Series 1 Episode 12: The Edge of Destruction

Serial: The Edge of Destruction/Inside the Spaceship
Episode: 1 (The Edge of Destruction)
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: David Whitaker
Director: Richard Martin
Producer: Verity Lambert
Original air date: 08/02/1964

VICTORIAN GOTHIC GENDER BINARIES...IN SPAAAAAAAAACE!

In which everyone is tripping balls, the Tardis is malfunctioning, the Doctor goes to some pretty dark places, Susan plays with scissors, and Barbara gives the Doctor a tongue-lashing he’ll never forget. Welcome to…THE EDGE OF DESTRUCTION! (The second episode of which is called ‘The Brink of Disaster’. I'm assuming that, had they had a third episode, it would've been called ‘The Cusp of Catastrophe’ or ‘The Precipice of Perdition’ or something.)

The episode begins as the previous episode ends: not with a whimper but with a bang. The Doctor, Ian, and Susan are flung backwards from the console. The Doctor lands on the floor; Susan lands back on the console; Ian, rather cushily, lands in a chair.

Jammy sod.

Enter Barbara, looking hungover as hell, still in her Thal trousers but with more sensible shoes and wearing her Special Thal Keepsake Dressmaking Fabric as some manner of pashmina. She staggers past the unconscious Doctor over to Ian, apparently trying to remember who he is as though she’s living the aftermath of an ill-advised one-night stand: ‘Mister…Chesterton? Ian Chesterton?’ How much did you have to drink last night, Babs?

And now Susan’s on her feet, looking distinctly zombie-like. She thinks she knows Barbara, but is distracted almost immediately by the mother of all headaches and a pain in her neck. Barbara offers to have a look, presumably so that she can check whether Susan has any other symptoms of meningitis, but then Susan spots the Doctor lying on the floor and feels the urge to screech ‘GRANDFATHER’ at the top of her lungs. Some people have headaches, Susan.

It appears the Doctor has cut his head open; Babs sends Susan for water and ointment, but Susan is temporarily distracted by not knowing who Ian is. The delivery is all (deliberately) stilted, with lots of awkward pauses in the dialogue, which is unsettling, but also slows everything down a lot. At any rate, it’s nice to have Susan asking Barbara what’s going on for a change, though in the great tradition of anyone who is ever asked this question on Doctor Who, Babs hasn’t got a clue.

And now Ian’s standing up, apparently under the impression that he’s at Coal Hill School, because he calls Barbara ‘Miss Wright’ and observes that she’s ‘working late tonight’.

Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger [. . .] across a crowded room.

It’s all rather trippy, and a recurring motif seems to be characters standing around saying ‘shouldn't we help him’ of one another but without appearing to commit to doing anything useful, like passers-by in the street witnessing a mugging or something. At any rate, it’s rather lovely that the Bezzie Mates from Earth recognise one another first.

Babs and her lashmina

Meanwhile, Susan's found a stripy bandage which she’s cutting up with some lethal-looking scissors. In the console room, Ian has taken over the first-aiding, observing of the Doctor that ‘his heart seems all right’. Given that we now know the Doctor has two hearts, it’s clear that Ian is either rubbish at first-aid or the Doctor was really not OK. And yes I know this wasn't actually a thing yet, but allow me my fun.

The Doctor is waking up, and we have the first instance of ‘WHAT is the Doctor mumbling about in his sleep that sounds REALLY interesting I would like backstory on THAT’ on the show, when he mutters ‘I can’t take you back, Susan, I can't’. WHAT’S THAT ALL ABOUT? Did he actually abduct her from Gallifrey like he abducted Barbara and Ian from Earth? Or is there another reason he can't take her back to Gallifrey beyond his inability to pilot the Tardis? Or is he just talking about 1960s Earth? Or another place Susan felt at home? I DEMAND ANSWERS.

First aid fail.

Ian is still pretty spaced-out and observes that the Doctor is ‘rambling’. Babs, however, seems to be getting the same ‘this reminds me of that time in a junkyard when the Doctor abducted a couple of schoolteachers’ vibe from the Doctor because it appears to have jogged her memory; she realises she’s in the Tardis and tries to get Ian in on the epiphany. Ian is still confuz.

