The Edge of Destruction

The Edge of Destruction, Episode One: The Edge of Destruction

Is this the single strangest episode of Doctor Who? Faced with a two-week gap to fill, no sets other than the TARDIS, and no actors other than the regulars, script editor David Whitaker writes a two-part bottle episode that is like almost nothing else. Where other writers might decide on a character piece, or a small self-contained mystery, Whitaker plumps for just weirding us out. The tropes of absurdist theatre are the easiest way to see what's going on here: there are long instances of silence, the recognizable archetypes of our main characters begin to break down, all within a stream-of-consciousness 'narrative' that doesn't quite fit together – but for all that we can retrospectively interpret 'The Edge of Destruction' in that way, it does rather ignore the fact that this isn’t entirely successful. We can tell it's a bit of a rush job, and because there's no clear mystery to get a hold of, not even the vaguest suggestion of what is causing the characters to act as they do, there ends up being such a disunity to what’s going on that even the actors can’t quite work out what to do with it. William Russell becomes incredibly stilted, where Carole Ann Ford switches wildly between hysterical and sinister. Hartnell is in a somewhat better position given the Doctor is already completely unpredictable at this point in the show – he’s been shifting from charming to alien for twelve weeks now. So, bizarrely, given all that, here is where Jacqueline Hill’s Barbara really begins to shine: amongst all the strangeness, she ends up holding all this together. Amongst all the other actors’ uncertainties, Hill finds who Barbara really is in this episode. Her dressing down of the Doctor at its climax is where the strength of her character finally comes through – and once they reconcile in the next episode, Hartnell and Hill end up becoming one of Doctor Who’s best double acts. For all that Ian inhabits the more traditional ‘hero’ role and Susan is the Doctor’s granddaughter, it is the relationship between the Doctor and Barbara that makes the first two years of Doctor Who so compelling.

But what this episode is really there to do is disorient you – after two bleak serials, now even the TARDIS is revealed to not always be a safe place. It’s not an idea that lasts, and only really an idea that’s introduced because there’s 50 minutes of screen time that need filling, but already the breadth of this series is becoming clear: from social realism and cavemen, to B-movie allegories, to cod-Beckett inside a time machine – this is a programme that can do pretty much anything. Who cares if every experiment doesn’t always work?

The Edge of Destruction, Episode Two: The Brink of Disaster

Well, thank God there’s some character work in this episode: if ‘The Daleks’ cemented Doctor Who’s popularity, then this episode – thirteen weeks into Doctor Who’s run – gets us to the point where the hostilities between Ian, Barbara, and the Doctor have some kind of resolution. Even if ‘An Unearthly Child 1’ was an alien abduction, Ian and Barbara are now adventurers with the Doctor. And it’s Barbara who facilitates it all: she’s the one who confronts the Doctor, she’s the one who solves the mystery, and she’s the one who the Doctor has to apologize to. In terms of the kinds of stories Doctor Who is able to tell, it’s still finding its way. One of the real joys of Verity Lambert’s tenure on Doctor Who is exactly that: everything it does is an experiment. But from now on, the skeletal structure of Doctor Who stories begin to take shape now that we have a happy crew on board the TARDIS. We’re still yet to see the Doctor as a character who chooses to get involved in events – but the Doctor as a character is still learning who he is. And even if everything else in these two episodes is a bit throwaway, the Doctor becoming increasingly recognizably ‘the Doctor’ absolutely isn’t.

The Edge of Destruction Episode Ratings:

Episode 1: 7/10

Episode 2: 8/10

Mean Average: 7.5/10