Series 1 Episode 13: The Brink of Disaster

Serial: The Edge of Destruction/Inside the Spaceship
Episode: 2 (The Brink of Disaster)
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companions: Barbara, Ian, and Susan

Writer: David Whitaker
Director: Frank Cox
Producer: Verity Lambert
Original air date: 15/02/1964

THE HUMAN(ITIES) SAVES THE DAY (and other stories)

We return to find the Doctor where he was last week: being throttled by a mystery strangler. Whose hands are these? Why, those are the murderous mitts of boggle-eyed zombie Ian Chesterton, who hasn't been fondling the Doctor’s neck for long before he makes a funny noise like a man about to fall off a cliff and falls over. Babs, roused from her slumber by whatever Spidey Senses she seems to share with Ian that alert her to his impending distress, rushes to his side, having witnessed the whole thing. She wants to Doctor to help Ian; the Doctor refuses because Ian tried to strangle him; Babs points out that Ian has fainted just like Susan did, showing a lot more common sense than the increasingly crotchety and paranoid Doctor. The Doctor accuses Ian of play-acting, which is fair enough actually given his ludicrously theatrical swooning, but Babs insists something terrible is happening to all of them. The Doctor is having none of it, and is convinced this is a plot between the two humans to gain control of his ship.

Ian Chesterton swooning at the thought of how much leg he's showing.

Then HOLY GRANOLA Susan what are you doing sneaking up on people like that like a possessed child in a jumpscare-heavy horror film? This is the most alien-seeming we've ever seen her, calm and oddly blank-looking as she agrees with the Doctor that Babs and Ian are behaving very strangely, walking over to stand at his side and really for the first time conveying her non-humanity. Usually she'll ally herself with her schoolteachers against her grandfather, but this time she's really emphasising her otherness and it’s startlingly effective.

But then YIKES it seems the Doctor is getting a little too scary for Susan, when he tells an increasingly flustered Barbara he intends to 'treat them as enemies'. Susan looks horrified; Barbara asks the Doctor what he’s going to do; the Doctor says that’s his business. I genuinely shudder to think.

Barbara, clearly sensing she may be about to be in real danger, turns her efforts to trying to wake Ian, who's groggy as hell. You know he must be feeling rough, because even when Bae is pleading rather poignantly for him to help her – and with a refreshing lack of hysteria, too – he can barely stir himself. The Doctor remains unmoved; Susan, however, asks Barbara how Ian got like this. Babs seizes the opportunity, telling Susan about the control panel, reminding her that she had something similar happen to her, and generally appealing to her better nature. The Doctor, cynically but accurately, accuses Babs of trying to 'divide and conquer'. Ian, in a timely fashion, chooses this moment to sit up, point at the control panel, and yell ‘don’t touch it, Doctor!’.

That time in the Tardis when Babs was briefly Peter Pettigrew.

Susan is now convinced of the humans’ innocence; the Doctor, however, is giving his xenophobia full rein, telling Susan that they are ‘very resourceful and cunning’ and must be put off the ship. It’s rather chilling to think how far he’ll go to protect Susan, and it really does seem at this point that he’s convinced Barbara and Ian have tried to hurt his granddaughter in some way and made him act in an unreasonable manner. I've always been curious as to why he and Susan left Gallifrey, but it’s stuff like this that really piques that curiosity.

Anyway, Ian is still mostly out of it, and the Doctor is giving him weapons-grade sass about getting his ridiculously short pyjama shorts the hell offa his ship. After a bit of floundering, Ian mumbles, ‘you’re going to have to help me, Barbara’, and I get to disguise the BrOTP-related melting of my treacherously unhardened heart as gladness at the reversal of the swooning-lady-must-be-supported-by-the-strong-armed-man trope. Also Barbara’s face is a picture.

Susan continues to protest, but the Doctor’s suggestion that a confession from the humans might buy them some mercy is interrupted by the Tardis making a godawful noise that Susan informs Babs is a danger signal. Ian is still about ten minutes behind everyone else, still yelling for the Doctor to watch out about the control panel, as the Doctor makes a startling discovery about the fault locator: literally everything is wrong.