Meanwhile, the water machine is playing up, which is probably significant. Susan steps through the doors into the console room and – GASP! – it’s a hatstand? Oh no wait I'm looking at the wrong thing. IT’S THE DOORS! They’re wide open, which is Very Bad, because they can’t open on their own. Barbara, reasonably, suggests they may have been forced open when the ship crashed; Susan says the ship can’t crash because that would be impossible. Which brings me to one of the reasons I love the experimental shoestring-budget mess that is this serial: early Tardis-dwellers have NO CLUE as to the Tardis’s capabilities and it’s a testament to the character development on the show that even the Tardis gets a 50-year-long character arc.

Susan is in hysterics and thinks there must be something inside the ship, which makes this Babs’s turn to say that’s impossible. In fact Babs has had enough of this nonsense and has taken over with the space bandages. And now the Tardis starts playing silly beggars: when Ian walks towards the doors, they close of their own accord; when he backs away, they open again. Susan tries the controls, has a scranny, and faints. I think Ian speaks for all of us when he yells ‘WHAT’S GOING ON HERE?’.

Ian being trolled by the Tardis

Babs tells Ian to take ‘the girl’ and put her to bed, which is a weird way to talk about Susan, but on the upside we get to see Ian’s excellent Fireman’s Lift technique, with bonus points for no Sixties Hemline Manfunctions.

The Doctor is waking up, complaining about feeling as though he’s been hit in the back of the neck. Babs is putting two and two together.

Meanwhile, Ian has put Susan to bed on some manner of ergonomic sunlounger, which I'm going to assume is one of the Space Beds aboard the Tardis. He arranges her hands, which is creepy. There’s more business with the water machine, during which Ian eventually manages to wet a handkerchief for brow-mopping purposes, and then OH CHRIST SUSAN WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THOSE APPALLINGLY DEADLY-LOOKING SCISSORS?

Be safe, kids.

Fuckaduck, she has no idea who the strange man in her bedroom is and now she’s going batshit and stabbing the ergonomic sunlounger with the scissors like something out of The Exorcist. And Ian is…watching? And just to complete the whole Meshes of the Afternoon knife vibe, there’s a close-up of the scissors to end the scene. I'm pretty sure these guys got in trouble for depicting stabby stabby household objects on a tv show for kids.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is bullshitting, hard, and Babs is having precisely none of it:

DOCTOR: No, no, the ship must have stopped and put us down somewhere.
BARBARA: But where? Where are we?
DOCTOR: Oh, all these questions Miss Wright! Please!
BARBARA: You don't know do you? You're just guessing aren't you?

DOCTOR YOU'VE BEEN RUMBLED.

Ian, however, seems to be more willing to indulge the Doctor's cryptic nonsense, or at least to be engaged in conversation.

However, he continues to speak for all of us when his response to the above is to say that '[e]verything's in a mess'. The Doctor accuses the two humans of having meddled with the controls; in a moment of true Babsian glory, when the Doctor points an accusing finger at our favourite history teacher, she does not even dignify him with a response. She has, however, been thinking:

BARBARA: Do you think something could have got into the ship?
DOCTOR: (Scoffing.) No, no, no.
BARBARA: Well the doors were open.
DOCTOR: No, it's ridiculous.
IAN: (Laughing.) What, you mean? An animal or a man or something?
BARBARA: Yes!
DOCTOR: It's…it’s not very logical now, is it? Hmm?
BARBARA: Or another intelligence.
DOCTOR: Well as I said, it's not very logical.
BARBARA: No it isn't, but does it have to be? I mean, things aren't always very logical are they? It's just that one's been through so much, I've...
DOCTOR: I've been very patient with you Miss…Wright, and really, there's no more time for these absurd theories.
IAN: Probably a mechanical fault.
DOCTOR: Yes, or electric.

