The Edge of Destruction/The Brink of Disaster

Hey there, faithful viewer! Chance here, once again,  with this week’s recap.

Okay, so this is a little weird, and really, it’s a sign of things to come. While a two-episode serial certainly seems out of place in classic Who (where a serial was considered short if it had only four parts), it’s considered the norm nowadays. With gems such as “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” “The Army of Ghosts/Doomsday,” and “The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone,” you wonder why Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert (the exec producers and creators of this lovely show) didn’t decide to switch over to a two-episode format back in the day.

But never mind. We wouldn’t change a thing about classic Who, not one single thing. Right, faithful viewer?

Well…

Feel free to call me crazy (I do on a regular basis, believe me), but this serial is just strange, and it doesn’t sit right in my Whovian brain. It doesn’t really go anywhere, and it also goes against a lot of Doctor Who canon that is accepted today as common knowledge. The focus of the episode is on a TARDIS malfunction, and the strange goings-on inside the Old Girl are a result of Sexy herself trying to warn the Doctor and his companions not to try and leave the ship until it’s fixed.

The first thing that irks me is the Doctor’s assertions that the TARDIS can’t possibly be trying to communicate with its inhabitants because, get this: the ship isn’t alive.

Um, what?

Since when has that been true? It’s a fact that the Old Girl is as alive as two alive things and that fact has often served, not only as a deus ex machina (as in “Boom Town,” “The Parting of the Ways,” “Rise of the Cybermen,” and many others), but also as a humorous and touching plot point (as in “The Doctor’s Wife” or “Forest of the Dead”). The fact that the Doctor, a Time Lord, would deny the sentience of his TARDIS, is frightening. Perhaps this was just one more sign of his initial mistrust of his non-Time Lord companions, but…I dunno. It just feels funky to me.

The other thing that bothered me was Susan’s behavior throughout the two episodes. It was a cool mystery going at the beginning of the serial, with Susan acting very strange and suffering from bouts of amnesia. The possibility was raised that she could be possessed by some sort of alien, and I started getting my hopes up that we were going to have an old-fashioned “Midnight” on our hands (though hopefully a less-fatal version than the admittedly-glorious one put together by Russell T. Davies).  Adding to this theory of possession was Susan seeming to switch between personalities, apparently changing seamlessly from scared teenager to sassy psychopath, which came across to me (I don’t know about you, faithful viewer) as an attempt to show how Susan was struggling against the entity that possessed her.

But no. No “Midnight,” no creepy and immature alien practicing its mimicry skills. Just a TARDIS malfunction and the revelation of a sentient ship. I’m not sure what Carol Ann Ford was playing at, or if I’m just misinterpreting her, but it didn’t work. Normally, I’m a huge Carol Ann Ford fan, (truly, she is a fantastic actor) but not this time. Sorry.

I will say this, though. These two episodes, despite all the shoddy continuity going on, are very important for the flow of the series. First of all, this serial establishes once-and-for-all that the TARDIS is much more than a time machine that looks like a police box. She’s very much alive, and she cares very deeply for the safety of the Doctor and his companions. Without these episodes, all the ones that I mentioned up above would be making much less sense than they do, were it not for “The Edge of Destruction.”

Also, it cements Ian and Barbara’s status as true companions. Up until this point, they were tagalongs, a lot like Martha Jones for much of Series Three. The Doctor didn’t trust them all that much, and neither did they trust him. Indeed, over the course of this serial, the Doctor believed the two teachers to be conspiring against him and ended up drugging them so that they wouldn’t try to sabotage the TARDIS! Madman with a box, my foot; that’s some harsh stuff!

However, as I’ve said, this was the serial that turned it all around. Once Ian, Barbara, and the Doctor all stopped trying to get the upper hand on each other, they realized that they made a pretty good time-traveling team. Of course, you and I, faithful viewer, could have told ’em that from the get-go, but never mind. Anyway, once the “Fast Return Switch” had been fixed (it’s always one little thing that mucks everything else up, isn’t it?), the Doctor and companions set off again, arriving in a snowy and mysterious landscape, with an enormous footprint right outside the TARDIS door. Cue the ominous background music.

Stay tuned ’til next week, when we travel to Cathay (where? Ancient China) and learn that the BBC were monumentally cheap buggers back in the old days.