Chapter The 246th, where the very first TARDIS team are inside the spaceship, go beyond the sun, and find themselves on the edge of destruction and the brink of disaster.
Plot:
The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan are in the TARDIS when there is an explosion knocking them out. When they wake up, they suffer from unexplained pains and memory losses. The doors to the ship open and close of their own accord. Susan is paranoid that something might have got into the ship that is inhabiting one of the others, and threatens Ian and Barbara with a pair of scissors. The TARDIS scanner shows seemingly random images. All the clocks and watches in the ship melt. The Doctor accuses Ian and Barbara of sabotage, a way to blackmail him into taking them home to their own time. (This doesn't really make sense, but nobody's behaving very rationally.) The Doctor deliberately sedates everyone so he can investigate alone, but a suspicious Ian hasn't drunk the drink given to him. Eventually, everyone's awake again and collectively they piece together what is happening. The TARDIS fault locator starts honking and flashing every fifteen seconds, which clues them in that the ship is trying to count down time. One of the controls, the fast return switch, has become jammed, and they were all travelling back in time, into the beginning of the formation of a solar system, where the TARDIS would have been destroyed. The Doctor fixes the switch and all returns to normal. He apologises to Barbara, who was hurt by his earlier comments.
Context:
I have a broken TV/Blu-ray player remote control again (see The War Machines post for the last time this happened, with hilarious consequences). With no way to watch the DVD of this story, I had to resort to Britbox. The Britbox app that I can use on the family TV, via a Fire stick, is a bit buggy; with perseverance, though, I was able to get both episodes to play. I watched them one a night on two consecutive nights midweek in the final full week of October. Before this, while looking around the classic Doctor Who offerings on the streaming service, I noticed that there's a photo reconstruction of missing episodes of Patrick Troughton story The Wheel in Space that, unless I missed it, has never been made commercially available on any shiny disc release. I viewed a bit of it, and it was rather good. I was almost tempted to override the random generator and watch that story instead, but rules are rules. I sucked it up and watched the - probably more dull, even than a slide-show - Hartnell two-parter.
First Time Round:
Does everyone remember the different houses they've lived in, and when exactly they moved in to each? And every change of job, and every birth, marriage or death, to pinpoint date/time accuracy without having to glance at a calendar? I'm half a century old, but I can recall this information for my entire life, only because of Doctor Who. My extreme fandom means that I know which Doctor Who videos, DVDs or broadcasts I was watching in which homes, and then I can date them (usually from memory, but even if I forget once in a while, a large section of the internet is devoted to remembering Doctor Who dates also). I don't know if this is an affliction or a superpower. Most of the 1990s I spent living in Worthing on the Sussex coast (except for being in Durham in term time for my three years at university there). I moved to Brighton in 1999, at first in a house share, and then in a flat on my own from November of that year. The Edge of Destruction came out on VHS (accompanied by the pilot episode) six months later in April 2000 when I was nicely settled in there. I was still working in Worthing, taking the train there every day. In a few weeks' time, I would start a job commuting into London daily, whereupon my usual suppliers of Doctor Who stuff would change to be more capital-centric, as I wouldn't get home until later. On the day The Edge of Destruction came out, I would have had time after getting home on the train from Worthing to walk down Queen's Road and purchase it in the Brighton MVC shop, as they were still open (though I'd still have had to trot down from the station at a reasonable pace to get in before they shut). I'd then have walked back up the hill to the Seven Dials area where I lived, get in, and put the video on straight away. My memory is that it was a thrill seeing a William Hartnell story that was new to me (there weren't many of those left to release that were so by 2000), and it didn't bother me that the story was short, and unhinged.
Reaction:
The Edge of Destruction, the third ever Doctor Who story, was something of an afterthought. The original commitment made by the BBC to the production team when the show was starting up in 1963 was for 13 episodes; 11 of these had been used creating the superlative two opening stories, four episodes for An Unearthly Child and seven episodes for The Daleks. Further full length stories were being prepped, somewhat at risk as there hadn't been a formal commitment to more at that point. Just in case they didn't get re-commissioned, they needed a space-filler - two episodes to slot in to complete the first batch, with the hope that more would follow if the decision went their way (as it eventually did). Writer (and script editor of the series at the time) David Whittaker had a tight brief, with limited resources he could use. If I remember rightly, even when it first came out for home video purchase in the year 2000 (as remembered above) the first impulse was again for it to be an afterthought. There was a plan to bring out a VHS box set of the first three William Hartnell stories; remastered versions of the first two that were already out on VHS, with the two episodes of The Edge of Destruction along for the ride. There was resistance to the idea that fans would have to pay for an expensive box set just to get two episodes of previously unreleased material, and the idea was shelved. That initial intention though would have reduced the two-part story to a glorified extra, with insufficient draw to stand on its own. In the end it had to, though. It may have been that, for a lot of fans, paying exclusively for two episodes of slightly inept psychodrama might have chafed more than if the cost had been subsumed into the experience of getting a pretty box and maybe a TARDIS-shaped keyring. Is it perhaps better for this story to remain an afterthought and not have too much focus upon it?
