Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

So that's who.

This is another story that seemed to suffer from the hype machine. Fans of the classic series always looked for any tidbit of the rest of the TARDIS to explore and a story that seemed set on getting into the real guts of the ship seemed quite promising. In addition, the title was a clear reference to classic Jules Verne stories which promised action and adventure. The resulting story ended up in more of a mixed camp.

Plot Summary

Attempting to get Clara more comfortable with the TARDIS, the Doctor turns off the shields and sets it in basic mode to allow her to try and fly it. Unfortunately, this makes the TARDIS visible to a passing salvage ship who activate their tractor beam and haul it in. The power of the beam damages the internal mechanisms of the TARDIS. The Doctor rushes to fix it as Clara is distracted by a device rolling across the floor, which burns her hand as she picks it up. The Doctor is unable to stop things and an explosion occurs in the console room, blowing Clara backwards through the corridor.

The salvage ship is manned by two brothers, Gregor and Bram and a flesh covered android named Tricky. They attempt to cut into the TARDIS but have no luck. Gregor suggests blowing it open but Tricky notices the Doctor lying unconscious under the TARDIS. Gregor starts to panic and decides to flush it back out into space when the Doctor walks in on their conversation. He promises them a great salvage if they help him find Clara in the TARDIS. They reluctantly agree.

Clara wakes in the corridor, finding her way back to the console room blocked by a fire sealed off by a blast door. She runs away from the fire and ends in one of the storage bays where the Doctor keeps mementos from his prior versions. She is then alerted to a couple of grey creatures that emerge from the shadows. She runs off, passing several other rooms and locks herself in the TARDIS library.

The Doctor and crew enter the control room where the Doctor vents the poison from the atmosphere. He then seals the ship and sets the self-destruct to force the crew to help him find Clara in thirty minutes. They decide to split up to cover more ground, the Doctor going with Tricky while Gregor goes with Bram. However, once split up, Gregor sends Bram back to the console room and orders him to disassemble it in order to find things for sale.

Gregor is lured by a hand held evaluator into a central room of the TARDIS where he finds a tree-like object that can create any machine. He moves to take one of the orbs but the Doctor and Tricky arrive and warn him not to, telling him that the TARDIS will fight back. Gregor takes the orb anyway and a subtle change comes over the ship with a door initially disappearing to trap them in and then reappearing to let them out.

In the library, Clara examines a book on the Time War when she hears a noise. She spies one of the creatures but gets past it when it lunges past her, hearing another noise. She runs through the corridors and finds what she thinks is the control room. However, it does not have a door to the outside. She goes back into the corridors and finds the control room once again, only in a different spot.

The Doctor, Gregor and Tricky wander through the corridors, walking in circles as the TARDIS refuses to let them leave. Gregor refuses to give up the circuit orb, even when Tricky tells him too. Fearing the TARDIS defenses, Gregor signals Bram to be careful. Bram doesn't hear them as he is climbing into the console at that moment. He contacts the control circuits, is shocked and falls to the floor. Partially stunned, he sits up and is attacked by one of the creatures that was hunting Clara.

A second creature, one that appears to be a conjoined body, attacks the Doctor and the other two. They race away and find a copy of the control room. The Doctor realizes that the TARDIS is making a safe space, trying to protect him from the creatures. He also hears Clara walking around and realizes she's in another control room copy. In her control room, Clara prepares to leave and finds one of the creatures outside. It chases her back into the room and corners her against the wall. The Doctor, hearing her screams, grabs Gregor's value scanner and links it to his sonic. He creates a bridge between the two phases of reality and pulls her through to his version of the control room, away from the creature.

With Clara saved, Gregor insists that the Doctor turn off the self destruct. The Doctor laughs and tells them it was a trick and that he had only turned on a countdown timer. He goes to turn it off but discovers that the engines are, in fact, damaged and could blow the ship up. He then opens an access panel in the wall and the four head down to get to the engines and repair them.

In the hallway, the group gets separated and Clara finds herself confronted by herself speaking things from before. She also sees the Doctor thinking. The regular Doctor then grabs her, telling her that the engines are leeching time so that instances of their past and future selves will randomly appear in the TARDIS.

As they hurry to catch up to the others, they hear an explosive decompression as the holders for control rods fail. This sends rods into the corridor. The two race to avoid them and discover Gregor and Tricky, where Tricky is pinned against a way by one of the rods. He insists that Gregor cut off his arm to free him and that he'll get a new one at their next docking. Gregor can't bring himself to do it and reveals that Tricky is not actually an android, but in fact his younger brother whom he tricked into believing he was an android so that he could become captain after their father died.