UGH. I'm very much not enjoying the gender divide between 'logical' and 'illogical' thinking. The Doctor and Ian are both portrayed as 'rational' beings who assume that there must be an underlying scientific solution to their predicament, whereas Babs is thinking actually quite like a Doctor Who scriptwriter from the 2010s. Victorian-style gender stereotyping aside, however, I do love this exchange insofar as it's another example of Barbara's character development: it seems that her experiences so far have caused her to think...well, not so much outside the box as inside it, if by box you mean Tardis. Her world view has now expanded to other worlds; the bounds of possibility are suddenly a lot more flexible than she had previously imagined. I also think a lot of the time Barbara's supposedly 'irrational' approach to problem-solving is less obnoxious for a modern audience than it ought to be for the simple reason that she and Ian are also meant to typify a Humanities/Sciences divide. It makes sense that a Science teacher would look for a mechanical fault in a malfunctioning machine, and that a History teacher would try a more narrative approach. I also think it's rather fascinating that Barbara's way of thinking is pretty much the way later incarnations of the Doctor would approach a similar situation - clearly our Babs had an enormous impact on the Doctor over this episode.

Ian Chesterton: the mocking face of the patriarchy

Anyway, Ian essentially tells Barbara to let the men deal with this, and the look she gives him as she finishes his sentence for him - '[k]eep an eye on Susan?' - would fell him where he stood were she in a world in which looks could kill. Yeah, sure, Ian, I'll go and babysit the scissor-happy teen, you patronising fuck. As Ian tells Barbara not to tell Susan about her theory about something being in the ship - presumably to save her irrational ladybrain from dwelling on such unsettling matters - Susan (predictably) rocks up all stealthy-like, dressed as some distinctly nun-like sleepwear, eavesdropping like crazy and stealing the scissors from their resting place on the table.

Left to their Sciency Maleness, the Doctor and Ian are trying to read the numbers on the fault locator, but the numbers keep blurring before their eyes. Which can't be good.

Meanwhile, Barbara is checking on Susan, whose resemblance to a nun has been heightened by the wimple-like compress draped over her head. Susan remembers who Barbara is but questions her first-aiding, claiming there's nothing wrong with her. There's some tense chit-chat during which Susan continues to act like a possessed novice in a horror movie before Barbara cuts to the chase teacher-style: 'Susan, why don't you give me those scissors?'

Sister Act 3: Back in the habit STAB IT

No flies on you, Babs.

Susan asks Barbara why she's been lying to her about something being on the ship. Babs tries to diffuse the situation as Susan continues to brandish the scissors at her, then takes advantage of Susan's hesitation to wrestle the scissors from her. You're a braver woman than I am, Babs.

Disarmed, Susan continues to be creepy as hell:

SUSAN: I've never noticed the shadows before. It's so silent in the ship.
BARBARA: Yes…or we're imagining things. We must be…I mean, how would anything get into the ship anyway?
SUSAN: The doors were open.
BARBARA: Yes, but…but where would it hide?
SUSAN: In one of us.

DUN-DUN-DUNNNNNNN!!! But seriously Susan WHAT THE FUCK? I must say I enjoy the weird noncommittal mucking about with horror movie tropes almost as much as I enjoy the fact that to go down that path the show would have had to have had a considerably bigger budget. This serial really is the forerunner of a lot of New Who episodes. I know Midnight often gets mentioned in conjunction with The Edge of Destruction, but it also lays the foundations for episodes like Amy's Choice or Journey to the Centre of the Tardis where the showrunners did actually have that kind of money lying around and would have had no trouble staging, say, the bit at the beginning of this episode where the teachers still think they're in Coal Hill School.

Anyway, Babs clearly realises she's on the gothic/irrational/feminine side of an antiquated gender equation, because she wonders aloud what the others on the classical/rational/masculine side of things would think if they heard them talking like this. 'Suppose there isn't a fault,' says Susan ominously, setting herself up for a jumpscare as Ian enters, observing that she 'must be clairvoyant', as there isn't in fact a fault. Curiouser and curiouser.

