "because it's running out," just means that they're almost beyond the point of solving the problem and preventing the TARDIS from disintegrating. How Barbara arrived at that conclusion is anybody's guess, but Barbara is shown to be deeply intuitive during her time on the series, and I choose to believe the TARDIS picked up on that and used her to further her plan. Perhaps the telepathic circuits are involved, because Barbara's line reads very much like something the TARDIS/Idris would say.
Even though they've figured out the problem lies with the TARDIS itself, somehow, they have yet to figure out how to fix it. They discuss the central column not moving properly, and the Doctor had mentioned that the "heart of the TARDIS" was under the column, and he says to Ian that, had it escaped, "If you felt the power, dear boy, you wouldn't live to speak of it." Years later, in The Parting of the Ways, when Rose does just that, the Ninth Doctor has to sacrifice himself to save her life. Setting aside whether or not the First Doctor would ever kiss the time vortex out of him, it would have been pretty interesting to see Bad Wolf Ian...
Unfortunately, it's 1964, and the Doctor is a sexist git. Apparently thinking the women wouldn't be able to handle the truth of their imminent destruction, he tells everyone they've got ten minutes to live. He then pulls Ian aside and tells him it's likely less than five and asks him if they'll face death together (perhaps he's closer to Ian than I thought? ...nah, pretty sure it's just sexist). The ship rocks violently, and the Doctor realizes they're "near the beginning" of a solar system - that the only power that could destroy the TARDIS seems to surround them here and now. After freaking out about it for a quick minute, Ian asked him where he was trying to go when they left the planet Skaro. The Doctor explains that he tried to use the fast return switch to take them back to 20th century Earth, and as he explains this, he notices the switch is stuck due to a little spring not operating properly. He fixes the spring, and everything settles and the TARDIS returns to normal.
Fifty minutes of drama, some of the weirdest stuff you'll ever see on the show, all down to a stuck spring, the most banal problem imaginable. Like I said above - barmy. I love it, though. You can't pull this sort of thing off every week, but as someone who finds tiny insignificant little details that throw everything out of whack like a stuck switch frustrating as hell, it works for me. Doesn't bother me in the slightest.
We then get a sweet little coda where the Doctor apologizes to Barbara. He doesn't say the words "I'm sorry," but does say "As we learn about each other, we learn about ourselves," meaning he realizes that Barbara had been right the whole time, and that she was on a mission to prove herself as such, and the Doctor acknowledges that. Susan pops in and says they've landed, and the Doctor gets Barbara a nice coat because wherever they've landed is cold. "We must look after you, you know. You're very valuable," he says, with a smile. He is completely genuine and sweet, and the scary, aloof, alien Doctor from the beginning of the episode seems miles away at this point. Barbara smiles, puts the coat on, and they walk arm and arm out of the room. Susan pelts Barbara with a snowball and Barbara chases her outside. These four people are friends, now, it seems, after thirteen episodes of teamwork out of necessity, and it's adorable.
The episode ends with Susan and Barbara finding a footprint in the snow, claiming it must have been left there by a giant.
This episode and "Edge of Destruction" get a lot of crap for being unintelligible and/or anticlimactic, but I truly do love them. If I were to rank the episodes of Doctor Who I've written about thus far, these two and "An Unearthly Child" would be in the top three.
Starting tomorrow, we've got a week's worth of episodes in a row that are all missing. I've heard them on audio with linking narration before, but never seen the reconstructions. I'll be viewing the reconstructions for all of Doctor Who's currently missing episodes.
"Doctor Who" puins so far: 2 | Tomorrow: "The Roof of the World"
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