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.

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.