Written by David Whitaker | Durected by Richard Martin | Produced by Verity Lambert | Original air date 02/08/64
Things are eerie pretty much through the entire episode. Barbara wakes up before anyone else, and barely seems to recognize Ian, and addresses him formally, trying to find out if he's awake, "Mr. Chesterton?" Susan wakes up next, sees Barbara, and says, groggily, "I know you," then grips her head in pain. She doesn't recognize Ian, either. The Doctor is passed out on the floor, apparently with his head split open. After Barbara and Susan inspect the Doctor, the shot cuts to Barbara in the foreground, with Ian standing straight up, rigidly, and the audience didn't see or hear him get up. He seems out of it, too - "You're working late tonight, Ms. Wright." He says he's feeling dizzy.
What a setup! Whatever is going on, the audience has no idea, at this point, and it's pretty tense and mostly strange. I've seen this before, and it still impresses me how David Whitaker makes the viewer feel tense and uneasy through the whole episode.
Susan, who had gone to get the Doctor some water and a bandage, whips out what looks like a long line of condoms and scissors (they're apparently bandages, but I wouldn't put it past her, in her "state," to have mistakenly grabbed condoms). The Doctor, still lying on the floor, mutters, "I can't take you back, Susan. I can't!" The doors then open, and Susan claims she can feel some sort of presence in the ship. Ian approaches them, and the doors shut - and when he backs away, they open again. It's almost as if the ship is alive or something, and messing with him...
After carrying Susan to bed, she wakes up and threatens to attack Ian - when he gets close, she says "No. Who are you?!" and holds the scissors up. I have to say, Carole Ann Ford is on fire in this episode - I've complained before that we don't get to see her be "unearthly" very often, but she very much is alien, here. Ian backs away, and Susan grabs her head and begins stabbing the chair she's sitting on with the scissors. Baffling, strange, and creepy.
The Doctor, meanwhile, wants to check the fault locator and asks for Ian's help. Before helping the Doctor, however, Ian tells Barbara not to tell Susan that something may have gotten in the ship, but Susan overhears this and picks up the scissors again and slinks out of shot. Barbara, after getting some water for Susan, goes back to room with chair, and Susan threatens her, too, telling her she knows that something got inside the TARDIS and heard Barbara and Ian talking about it. Barbara doesn't quite believe it, though:
Barbara: "How would something get inside the ship, anyway?"
Susan: "The doors were open."
Barbara: "Yes, but where would it hide?"
Susan: *pause* "In one of us."
Where is this episode going? What the hell is happening? Is one of them possessed? Did I miss something? What? What?
Ian saunters into room and says there's no fault in the ship, everything is perfect. He says the Doctor is about to check the scanner, and Susan freaks out and runs out to tell him not to so he doesn't get shocked. He ignores her and uses the scanner anyway, and on it, we see a still photograph of, apparently, England. Barbara is excited they may finally be home, but the Doctor sees through the image and realizes it's a photograph. The doors then open and a roar is heard. Ian closes them. Another image is shown on the scanner, and Susan recognizes it as Quinnis, which is apparently somewhere the Doctor and Susan had visited "four or five trips ago," offscreen, where they apparently almost lost the ship (please see Big Finish for a Companion Chronicle about this trip, apparently. I haven't heard it, so can't speak to its quality). The Doctor explains that the ship has memory banks, and that is what they're seeing on the scanner.
He then accuses Ian and Barbara of sabotage. He thinks they knocked him and Susan out because they wanted to blackmail him into getting them back to England. How they would blackmail him into doing that is a mystery, though. We then get this from Barbara: "Don't you realize, you stupid old man, that you'd have died in the Cave of Skulls if Ian hadn't made fire for you? And what about what we went through with the Daleks?" She's angry that the Doctor tricked them all into going down to the Dalek city. "Accuse us?! You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us. But gratitude's the last thing you'll ever have, or any sort of common sense, either." Jacqueline Hill is on fire in this scene, and she cements herself here as my favorite Hartnell companion. What a great actress. Before the Doctor can respond - he'd just been mumbling in disagreement through Barbara's tirade - she sees something on the clock in the corner and screams. She rips her watch off her wrist and throws it across the room and begins weeping quietly. Ian takes his watch off, too, as the Doctor enters the room from nowhere with four cups of tea, clearly affected by Barbara's takedown and trying to make peace. Barbara isn't buying it, though, and after taking a cup, announces she's going to bed and leaves. Susan asks the Doctor to apologize to Barbara and leaves, too, and Ian tries to make the Doctor say he's sorry, too.
After everybody falls asleep, the Doctor checks on Ian and Barbara to make sure they're not awake, and, chuckling to himself, approaches the central console. Just as he's about to use it, he whips his head around, as someone grabs his throat as if to choke him, and the episode ends.
What a ride. We get absolutely no information at what's going on, just hints of perhaps a possession of some sort, or everybody has gone crazy. Hartnell fluffs a few lines, but in his defense, there is a lot of dialogue in this episode. Jacqueline Hill and Carole Ann Ford are awesome, here, both of them my easy favorites of this episode. Honestly, though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, this is my favorite episode since the very first one. I don't remember exactly how tomorrow's episode goes - I think it's not quite as interesting as this one - but this is gripping television, especially viewing this in order. Barbara's tirade against the Doctor is a hint that this may have been the penultimate episode of the series at one point, because prior to the Dalek episodes airing, it wasn't deemed popular enough and was apparently expensive to produce. Her tirade really reads as a sort of end-of-season review - but, in retrospect, we know it's not, since we've still got thirty episodes left before the actual end of the first season. Still, to this point, all the stories have been pretty well serialized, so hearing Barbara reference their adventures thus far was nice.
I'll have to keep an eye on this David Whitaker fellow, it seems he's script editor for a good reason...
"Doctor Who" puns so far: 2 | Tomorrow: "The Brink of Disaster"
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