pmcray

The thing about "The Edge of Destruction" is that is probably makes more sense now than it did at the zenith of Old Who in the late 1970s. It's a two parter, which makes it the length of a NuWho episode and it's a bottle episode with which we are also familiar from the new series. Here we just have the four regulars, in the TARDIS, going (more than) slightly mad. In 1964, everyone would have been familiar with television drama involving a small group of people trapped in some kind of restricted and claustrophobic environment. This was an age when Sartre's Huis Clos could be on primetime television and many of the plays that filled up the schedules would have demonstrated the influence of Beckett, Ionesco and the Theatre of the Absurd. If we imagine that the ideal viewer of Doctor Who as a 17-year old Galoise-puffing A-level French student who enjoys discussing Camus and the roman nouveau in the local espresso bar over a milky coffee served in those rather natty glass cups (when will we those back in fashion?), we get some notion of how this story is expected to work for the audience.

Of course, another way TEoD made more sense then was that it could be seen as a sideways story - we've had a time story and a space story, so now was the turn of the third kind of adventure that the series was intended to feature. Melted clockfaces are the kinds of things that turn up in dreams (apparently one of telling whether you are in a dream is to look at your watch, look away and then look at it again - the time will be different) and Daliesque surrealist paintings. The characters are in some kind of fugue state and we can expect the unexpected.

So we get Susan stabbing a couch a pair of rather nasty looking scissors. The kind of thing we might have expected in a post-watershed play, but pretty strong stuff for Saturday teatime even in 1964. We won't see the likes of that again and we can imagine the kinds of interpretation that would have been put on it by our proto-Lacanians in the sixth form common room on Monday morning.

Interestingly, it is only the third story and the idea that the TARDIS is both somehow alive and sentient, and able to communicate telepathically with the crew has been established. There'll be more of that in the decades to come. Of course, today the notion that TARDIS rearranges the interior of the TARDIS to suit the exigencies of the plot seems second nature (how physical is the interior of the TARDIS? - it seems to get a pretty good trashing at the end of "The End of Time", and regenerates in "The Eleventh Hour" - I believe this is treated in the late 1970s).

It turns out that the ship hasn't been invaded, but that the fast return switch has become stuck (the name of the switch is written in felt-tip next to it), which causes the TARDIS to constantly go back in time and ultimately reach the fiery birth of a planetary system (possibly the Solar System, although given Whittaker's grasp of astronomy, he might have meant a galaxy or the universe) when the ship will be destroyed. The fugue state is the TARDIS's way of telling the crew that something is wrong. A flashing indicator "WARNING: FAST RETURN SWITCH ON" might have been more useful or perhaps an automatic override. But this was the 1960s. This was an age when things did go wrong because a button had become stuck in a particular position. It was also an age when the vehicle bus wasn't the single most expensive component in a car. People just didn't expect multiply redundant command and control systems in those days (I wonder to what extent they existed in aircraft in the early 1960s).

Now Write On...

"The Ghosts of the TARDIS": the Doctor or a companion alone in the TARDIS. A companion would have more reason to do some exploring - and go through that door that the Doctor has explicitly told her never, ever, to even think about opening. Of course, the Doctor is more likely to be alone in the TARDIS (the companion could have gone to visit her mother or aunt). And for him, the TARDIS is full of ghosts. We might never even see the "ghosts". It could all be done with lightning and sound. Has the TARDIS been invaded by something? Is the fast return switch stuck on again? Is something that has been living and evolving somewhere in the TARDIS for centuries? The Doctor thinks he is going mad as he tries to use logic and intuition to deduce what is going on. The Doctor eventually realises that the something has been growing in a single room and is now using the internal phone and servant bell system to try to escape. The Doctor realises that the infection will soon overwhelm the TARDIS. He somehow draws it out and then uses the TARDIS interdimensional pneumatic telegraph system that connects each of the infinite number of rooms in the TARDIS to split the "ghost" into an infinite number of pieces, which are then distributed to each of an prime-numbered rooms. There are still an infinite amount of rooms left to use in the TARDIS hotel and each "ghost" is merely an infinitesimal fragment of the infection and will take an infinite amount of time to grow back to its former size (perhaps).

This could be a very economical episode. Given the new TARDIS set and the Moff's recent statement that he considers the TARDIS to be infinite (a very Borgesian notion and one in full concordance with my own idea of the TARDIS), we might need a couple of rooms we haven't seen before (in addition to the swimming pool and the library), but this would allow the actor playing the Doctor to some real acting. We don't see many one person shows on primetime TV these days, but the Doctor does talk to himself a great deal, so he doesn't have to have anything but the various ghostly phenomena to play off. I think (I hope) we are going to see a lot more of the TARDIS under the Moff (despite his comment that we want want Narnia, not the wardrobe, but the TARDIS is no wardrobe), so this could be a real possibility for a (literal, almost) capsule episode for the new dispensation.