A Sort of Time Television

So - who's the Doctor's mysterious assailant? Well, as I gave the game away last week that - despite all the talk of a possible intruder in the TARDIS - only the regular cast appear in this serial it won't come as much of a surprise that it's one of his companions. Ian, in fact - an extremely crazed-looking Ian, who falls over a tad over-dramatically when the Doctor pushes him away.

This event has only strengthened the Doctor's conviction that Ian and Barbara are attempting to sabotage the ship, and he won't listen to Barbara's insistence that something much stranger is going on (a note on TARDIS nightwear: Ian has acquired a perfectly ordinary looking dressing gown, while Barbara is dressed in a garment the same as Susan's: they look like a pair of lady monks).

Susan's inclined to agree with her grandfather that Ian and Barbara have been behaving strangely (somehow Barbara forebears to point out that she wasn't the one menacing people with scissors). But even she's shocked by his decision to throw his "enemies" off the ship, whatever might be waiting outside the doors. Especially as Ian's semiconscious ravings suggest that he was simply trying to stop the Doctor from being electrocuted by the control console.

The Doctor's at the most unpleasant we've yet seen him, adopting a hideously sneery tone of voice as he boasts about how valuable his ship is and hustles Ian to his feet prior to being shoved outside (poor dazed Ian, victim of the Doctor's sinister nightcap has no idea what's going on).

The Doctor's cut off mid-rant by the sound of an alarm. All the lights on the ship's fault locator are flashing, a sight that fills him with terror. But now he realises that Ian and Barbara have nothing to do with the strange things that have been happening, and shamefacedly entreats them to trust him. Hartnell plays the old man's lightning turnaround brilliantly.

The fault locator's meltdown means the TARDIS is on the verge of disintegration. "We're on the brink of destruction!" exclaims the Doctor, merging this episode's title with that of the last (actually Hartnell stumbles over his line, making it the brink of disruck-destruction). He's realised that the ship is threatened by an unknown force, though he doesn't think there's another intelligence aboard. Another explosion rocks the control room. The lights go dim, but the central column of the console glows menacingly.

The Doctor explains that the ship's power source is under the column, and it looks like it's about to escape. If it does they'll be "Blown to atoms by a split second!" (I think that's a fluff, but I think the idea of deadly time leaking out sounds quite good). "Can it be possible, then, that this is the end?" he muses, estimating they've got about 10 minutes left. Barbara surely speaks for the whole audience as Susan starts getting hysterical.

Barbara starts to wonder if the strange things that have been happening are clues the ship's been giving them to help avert the catastrophe. At first the Doctor seems affronted by the idea his ship could think to do this, though he admits it has a kind of computer intelligence.

The Doctor announces he's going to try opening the doors, and sends Susan and Barbara to report what's outside. But he admits to Ian this is simply a ruse so they're not aware of when the ship's going to explode. The Doctor, a bit late in the day, has decided to try bonding with one of his companions, asking Ian to stand shoulder to shoulder with him as they face the end.

The scanner once again shows the countryside, but the doors open to show the blinding white void that's really outside. The Doctor notes that, when the scanner shows a pleasant scene, the doors open - but they close when the image is a hostile one.

Now the scanner shows an increasingly distant view of a planet, culminating in a flash of white. Suddenly, the Doctor realises what's happening: this is the journey the TARDIS has made. The ship wasn't destroyed in the explosion, and it's been trying to tell its occupants about it.

Hartnell gets his biggest dramatic opportunity in the show to date now: a long monologue, explaining exactly what's been happening. He clearly relishes every moment of it, but it's quite an agonising watch. You're willing him not to muddle his lines, and by George he doesn't.

It turns out that the Doctor used the ship's fast return switch in an attempt to get Ian and Barbara back to Earth - but it got stuck and propelled them all the way back to the creation of the solar system. The ship's been trying to tell them what happened, but has only been able to do so in the most unhelpfully oblique ways possible. Note that the Doctor has clearly written "Fast Return" on the console to remind himself what the switch is.

The Doctor fixes the switch and all is back to normal. But Ian, and especially Barbara, are still a bit miffed about how the Doctor's treated them.

Realising he's gone too far this time, the Doctor goes and apologises to Barbara, who's now acquired a polo neck jumper that will stand her in good stead for the rest of her time on the show. This is a beautiful little scene, the Doctor having undergone a complete change of heart since the start of the episode (writer David Whitaker provides a clever callback to the Doctor's earlier rant about his "valuable" TARDIS by having him tell her how valuable she is). These two are positioned here as the show's most crucial characters, the intuition that helped Barbara to guess what was really going on the counterpoint to the Doctor's cold logic: "As we learn about each other, so we learn about ourselves," he tells her, and extends the hand, well, the arm, of friendship.

The ice may now have definitively melted in the ship, but it's absolutely freezing outside. Barbara dashes out to join Susan in a snowball fight, while Ian models a "very chic" Ulster given to the Doctor by Gilbert and Sullivan (the very first example of the Doctor's habit of historical name-dropping).

We end on Susan and Barbara's discovery of a giant footprint in the snow...

The Brink of Disaster is probably the only episode of Doctor Who to share its name (give or take a definite article) with a Lesley Gore song. Other than the name the main thing they have in common is that they're both very strange.

Saturday 8 February

Initially the BBC would only commit to 13 episodes of Doctor Who, which was a pain as the planned stories wouldn't slice up that way. The first two serials used 11 of these, but what about the other two, for which there was precious little in the way of budget left? The only option was for the show's script editor, David Whitaker, to come up with a story using only the regular cast and existing sets. And as so much of the show's budget had been spent on constructing the TARDIS interior, it made sense to make good use of it. So the next two weeks see the Doctor, Susan, Barbara and Ian trapped aboard the ship, the tensions that have been simmering between the time travellers and their abductees over the past 11 weeks roaring to a head.