It's tough for me, though, as it's come up for the blog and I've watched it, so I have to write something. There's just not that much to say, as there's not much to The Edge of Destruction. It's only two episodes long and at the slow pace of the black-and-white stories of the time, but then so was The Rescue, and that had a somewhat engaging plot. Even the single episode story Mission to the Unknown, which doesn't include any of the regular cast, contains a reasonable amount of incident. There's something to be said for featuring other places, times, or people in a story. Within the severe restrictions he was faced with of not being able to do any of that, Whittaker still falls upon one very clever idea, the false suspicion that some formless creature has entered into the TARDIS and possessed one of the four, only for this to turn out just to be paranoia. If the script just developed this plot, I think it would succeed, or at the very least be better, but it doesn't. Each scene acts like an unconnected sketch or tableau on the loose theme of 'people going a bit loopy' without any real sense of progression. The four characters - five, if one counts the TARDIS itself - act strangely in their own little orbits, but rarely intersect with one another. Carole Ann Ford plays it all fear and rage, Hartnell is accusatory and aggressive, Barbara floats through proceedings like a zombie, and William Russell plays many scenes like a giggling drunk. Occasionally this works (Carole Ann Ford poised, still, arm raised with the scissors ready to strike is a wonderful image), but it seems more by accident than design.
The eventual explanation that the TARDIS has been deliberately dropping cryptic hints is ludicrous, obviously (it melted all the clocks to tell its crew that their time was running out, but it can't override the fault locator to register an issue in a jammed component because it is technically still functioning correctly); but it's also inadequate. Did the TARDIS somehow cause injuries to the backs of a couple of characters' necks? If so, why? If not, it's a bit of a coincidence that two different people got injuries in the same way. Did the TARDIS make Susan repeatedly stab a pair of scissors into a space-age chaise-longue? If not, what did make her do this? Big actions with insufficient motivation, alas, equals melodrama. That, plus limited options for visual interest, equals stagey melodrama. Nonetheless, there are a few moments that work - Hartnell's monologue about the mysteries of the universe when he witnesses the formation of a solar system is okay, although he delivers it when he knows they're short of time and in incredible danger. Have a sense of urgency as well as a sense of wonder, please, Bill! The story also works better in context than in isolation: a couple of episodes of breather in between longer stories, and something a bit different. In its third story, the programme demonstrates that it can go anywhere, even deep into some very strange story ideas indeed, and then - at the end - it moves on, and the four travellers find themselves at the 'roof of the world' just about to meet Marco Polo. The series would, of course, use this structure of continuing adventure, changing tone and genre and locale frequently, and - yes - occasionally trying something odd or something that didn't quite work, to power through another 13 episodes, and then another, and then another... for nigh on 60 years now, and counting.
Connectivity:
The Edge of Destruction and Orphan 55 both feature a four person TARDIS team and the Doctor doing a monologue towards the end. That's pretty much it.
Deeper Thoughts:
The Ship in a Bottle Episode. The Edge of Destruction is Doctor Who's first ever bottle episode, in the truest sense of the term. If you're not familiar with bottle episodes, it is a phenomenon, and the resultant terminology to refer to that phenomenon, emerging from US TV. When you have to produce 26 episodes a year of a comedy or drama series, year in year out (which is rare in the UK, but commonplace in the US), there will be times when you need to economise. Just like the clip show, a bottle episode is a way to make the budget stretch a bit further. Unlike a clip show, which would allow a production team to make an episode out of recycled material with a small amount of newly filmed content as a framing device, a bottle episode is a full programme of new material. To keep it cheap, though, the cast and sets are kept restricted. Just as in Edge of Destruction, the most bottliest bottle episode features only the regular cast and standing sets. Often, plot has to be minimal because of this, and so stories tend to be at the inter-personal level, with characters exchanging dialogue to paint word pictures in lieu of globe-trotting, and subtext in lieu of action. Examples would be the Breaking Bad episode Fly (just the two main regulars in the lab set) or the One Where No One's Ready episode of Friends (just the six regulars in the large apartment set). Interestingly, the clip show did gain some traction in the UK around the time that Doctor Who started; Gerry Anderson's rival tele-fantasy series like Stingray and Thunderbirds often used the clip show approach. British TV didn't do the bottle episode, though, or at least not in the same way. To take an example: an entire series of a comedy like Steptoe and Son might rarely feature any scenes not in the standing sets of the house and the totter's yard: every episode was to a certain extent a bottle episode. UK television took longer to grow out of its roots as filmed theatre than the offerings from across the pond, and budgets tended to be lower, and expectations lower, from the get go.
