THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS

Inside the Spaceship 		Target novelisation
Doctor Who - The Edge of Destruction

Author Nigel Robinson Cover image
Published 1988
ISBN 0 426 20327 5
First Edition Cover Alistair Pearson

Back cover blurb: In a final bid to regain control of the Tardis's faulty control system the Doctor is driven to experiment with a dangerous untried combination. With a violent explosion the TARDIS blacks out and the crew find themselves trapped inside. A simple technical fault? Sabotage? Or something even more sinister? Tension mounts as the Doctor and his companions begin to suspect one another. What has happened to the TARDIS? Slowly a terrifying suspicion dawns. Has the TARDIS become the prisoner of some powerful fifth intelligence which is even now haunting the time-machine's dark and gloomy corridors?

Reviews

Edge of your seat reading by Andrew Feryok 21/5/13

"How dare you!" she exploded furiously. "Do you realize, you stupid old man, that you'd have died in the Cave of Skulls if Ian and I hadn't helped you to escape!... And what about all we went through on Skaro against the Daleks? Not just for you and Susan too - and all because you tricked us into going down to the Dalek City in the first place! Accuse us! You ought to go down on your hands and knees and thank us! But oh no, gratitude is the last thing you'll ever have. You think you're so superior, so much greater than everyone else, but when are you ever going to realize that other people are worth just as much as you? We might not be as intelligent as you, we might not have experienced as much, but we have feelings. Do you know what they are? It's a concern for your fellow creatures, a belief that no matter what our differences may be we're all in this mess together and we'd better help each other out. We're not just some laboratory animals for you to study, or inferior creatures for you to make use of... But oh no, humility is the last thing you'll ever have - or any sort of common sense!"
- Barbara's extended speech to the Doctor, The Edge of Destruction, Pages 72 and 73, Chapter 6

The Edge of Destruction is definitely one of the weirder episodes of the show. In fact, you could almost see this as being a predecessor to stories like The Celestial Toymaker and The Mind Robber. I mean, when you have as story where the time travelers appear to be going mad, the TARDIS seems possessed, clocks are melting and Susan is going psycho with scissors, you know you are not Kansas anymore! Despite the psychedelic insanity of the story, The Edge of Destruction remains one of the more forgotten stories of the show. A small piece of insanity to be stared at and then shelved for watching later on. I owned it fairly late when it first came out on VHS in the early 2000s and later revisited it on its DVD release, but I can't say I've ever really given the story much thought. However, I was intrigued to see what Nigel Robinson would make of this strange two-part story. Could he fill 120 pages with a story set largely in one location with a small cast and a lot of talking?

The answer of course is yes! Nigel Robinson turns in a brilliant "special edition" version of The Edge of Destruction. He spends most of the book, nearly three quarters of it, focusing on the events of the first episode as he builds up the paranoia and claustrophobia amongst the TARDIS crew. By the time events reach their climax at the end of episode 1, the events of episode 2 then end up breezing by in a flash as events rocket to their conclusion. Robinson's prose style is very easy to read and it's clear that the man is a fan of the show since he takes great delight in weaving continuity from An Unearthly Child and The Daleks so as to tie the events together as if this story was the culmination of a story arc, which essentially it is with the characters of the Doctor, Ian, Barbara, and Susan.

Robinson's characterization is stunning. Because he only had to focus on four characters, he really spends time expanding them and allowing us to get to know them. This is probably the darkest version of the First Doctor I have read outside of David Whitaker's Doctor in the preceding Doctor Who in An Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. His arrogance and aloofness is played up even more and he literally becomes a villain in his own series here! Robinson adds some nice moments to really play up the suspicion of the Doctor and Susan. They are seen to be whispering in corners to each other and constantly eying Ian and Barbara with suspicion. There is even a new scene where the Doctor and Ian visit the engine room of the TARDIS and it appears that the Doctor has locked Ian in a room to suffocate to death! Although it is later revealed that the TARDIS itself saves Ian, the question is never answered as to whether the Doctor really did attempt to commit murder and this constantly hangs over the Doctor.

There is also some strong characterization for Susan. Robinson plays up her alien half more than any other author I have read. The book opens with an introduction recounting the events of An Unearthly Child and The Daleks, but Robinson subtly alters these events so that it was Susan who wanted to abandon Ian and Barbara on the radiation-soaked world of Skaro and escape in the TARDIS instead of the Doctor. Then as we see Susan seemingly descend into madness, it is not because some force is taking her over (although Robinson does play up this red herring at one point), but because she sees Ian and Barbara as the aliens. As far as she is concerned, they are as strange and alien to her as little green monsters from Mars; as things get more and more desperate, she becomes suspicious that Ian and Barbara are possessed and trying to kill her.

