Doctor Who - The Edge of Destruction by Nigel Robinson

Published: May 1988

Edition read: Target first

Coolest Cover: Alister Pearson’s is good enough to disguise the fact that there’s only so much you can make a cover from. An interesting choice for the 1987 logo’s debut on a past Doctor story, though.

The BBC Budget Wouldn’t Run To: The Doctor’s antique collection and the TARDIS engines.

Childhood Recollections: I can clearly remember buying this in Waterstones in Deansgate in Manchester- never read it until now, though.

Ramblings: Target could probably have been forgiven if they’d conveniently forgotten about ‘The Edge of Destruction’ - after all, having been written as character-based filler, if it hadn’t had the fortune to survive in the archives, the story might well have been forgotten full stop. It’s short, the characters seem to change personality from scene to scene and the resolution, when it comes, is a particularly lame payoff. Twenty-five minutes of running around, shouting at each other and stabbing beds for the sake of a broken spring. To his credit, though, and perhaps encouraged by Ian Marter’s successful expansion of ‘The Rescue’, Nigel Robinson rose to the challenge and turned in not only a faithful adaptation of David Whitaker’s scripts, but extended the original story in a way which would have resonances throughout the following two decades of Doctor Who fiction.

Robinson’s first challenge is to deal with the unusual dialogue and performances in the story as transmitted, where a strange atmosphere is created from the start with the regulars speaking stilted dialogue in a dazed and unnatural way. This, and most of the subsequent strangeness, he rationalises by sensibly using the level-headed Barbara to navigate his way through the strange atmosphere- in fact, it’s probably Barbara who comes off best from the adaptation, as she’s the only one of the regulars to keep a reasonable amount of self-possession. Her wonderfully naturalistic rant at the Doctor is kept intact, too, but one consequence of the focus on Barbara is that the other characters, particularly the Doctor and Susan, stay two-dimensional to an extent. The second challenge- the story’s length- Robinson addresses firstly by adding a prologue which serves as a precis of the events of the eleven episodes to date, and then by seamlessly inserting additional scenes where the Doctor and Ian wander around in the bowels of the TARDIS, passing the Doctor’s antiques and brass pumping engines in the heart of the Ship, or Barbara’s excursion into the TARDIS library. Although these are tacked on at moments when the relevant characters are off screen in the original adventure, they don’t feel particularly out of place and indeed do come across as sympathetic to David Whitaker’s ambitious vision of the Doctor and his Ship.

The only problem, really, is in the resolution- I’ve already mentioned how weak the final explanation seems, but in a novelisation which sees the TARDIS directing Ian’s course back to the Doctor, or throwing books from the library shelves to force Barbara away from the Doctor’s radiation-filled laboratory, it seems even more silly that it can’t tell its crew plainly and simply that one of the switches is stuck without the need for forty-five minutes of neurotic psychological drama and recrimination. The story probably works best as a kind of collective nightmare for the crew, which rather makes any concrete explanations incongruous and jarring, but then again rounding off the story with no explanation at all would be too avant-garde for an infant series having to justify itself week in and week out. As an incidental point, I think we have a new record holder for making the first episode last as long as possible- the cliffhanger comes no later than page 88- but the link into ‘Marco Polo’ isn’t quite as direct as on television. It’s a very good adaptation, though, and some of the basic ideas such as the TARDIS’s intelligence and its various unseen rooms would go on to influence original Doctor Who fiction at least as late as ‘The Gallifrey Chronicles’- most writers at the very least could find time for a wander in the Library at some point. And so a book which didn’t really need to be written turns out to be quite influential in its own way, tying the Eighth Doctor’s last adventure in print back to the television series’ very first year and laying some of the groundwork for the equally ambitious novels to follow.