An interstellar salvage team get their hands on the TARDIS, sending its systems into meltdown. With Clara lost in the depths of the seemingly infinite and labyrinthine ship, the Doctor enlists the help of the salvage team to try and find her, but the clock is ticking, and there’s something else lurking in the TARDIS’s winding corridors... Stephen Thompson’s Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS promised us, as one would expect from a title like that, an adventure deep within the bowels of the Doctor’s iconic time-travelling police box. I had very high expectations...
The last time an episode of Doctor Who took us into the TARDIS itself was in The Doctor’s Wife (I think I’ve managed to mention that episode in all of my reviews of this series...), which did it rather well to say the least, and as one of the finest episodes in living memory it was naturally going to be a tough one to beat! We weren’t treated to a full tour of the TARDIS in that episode, but we were introduced to the complexities of shifting corridors and time dilation. Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS did this and a little more, giving us a glimpse of the oft-mentioned swimming pool, a brief wander in the majestical library, and a look at the Eye of Harmony. And corridors. Lots and lots of corridors. The sets were truly magnificent, exceedingly well produced and brilliantly inspired; it gave the sense of a ship far larger than one could possibly imagine, an infinite number of rooms down an infinite number of winding corridors, and was precisely the kind of thing you’d hope to see in an episode set inside the TARDIS. I only wish we could have seen more of it!
However, with the potential to explore the TARDIS in all its marvellous complexity, this episode felt like it fell short of what it could have achieved. Getting lost in the TARDIS could have turned out to be a fantastic episode, but unfortunately for me it felt more like a sub-plot to the salvage team’s story and the search for Clara. As a result, not enough time was spent dwelling on the various rooms and secrets hidden in the TARDIS, with a few things getting just a customary passing glance rather than a proper look at them (for example, what I’m guessing was an observatory, which got all of two seconds and a “huh” from Clara). The library got a bit more exposure than most areas, just enough to reveal the existence of written records from the Time War, and a brief game of hide and seek with an ossified demon, but ultimately this too felt too brief, with the majority of the episode revolving around the endless corridors.
There are also a few story elements that didn’t quite work. For starters, the three-man salvage team felt quite redundant (as did their plot twist, which in my opinion bore no real relation to the narrative what-so-ever), and I reckon the story’s key premise could have easily been carried out without them. Sometimes, a few of the plot points came and went so quickly that if you hadn’t been keeping up with it this whole time you’d be thoroughly lost! There are a few niggly things as well, like the fact that the TARDIS was behaving as if it didn't trust the Doctor. After 900 years of a relationship between man and ship, a bond stronger than the Doctor has had with any of his companions, based on their mutual trust of one another, you'd expect the TARDIS would be a little more helpful! It's behaviour didn't seem consistent with previous situations (especially considering last week's episode, where it risked itself to save the Doctor), and preventing the Doctor from getting to where he needed to go just didn't add up. There’s also the matter of the episode being neatly tied up quite literally at the press of a button, which essentially rebooted time back to just before the episode began, fixing everything that went wrong - simply pressing a reset button never feels like a satisfying conclusion to a story.
That being so, the ideas behind Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (henceforth known as JTTCOTT or ‘the episode’, because I’ll be buggered if I’m typing that title out every time I mention it!) aren’t without merit. There were some good ideas that were well executed; time leaking was an especially good plot point, causing the past, present and future to converge in a typically wibbly manner. The shambling, burnt corpses marauding the corridors were also a fine addition, maintaining a level of mystery and intrigue, and the revelation of their true identities was a nice - if rather macabre - twist. And as mentioned before, the set pieces gave the sense of a ship that existed beyond just the control room.
As with Hide, JTTCOTT is an episode founded in great ideas, but let down by its narrative. In my opinion, it would have made for a better story if the TARDIS had hit some temporal turbulence or a spatial rupture. In dire need of repair, the Doctor and Clara set about looking for spare parts and components to patch things up, but they’re separated by dimensional distortions changing the TARDIS’s layout (a la Amy and Rory, The Doctor’s Wife), and must try to navigate the ever-shifting corridors to find each other and repair the ship. This would give reason to having a look around several different rooms and allow more time in exploring the TARDIS, as they must search for different items to fix it - this would also eliminate the reboot button, or at the very least make it feel less like a reboot button due to the effort they had to go to to create it. But back to the episode itself...
For me, the bit that stands out most about this episode is something that is no doubt going to be touched on later... The History of the Time War. It only gets a brief look in this episode, but I’m hoping that through its pages we might learn more of this cataclysmic conflict. However, from the book Clara learns something that no-one must ever know - the Doctor’s true name (presumably to be revisited in the episode titled The Name of the Doctor - just a hunch!). Now that events have been reset, it can be assumed that Clara no longer has this knowledge, but it’s intriguing to know that she (with three different versions of her meeting the Doctor at different points in time) might know his true identity. Is Clara’s impossible nature intrinsically linked with the Doctor’s name? (Which, incidentally, I hope is never revealed; the mystery is far more tantalising than the possibility of ever knowing the truth, and if his name is revealed then it kind of renders 50 years of cultural history null).
I suppose, at the end of the day, there were good bits and bad bits to JTTCOTT, but everything aside from the set pieces and lead actors ultimately felt a little lackluster. The story wasn’t as gripping as I’d anticipated, and what we saw of the TARDIS didn’t feel quite as special as I’d hoped it would. However, there were plenty of good ideas behind the story, some of which were executed particularly well, and the setting was exceptionally well designed.
Overall, I’d quantify this episode as a 6/10.
Next week’s episode sees the return of Vastra, Jenny and Strax in Mark Gatiss’s The Crimson Horror.
If you technically missed last night’s episode because time was rebooted at the press of a big friendly button, you can watch it again (or for the first time, subjectively speaking) on iPlayer here.
You can read last week's review of Hide here.
(Never have I written the word TARDIS so many times in one place...)
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