We pick up from the explosive ending of last week's episode, with the travellers gradually coming round after being knocked unconscious on their departure from the planet Skaro.

Barbara's the first to come to her senses, surveying her companions in puzzlement. Susan's next, suffering terrible head and neck pains.

Together they minister to the Doctor, who's cut his head open in his fall. Susan provides a special bandage with stripes of ointment that fade as the wound heals. Susan doesn't recognise Ian, who initially thinks he and Barbara are still at school when he comes round. Jacqueline Hill's the only one of the four actors to avoid staginess in conveying her character's confused state, with William Russell's stilted performance as the spaced-out Ian especially hammy.

When she goes to fetch water for her grandfather, Susan's puzzled to find the food machine claiming it's empty, though it dutifully provides her with a plastic bag full of the stuff.

Returning to the control room, Susan's shocked to find the TARDIS doors are open. Having finally remembered where they are, Barbara thinks that the ship must have crashed. Susan puts forward the troubling theory that something unknown has got inside the ship. Outside the doors is a white void. As Ian approaches them, they close. When he retreats, they open again.

Susan tries the controls but, like Ian in the show's first episode, gets an electric shock. This one knocks her unconscious again.

Ian hoists her over his shoulders and takes her for a lie-down, allowing us our first glance at the ship's fold-away, sun-lounger like beds.

After fetching her some water (and getting the same curious message from the machine), Ian returns to find a wild-haired Susan threatening him with a lethal-looking, daggerlike pair of scissors. When she asks him who he is he responds "Susan..." which is hardly likely to make her any less confused.

Ian, still wonky himself, tries to pacify her, and eventually she goes all Psycho on the bed, finally collapsing.

Ian returns to the control room to find the Doctor up and about. He and Barbara are discussing Susan's theory that someone's inside the ship, to which Ian responds with a zonked-out snigger that's practically a premonition of Beavis and Butthead.

The Doctor also pooh-poohs the idea. "It's just that one's been through so much..." sighs Barbara. Jacqueline Hill is just astoundingly good in this episode.

Barbara goes to see Susan, now dressed in an, erm, interesting black garment, and manages to get the scissors, which she snuck into the control room to grab back, off her. Susan's disquieting behaviour ("I never noticed the shadows before...") gives Carole Ann Ford get the chance to recapture some of the original strangeness of her character, which has been diluted over 10 episodes of falling over and screaming. Most unsettlingly of all, she suggests that if an intelligence of some kind is in the TARDIS, it came aboard inside one of the travellers.

By the way, in long shot the food machine looks like a goggle-eyed robot. It's a shame they didn't take the opportunity to make Foodie more of a character in the show.

On learning that her grandfather plans to switch the scanner on, Susan hysterically tries to stop him getting shocked by the console like she was. The controls work perfectly OK for him though, and the scanner shows a delightful pastoral scene (complete with birdsong).

But the Doctor thinks the image is just "a photograph", and when the ship's doors open, the white void is there once more.

The scanner keeps showing different pictures, which the Doctor has deduced are taken from the TARDIS's memory banks.

Suspicious that Ian and Barbara didn't hurt their heads in the crash the way he and Susan did, the Doctor accuses them of sabotage. His rage is marred slightly by William Hartnell's lines getting away from him: "And you both knocked Su - you know you both knocked both Susan and I unconscious!"

Barbara is spectacular in standing up to him here, also catching any viewers up on what's been happening in the show so far: "How dare you! Do you realise, you stupid old man, that you'd have died in the Cave of Skulls, if Ian hadn't made fire for you?... And what about what we went through against the Daleks? Not just for us, but for you and Susan too. And all because you tricked us in going down to the city. Accuse us? You ought to get down on your hands and knees and thank us. But gratitude's the last thing you'll ever have, or any kind of common sense either."

Unfortunately, her big speech is slightly undermined by the fact that directly after it she screams at a clock. But as the clock's melting (as is her wristwatch) this seems fair enough. Barbara's been the only one clinging on to her sanity in this episode, and suddenly it seems to slip away from under her. It's a terrifying moment.

Ian sits Barbara down to recover, and suddenly the Doctor, appears with drinks for everyone. He's behaving in such a ridiculously sinister manner that it's something of a surprise that Ian and Barbara each take one. It's a nightcap, he tells them. "We have no way of telling [when it's night] now," sighs Ian, who doesn't seem to have realised that the time your watch tells you means very little when you're hurtling through time and space.

Susan apologises to Barbara for her behaviour, but the Doctor still seems highly suspicious of the teachers. The way he hovers over each of them once they're asleep certainly suggests he put something in their drinks.

With clear purpose of some kind in mind, the Doctor advances on the console while the others sleep. But then someone unseen grabs him by the throat...

Sunday 9 February

Judy Parfitt guest stars in tonight's (now lost) episode of Dr Finlay's Casebook on the BBC, alongside her husband, It's Dark Outside's Tony Steedman.

Monday 10 February

Tonight's exciting edition of Come Dancing on the BBC pits Central London (from the Lyceum in the Strand) against South London (from the Orchid Ballroom, Purley).

Tuesday 11 February

Wednesday 12 February

Tonight's Festival play on the BBC is Alexandre Dumas' The Lady of the Camellias, directed by Rudolph Cartier and with a deluxe cast including Billie Whitelaw, John Fraser, Dennis Price, Alexander Knox, John Le Mesurier, Sandra Dorne, Brian Oulton, Vanda Godsell, Gary Hope, Hilary Mason and Bruce Montague.

Thursday 13 February