Robinson makes some neat additions to the story as well. They are obviously put in there to pad out the story, but they also serve to showcase the sheer size and wonder of the ship. Chapters 3 and 4 chronicle Ian and the Doctor's journey through endless corridors to the engine room. Along the way, Ian gets separated and lost from the Doctor and has to find his way back. Once they reach the engine room, we get a spectacular vision of the engine room of some Jules Verne/Ocean Liner engine room. All throughout the book, the lights inside the TARDIS have gone out except around key areas of the TARDIS console and the fault locator, which are meant to show them where the fault lies. Instead, they spend the rest of the story creeping around with oil lamps! In Chapter 7, Barbara explores the Doctor's huge laboratory with an oil lamp only to run into what seems to be poltergeists sending books and equipment flying everywhere! In fact, throughout the book we see doors opening and closing, lights flashing to keep the time travelers awake, and other things to make us think that the TARDIS has been possessed. In the end, the Doctor is forced to face the notion that maybe his ship has a form of intelligence and has been helping them to understand the problem at hand in the only way it can, a notion which the Doctor still has a hard time believing by the end of the book.

On the whole, this is a fantastic read. Nigel Robinson has turned in an amazing adaptation of an otherwise forgotten two-episode corner of the Doctor Who series. He expands the story enormously, giving us a deeper look at the TARDIS and its crew. We even get extended dialogue such as an extended version of Barbara's amazingly scalding speech to the Doctor's accusations of sabotage and intrigue (see the quote above). If you are going to explore the Target series, this one is not to be missed. 10/10

Going Further Inside The Spaceship by Matthew Kresal 23/1/21

Of the earliest stories in Doctor Who's long televised run, The Edge of Destruction tends to get overlooked. It's two episodes effectively wedged in between the first Dalek story and a much-missed historical story. Indeed, when it came time for the Target novelizations, it was one of the last First Doctor tales to receive such treatment. Perhaps that wasn't a bad thing, as Nigel Robinson's 1988 book is an excellent read.

Robinson certainly had his work cut out for him in turning the serial into a book. After all, the TV version had a running time of less than an hour, had only the show's four leads and was set entirely inside the TARDIS. Those factors might suggest a slow, talky, dull story. If you do think that, about either the TV version or this novelization, you'd be dead wrong.

In turning David Whitaker's scripts to prose, Robinson picks up nicely on the Gothic elements of the tale. Whitaker turned the TARDIS, with its regularly bright interiors, into something akin to a Gothic mansion, looming and full of secrets. Robinson, with an expanded page count, picks up on that atmosphere splendidly. He not only recreates it but heightens it as well, taking us into the thought processes of the four characters as they deal with all the high strangeness involved. The ability of prose to get inside a character's head also works in Robinson's favor, allowing him to explore just what causes the suspicions and outbursts throughout the story. All of which helps bring out the best elements of the original story.

The extended page count also has another benefit. Robinson gets to expand and add sequences to the tale, especially in the middle portion, which gets to take readers further inside the spaceship (to use one of the serial's alternate titles). There's a fascinating sequence with Ian and the Doctor exploring the TARDIS power rooms, for example. Later on, Robinson adds a sequence with a sleepless Barbara that plays up the Gothic elements right to the hilt with a scene right out of a classic haunted-house tale. These are but a couple of examples of how Robinson creates what is, in effect, a big-budget reimaging of the original TV tale in the readers' mind.

While the book itself may be out of print, it has found a second life on audio. Released in 2011 as an audiobook read by actor William Russell, Robinson's work gets a further added layer. As Big Finish listeners know, Russell (who played Ian Chesterton in the TV version) is an excellent reader. His narration brings the tale to life from his fellow actors to describing the various TARDIS interiors. The icing on the cake is the sound design and music, which add to the Gothic atmosphere created by Whitaker and Robinson. All told, it's a solid piece of work.

The Edge of Destruction stands out as an excellent example of the late Target range. Robinson takes an underrated First Doctor story and transforms it into a tense, Gothic tale. In doing so, he remains at once faithful to the original scripts while also expanding upon it neatly. Especially with its 2011 audiobook edition, it's a welcome addition to any Doctor Who fan's library.