Meanwhile, Ian is now attempting to throttle Barbara behind her back. Instead of smacking him in the mouth, Babs rather indulgently continues to try to convince him that everything’s alright yes everything’s fine; he mumbles about trying to pull her away and that the controls are alive. Babs gives him a cuddle that looks far nicer than the weird ‘comforting’ chokeholds that are his own speciality and it’s freaking adorable.

Babs channels her inner Bond villain.

The Doctor, meanwhile, appears to have had a change of heart(s), and tells the cowering humans at his feet not to be frightened…because he’s just realised what kind of danger they’re actually in. In fact, the ship is ‘on the point of disintegration’, and not one of them is to blame; rather ‘all four of us are to blame’ for the death of Eva Smith. Chillax, Inspector Goole.

Ian is back to normal, and has some surprisingly good-natured banter with the Doctor about the latter having drugged them all. Ye Gods.

Now the Doctor is mostly addressing himself to Ian, telling them (eventually, after some Billy fluffs) that they’re all ‘on the brink of destruction’. He tells them they must all work together to find out what’s wrong with the ship, Sorting Hat stylee.

Then this happens:

SUSAN: [The danger signal’s] happening every quarter of a minute.
IAN: Well what does that prove?
BARBARA: (with dawning realisation) That we have a measure of time as long as it lasts. Yes of course, that explains the clock face. We had time taken away from us, and now it's being given back to us... because it's running out!

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASSSSS LET’S HEAR IT FOR BARBARA WRIGHT AND THE HUMANITIES! Babs is essentially doing a close-reading of the Tardis’s batshit behaviour and getting better results than the Science guys. I bloody love this serial.

'I confess to you, Lord, that I still do not know what time is...'

As though concurring, the Tardis takes the opportunity to say ‘BOOM’, by which I mean there’s a loud noise and a flash of light and everyone is thrown back slightly as the central column moves for a moment before stopping. There’s the first mention of the ‘heart of the machine’ being under the column (hurrah for Tardis lore), and what follows is a reasonably mind-mangling series of leaps of logic that I can’t properly explain:

IAN: Well what made it move?
DOCTOR: The source of power. You see when the column rises, it proves the extent of the power thrust.
BARBARA: Then what would have happened had the column come out completely?
SUSAN: Well, the power would be free...free to escape!
DOCTOR: Can it be possible then…that this is the end?
IAN: The end! What are you talking about?
DOCTOR: We have ten minutes to survive.
BARBARA: Ten minutes? As little as that?
DOCTOR: Maybe less.

I’M SORRY WHAT? No actually I can’t be bothered to try to work out how this makes any kind of sense and choose simply to accept that the Doctor knows what he’s talking about and simply move on to dealing with the fact that everyone is in Mortal Peril.

Everyone is surprisingly muted at this revelation, and I’m mildly outraged that there isn’t more New Who-style let’s-confess-our-emotions-IMMEDIATELY sort of stuff going on, but this was England in the early 1960s and public displays of emotional excess hadn’t been invented yet, so we’ll just have to accept that had they all died it would have been without embarrassing themselves by saying anything heartfelt.

The Doctor goes to stand by the scanner, which is the only safe part of the control panel. Babs is starting to question why this is when she’s rudely interrupted by Susan being hysterical and pessimistic. Babs, presumably because she doesn’t want to spend the final moments of her life getting Susan to calm the fuck down, tells her ‘please don't’. The Doctor tells Chesterton he hasn't a clue where to begin. Barbara, however, strikes another resounding blow for the Humanities by suggesting that they've in fact been ‘given nothing else but clues’, such as the food machine and the clocks that made them aware of time. Ian and Susan seem to be convinced by what is essentially Barbara’s anthropomorphising of the Tardis; the Doctor, however, takes a little more time to get there:

DOCTOR: ‘It?’ ‘It?’ What do you mean? My machine can't think.
BARBARA: You say it has a built in defence mechanism?
DOCTOR: Yes, it has.
BARBARA: Well that's where we've been wrong. Originally, the…machine wasn't at fault, we were. And it's been trying to tell us so ever since.
IAN: A machine that can think for itself?
BARBARA: Yes.
IAN: Is that feasible, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Oh, think, not as you or I do, but er, it must be able to think as a machine, you see it has a bank of computers.