Though a UK show might feature limited sets, it would then have a bit of budget for actors, a girlfriend for Steptoe Junior or a dodgy dealer come to sell him and Steptoe Senior some scrap metal, and so on. Doctor Who could only have done such a purist bottle episode as The Edge of Destruction early on, as later it had something of the opposite challenge. It was only in the early years of Doctor Who where spending significant story time in the TARDIS between jaunts was common, and there were sets built to accommodate this. Later, the console room set was the only standing set for the series, and it was too small to comfortably house an entire episode without the available camera angles becoming very boring very quickly. Doctor Who being a series of serials, each one in a new locale, meant that it had to create a new set of sets every few weeks, and therefore might not have had so much money for actors. This gave rise to a format later in the series where a large standing set was created to last the four to six weeks of the serial (the tomb in The Tomb of the Cybermen, the moon base in The Moonbase), and the cast was limited. The 'base under siege' format, as it became known later, gets some artistic genre value out of the restriction, and for a few years in the Patrick Troughton era Doctor Who focusses on horror plots where monsters infiltrate lonely outposts and pick off members of the limited cast one by one. There are echoes of this throughout Doctor Who long after it shrugged off that house style, in such stories as Tom Baker's The Ark in Space (which features only the regular cast in its first episode as they explore the impressive new sets) and something like Midnight (regular cast and limited guest cast trapped in a small newly built set) in the new series. These not quite pure bottle episodes are in good company; famous examples of similar episodes of other shows would be Seinfeld's The Chinese Restaurant (regular cast on a single new set) and Brooklyn 99's The Box (a couple of the regular cast on a standing set, but they've splurged on a big name guest actor in Sterling K. Brown).
Though Doctor Who would never be a stranger to budgetary constraints, it didn't often have to do anything as extreme as The Edge of Destruction again. The closest it came was having to work up from nothing an additional episode to be added to the front of Patrick Troughton story The Mind Robber to plug a gap. As well as the regulars and the TARDIS sets it featured a blank cyclorama to represent a white void, some non-speaking characters in robot outfits from stock, and a nifty bit of filmed effects work where the TARDIS blows up. It's arguably better than the four following episodes that had a more generous budget. Since it came back, the new series has had more budget and commitment from BBC executives than anyone could have dreamed of in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. There have still been challenges, though. In the first ten or so years after the 2005 return, the show was making 12 or 13 episodes a season, but also had to create a Christmas special. To make the schedule stretch, double-banking was often employed - splitting the regular cast between episodes so that two could be shot simultaneously. Often, this used similar techniques to the bottle episode. For example, in both Flatline and The Girl Who Waited the Doctor is stuck in the TARDIS, allowing the lead actor to do a short period of filming on the standing set that can then be intercut with the rest of the action, giving the character more screen time and interaction with the other characters than otherwise. In later years, with fewer episodes being made per year, double banking hasn't been necessary, and there's been no bottle episodes either. On the contrary, the show has travelled far and wide both in the real world (filming in many locations around the globe) and the fictional one (the many planets and times featured in Flux, despite the restrictions imposed by Covid-19 on filming). If a bottle - or bottle-ish - episode were to happen in future, it would most likely be for artistic rather than budgetary reasons.
In Summary:
Bitty, brief and bizarre.
Plot:
The Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan are in the TARDIS when there is an explosion knocking them out. When they wake up, they suffer from unexplained pains and memory losses. The doors to the ship open and close of their own accord. Susan is paranoid that something might have got into the ship that is inhabiting one of the others, and threatens Ian and Barbara with a pair of scissors. The TARDIS scanner shows seemingly random images. All the clocks and watches in the ship melt. The Doctor accuses Ian and Barbara of sabotage, a way to blackmail him into taking them home to their own time. (This doesn't really make sense, but nobody's behaving very rationally.) The Doctor deliberately sedates everyone so he can investigate alone, but a suspicious Ian hasn't drunk the drink given to him. Eventually, everyone's awake again and collectively they piece together what is happening. The TARDIS fault locator starts honking and flashing every fifteen seconds, which clues them in that the ship is trying to count down time. One of the controls, the fast return switch, has become jammed, and they were all travelling back in time, into the beginning of the formation of a solar system, where the TARDIS would have been destroyed. The Doctor fixes the switch and all returns to normal. He apologises to Barbara, who was hurt by his earlier comments.