Journey to the Center of the TARDIS by Jason A. Miller 27/12/23

There are many ways to adapt a two-part Classic Doctor Who serial. The majority of the novelizations adapt four- and six-part stories into a 100 to 120-page book, which requires trimming, economizing, adapting. The two-part stories, and there aren't many, require the opposite, and there are different ways to stretch the material out. A two-parter like The King's Demons gives us a completely different ending; a two-parter like Black Orchid adds scenes and subplots, changes some character fates, but otherwise sticks to the script; a two-parter like The Awakening adds lots and lots of prose, but otherwise doesn't add any dialogue or scenes.

But those were all books adapted by their credited scriptwriters. For the two-parters adapted by in-house Target writers -- the ones I know best are Ian Marter's The Sontaran Experiment and Nigel Robinson's The Edge of Destruction -- we get something different. Both novelizations add subplots that weren't on TV, to emphasize the original themes, but otherwise start and end their TV stories in exactly the same place. Marter was quite a fan of torture-porn, come to find out. Robinson instead builds on the TV story's haunted-house theme and gives us Poltergeist in the TARDIS.

Using the book's extra space, Robinson adds a Prologue and an Introduction, both of which give us the story so far: The Edge of Destruction was only Doctor Who's third serial, so Robinson recaps the first two before getting down to business. Oh, and he includes a teaser for Barbara's knowledge of the Aztec civilization.

Robinson invests his most energy adapting Episode One, which takes up seven of the book's ten chapters proper. His biggest alterations are to add visual imagery that would have been impossible to produce on TV and to add two subplots that would have been difficult to realize, due to Doctor Who's early cramped studio space.

The story proper opens with Ian and Barbara, still stunned from the explosion in the TARDIS that ended the previous serial, believing that they're actually still inside Coal Hill School. This couldn't have been done on TV, not in an episode that was produced live-to-tape. The next couple of chapters play out exactly with the TV dialogue, but Robinson subtly upgrades the visual look, so this is a TARDIS with video display units, akin to the late-'80s TV TARDIS console, rather than the original Hartnell mode -- and the TARDIS disaster alert is retconned as a tolling bell, the Cloister Bell. A plot hole is filled, as Robinson explains why the Fault Locator is still working even when the rest of the ship isn't. Robinson's prose is a bit heavy, though, so it's more fun to read about the changes in list format than it is to experience them by reading the book itself.

And then the ghost-story comes in, with Robinson taking us much deeper into the TARDIS than David Whitaker did on TV, to the power rooms and the Doctor's laboratory, where Ian and Barbara both have close encounters with death. These sequences might have been realized on a 1964 budget and sets, although adding the power room and labs to the TARDIS console room would have required Lime Grove D to be dimensionally transcendental. Building on the ghost-story theme, one nice added creepy detail is that the TARDIS's life-support system sounds like a person breathing.

The rest of the book is psychological drama, but this is where the book is less successful for me personally than it was for Andrew Feryok. If you're going to fill up a 120-page book with only 50 or 60 pages of TV script, you also have to take us inside the characters' heads, in addition to inventing scenes out of whole cloth. So we get Ian and Barbara's private takes on the Doctor's behavior and the Doctor's disdain for the two humans. This is all a little too much for me, especially as the Doctor comes across pretty badly here, until the last two chapters. But, because Robinson needs to end the story with the Doctor discovering his heroic side, and because he's dug the Doctor into such a deep psychological hole, he ends up messing with the structure of the story a bit. To that end, he takes Barbara's big onscreen revelation about the melted clocks and reassigns it to the Doctor. Now, I'm as big a fan of the Hartnell Doctor as it gets, but you Do. Not. Mess with Barbara Wright in my world.

The Edge of Destruction on TV is a curiosity. It was commissioned not as a story-that-needed-to-be-told, but because the show needed a two-week filler episode to satisfy its original production order. It's a bottle episode confined to the TARDIS and shows the regulars acting all out of character. The last ten minutes are superb, as the original four regulars come together, stop the squabbling and become a cohesive team for the first time, and there's even a lead-in to Marco Polo, but the first episode and a half are be a bit jarring. In adapting this short serial into a full-length novelization, Robinson adds extra scenes and character insights that build up what we saw on TV, but the material he's building off of is a bit wobbly, so the extra stuff didn't work for me.

Robinson at least is a competent writer, even if he lacks the effortless prose of Terrance Dicks, the acerbic wit of Malcolm Hulke or the visceral descriptive power of Ian Marter. This is an interesting take on a strange story, but it doesn't earn a 10/10 for me, not when so many Dicks, Hulke and Marter books are legit 10/10s. Strictly middle of the pack for me, I'm afraid.