Trollheart

"No, no Ian! The caveman serial is OVER! Think of your career, man! Is it really worth it?"

With the ill-advised confidence of a skinny kid who goes up to the big bully and taps him on the shoulder, I forge ahead, praying it can get no worse, fearful that this is a vain hope.

Title of episode: “The Edge of Destruction”
Title of Serial: The Edge of Destruction
Chronology: 3rd serial, 12th episode overall
Part: 1 of 2
Doctor: William Hartnell
Companion(s): Susan Foreman, Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright
Written by: David Whitaker
Original air date: February 8 1964

Oh dear. When the guy can’t even be bothered to title the episode different to that of the serial, it’s not a very good start is it? At least there are only two episodes in this, shortest one yet. So where’s Barry Maguire then? Oh no wait: that’s “The Eve of Destruction”. My mistake. A new writer, so can we hope for better? Well, to be honest, if the great Terry Nation couldn’t pull this out of the shit I don’t hold out much hope that some guy who may or may not be related to the whistling crooner is going to be any more successful, but we’ll see.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdWGp3HQVjU

In an opening scene which is surely to become depressingly familiar, both to me and to the luckless Companions, who are surely wishing they had stayed at home after having faced homicidal Daleks bent on microwaving them and cavemen determined to, um, grunt at them a lot, the TARDIS is once again out of control and doing its own thing. First to regain consciousness is Barbara, who sounds, to be honest, as if she’s, um, having an orgasm. But hold on! This is 1964! This is the BBC! A WOMAN having - ahem - reaching, ah, completion WITHOUT A MAN? Impossible, sir, I tell you! This may be science fiction for the little bra - um, kiddies, but you surely don’t expect US, grown men, to accept such a frankly preposterous claim? The very idea!



"Hey! How about I put something on the juke-box, daddy-o?"
"There any Mozart on that thing?"

Barbara wanders around in the leather pants she no doubt accidentally switched with Ganatus when they were surprised in bed - I wonder if her dress fits him? - already changing her image from staid, prim teacher to rock chick, while Ian murmurs “Five more minutes, mum, please. I have double French today and the teacher hates me. I know I am the teacher. That’s the problem!” For some reason she calls him Ian Chesterton, with a question mark at the end. Why? How many Ians are on the TARDIS? Susan appears and does a good impression of an extra for Night of the Living Dead, and seems to have lost her memory. Good: she won’t remember what a **** actress she is. Her career might be sav - oh no. She’s remembered and she’s already screaming “Grandfather!” Normal service has been resumed. Ian seems to think he’s back on Earth, and in school. The Doctor is lying on his side, doing nothing. Normal service has definitely resumed. Nobody seems to have a fucking clue what’s going on. Like I say…

The TARDIS seems to have lost it too, playing with Ian by opening the doors but then closing them as soon as he walks towards them. Susan is as hysterical as ever; memory loss has not translated into better acting unfortunately, and thankfully she passes out before her fucking high-pitched Psycho-style screaming can do my head in any more. As Ian moves her, on Barbara’s instructions - she seems to be the one running things now; nobody tell the Director General! - the annoying little cu - ah, cute kid goes for him with a long scissory-knife thing, but decides instead to take exception to a kind of cross between a dentist’s chair, a chaise longue and an analyst’s couch, and stabs the living bejaysus out of it. Sure and why not?


"So you wish to join my cult? I said CULT! What's wrong with you people???"

She seems to have gone all creepy cult figure; while Barbara had changed out of her leather strides and into a more becoming skirt and blouse, Susan is wearing some sort of black robe. She seems to be in pain. I can sympathise. The idea seems to be that there’s some alien intelligence on the TARDIS and it’s taken one of them over. I wonder who? Paranoia runs rampant - well, shuffles around looking for something to read, maybe - as each accuse the other of being the invader, the sides drawn along lines of Barbara and Ian vs The Doctor and Screech sorry Susan. What was that the Doctor accused Ian of just now. “While I was lying there unconscious you tampered with my what?” Probably best to move on, nothing to see here.

Barbara finally lets the Doctor have it, reminding him that it was his bloody fault they got trapped in the City of the Daleks and that she was forced to have mad, passionate sex with Ganatus - well, you know, one must do one's part. Or, possibly, one other's part. The Doctor, seeing his stupidity revealed before him (Hooray! She finally calls him a stupid old man, which he is - it needed to be said) does a lot of impotent lapel-clutching and blustering. Hey, it always worked in the eighteenth century! Hold the phone there: “You ought to get down on your knees and spank us?” Oh! OH! THANK us. Right. BBC. 1964. What was I thinking?

