A Far Wider Academy of which Human Nature is Merely a Part: The Edge of Destruction
It is February 8th, 1964. In the UK, the number one single is “Needles and Pins” by the Searchers, a Liverpool band. The songwriter, however, is American Sonny Bono, future Republican Congressman who will go on to author a massive copyright extension act that is itself a compromise over his own loathsome view that copyright should be perpetual. He will then ski into a tree and die. Speaking of America, however, the number one single over there is fellow Liverpool band the Beatles, who have just touched down yesterday at JFK to a throb of fans, offering both a strange juxtaposition with Byron de la Beckwith getting away (for at least the next 30 years) with the murder of Medgar Evers and something of a significant colonization attempt, although for our purposes, the more intriguing product would not make its way to the US until 1972.
In the alarmingly more intelligent context of Doctor Who, the series third adventure, a two part serial hastily cobbled together in order to get the series to fill out its 13-episode initial order without requiring the use of any additional sets or characters. As a result, both episodes feature only the core cast – something that has, admittedly, happened twice previously in the series, but that will not happen again for more than a decade (I don’t think, at least)
The rush nature of the story is all too clear at points. The opening ten minutes or so are horrendously awkward, with Ian and Barbara alternately acting like children and dementia patients, often changing over mid-word. At which point the episode improbably picks up with an absolutely insane and thoroughly chilling scene in which Susan deliriously stabs a whole lot of things with scissors.
The thing about early Doctor Who, though, is that even the rush jobs are massively significant. Doctor Who’s canon is wholly additive, with new things just sort of being grafted on to the knobby bits as time goes on. Basically, it’s a giant narrative Katamari. Nothing is ever contradicted or removed. In the event of a contradiction, basically, you’ve just created a new knobby bit. The only thing likely to happen to a bit of Doctor Who continuity is that it will be smoothed down until it’s actually a good story, which, to be fair, it has not always been to start.
But in early Doctor Who, it was all knobby bits. So in these first episodes, a lot of things get established. We have the Doctor already. We have monsters. This story gives us two more things – companions and the TARDIS.
We have the TARDIS already, of course. It’s where the show started, its incongruous and brilliant central premise. But this is where we are finally allowed to have a look at her. The pronoun, by the way, is not merely an homage to naval tradition. The pronoun is because this story has five characters in it, even if we don’t see one of them until the very end.…