Does your television program need two more episodes to fill out a series contract? Do you have no budget because your program was also technically cancelled at this point? Then you need, A BOTTLE EPISODE! That’s right, take your salaried actors, the one set you don’t take down, and have them all talk to each other for twenty-odd minutes. The resulting pair, The Edge of Destruction and The Brink of Disaster are a quite remarkable accomplishment with a load of fun trivia to boot. It has the smallest cast of any episode, is the only one to take place entirely in the TARDIS, and features only The Doctor and his current companions. It’s a very simple story, but a very bizarre one and I’ll be tackling it a little differently than my usual recap because doing that would drive me slightly mad.

Holy fuck, this episode is if David Lynch fucked Samuel Beckett. I can say that because I have an Arts degree but I’ll also show my working. First, media have means of expression that are unique to them, this is called “medium specificity” and we go into any media experience with these. You don’t expect the same thing from attending a gallery opening focusing on sculpture as you do from whatever has popped up in your Netflix recommended list. Even within modes, you’ll expect different things from a documentary and a Marvel movie and films can leverage various effects off these expectations. Take The Blair Witch Project and the subsequent “found footage” genre for instance. Movies have an inbuilt suspension of disbelief its audience has to engage in because they are aware they are watching a movie. The Blair Witch Project subverted this by finding an excuse for the existence of the footage that fits in with...