Free Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) by Robert Shearman, Toby Hadoke

unconscious in a chair, is revealed as standing up, impassively staring at Barbara in the background.
    Because this episode breaks all the rules, because we can never for a second work out what the threat is, almost everything has the potential to be creepy. It could be the smile on the Doctor’s face as he hands out drinks to all his companions, it could be the somewhat too self-conscious shrug that Ian gives when Barbara asks him why the Doctor is staring at them. There’s a wonderfully disturbing idea at the heart of this episode – that something has entered the Ship, and is hiding in one of the crew. If you can forget the depressingly prosaic explanation that’s instead offered next week, and if you can pretend that you’re watching The Edge of Destruction as viewers did in 1964, then this is unnerving stuff.
    You also have to cherish a series that can be as insane as this. Having just played out a monster serial with fights and explosions, it offers this – this strange, ugly, unwieldy thing. At a time when Doctor Who acts as if it’s one ongoing serial, the contrast between what the show has been promising its audience and what it’s now giving them is extraordinary. No, The Edge of Destruction doesn’t really work. But it’s probably the single maddest thing it’s ever attempted in its 45 years of history, and it does it only 12 weeks in.
    T: I watched this episode while unwinding after my first gig back, so I’m typing these thoughts after having taken a couple of relaxing drams... which I’m hoping in some way goes to explain what I’ve been witnessing. This is bonkers! As you say, the cast are acting each scene in a completely different manner; it’s as if they’re contestants on Whose Line Is It Anyway, and the audience is shouting for them to perform “melodrama!”, then “kitchen sink drama!”, and then – to William Russell – “drunk vicar!” Even the regulars’ dress sense seems mercurial – Barbara seems to be wearing Thal trousers (an odd present to give someone), and Susan has been reduced to floating around in a maternity dress. And now she’s got a flannel on her head! I’m half expecting her to stick two pencils up her nose and plead insanity.
    Among the genuinely weird vignettes, there are some chilling moments – the way that Jacqueline Hill’s voice cracks in a brilliant evocation of full-on fright, and the eerie manner in which Susan suggests that if an intruder has penetrated the TARDIS, it might be hiding “in one of us”. Carole Ann Ford in particular seems very much in her element with this story – she’s able to channel the spirit of An Unearthly Child, which suits her visage and the disarmingly offbeat look she can muster in her eyes. It’s especially disturbing when she becomes so demented that she produces a huge pair of scissors, has an orgasm and starts stabbing her bendy space chair (or wibbly space bed, take your pick). And is it wrong of me that, amongst all this madness, I find Susan quite sexy while she’s lolling about on the wonky space divan clutching those scissors? (I did mention that I’ve had two winter warmer whiskeys, right?)
    You’re right, though, to highlight Jacqueline Hill, who delivers a smashing retort to the Doctor’s paranoia and accusations that she and Ian have sabotaged the Ship. Not for nothing has this fantastic confrontation – where Barbara, bristling with principled and righteous anger, really sticks it to the old man – been cited by some commentators as a turning point in the Doctor’s character, and therefore in the entire series. The only downside to this smashing performance is that Hill is made to top it off by over-reacting to a melting clock, and then a wristwatch. I do feel sorry for her and Ford: they get all the rubbish stuff to do despite the occasional gems they’re thrown. People wouldn’t as fondly remember the Doctor musing “Have you ever thought what it’s like to be wanderers in the fourth