As irritating as it is that Ian has to check whether the Doctor is on board before backing Barbara’s theory, the fact remains that Barbara’s approach has been the most productive, and it’s her Humanities-based intuition that the Tardis is essentially a consciousness that puts them all on the right track. It’s also fascinating beyond belief that it takes Barbara to make the Doctor think of the Tardis in this way, laying the foundations for a character arc that culminates in The Doctor’s Wife. As I say, I love this serial.

Oh Babs what have you started?

Anyway, this leads to speculation as to what could have made the power under the column want to escape; the Doctor doesn’t know, but it would be a force ‘strong as a solar system’. Bang on cue, the Tardis has another ‘boom’ moment:

BARBARA: You see? The machine's been warning us all along. All those blackouts we had.
SUSAN: Yes. But only if anybody went near the control column.
BARBARA: Yes.
IAN: But it could be the power escaping.
DOCTOR: No, no it couldn't. If you felt the power dear boy, you wouldn't live to speak of it. You'd be blown to atoms in a split second.
SUSAN: Besides, it’s the part of it that's safe.
BARBARA: Yes, the scanner. I wonder…?
DOCTOR: (understanding Barbara’s meaning) We’ll try it, but we're clutching at straws.

GO BABS. The Doctor rewards Barbara’s thinking by…telling her to go and stand by the doors with Susan and tell him what’s outside if the doors should open again. Ugh. Then UGH UGH UGH, the Doctor takes Ian aside and tells him he ‘lied, deliberately’: they actually only have five minutes left, and so when the end comes, the two women ‘won’t know anything about it’. FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DOCTOR. But of course we must deny the women aboard this ship the knowledge that their demise will be sooner than they imagined for fear that they might do something tiresomely womanish in their final moments, because thinking you only have ten minutes to live is so much more relaxing than thinking you only have five minutes to live. AND IAN IS OK WITH THIS. And no, I won’t give the Doctor points for asking Ian if he’ll ‘face it with me’ – ‘it’ being the End of All Things, Mr. Frodo – because as poignant as it is, it’s laced with bullshit masculinity and I’ll have none of it. (I also can’t believe that Ian wouldn't want to spend his final moments giving Barbara the Chesterton Neckpinch, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, the Tardis doors do in fact open, and the two women are blinded by the light; Susan is horrified to inform them that there’s nothing out there – 'nothing but space'. Barbara gives Susan a hug.

If in doubt, hug it out.

Meanwhile, the scanner is doing its thing. Ian suggests that Babs might be right; Babs, who (despite her lovely displays of woman-to-woman solidarity) has better things to do with her last minutes alive than babysit Susan, concurs:

BARBARA: Whenever there's a good picture, the doors open because it's safe for us to go outside and then it shows us a terrible picture and the doors close again.
DOCTOR: Yes, then we have the sequence: a planet; aplanet in the solar system; getting further away; blinding flash; destruction. Yes, of course – it's our journey!
BARBARA: And….and the ship refused to destroy itself.
DOCTOR: Yes, yes.
BARBARA: (To SUSAN) The defence mechanism stopped the ship, and it's been trying to tell us so ever since!
DOCTOR: Of course. Of course!

But seriously, I couldn't be happier that it’s basically Barbara and the Doctor who have fathomed it out using Barbara's lit crit approach.

Then there’s a beautiful monologue from the Doctor, leaning on the console, alone, in darkness. He said it would take the power of a solar system to destroy this ship, and so it has: they’re at the beginning of a new solar system. It’s essentially an extract from a Brian Cox Wonders documentary, gorgeously narrative, and oh Mr. Hartnell I take my hat off to you for such weird and wonderful delivery.

Ian interrupts and shakes the Doctor a bit, asking where he asked the ship to take them after Skaro. The Doctor says he simply used the Fast Return Switch to try to get them back to Earth. Ian asks the Doctor to show him the switch, and the Doctor blusters about it being too dark to see. While he’s faffing, Susan tells Barbara it’s near the scanner switch, which Barbara points out is the one part of the control panel they were able to touch safely. The Doctor locates it, and…OH THE SIMPLICITY! The switch is stuck and hasn’t released itself. The little spring that works the button is jammed, and oh it’s such a gloriously simple fix! The power is back, and everyone is gathering round. The Doctor and Susan hug at their safety. They can all relax. It’s beautiful.