However, when Ian informs them that the genius Doctor has decided that if the fault isn't inside the ship then it must be outside it and is going to check the scanner, Susan the Living Klaxon leaps up from her recliner and runs into the control room, yelling that he mustn't touch. It turns out that Susan's mystery neck pain occurred when she tried to touch the Tardis controls. Ian, rubbing the back of his neck like a troll, observes that he and Babs haven't been similarly affected.

The Doctor tries the switch anyway...and nothing happens. Then the scanner starts up, and in another glorious meta 'look at how much budget we don't have' moment, they realise the scanner isn't really showing images from outside but just a series of photographs. It turns out the Tardis memory banks have started a slideshow of holiday snaps from previous adventures before showing what I'm pretty sure are images from the Thals' hexagon history database: a planet; a planet from a distance; a galaxy; then a blinding flash.

Everyone is Very Confuz. The Doctor, however, rounds on Ian, having decided that since he hasn't a clue what's going on it must be the fault of the two humans, who have sabotaged his ship. Outrageous! The three of them argue for a bit, but it's Babs who eventually goes for the jugular and sets the gold standard for every companion since who has ever called out Doctor Bullshit on his Time Lord Nonsense:

YES BARBARA! TAKE HIM TO SCHOOL! I'll dock you a point for trying to belittle him with ageism, but otherwise this tirade is absolutely spot on and entirely deserved. It's also a key moment in the Doctor's character development, as I'll bet nobody has spoken to him like that in a good long while. Admittedly, as we're about to see, the Doctor doesn't immediately and magically become a better person as a result of this talking-to, but in the long term I'd argue it's incredibly effective in terms of the Doctor's long relationship with the human race and its impact on his character. In fact I'd go so far as to say that if it weren't for Babs, this would have been a very different show with a far less likeable lead.

We're not allowed to revel in this epic schooling, however, because Barbara's mic-drop is rudely interrupted by Salvador Dali or rather a big melty clock staring Babs in the face as she turns to leave. She lets out a blood-curdling scream because...she's always hated surrealism? 

Stop all the clocks...

The others gather round, showing varying levels of concern, and the humans realise their wristwatches have also got melty faces. Barbara rips hers off, throws it across the room with another scream, and collapses weeping into the nearest chair. At this point, having seen her in action in The Daleks, I'm more inclined to say this outburst of hysteria is in character than I was when she was having a breakdown all over An Unearthly Child and being mollycoddled by Ian. Clearly this is a woman at the absolute end of her tether, and if that means having a meltdown over a clock after having given the Doctor a piece of her mind, then I'm ok with that. This is also not just another excuse for Ian to smother her or to showcase his 'I am a big strong man and I will deal with the things with which your hysterical ladybrain cannot cope' abilities; this is all about Babs.

Well, for the moment, because having patted her on the shoulder and left her to calm down, Ian turns to the Doctor all 'I am so rational'-like to tell him he can hardly blame them for turning the Tardis into a surrealist painting. Only to find that the Doctor has popped out to get them all some drinks to calm them down. They're definitely not spiked.

Anyway, Babs is going to bed, followed by Susan, whose parting words to her grandfather are a plea to make it up with Barbara. YES GIRL SOLIDARITY! And oh the solidarity continues after the ladies have retired because now Ian is chiding the Doctor in his most teachery voice:

Oh Ian, you gain many-many brownie point for this. Also, I imagine that he and Babs have the world's best good cop/bad cop routine going on back in Coal Hill School. The Doctor tells Ian this is 'no time for manners' and that 'rash action is worse than no action at all'. However, because the Doctor has offended his Bae, Ian is like a dog with a bone: 'I don't see anything rash in apologising to Barbara', he retorts. Then this happens:

IAN: Frankly Doctor, I find it hard to keep pace with you.
DOCTOR: You mean to keep one jump ahead. That you will never be. You need my knowledge and ability to apply it and then you need my experience, to gain the fullest results.
IAN: Results? For good or for evil?
DOCTOR: One man's law is another man's crime. Sleep on it Chesterton, sleep on it.

Fucking HELL, Doctor, that's in NO way horribly disconcerting. No way would I sleep after that, unless I'd been drugged, which is precisely what has happened to the others though they don't realise it yet. Surely they'll all be murdered in their beds by this malevolent imp!

