The Doctor Who Viewing Project: The Edge of Destruction
In which Barbara Wright is revealed to be MADE OF AWESOME, and we have our last proper televised serial before the narrated audio reconstructions start having to be taken into account...
Previous posts:
Season 1: An Unearthly Child | The Daleks
Doctor Who 01x03, The Edge of Destruction
So, this is the first "cheap" story in classic Doctor Who, which is saying something since it had a tiny budget for most if not all of its run (later stories will give us monsters and outfits made of bubblewrap). So we get a story with no actors other than the four leads, and in a single location, which happens to be the TARDIS. It works surprisingly well as a creepy character and mood piece, but it's definitely not as good as any of the stories we've gotten so far (including the caveman romp back in An Unearthly Child) or any of the stories coming up.
So, the last story ended with an explosion rocking the TARDIS and the four main characters falling down unconscious. They awaken, with some form of amnesia; as their memories and normal personalities begin to return, tensions that have been present between the two factions (Doctor-and-Susan and Ian-and-Barbara) since the beginning begin to boil over. Susan starts stabbing her bed with scissors, Ian seemingly tries to strangle people while in his dressing gown, and the Doctor's paranoia and mistrust reaches an all-time high, culminating in his threat to dump Ian and Barbara off the TARDIS, no matter where they are. And Barbara, while a little more touchy than usual, goes on a RANT OF AWESOME at the Doctor, berating him for his ingratitude and mistrust of her and Ian:
Barbara: How dare you! Do you realize, you stupid old man, that you'd have died in the Cave of Skulls if Ian hadn't made fire for you?
Doctor: Oh, I...I...
Barbara: And what about what we went through against the Daleks? Not just for us, but for you and Susan too, and all because you tricked us into going down to the city!
Doctor: But I...I...
Barbara: Accuse us? You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us. Gratitude's the last thing you'll ever have, or any sort of common sense either!
Sadly, the words can't quite capture the depth of contempt Jacqueline Hill manages to infuse in that last bit, and even in the midst of his mistrust the Doctor manages to look entirely taken aback and abashed as Barbara stalks off.
Susan is once again perhaps the creepiest of Our Heroes, being so heavily affected by the distrust and paranoia floating around that she takes to threatening Ian and Barbara with scissors:
Ian, meanwhile, is spending much of his time this week in his dressing gown, and occasionally sprawled on the floor, thus revealing that he is in fact a boxer man:
...Not that I'm complaining. He also gets drugged by the Doctor with a sleeping aid, leading him to sleepwalk and seemingly attack the Doctor:
In actuality, though, he was merely trying to keep the Doctor away from the console, which had earlier been electrified. (They eventually realize this because he later does the same to Barbara.)
The Doctor's morally iffy action of the week: threatening to dump Ian and Barbara outside the TARDIS, and seemingly meaning it. He claims that because they don't know, the TARDIS could be anywhere - even modern-day England - but as we later find out that it's in space rapidly approaching the creation of the solar system, it's pretty clear that dumping the two of them would have basically been a pretty immediate death sentence.
Back to the menace of the week, though: in spite of the red herrings that THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE TARDIS AND IT MUST BE IN ONE OF US, TRUST NO ONE ZOMGGGGG, it turns out that it is in fact the TARDIS itself, which has been sent careening back towards the beginning of a solar system accidentally and which is trying (rather unhelpfully, it must be said) to warn its users of that danger, mostly through such clear clues as melting clocks:
The key to the solution, of course, comes in Barbara's reliance on intuitiveness versus the Doctor's insistence on rationality (perhaps stereotypical, gender role-wise); she's able to interpret these bizarre clues as a story through some leaps of logic and figures out most of what's going on while the Doctor's spinning his wheels.
And once the Doctor has, based on her theories, figured out what's going on and saved them all (by taking up a switch that had been stuck and fixing it), the aftermath naturally is that he has to come to terms with the fact that he's acted like a gigantic dick while Barbara has been nothing but awesome. And the Doctor, in fact, actually apologizes to Barbara, and from this point on has a respect for her that he doesn't seem to give to either Ian or Susan. The two walk off arm-in-arm to regroup with the others:
Interestingly, Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood in About Time mark this as the moment in which the tensions that have been simmering among Team TARDIS through the past two stories finally explode, then subside never to return. While certainly there are clashes within the team - the most notable coming just a few stories away, and again focused on the Doctor and Barbara, in The Aztecs - this is the last time the team truly mistrusts each other, at least in this incarnation. The Doctor and his crew may argue, have differences of opinion, and even have major conflicts of values, but at least he never again threatens to dump them out the airlock. XD
When the group meets up again in the console room, Barbara and Susan go outside to explore wherever they've ended up, while the Doctor smirks at Ian wearing his voluminous old ulster (which, the Doctor explains, he got from Gilbert and Sullivan; Ian remarks that he thought it was made for two):
And then THEY go off arm-in-arm as well...
...while Barbara and Susan mention that they've discovered a giant footprint in the snow that looks as if it was made by a giant:
Is it a Yeti? No, we'll have to wait a few years for that.