Budget BBC is the best BBC

Barbara and Ian wander off, rather numbly. Susan asks her grandfather what happened, and the Doctor explains that the reason the fault locator didn't show that the Fast Return Switch was gammy was that it wasn't registering as broken, because it was simply as though the switch were continually being pressed. Then this happens:

Understatement of the century. The Doctor tells Susan he thinks she was very brave and that he’s proud of her. STOP BEING CUTE, DOCTOR, I'M STILL ANGRY AT YOU. Speaking of which, Barbara and Ian are now sitting over to the side of the Tardis, back to back, not speaking, looking grimly traumatised.

Unhappy bunnies.

Susan points out that the Doctor said some pretty shitty things to them and that he ought to apologise. The Doctor mumbles in a noncommittal sort of way, and Ian blusters up to him essentially telling him there’s no need to apologise. Barbara, however, to her eternal credit, is nowhere near as forgiving, and is still sitting silently with a harrowed look on her face that defies description but which suffice to say moves the Doctor to do some serious crawling:

DOCTOR: Well, er, as for you, young lady, well, er, you were absolutely right. With your instinct and intuition against my logic and you, er, succeeded. I mean, the blackouts and the still pictures and...and…and, er... and, er, the clock. Well, you read a story into those things and was determined to hold on to it. We all owe you our lives.

DAMN RIGHT YOU OWE HER YOUR LIVES. A thousand cringes for the reinforcement of the logic/intuition binary, but I still count this as a welcome victory for the Humanities even though it’s a gender stereotype. I also love that Barbara doesn’t immediately forgive the Doctor. She’s clearly still very upset, and actually leaves the room, calmly but looking like she’s about to cry, rather than salve the Doctor’s guilty conscience. Ian watches her go with poignant admiration as the Doctor rather patronisingly observes that he really believes he has ‘underestimated that young lady in the past’. I’m guessing Babs wants to be alone right now, but a better friend would be less willing to have a good old belly laugh with the Doctor about starting again when his BFF is clearly not happy.

AND THEN THERE WAS THIS GIFT FROM CLASSIC WHO: rather than end the serial on the Tardis dematerialising, we are treated to the Morning After. Babs is sitting alone in silence, clad in the ensemble that will later be known as her Battle Dress (dark trousers and a boatneck jumper), when the Doctor enters the room, wanting to talk, trying to engage her interest about the rather chilly planet on which they've landed, which I'm guessing is nowhere near as frosty as Barbara's response:

DOCTOR: (Quietly.) Yes, you haven't forgiven me, have you?
BARBARA: You said terrible things to us.
DOCTOR: Yes, I suppose it's the injustice that's upsetting you, and when I made a threat to put you off the ship it must have affected you very deeply.

Then this happens:

Well that's just gorgeous. I love that a lot of the Doctor’s iconic lines so far – this one and ‘fear makes companions of all of us’ – have arisen out of conversations with Barbara. It’s still a little patronising, but nevertheless it’s enormously important in terms of the Doctor’s character development. It’s just as he says, in fact: ‘as we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves’; and the Doctor, having had Barbara pretty much demand his respect in this serial, has learned a lot about himself through her actions. And as I've said before, Barbara’s approach to problem solving becomes key to the way the Doctor looks for solutions in future episodes. And while he continues to turn to Ian as a fellow scientist, it's clear that he now has enormous respect for Barbara, or at least as much respect as the Doctor has for any human – or anyone other than himself – at this early stage in the show. He owes Barbara his Tardis and his life, and though he remains a stubborn, arrogant imp, he's starting to change for the better as a result.

Though not unmoved by this iconic dialogue, Babs remains a tad sceptical:

BARBARA: Perhaps.
DOCTOR: Oh yes. Because I accused you unjustly, you were determined to prove me wrong. So, you put your mind to the problem, and, er, luckily you solved it.

However, when Susan enters, wrapped up for the cold, and asks Barbara whether she's coming, Barbara says yes; the Doctor is, it seems forgiven. For now.

There’s the first mention of the extensive Tardis wardrobe (hence Babs's new outfit), and the Doctor continues to be on his best and most gentlemanly behaviour, telling Barbara ‘we must look after you’, as she’s ‘very valuable’. Is it still a bit patronising? Yes. Am I willing to accept the Doctor’s grovelling because it's actually really cute and I truly believe Barbara isn't just succumbing to flattery? Yes. He holds Barbara’s coat for her; she chuckles, and he offers her his arm, which she accepts. It’s adorable.

