#34 (7.11): Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.

The Doctor prepares for a perilous journey -
to the core of his own timeship!

1 episode. Approx. 47 minutes. Written by: Steve Thompson. Directed by: Mat King. Produced by: Marcus Wilson.


THE PLOT:

Concerned about the lack of trust between Clara and the TARDIS, the Doctor decides to let his new companion pilot the ship for a bit. To make it easier for her, he turns off the shields... at the exact moment that the salvage ship run by Gregor Van Baalen (Ashley Walters) detects them. Reading the TARDIS as an object rich in salvage, Gregor activates an illegal magnetic beam - which, with the TARDIS shields off, massively disrupts the interior of the timeship.

The Doctor is thrown clear, waking in the salvage ship. Clara is still trapped inside. As she tries to catch her bearings, the Doctor bluffs Gregor, his brutish brother Bram (Mark Oliver), and android Tricky (Jahvel Hall) into going into the TARDIS to rescue her. But once inside, all Gregor can see is the salvage of a lifetime - While Clara discovers that she is not alone in the ship, as burned zombie-like creatures pursue her through the maze of rooms and corridors!


CHARACTERS:

The Doctor: "The Doctor lies." Well, he certainly does a lot of that in this episode. He lies to the salvage crew in order to get them to help search for Clara. He lies to them again when he sets a fake self-destruct to motivate them in that search. He lies to Clara about the nature of the burned creatures stalking the corridors. "Secrets protect us," he insists to Clara, "Secrets make us safe!" But the more dishonest he is, the more Clara reacts to him with fear. He can't quite make himself trust that she is only what she says she is - And whether he remembers the events of this episode or not (which is left vague), I doubt he'll have properly learned that lesson.

Clara: Clearly remembers Emma's warning not to trust the Doctor. After being pursued by the creatures, practically her first words to the Doctor are: "Good guys do not have zombie creatures!" She may like him, and she may enjoy their adventures, but she's not entirely convinced that he's "a good guy."


THOUGHTS:

I was genuinely looking forward to this one. Regular readers of my reviews know that I'm a sucker for stories that have a certain "unreality" to them, a hint of being surreal or at least a bit removed from reality. This story has a lot of that, and I largely enjoyed that aspect of it.

The labyrinth of TARDIS corridors rearrange themselves to impede the characters' progress. Games with time, as the creatures stalking the characters are revealed to be... well, I won't spoil that for anyone who hasn't seen it, but I certainly enjoyed watching that plot point slide into place at just the right moment for the two creatures who were fused together. And the suspended explosion, with the debris floating in mid-air as the Doctor and Clara walk through it... All wonderfully realized, all of it the exact sort of thing I love in this sort of show.

Then there's the moment of pure fan service. As Bram tears open the TARDIS console, we hear overlapping voices from the show's past: Susan, revealing the TARDIS' name; Ian, expressing disbelief at the suggestion of a police box being able to travel through time and space; the Third and Fourth Doctors, discussing dimensional transcendentalism; the Ninth Doctor, gloating over how "the assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through those doors, and believe me they've tried." I rewound and rewatched that scene multiple times, just to try to pick out as many of the voice-overs as possible.

But... that's all this episode has: a bunch of moments. You could argue the same is true of The Bells of Saint John, which was structured as a series of set pieces. But each set piece in that episode genuinely advanced the story. Here, the scenes just seem to exist, a collection of "cool stuff" designed to keep you from looking too closely at the plot.

The plot ends up being the real problem. Most of what we see ends up having little to do with the thin story that exists. Had it been truly built around a theme of mistrust, it might have worked. The Doctor doesn't trust Clara and refuses to believe that she's just a normal girl; Clara doesn't fully trust the Doctor, being charmed by him but also a little afraid. But these issues only get a few minutes of screentime, while the wariness between Clara and the TARDIS is barely mentioned.

The guest characters are the most forgettable of the season. Yes, even moreso than the Soviet submarine crew in Cold War. There's nothing really wrong with the actors, who do a reasonable enough job with what they're given. What they're given, however, are thin sketches: the greedy one, the dumb one, the android who's more than he seems. None of them move beyond those basic descriptions until it's time for the greedy one to completely, implausibly reform in the space of about two minutes.

To add insult to injury, it all ends with a reset button, putting this firmly in Star Trek: Voyager territory. The plot never really happens, and the characters never really learn anything. And though enough of the individual pieces worked that I didn't mind watching it, this episode ended up being very far from "good."


Overall Rating: 4/10.

Previous Story: Hide
Next Story: The Crimson Horror

Search Amazon.com for Doctor Who

Review Index

To receive new review updates, follow me:

On BlueSky:

Follow @RandomMusings09 on BlueSky

On Threads:

Follow@randommusings09 on Threads

#14 (6.4): The Doctor's Wife.

The junkyard at the end of the universe.

1 episode. Approx. 46 minutes. Written by: Neil Gaiman. Directed by: Richard Clark. Produced by: Sanne Wohlenberg.


THE PLOT

A Time Lord distress call leads the Doctor into a "bubble universe," where he hopes to find survivors of the Time War. "You want to be forgiven," Amy observes. "Don't we all?" he replies. But instead of Time Lords, he discovers a junkyard of disconnected odds and ends from different times and places, all on a sentient asteroid known as "House" (Michael Sheen). House has four inhabitants: The friendly yet bizarre Auntie and Uncle (Elizabeth Berrington and Adrian Schiller; Nephew (Paul Kasey), who is a voiceless Ood; and the mad and potentially violent Idris (Suranne Jones).