Context:
I have a broken TV/Blu-ray player remote control again (see The War Machines post for the last time this happened, with hilarious consequences). With no way to watch the DVD of this story, I had to resort to Britbox. The Britbox app that I can use on the family TV, via a Fire stick, is a bit buggy; with perseverance, though, I was able to get both episodes to play. I watched them one a night on two consecutive nights midweek in the final full week of October. Before this, while looking around the classic Doctor Who offerings on the streaming service, I noticed that there's a photo reconstruction of missing episodes of Patrick Troughton story The Wheel in Space that, unless I missed it, has never been made commercially available on any shiny disc release. I viewed a bit of it, and it was rather good. I was almost tempted to override the random generator and watch that story instead, but rules are rules. I sucked it up and watched the - probably more dull, even than a slide-show - Hartnell two-parter.
First Time Round:
Does everyone remember the different houses they've lived in, and when exactly they moved in to each? And every change of job, and every birth, marriage or death, to pinpoint date/time accuracy without having to glance at a calendar? I'm half a century old, but I can recall this information for my entire life, only because of Doctor Who. My extreme fandom means that I know which Doctor Who videos, DVDs or broadcasts I was watching in which homes, and then I can date them (usually from memory, but even if I forget once in a while, a large section of the internet is devoted to remembering Doctor Who dates also). I don't know if this is an affliction or a superpower. Most of the 1990s I spent living in Worthing on the Sussex coast (except for being in Durham in term time for my three years at university there). I moved to Brighton in 1999, at first in a house share, and then in a flat on my own from November of that year. The Edge of Destruction came out on VHS (accompanied by the pilot episode) six months later in April 2000 when I was nicely settled in there. I was still working in Worthing, taking the train there every day. In a few weeks' time, I would start a job commuting into London daily, whereupon my usual suppliers of Doctor Who stuff would change to be more capital-centric, as I wouldn't get home until later. On the day The Edge of Destruction came out, I would have had time after getting home on the train from Worthing to walk down Queen's Road and purchase it in the Brighton MVC shop, as they were still open (though I'd still have had to trot down from the station at a reasonable pace to get in before they shut). I'd then have walked back up the hill to the Seven Dials area where I lived, get in, and put the video on straight away. My memory is that it was a thrill seeing a William Hartnell story that was new to me (there weren't many of those left to release that were so by 2000), and it didn't bother me that the story was short, and unhinged.
Reaction:
The Edge of Destruction, the third ever Doctor Who story, was something of an afterthought. The original commitment made by the BBC to the production team when the show was starting up in 1963 was for 13 episodes; 11 of these had been used creating the superlative two opening stories, four episodes for An Unearthly Child and seven episodes for The Daleks. Further full length stories were being prepped, somewhat at risk as there hadn't been a formal commitment to more at that point. Just in case they didn't get re-commissioned, they needed a space-filler - two episodes to slot in to complete the first batch, with the hope that more would follow if the decision went their way (as it eventually did). Writer (and script editor of the series at the time) David Whittaker had a tight brief, with limited resources he could use. If I remember rightly, even when it first came out for home video purchase in the year 2000 (as remembered above) the first impulse was again for it to be an afterthought. There was a plan to bring out a VHS box set of the first three William Hartnell stories; remastered versions of the first two that were already out on VHS, with the two episodes of The Edge of Destruction along for the ride. There was resistance to the idea that fans would have to pay for an expensive box set just to get two episodes of previously unreleased material, and the idea was shelved. That initial intention though would have reduced the two-part story to a glorified extra, with insufficient draw to stand on its own. In the end it had to, though. It may have been that, for a lot of fans, paying exclusively for two episodes of slightly inept psychodrama might have chafed more than if the cost had been subsumed into the experience of getting a pretty box and maybe a TARDIS-shaped keyring. Is it perhaps better for this story to remain an afterthought and not have too much focus upon it?