Next time, we get our first missing story (only existing in audio form), and we get our first proper historical (i.e., not involving furry bikinis and raw meat).
Previous posts:
Season 1: An Unearthly Child | The Daleks
Doctor Who 01x03, The Edge of Destruction
So, this is the first "cheap" story in classic Doctor Who, which is saying something since it had a tiny budget for most if not all of its run (later stories will give us monsters and outfits made of bubblewrap). So we get a story with no actors other than the four leads, and in a single location, which happens to be the TARDIS. It works surprisingly well as a creepy character and mood piece, but it's definitely not as good as any of the stories we've gotten so far (including the caveman romp back in An Unearthly Child) or any of the stories coming up.
So, the last story ended with an explosion rocking the TARDIS and the four main characters falling down unconscious. They awaken, with some form of amnesia; as their memories and normal personalities begin to return, tensions that have been present between the two factions (Doctor-and-Susan and Ian-and-Barbara) since the beginning begin to boil over. Susan starts stabbing her bed with scissors, Ian seemingly tries to strangle people while in his dressing gown, and the Doctor's paranoia and mistrust reaches an all-time high, culminating in his threat to dump Ian and Barbara off the TARDIS, no matter where they are. And Barbara, while a little more touchy than usual, goes on a RANT OF AWESOME at the Doctor, berating him for his ingratitude and mistrust of her and Ian:
Barbara: How dare you! Do you realize, you stupid old man, that you'd have died in the Cave of Skulls if Ian hadn't made fire for you?
Doctor: Oh, I...I...
Barbara: And what about what we went through against the Daleks? Not just for us, but for you and Susan too, and all because you tricked us into going down to the city!
Doctor: But I...I...
Barbara: Accuse us? You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us. Gratitude's the last thing you'll ever have, or any sort of common sense either!
Sadly, the words can't quite capture the depth of contempt Jacqueline Hill manages to infuse in that last bit, and even in the midst of his mistrust the Doctor manages to look entirely taken aback and abashed as Barbara stalks off.
Susan is once again perhaps the creepiest of Our Heroes, being so heavily affected by the distrust and paranoia floating around that she takes to threatening Ian and Barbara with scissors:
Ian, meanwhile, is spending much of his time this week in his dressing gown, and occasionally sprawled on the floor, thus revealing that he is in fact a boxer man:
...Not that I'm complaining. He also gets drugged by the Doctor with a sleeping aid, leading him to sleepwalk and seemingly attack the Doctor:
In actuality, though, he was merely trying to keep the Doctor away from the console, which had earlier been electrified. (They eventually realize this because he later does the same to Barbara.)
The Doctor's morally iffy action of the week: threatening to dump Ian and Barbara outside the TARDIS, and seemingly meaning it. He claims that because they don't know, the TARDIS could be anywhere - even modern-day England - but as we later find out that it's in space rapidly approaching the creation of the solar system, it's pretty clear that dumping the two of them would have basically been a pretty immediate death sentence.
Back to the menace of the week, though: in spite of the red herrings that THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE TARDIS AND IT MUST BE IN ONE OF US, TRUST NO ONE ZOMGGGGG, it turns out that it is in fact the TARDIS itself, which has been sent careening back towards the beginning of a solar system accidentally and which is trying (rather unhelpfully, it must be said) to warn its users of that danger, mostly through such clear clues as melting clocks:
The key to the solution, of course, comes in Barbara's reliance on intuitiveness versus the Doctor's insistence on rationality (perhaps stereotypical, gender role-wise); she's able to interpret these bizarre clues as a story through some leaps of logic and figures out most of what's going on while the Doctor's spinning his wheels.
And once the Doctor has, based on her theories, figured out what's going on and saved them all (by taking up a switch that had been stuck and fixing it), the aftermath naturally is that he has to come to terms with the fact that he's acted like a gigantic dick while Barbara has been nothing but awesome. And the Doctor, in fact, actually apologizes to Barbara, and from this point on has a respect for her that he doesn't seem to give to either Ian or Susan. The two walk off arm-in-arm to regroup with the others:
Interestingly, Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood in About Time mark this as the moment in which the tensions that have been simmering among Team TARDIS through the past two stories finally explode, then subside never to return. While certainly there are clashes within the team - the most notable coming just a few stories away, and again focused on the Doctor and Barbara, in The Aztecs - this is the last time the team truly mistrusts each other, at least in this incarnation. The Doctor and his crew may argue, have differences of opinion, and even have major conflicts of values, but at least he never again threatens to dump them out the airlock. XD
When the group meets up again in the console room, Barbara and Susan go outside to explore wherever they've ended up, while the Doctor smirks at Ian wearing his voluminous old ulster (which, the Doctor explains, he got from Gilbert and Sullivan; Ian remarks that he thought it was made for two):
And then THEY go off arm-in-arm as well...
...while Barbara and Susan mention that they've discovered a giant footprint in the snow that looks as if it was made by a giant:
Is it a Yeti? No, we'll have to wait a few years for that.
Next time, we get our first missing story (only existing in audio form), and we get our first proper historical (i.e., not involving furry bikinis and raw meat).