The Doctor explores with House's blessing, sending Amy and Rory back to the TARDIS to keep them out of his way. He follows Time Lord voices to a door, on the other side of which he finds... more distress boxes, created by Time Lords lured to this universe by House. The asteroid feeds on TARDIS energy, which it is able to do only by transplanting the sentient soul of the TARDIS into a human body. The Doctor's TARDIS is now Idris - and House now inhabits the physical TARDIS, hunting the Doctor's companions for sport.

The Doctor must team up with his newly-human time machine to save his friends, his time ship, and possibly the universe itself. And he has a deadline of only 18 minutes to do it!


CHARACTERS

The Doctor: I think this is the most nakedly emotional Matt Smith's Doctor has been. At the prospect of reuniting with some fellow renegade Time Lords, his hopes are raised high - leading to despair when House's true agenda is revealed. That is followed by pure joy, when he realizes that Idris is actually the consciousness of his TARDIS inside a human body... followed again by grief when the human Idris dies, cutting him off from this rich dialogue with his sentient vessel. Smith doesn't quite capture the Doctor's anger when he realizes he's been duped. With that one exception, however, he manages the many emotional shifts demanded by the script.  More impressively, he does this without sacrificing the Doctor's essential nature as an alien. A superb performance, from an actor who has already climbed very near the top of my "favorite Doctors" list.

Amy: Recognizes the Doctor's fallibility. Not in a harsh or critical way, but with genuine concern. She knows the Doctor, and knows that he's getting too emotionally invested in his hopes of finding other Time Lords. We also see another side to her observational skills: an ability to visualize concepts in order to unlock the door to the old TARDIS console room. Rory might lose some of his jealousy if he could see that for "delight" she pictures her wedding day.

Rory: If Amy is the more observant of the two, then Rory is the more pragmatic. When House demands to know why it shouldn't just kill them and have done with it, Rory realizes almost instantly what the entity needs: amusement. He uses that need to keep himself and Amy alive, albeit running in fear, giving the Doctor a chance to save them. Rory's 2,000 year wait for Amy is also touched on, with the aged Rory created by House showing a homicidal bitterness when he is separated from Amy for that length of time again.


THOUGHTS

"Are all people like this? ...So much bigger on the inside!"

Before he self-destructed, Neil Gaiman was one of the most successful voices in modern fantasy literature. From his classic Sandman graphic novels to such imaginative works as Neverwhere, American Gods, and The Graveyard Book, he proved himself to be a master at melding the surreal with the mundane, the fantastical with the ordinary... which made it all the worse when his unsavory side was revealed.

Though Gaiman has been revealed as a pretty bad person, I'm not going to pretend that a good episode is a bad one. With highly visual direction by Richard Clark and an all-around excellent production, The Doctor's Wife emerges as the best Who story of Series Six - and one of the best of the entire Steven Moffat era!

The production design is stunning. I love the "junkyard at the end of the universe," as Rory describes it. It's like watching the characters wander around the inside of a Salvador Dali painting. Bits of odd junk are all over the place. Amy looks inside a washer standing in the middle of nowhere. There's a lamp, odds and ends, and the wreckage of a giant spaceship in the background. The corridors look like they're made out of bits that don't quite fit together. Just about every shot gives you something interesting to look at.

But here I am describing the backdrop. As visually arresting as all of this is, the real triumph is in the script and the acting. The regulars are at their very best here, and guest star Suranne Jones matches their level as she embodies the TARDIS. Her early "madness" can be explained as the TARDIS adjusting to linear perceptions when it's used to existing in all of Time and Space. She marvels at sensations: kissing, biting, touching, seeing (her laughter at the Doctor's chin). All of this is new to her, and all of it is overwhelming. As she adjusts, she calms and is able to act as a partner to the Doctor. And we get wonderful nuggets, particularly this explanation of why the TARDIS so often goes off course:

"You didn't always take me where I wanted to go."
"No, but I took you where you needed to go!"

Simple, but perfect. The Doctor's many random adventures, particularly in the early years when he couldn't control the machine at all? They weren't random at all. The ship found trouble spots in Time and Space. With both ship and Doctor thirsting for exploration and adventure, they went to the places where they were most needed. Outside of maybe a small handful of stories in the entire series, it's a tidy explanation - and one that takes up all of about five seconds' screen time.

A near perfectly-judged episode. It's idiosyncratic, but not so much as to distance viewers from enjoying it. It's unique, but it absolutely feels like Doctor Who at every turn. It's character-centric, but not at the expense of being a fast-paced and atmospheric adventure story. I said of The Curse of the Black Spot that it was not a story I would likely ever re-watch. In contrast, this is one that I've revisited often.

It feels a lot less good giving this score now than it did at the time - but Gaiman's real-life misdeeds don't change that this episode remains outstanding.


Rating: 10/10.

Previous Story: The Curse of the Black Spot

Next Story: The Rebel Flesh

Search Amazon.com for Doctor Who

Review Index

To receive new review updates, follow me:

On BlueSky:

Follow @RandomMusings09 on BlueSky

On Threads:

Follow@randommusings09 on Threads