The eventual explanation that the TARDIS has been deliberately dropping cryptic hints is ludicrous, obviously (it melted all the clocks to tell its crew that their time was running out, but it can't override the fault locator to register an issue in a jammed component because it is technically still functioning correctly); but it's also inadequate. Did the TARDIS somehow cause injuries to the backs of a couple of characters' necks? If so, why? If not, it's a bit of a coincidence that two different people got injuries in the same way. Did the TARDIS make Susan repeatedly stab a pair of scissors into a space-age chaise-longue? If not, what did make her do this? Big actions with insufficient motivation, alas, equals melodrama. That, plus limited options for visual interest, equals stagey melodrama. Nonetheless, there are a few moments that work - Hartnell's monologue about the mysteries of the universe when he witnesses the formation of a solar system is okay, although he delivers it when he knows they're short of time and in incredible danger. Have a sense of urgency as well as a sense of wonder, please, Bill! The story also works better in context than in isolation: a couple of episodes of breather in between longer stories, and something a bit different. In its third story, the programme demonstrates that it can go anywhere, even deep into some very strange story ideas indeed, and then - at the end - it moves on, and the four travellers find themselves at the 'roof of the world' just about to meet Marco Polo. The series would, of course, use this structure of continuing adventure, changing tone and genre and locale frequently, and - yes - occasionally trying something odd or something that didn't quite work, to power through another 13 episodes, and then another, and then another... for nigh on 60 years now, and counting.
Connectivity:
The Edge of Destruction and Orphan 55 both feature a four person TARDIS team and the Doctor doing a monologue towards the end. That's pretty much it.
Deeper Thoughts:
The Ship in a Bottle Episode. The Edge of Destruction is Doctor Who's first ever bottle episode, in the truest sense of the term. If you're not familiar with bottle episodes, it is a phenomenon, and the resultant terminology to refer to that phenomenon, emerging from US TV. When you have to produce 26 episodes a year of a comedy or drama series, year in year out (which is rare in the UK, but commonplace in the US), there will be times when you need to economise. Just like the clip show, a bottle episode is a way to make the budget stretch a bit further. Unlike a clip show, which would allow a production team to make an episode out of recycled material with a small amount of newly filmed content as a framing device, a bottle episode is a full programme of new material. To keep it cheap, though, the cast and sets are kept restricted. Just as in Edge of Destruction, the most bottliest bottle episode features only the regular cast and standing sets. Often, plot has to be minimal because of this, and so stories tend to be at the inter-personal level, with characters exchanging dialogue to paint word pictures in lieu of globe-trotting, and subtext in lieu of action. Examples would be the Breaking Bad episode Fly (just the two main regulars in the lab set) or the One Where No One's Ready episode of Friends (just the six regulars in the large apartment set). Interestingly, the clip show did gain some traction in the UK around the time that Doctor Who started; Gerry Anderson's rival tele-fantasy series like Stingray and Thunderbirds often used the clip show approach. British TV didn't do the bottle episode, though, or at least not in the same way. To take an example: an entire series of a comedy like Steptoe and Son might rarely feature any scenes not in the standing sets of the house and the totter's yard: every episode was to a certain extent a bottle episode. UK television took longer to grow out of its roots as filmed theatre than the offerings from across the pond, and budgets tended to be lower, and expectations lower, from the get go.
Though a UK show might feature limited sets, it would then have a bit of budget for actors, a girlfriend for Steptoe Junior or a dodgy dealer come to sell him and Steptoe Senior some scrap metal, and so on. Doctor Who could only have done such a purist bottle episode as The Edge of Destruction early on, as later it had something of the opposite challenge. It was only in the early years of Doctor Who where spending significant story time in the TARDIS between jaunts was common, and there were sets built to accommodate this. Later, the console room set was the only standing set for the series, and it was too small to comfortably house an entire episode without the available camera angles becoming very boring very quickly. Doctor Who being a series of serials, each one in a new locale, meant that it had to create a new set of sets every few weeks, and therefore might not have had so much money for actors. This gave rise to a format later in the series where a large standing set was created to last the four to six weeks of the serial (the tomb in The Tomb of the Cybermen, the moon base in The Moonbase), and the cast was limited. The 'base under siege' format, as it became known later, gets some artistic genre value out of the restriction, and for a few years in the Patrick Troughton era Doctor Who focusses on horror plots where monsters infiltrate lonely outposts and pick off members of the limited cast one by one. There are echoes of this throughout Doctor Who long after it shrugged off that house style, in such stories as Tom Baker's The Ark in Space (which features only the regular cast in its first episode as they explore the impressive new sets) and something like Midnight (regular cast and limited guest cast trapped in a small newly built set) in the new series. These not quite pure bottle episodes are in good company; famous examples of similar episodes of other shows would be Seinfeld's The Chinese Restaurant (regular cast on a single new set) and Brooklyn 99's The Box (a couple of the regular cast on a standing set, but they've splurged on a big name guest actor in Sterling K. Brown).
In Summary:
Bitty, brief and bizarre.
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