Babs, meanwhile, has donned one of the Tardis's sleeping habits for lady sleepers who like to preserve their modesty. Susan apologises for her grandfather, which is rather poignant. Babs is rather cold with her but at least doesn't blame Susan for the Doctor's douchebaggery. Susan begs her to try to understand and forgive him. Babs tells her to try to get some sleep.

And now the Doctor is in full creepy giggly goblin mode, and is checking to see whether he has successfully drugged the rest of the crew, which in fact he has. He chuckles disconcertingly. Ian is rocking some Tardis sleeping negligé for gentlemen sleepers who like to show a bit of leg.

And now Doctor Chuckles is in full Rumpelstintskin mode, fingers twitching with anticipation over the Tardis controls...but oh horror! Two hands have appeared from nowhere and have seized the Doctor by the neck!

HOLY CLIFFHANGER BATMAN! WILL THIS MYSTERY STRANGLER THROTTLE DOCTOR DOUCHEBAG? WILL THE DOCTOR DECIDE TO BE LESS OF A BELLEND AFTER HIS TALKING-TO FROM BABS? WILL BARBARA AND THE DOCTOR MAKE IT UP AND BECOME THE NEW MRS. ANNA AND KING OF SIAM? WILL THERE EVER BE AN EXPLANATION FOR THE TARDIS'S BIZARRE SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS? WHAT IN FACT IS GOING ON?

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? After a rocky couple of episodes, we're back on track with several plot-heavy conversations between Susan and Babs.

Is the gaze problematic? No.

Is/are the woman companion(s) dressed 'for the Dads'? No, but Ian is showing a lot of leg in his sleep attire.

Does a woman fall over/twist her ankle (whilst running from peril)? No.

Is/are the woman companion(s) captured? No.

Does the Doctor/a man companion/any other man have to rescue the woman companion(s) from peril? No.

Is/are the woman companion's/s' first/only reaction(s) to peril gratuitous screaming? There's quite a lot of gratuitous screaming fro the women this week, what with Susan's continued inability to express concern for her grandfather's wellbeing without shattering my eardrums and Babs's sudden phobia of clocks.

Does a woman companion go into hysterics over something reasonably minor? Nope.

Is a woman 'spared' the ordeal of having to do/witness something unpleasant by a man who makes a decision on her behalf/keeps her deliberately ignorant? Yes. Poor Susan.

Does the woman companion have to be calmed/comforted by the Doctor/a man companion/a man? Ian pats Barbara on the shoulder after she starts crying in a chair, but it's in no way overbearing.

Is a woman the first/only person to be (most gratuitously) menaced by the episode's antagonist(s)? Hmm, Susan is most affected by memory loss and freakish behaviour, but Ian is the first to be menaced with the scissors.

Is a man shamed into doing/not doing something because the alternative is a woman doing/not doing something? No.

Does the woman companion come up with a plan? No.

Does the woman companion do something stupid/banal/weird which inspires a man to be a Man with a Plan? Nah,

Does a woman come up with a theory and is it ridiculed by the Doctor/a man? Yes and yes.

Does a woman call the Doctor out on his bullshit? YES.

Does a woman get to be a badass? See above.

Is the young, strong, straight, white male lead the person most often in control of the situation? It's mostly the Doctor pulling the strings this week.

Is there past/future/alien sexism? I'm going to say that the Victorian Gothic Gender Binaries count as past sexism.

Does a 'present'-day character call anybody out on past/future/alien sexism? No.

Did a woman write/direct/produce this episode? No/No/Yes.

Verdict

Fascinating in terms of character development and as a precedent for more ambitious self-contained episodes in the Who That Is To Come. Barbara really gets to shine, and Susan gets to be all freaky and possibly possessed and threaten to stab people with scissors. The Doctor is a nob in this episode, but as we've seen, Babs is probably going to be instrumental in changing that. Didn't enjoy the women-are-irrational/men-are-rational slant on the episode, though I'll reserve judgement until either party is proven to be in the right.