Suddenly some strange structure appears. Kind of looks like it someone impacted Disney’s Sleeping Beauty castle between two trucks. Barbara has a sudden headache. Great, thinks Ian. You hadn’t a headache when you vanished into the Petrified Forest with Ganatus! Bet he was petrified all right! Or part of him, anyway. Everyone looks at their watch for some reason (maybe this is sponsored by Timex?)

"When I said this thing needed structure, girls, this is not really what I had in mind."

I can see the ad now. “Stuck on an alien planet, in a box with a crazy old man and a hysterical kid? A malevolent alien intelligence roaming about, intent on sucking out your brain through your ears? Then you’ll be glad you can always tell what time it is, with Timex Watches!”

Would you take a drink from this man??

Everyone wanders around (sound familiar?) looking for something to do, someone to blame, or in the Doctor’s case at one point, someone to serve tea to. I kid you not. Susan apologises to Barbara. Not for attacking her with a knife, oh no: for what her grandfather said to her. Well that’s nice. Seems a bit weird to me that, in a ship apparently the size of a small city, or thereabouts, everyone is sleeping on the couch. Surely the Doctor has a nice four-poster stashed away somewhere? A guest bedroom? A roll-out ****ing sofa bed? No. Just uncomfortable-looking loungers, which look as easy to sleep in as chairs in the emergency room. They also look, as I noted earlier, rather disturbingly similar to those couches people get strapped into when other people of dubious medical qualifications want to do very dubious experiments on them, usually against a backdrop of thunder and lightning, and perhaps the tune of a church organ too. Looks to me like the Doctor is the one who’s been taken over, though at this point it’s hard to find the will to care.

Next, and final episode is called “The Brink of Disaster”. I wonder if that’s a comment on what I rather generously and reluctantly describe as the writing?

Comments

Well, we just go from bad to worse, don’t we? The first serial was, to put it mildly, shit, and the second one, after initial three cheers for the introduction of the Daleks, disappointed in a way I haven’t been since I sent off for a pair of X-Ray specs. Bloody ripoff. This one, however, pushes the bar down to even greater depths. I mean, seriously: what the blue jumping fuck is going on here? It’s twenty-five minutes of nothing. People looking suspiciously at each other, tempers flaring, one member joining or starting a cult by the look of it, the other trying to renew his fight with the Doctor, while Barbara is ready to give him a piece of her mind too. I wonder if, considering there is an alien intelligence knocking around, it’s decided fuck this, I want no part of these losers. There must be some amoeba or something I can take over?

It’s hard to find anything to write about it because there really is nothing to write about. I literally do not know what’s happening. I think the basic idea is, as I say, that the TARDIS has been infiltrated by some alien thing, which is either jumping from one of them to the other (probably going “surely this one - nope! Let’s try our luck with this - oh hell no!”) and causing them all to mistrust and suspect each other, but where it’s all going I don’t know, other than right in the rejection bin with an attached note to advise Mr. Whitaker to see if he can find a job writing lyrics for his cousin Roger. New World in the Morning? Let’s bloody hope so.

Diagnosing the Doctor

Oh Christ on the space shuttle, doing important work fixing satellites and then losing his grip and sailing off into space without an umbilical! Every time I think it’s impossible for Hartnell to get any more annoying, he proves me wrong. His attitude and behaviour here, his smug insistence that he knows everything, when he seems to know fuck-all, makes me want to fire up a chainsaw and introduce him to the Trollheart diet: lose two stone in as many minutes. I can’t even talk about the fucker any more. If he was my teacher I wouldn’t just egg his car, I’d blow it up.

Doctor: First (William Hartnell) - S01E12 - Minus 95/100

Charting the Companions

The only one I can give any real points to here is Barbara, if only because she stands up for womankind and essentially tell the establishment, in the shape of the Doctor to go fuck himself. Also, she looks pretty sexy in those tight leather pants, I must say. Susan’s face annoys me so much now that I want some alien beast to come in and chew it off. Her permanent set frown which can turn so quickly into a scream of hysteria makes me just want to punch and keep punching till it’s raw, bloody… sorry, sorry. Take your pills, Trollheart. Remember what happened last time, for the love of God. You can’t go back to jail! Take the pills.

Ian is basically all but absent, notwithstanding his handbags at twenty paces with the Doctor, and it’s hard to see how any of them cover themselves in glory here. Mind you, in their defence, they don't seem to have been told what to do, and just mostly stand around arguing and bickering and bitching. Hey. It’s like my house at Christmas. Apart from the people, that is. And the good cheer. And the presents. And the booze.

Susan: Minus 55/100
Ian: 85/100
Barbara: Minus 10/100

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018