'We'd better be going in, Anna.'

Ian meanwhile is twirling about in a flouncy Victorian cape that Barbara is clearly digging because she pronounces it chic and is only prevented from some serious coat-fondling by Susan lobbing a snowball at her. GAME ON, KID. Babs runs out through the Tardis doors to unleash snowball fury upon her sometime pupil as the Doctor does what I reckon is his first namedrop of the show, telling Ian he acquired the Victorian flouncey thing from Gilbert and Sullivan; Ian makes a lame Dad joke about it being made for two. In a moment of Victorian whimsy, Ian offers the Doctor his arm, suggesting that they ‘join the ladies’. Unfortunately for the world, the Doctor is prevented from taking Ian’s arm by Susan alerting him via the scanner to something she and Barbara have found: IT’S AN ENORMOUS FOOTPRINT!

YE GODS TIS SURELY AN ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN POISED TO DEVOUR TEAM TARDIS AND JUST WHEN THEY'D ALL MADE FRIENDS AGAIN TOO OH THE CRUELTY OF FATE OH THE HUMANITY. WILL BABS AND THE DOCTOR BE BESTIES FROM NOW ON? IS HE REALLY CHANGING FOR THE BETTER OR WILL HE REVERT TO BEING A NOB AT THE FIRST SIGN OF TROUBLE? WILL IAN START SINGING LIGHT OPERA? WILL SUSAN FINALLY GAIN A SENSE OF STABILITY WITH HER NEW EXTENDED FAMILY? WILL BABS'S ABILITIES AS A TARDIS WHISPERER BLOOM AND GROW FOREVER LIKE SPACE EDELWEISS?

Summary (as applicable to this episode)

Does it pass the Bechdel test? Indeed.

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? Surprisingly, no, given that at one point they're all given ten minutes to live.

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. AND IT'S UNACCEPTABLE.

Does the woman companion have to be calmed/comforted by the Doctor/a man companion/a man? It's mostly Babs who's on Susan duty this week, and actually it's Ian being comforted by Barbara for a lot of this episode. 

Is a woman the first/only person to be (most gratuitously) menaced by the episode's antagonist(s)? Define antagonist...

Is a man shamed into doing/not doing something because the alternative is a woman doing/not doing something? There are shades of this when the Doctor asks Ian to face the end with him and not tell the women they're going to die in five minutes, but generally not particularly.

Does the woman companion come up with a plan? Yup. Babs and the scanner.

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

Does a woman come up with a theory and is it ridiculed by the Doctor/a man? Yes. And this time, no.

Does a woman call the Doctor out on his bullshit? More subtly this time.

Does a woman get to be a badass? A lit-crit kind of badass.

Is the young, strong, straight, white male lead the person most often in control of the situation? Nope.

Is there past/future/alien sexism? Alien sexism from the Doctor maybe when he keeps the women in the dark about their fate?

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

Barbara Wright saves the days with her mad Humanities lit-crit skills and it's fucking glorious. And she's tamed the Doctor good, because now he's desperately courting her approval and telling her how valuable she is and holding her coat and oh let's hope it's the start of a beautiful friendship. She also manages to calm Susan down, deal with Ian's swooning fit, and stare into the screaming void without losing her shit, all whilst wearing a space habit. Excellent Doctor-related character development and a beautifully strange monologue thrown into the mix. Ian is still derping his way around space, and Susan has some lovely 'hey remember I'm an alien' moments, but she's clearly the poorest served in terms of character development. I adore the emphasis on people learning about themselves through learning about others, and it's good to see Team Tardis all pals again at the end of the serial. And speaking of the Tardis, I can't get enough of the fact that it's Babs's personification of the time machine that sets in motion a character arc that culminates in the Tardis actually appearing in human form almost fifty years later. In short, a weird serial done on a shoestring with some mind-mangling plot points but with some of the most important character moments so far in terms of setting things up for the next half-century of telly. Next week...OH CRAPOLA it's Marco Polo. Someone find the missing episodes already I can't be doing with two months of stills and YouTube reconstructions.