Episode 13: The Brink of Disaster

Synopsis:

With everyone asleep in bed, the Doctor goes alone to the console room and studies the controls Someone approaches quietly from behind and seizes him by the throat as he turns to see who it is...

It proves to be Ian, who is immediately struck down by some unknown force. The Doctor takes this as proof that the teachers have been responsible for what has happened to them. He determines to throw them off the ship at their next destination - irrespective of where or when they are. Ian tries to tell him that he was trying to stop him from being hurt by the console.

The Fault Locator suddenly alerts everyone to a problem. The Doctor is horrified to see that everything is breaking down at the same time. He realises that Ian and Barbara can't possibly be responsible for all this. Fearing that the TARDIS is about to be destroyed, he enlists the recovered Ian's help - but it is Barbara who begins to work out what is going on.

With the Fault Locator sounding every couple of minutes, she realises that this provides them with a measurement of time, especially since their clocks and watches melted. They have been given this measure of time, because time is running out. The part of the console where the scanner controls are is the one part of the unit which they can safely approach - the rest of it causing them to suffer debilitating pain at the back of the neck. This is what had caused Ian to collapse.

The scanner images they have seen are repeated - a safe place when the doors open, and a dangerous place when the doors close, followed by the sequence of the planet, in its solar system and then a blinding flash.

The room is plunged into darkness as the TARDIS heads towards destruction, but the Doctor has realised that the scanner is showing them their journey. He had used the Fast Return switch to hopefully take the TARDIS back to London, 1963, after leaving Skaro. This is located on the safe panel of the console. When he checks it, he discovers that it has jammed. The ship has been hurtling back in time towards destruction in the explosive birth of a galaxy, and has been trying to warn them of this.

Once the switch is unjammed, everything returns to normal.

The Doctor must come to terms with his false accusations against the two teachers. They decide to accept his apologies and move forward.

A short time later, the TARDIS has landed in a wintery wasteland. Susan and Barbara call out for the Doctor and Ian, as they have found a gigantic footprint in the snow...

Next episode: The Roof of the World.

Data:

Written by: David Whitaker

Recorded: Friday 24th January, 1964 - Lime Grove Studio D

First broadcast: 5:15pm, Saturday 15th February, 1964

Ratings: 9.9 million / AI 60

Designer: Raymond P Cusick

Director: Frank Cox

Critique:

The second half of this story sees Varity Lambert testing out a new director with a single episode - Frank Cox. The plan was for him to get a story of his own to direct later in the season.

Once this story's original purpose was no longer required - a means to round off the series - David Whitaker could use it to act as something else.

In rehearsals Jacqueline Hill had been the one to say she liked this story, as it gave little windows into their characters. The Brink of Disaster is a particularly strong episode for Barbara, as she is the one who starts to work out what is going on before even the Doctor and Susan, who are supposed to know the TARDIS. The Doctor allows his suspicions and paranoia to get the better of him, bringing his distrust of the teachers to the fore. This has been around since the very first episode, either implicitly or openly stated. To have continued this tense, antagonistic relationship any longer would have been off-putting to the viewers. Whitaker brings things to a head so that issues can be resolved, and the TARDIS travellers can move forward, more understanding of each other. They will be friendlier towards each other, and more likely to work together to overcome the challenges they will face.

One character in particular gets placed under a spotlight - and that is the TARDIS itself. Simply a means to get them from one adventure to the next up to now, it comes into its own here as the fifth character in the series.

The suggestion from the first story had been that the Doctor had built the TARDIS himself - with Susan even claiming to have come up with the name.

In the earliest days, it was the Doctor who was responsible for their erratic journeying. Even in the programme's planning stages, it was identified that the Doctor was a bit forgetful and did not know how to properly operate his own ship. It was only much later that the notion of the TARDIS itself being faulty was introduced. The idea that it is a living thing, capable of telepathic communications with its operator, won't appear until the Pertwee era.

Here, the Doctor cannot believe that the TARDIS might have attempted to communicate its warning to them - claiming it can think only as a machine thinks.

It is a very bizarre method which it uses to let them know of the danger, and it is never explained how the ship could achieve physical effects like the melting of the clock and, especially, their watches.

After all of the mystery and weirdness of the first episode and the first half of this one, with various causes and solutions being proposed and discounted, it comes as a great disappointment to learn that it is something as mundane as a stuck switch which is the cause of the problem, and simply taking out the spring and putting it back in again resolves things. William Russell in particular disliked this conclusion, thinking it "lame".

Trivia:

• Frank Cox was married to actress Bridget Turner, who played Alice Cassini in Gridlock.
• The Brink of Disaster is almost three minutes shorter than the first instalment, at only 22' 11".
• The episode comprised only four scenes originally.
• In the first draft, the Ulster which the Doctor loans to Ian belonged to Ferdinand de Lesseps, the canal engineer, rather than to Gilbert and Sullivan.
• If Hill liked these scripts, Hartnell was unhappy with the lengthy speeches he had to memorise, likening them to Macbeth.
• When asked many years later, designer Ray Cusick believed that the words "Fast Return Switch" written in felt-tip pen on the console were put there for Hartnell's benefit, so he and the cameraman could easily find it, and should have been wiped off before the scene was recorded.
• The VHS The Hartnell Years included a clip from this episode dubbed into Arabic - the Doctor's speech about planetary formation.
• The idea that the scanner will show nice images to indicate a safe location outside, and something dangerous if it is unsafe, was used in another David Whitaker script - the first episode of The Wheel In Space. 
• The planet image will be used again in the final moments of The Space Museum, where it will be identified as Skaro. The wider view of the galaxy had already been used to indicate Skaro's system in The Daleks.