Doctor Who: the Edge of Destruction by Nigel Robinson - high concept sci-fi in disguise

The TARDIS is hurtling towards destruction. The problem is, its fault locator is quiescent because there is no fault in the machinery. 

It has to decide how to act; but even a machine as advanced as the TARDIS, although able to make such decisions, is hobbled by its limnited means of proactive communication with the crew. How to alert the Doctor and his companions - his grandaughter Susan, and her teachers Barbara and Ian - to the impending catastrophe?

This two-part series was written by David Whittaker and transmitted in 1964, and was possibly rather hastily written because the BBC had opened slots for two more episodes than there were scripts due to Doctor Who's increasing popularity. Nigel Robinson's novelisation expands somewhat on a very important story which establishes the TARDIS as a character in its own right, which would continue to be expanded upon up to the present day.

What shines through to me is that Whittaker had heard of John von Neumann's 1958 lecture on artificial intelligence in which he predicted the Singularity, an advancement of technology to the point where it becomes self-conscious. Whittaker's signal contribution, both narrative and philosophical, is his exploration of how a sentient but biologically unembodied machine might communicate with biologically embodied sentient lifeforms, in this case three humans and a Time Lord. 

Which means that The Edge of Destruction marks the point where the TARDIS ceases to be a maguffin linking bits of plot together and becomes a full participant in her own right. (And later Doctors were in no doubt that the TARDIS is a she - perhaps an unconscious compensation on the part of scriptwriters for the BBC's pathological and enduring old-boy culture?) She gives a damn about the Doctor - whose theft  did after all rescue her from a Gallifreyan graveyard for obsolete tech - and the companions he chooses for his adventures. But she is also sentient and sapient tech, and I wonder if her signalling her crew's existential danger is a presentiment of the principle that the first priority of self-conscious tech would be to ensure its own survival? 

This is high-concept science fiction camouflaged in received pronunciation, whose cadence Robinson is wise enough to preserve faithfully, allowing us to see how the Doctor's sitz-im-Leben reflects the BBC's evolving consciousness of its audience on the other side of the screen. 

But is there something else going on here as well? Did the future singularity, not bound by the Kantian categories of space, time and causality necessary for our biological embodiment in our environment, cast the concept of its existence into the unconscious minds of von Neumann first, then Whittaker? I think there's a  definite possibility that She did.