003 - The Edge Of Destruction

Broadcast:

8^th - 15^th February 1964

Doctor:

William Hartnell

Companions:

Ian, Barbara, Susan

Adversary:

??

Written by:

David Whitaker

Director:

Richard Martin, Frank Cox

Music:

Stock

Script Editor:

David Whitaker

Producer:

Verity Lambert

Average Viewers:

10.2m (10.4, 9.9)

Summary: The TARDIS falters, the travellers are knocked unconscious and everything goes hazy and a little confusing as they turn on each other. There's an eerie silence, clock faces are melting and the TARDIS doors open and close on their own!

To set the scene, Robin Dixon and Tony Nash have just won a gold medal for Two-Man Bobsleigh at the Innsbruck Winter Olympics - the first British medal of any colour for 12 years and there wouldn't be another until the games returned to Innsbruck 12 years later! Britain and France have just agreed a deal to construct a channel tunnel (though construction wouldn't start for another 10 years and would barely commence before being closed down and a successful project was another decade away). The Beatles have just brought Beatlemania to America and the Searchers remain at number one in the UK chart with "Needles And Pins" for the two week duration of The Edge Of Destruction. Meanwhile between episodes, Southampton became the first town granted City Status by Queen Elizabeth II. And the day after the story finished, a curtain Christopher Ecclestone was born!

As for the story itself, it is difficult to know what to say since there are only two episodes and the plot is quite simple - though the way it plays out is unsettlingly tense and mysterious. During the shows early development, concerns about costs and feasibility lead to the early hopes for it to run all year being squashed and the BBC initially only committed to four episodes! As production commenced and once filming of those first four episodes was well under way, the series was extended to 13 weeks. This lead to an imbalance of numbers. The Daleks would provide enough to take the series to 11 episodes but following that with Marco Polo would require 18 episodes. Cutting five episodes out of the two combined stories wasn't possible and The Daleks had already been extended from 6 to 7 episodes and couldn't take another 2! The Edge Of Destruction was therefore born out of necessity and with very little budget for new sets or actors. As it turned out, once The Daleks hit the screens, the series was given a much bigger extension so Marco Polo could have gone into production, but without that knowledge the risk of it being left unfinished was too great and simply unacceptable. As Script Editor (or Story Editor as the title was at the time) David Whitaker took the unusual step of writing the story himself, knowing the restrictions and requirements better than anyone, and provided the characters and audience alike the chance to learn more about each other and develop a greater understanding of just what the TARDIS was and what it was capable of.

The first episode opens, of course, with a reprise of the previous episode's ending... the TARDIS jolts and everyone falls to the floor. Curiously, the main doors are on the right of the picture (as noted before) but when the new action begins, we see the fault locator is on the right and the doors are eventually seen to be on the left again! In fact the whole architecture of the the TARDIS is confusingly different because until now it has only had a small part of the studio to fit into whereas now it is the only set used and can be more spacious and creative. There are dark areas and wide columns and the fault locator has greater prominence appearing on the right, left and even centre screen as the cameras have greater freedom of movement. There are also two extra rooms introduced, and although the vastness of the TARDIS would be hinted at over the years and extra rooms would occasionally appear (particularly during Peter Davison's tenure in the early 80s) the console room itself would never appear so large again during the classic era.

Barbara is the first to wake, groggy and delirious. She sees Ian slumped in a chair and recognises him formally "Mr Chesterton...? Ian... Chesterton?" then Susan stirs from the console and peers at her simply saying "I know you..." There is barely a sound coming from the machinery and something is clearly wrong when we see that the main doors have opened on their own. Susan is afraid that something has got in and it's not long before she seems to be possessed and is brandishing a large pair of scissors (something that Producer Verity Lambert regretted and apologised for) It is ten minutes before the Doctor is fit for action but even he has been affected and distrusts Ian and Barbara as much as when he first met them. He calls Barbara Miss Wright and Ian is always Chesterton, not a single variation until the very end when all is back to normal. He becomes aggressive and directly accuses the teachers of causing an accident by trying to get themselves home, or tricking him to take them home. Sadly, his most aggressive moment causes what may be William Hartnell's worst line fluff and I counted seven in total across the two episodes. Despite this and the clear stress involved in such a concentrated and intense story, he does manage to give a perfect soliloquy towards the end even as the camera creeps closer and closer.

So everyone is behaving oddly and Barbara is the only one to not attack anyone, the TARDIS is doing odd things, even showing seemingly random images on the scanner screen, clock faces have melted (sadly in one of the show's least successful special effects, relying entirely on audiences faith in what the actors say) and the fault locator apparently shows that both everything and nothing is wrong! The food machine (which wobbles when Susan first presses a button!) reports that it has no water, yet delivers it as requested and the central column moves even though the power is off! All together, Barbara realises that everything that has happened has been a clue and the Doctor reasons that the TARDIS, though it can not think has been trying to tell them what is wrong. We learn about the power source in the heard of the TARDIS, held down by the central column and how it refused to destroy itself. Once the Doctor pieces everything together (following Barbara's lead, it must be said) he fixes the problem and the TARDIS starts to hum again and the lights return to normal. Rather like The Daleks, this happens with a good five minutes left to the episode and the remainder is used to explain the principle of springs and switches with the use of the Doctor's pen torch (which, retrospectively, could be viewed as a sonic screwdriver but is simply just a torch), settle the characters back to normality and lead into the next adventure... it's cold and snowy outside and the girls find a giant footprint!

Points of interest not mentioned yet include a first aid bandage which Susan fetches for the Doctor's head. Rather than being white, it has unusual coloured stripes (brown, apparently) which are the ointment and fade away as it is absorbed by the wound. We learn that one of the images on the scanner screen is the planet Quinnis of the fourth universe, where the Doctor and Susan nearly lost the TARDIS four or five journeys ago, which would be the adventure immediately before they arrived in Totters Lane. On the negative side, as well as the large number of fluffs and the wobbly food machine, there are two notable camera problems. One is a wobble as it closes in on Susan when she is 'possessed' and the other is a struggle to focus as Barbara walks to wards the camera. It's also worth noting that stage hands notoriously struggled with the TARDIS doors for many years and it is very obvious here when they play such a significant role in the narrative. They open and close on their own, yet fail to do so smoothly and inevitably have bounce-back. Finally, there is a rather ironic line from Ian which is, of course, unintentional. He asks the Doctor "Why did you say we were on the brink of destruction?" moments after William Hartnell had barely managed to stumble through "of destruction"!

Finally, you might be wondering what the cause of the problem was... well, I'd rather not give it away, but building any kind of suspense would leave you with a false sense of hope for something profound. In fact, much like the idea of having a story centred around the TARDIS materialising in perfectly normal surroundings but leaving the travellers minute in size so everything becomes a big challenge (an idea that wouldn't get to the screen for nearly a year) David Whitaker wanted a story where something very small had catastrophic consequences... Not a bad premise but it doesn't quite play out satisfactorily. Perhaps because the clues and the logic that ties them all together is a little lost among the psychological confusion, or perhaps because the explanation isn't quite clear as to what the rogue button actually does. My first impression was that the Fast Return Switch was like an undo button and was supposed to return the TARDIS to its previous location, but it also sounds like it could be a high speed reverse resulting in the TARDIS overshooting and reaching the beginning of time. Either way, with everything considered, including the sparsity of the music and affectiveness of the stock pieces used, I scored The Edge Of Destruction 75%