New Who Review – Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

She’s the only character on the show to appear in almost every episode.  She’s the TARDIS and she’s as important to the series as The Doctor himself.  So it’s nice when we get a story that features her  in a major way.

JOURNEY TO THE CENTRE OF THE TARDIS
by Stephen Thompson
Directed by Mat King

Trying to get Clara and the TARDIS to get along,  The Doctor tries letting her fly the ship, shutting off some of the higher more complex functions…like the shields.  This exposes the ship to outside detection, and detected it gets, but space salvage collectors the Van Baalen Brothers.  Using an illegal magna-grab system, they grab the TARDIS, causing a massive overload in the ship, one that flings The Doctor out of the doors, and Clara rolling back deep into its corridors.  The Doctor is forced to engage the brothers to help him save Clara, and later, keep the TARDIS from exploding and destroying much of the universe.

The main threat of the episode is effectively a condensed version of the arc plot from Matt Smith’s first series – the destruction of the TARDIS causing a rift in time, and held in stasis by the TARDIS itself.  Even the solution – the Doctor telling himself what to do to fix it has been done in Moffat’s two-part short for Comic Relief Time and Space, and to a more in your face level, the earlier special Time Crash.

THE MONSTER FILES – The TARDIS is both the setting and primary antagonist of the episode, trying to keep itself safe as well as keep the Van Baalen Brothers powerless.  There have been a number of TARDIS-centric episodes of the series, in an attempt to give some glimpse into its workings. The Edge of Destruction was way back in the first series, and was the first opportunity to both open up the backstory of the show, and the first time it was suggested that the TARDIS was at least some form of sentience – it tries to warn the crew that it was heading back to the beginning of time. We got a mini-tour of the ship in The Masque of Mandragora in which we first see the second control room, and a very large boot cupboard.  The Invasion of Time promised a deep look inside the TARDIS as The Doctor must face invading Sontarans- alas, a strike meant that the planned TARDIS sets were never built, leaving them to film in a disused hospital. We saw sevela new rooms, including a wardrobe and the Zero Room in Castrovalva.  Neil Gaiman’s previous episode The Doctor’s Wife showed a lot of the interior of the ship, as well as a major insight into her character. One of the downloadable video games, simply titled TARDIS, gave a look at many of the rooms in the ship as well,

GUEST STAR REPORT

Steven Thompson (Writer) has admitted in interviews that he has a handful of dream episode he planned to pitch for the show, including a way to bring back the Krynoids from The Seeds of Doom. Moffat pithced this story to him, he decided it was a much better idea, and went off to write it. Thompson  has written three episodes of Sherlock, last coming over to Doctor Who for The Curse of the Black Spot.

BACKGROUND BITS AND BOBS – Trivia and production details

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div id=”article-copy”>A WHOLE LOT OF RUNNING – Last seen in the aforementioned The Doctor’s Wife, we get another iteration of the classic “endless corridor” gag in this episode.  Doctor Who is notorious for this set-up – a simple set of two or three corridors, set at an angle to each other, and with a bit of careful cinematography, you can make them look like an endless set of twists and turns.  At least a couple of these corridors were built right along with the new set – we see The Doctor head down one to look for his the garage in The Bells of Saint John.  In the case of The Doctor’s Wife, the corridors were built expressly for the episode.  They also knew the episode was coming, so they left the Tennant control room set standing expressly for its use.…AND A ROOM AND A ROOM – We get a fleeting look at the swimming pool (last seen in Invasion of Time), the library (and a VERY interesting book), and what looks like an observatory.  The Telescope within is very reminiscent to the light collection weapon from Tooth and Claw.  It’s likely that it’s just a quick re-use of the model by the special effects team as opposed to it being the actual device from that episode.WE NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY – In that storage room Clara enters we see The Doctor’s (and River’s) crib, one of Amy’s hand-crafted TARDIS toys, a magnifying glass used (among other times) by Donna Noble in The Unicorn and the Wasp, and an umbrella that many presume is Victorian Clara’s from The Snowmen, it actually more closely resembles the umbrella carried by the eighth Doctor in Paradise Towers. VOICES FROM THE PAST – As Bram starts to dismantle the console, we hear voices from past adventures, including Susan, The Third, Fourth, Ninth and Eleventh Doctors, a couple of the Companions, and finally Five, complaining that Ten had “changed the desktop settings”.  Susan was allegedly the one to name the TARDIS, but in later adventures the name seems to be an official one.  Pertwee was the first to use the term “dimensionally transcendental”, techspeak for “bigger on the inside.  Baker’s line is from <a href=”

target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”> the single best explanation of  dimensional mechanics ever, given to Leela in Robots of Death.