TV doesn’t live on the edge any more, well that’s how it feels to me. Everything is signed off, in the can and ready to show months before transmission (well, maybe weeks in some cases) whereas, in the 60s, you can feel the terror on the screen as the actors know that this is “it”, they can’t re-take, can’t film padding scenes during the next studio blocks and that if you don’t get it right, the BBC will be showing the test card for 25 minutes next Saturday tea-time. For the extreme example of this, you should see some episodes of “Dark Shadows”, one of my other all-time favourite shows, where sometimes they were filming mere days ahead of transmission. And if any actor fell ill… better get that script editor on the phone and courier over multiple bottles of whiskey to him to help with last minute re-writes. Or, as in the case of “The Edge of Destruction”, allegedly last minute full on write from scratch. Everything about the production side of the story is well documented, many times over, but HBWho is, as always, far more interested in the implications of what’s seen on screen. I’ve already mentioned how strange it is that everyone forgets there’s the convenient “electrify the console” function and, further down the line, I’ll also come back to this as a great example of the magic morphing main room but let’s take a brief look at the plot. It’s messed up, it’s the cast saying the lines without even knowing what they mean and it’s someone risking giving Hartnell a speech. However, it’s also not a stand alone story. It’s part of over 60 years of tales and, as such, it’s time to fill in the things that were blank at the time but we now know to be “true”.
With just two stories under the belt, it’s safe to say that we know damn all detail about the Doctor’s past for this third story. Or, rather, we knew (past tense). Within the story we do learn a few things, such as it was four or five journeys ago that the Doctor and Susan landed on Quinnis in the fourth Universe and nearly lost the ship. Simple subtraction says that was probably one of the last stops they made before London 1963. As it’s a planet in another universe (whatever that actually means) suggests that the TARDIS wasn’t an Ionic column or a sedan chair for its disguise so we’ve now got vague details about three landings before Totters Lane. The fact that the TARDIS is in a bad state in London 1963 also suggests that it was probably on Quinnis that the ship got damaged. So far, nothing new. But what about the things we learn in the stories AFTER this one. As we’ll find out between now and the end of season two, it’s highly likely that the Doctor was some sort of geological surveyor/researcher (yes, really) and though we know the Doctor seemingly grew to like being in danger (yes, really), being a geologist doesn’t seem to be that thrilling. It would, however, have seen him getting a feel for life off Galliffrey and I can’t help but wonder how many of these geology trips were official solo missions and thus had clocked up quite a few time-miles in the TARDIS before he finally got Susan on board and they did a bunk for good. In just a couple of stories time, he’ll be commenting on “in all my travels” rather than anything that states explicitly that Susan was with him when he made them. We will learn of a few other trips with Susan that happened before “An Unearthly Child” but they’re definitely one for the relevant episodes. Come forward just slightly, well okay to the time of 10 and Rose, and we start to get a feel for what the TARDIS is seemingly capable of in terms of gravity and black holes and then, by the time of “Journey’s End” we see the TARDIS casually towing planets around.
Combining all of these little bits together gives one potentially interesting scenario. Admittedly it means actually believing that anyone in the Doctor Who production team knew anything about science (oh I had to grit my teeth whilst typing that out) or was starting to keep a “show bible” (and yes, I paused for laughter at that thought) but if we take the Doctor at his word then it becomes perfectly plausible that Quinnis was some sort of geological trip that had the “brief” of observing planetary formation in a region of space that’s somehow classified as a different universe to ours (more teeth gritting that will probably end with them shattering when I eventually get to “Full Circle”). This then means that the plot of “Edge of Destruction” actually begins to become coherent, not words that I feel have been typed too many times in 60 years. The fast return switch (conveniently but weirdly labelled in felt tip) is presumably supposed to be pressed once to take you back one journey, twice to take you back two etc etc. It’s sort of like the undo function in pretty much every piece of software. But hold the button down (or disconnect the spring so it never releases) and presumably it keeps registering as a constant press and so keeps trying to take you back. So they overshoot Skaro, overshoot the Tribe of Gum, miss Totters Lane by a million miles and start heading back to Quinnis, or rather the formation of Quinnis. Piloted properly and (hopefully) with all kinds of safety features engaged, being near the formation of a solar system is probably easily within the design tolerance of a fully working TARDIS. But if the ship is falling apart already AND you don’t engage the safety features, I expect you’re going to end up in trouble. You’ve got the TARDIS engines trying to pull you back through the vortex but you’ve got a massive gravity whirlpool trying to pull you forward at exactly the same time. Is it any wonder the ship doesn’t cope too well. Given that the Doctor feels very cut off from his home time and planet, it’s a reasonably safe bet that Gallfirey wasn’t the stop before Qunnis. Or, if it was, does that suggest that the TARDIS thought it would be preferable to be pulled into the formation of a solar system in a different universe than return to the docking bays!
Now, time to throw the nature of the TARDIS into the mix. As vaguely acknowledged in the story but then seemingly confirmed many times over the years, the TARDIS is more than just a machine and has some sort of “essence” about it that means it has an extra-dimensional life force to it. I don’t know about you, but if someone were to tie my left wrist to a boulder that’s about to be pushed off a cliff and my right wrist to a car that’s trying to accelerate away from the cliff edge, I’m not sure I’d be too coherent in my communication. There would probably be lots of loud swearing, a very panicked tone to my voice and probably one or two exceptionally loud and terrified screams. Now imagine you don’t have vocal chords, all you have is a loose telepathic connection to the people who travel inside you. That pain and that fear is going to fly out of your telepathic circuits and hit them full force. Now try and tell me that those people are going to come out of this well. Okay, maybe melting the faces on a very nice looking clock was a bit ott (I wonder if there are still pocket watches laying around in the ship that have molten faces) but really, given it doesn’t have a handy text-to-speech button, I think it does pretty well. Just minus several million marks to the Doctor for never installing an update that gives it more language based warnings, as all it looks like the Doctor ever did was update the klaxon to being the cloister bell.
I’m not saying it’s perfect, far from it, and there’s still a lot that’s wrong, baffling and inexcusable about the story (I think it’s strange that the females have absolutely ghastly shapeless sack type things to sleep in whereas Ian gets quite natty pyjama shorts and top) but if we allow ourselves to look at the story with knowledge of the following 60 years or so, to me the story actually starts to hold together quite well. And when it does come down to Earth with a bump for the next story, THAT’S where the TARDIS functions, physics and floor plan will really start to fall apart.