Gregor frees Tricky and the Doctor leads them to the engine corridor room. He rushes through and unlocks the door on the far side before running back to pull everyone through. As they enter the room, the creatures emerge at both doors, trapping them in the middle while radiation from the Eye of Harmony falls on them. Gregor scans the creature at the near side and it identifies as Clara. The Doctor reveals that the creatures are them if the time stream continues unchecked. He also lets slip that Clara has died before.

Gregor runs to the other side and one of the creatures grabs the circuit in his backpack. Gregor rips it off and the creature falls off the bridge and into the star. A two headed creature follows it and the Doctor realizes that if he keeps Trick and Gregor from touching each other, he can disrupt the flow of time. He urges them apart and Tricky rushes the creature, knocking it off the bridge. He tips over and Gregor rushes to help him up. The Doctor and Clara rush past but as Gregor pulls Tricky up, they burn and become a new version of the two-headed creature.

The Doctor seals the door and he and Clara rush into the engine room. It appears as a cliff face with fog covering the drop. Unsure, the Doctor interrogates Clara, demanding to know what she is. He reveals that he has met her and that she has already died twice but she is completely in the dark about what he is talking about. Convinced she is telling the truth, the Doctor guesses that the TARDIS is protecting the engine room with an illusion and urges Clara to jump with him into the abyss.

They jump and land in a white room with bits of junk suspended in space. The Doctor realizes that the engine of the TARDIS has already failed and that it has frozen time to contain the damage. But as time is leaking out, the damage can't be contained forever. Clara grabs the Doctor's hand to comfort him and as she does so, he feels the burns on her hand. The burns are words and he realizes it's a message to himself.

The Doctor grabs the magnetic beacon, which will nullify the tractor beam, and runs to a crack in the control room, leading back to the moment when the TARDIS was first grabbed by the tractor beam. He etches the same message on Clara's hand into the beacon and steps into the crack with it. The beacon rolls to Clara's feet as before and she drops it once again. The Doctor, alerted by his earlier self, grabs it and activates it.

Activating the beacon resets time, but with some effects. The salvage ship flies by but with Tricky not being tricked into thinking he's an android and respected by Gregor. The TARDIS is in good shape and Clara emerges from having taken a shower, not remembering any of the events that had happened. The Doctor does remember and shoos her off to get some rest while he preps for their next adventure.

Analysis

In concept, this is not a bad episode. Parts of the execution are also not bad. Where it fails is in two major points: the poor acting/underdevelopment of the salvage brothers and the overly complicated behavior of time with a Deus Ex Machina ending. I think the story can be enjoyed but it will fall short on certain levels and that will have an unsatisfactory feeling for a lot of people.

One of the best parts of this story is when it's in horror movie mode. The burned future selves that pursue the characters are constantly kept in shadow and partially off-screen. The shots are tight on the faces of the pursued, especially Clara which produces moments of genuine fear. If you throw in the fact that Clara's two earlier deaths had not yet been explained, there was some proper fear for her as it was not out of the question that she could die again.

I quite liked Clara in this story. I actually liked her better than the Doctor, although he was good too. It felt like she was genuinely afraid and panicked, both by the creatures but also by the Doctor's reaction to her. I do wish the director had not indulged in the trope of her outrunning the fire after opening the door near the beginning of the story. It just looked dumb and I think it would have worked better if she had slammed the door shut after seeing the fire, then slumped on the wall and said "Bad idea" rather than quipping the same while standing their and having the fire rush towards her. But that's a directorial quibble, not an acting quibble.

The Doctor was good, although a little angrier and darker than you're used to seeing the Eleventh Doctor. Still, he's funny and enjoyable to be around. His dark moments almost seem scary because you're not used to them. I do wish the sound had been cleaned up a bit because at the rate of speed the Doctor talks, it's hard to make out what he is fully saying while running and shouting. In a story as complicated as this, that is a serious drawback at times.

The guest actors were terrible. They mumbled and gave flat performances. The closest you got to real emotion was when Tricky is injured and then realizes he's not an android. Then you start to see emotion and evidence of a real actor under there. His portrayal as an android is just bad. Gregor and Bram are also terrible in their delivery and at no point did I ever care about them because I could never see the character, only the bad actor. That they got very little character development on top of that didn't help either. When Clara was terrorized by the burnt future selves, you cared because you liked her. These three, not so much.

Unlike some fans, I enjoyed going through the TARDIS and was not disappointed that most of it was corridors. There were glimpses into rooms of the past and new rooms that we got to indulge in. Going through corridors of the TARDIS is just par for the course both since corridors have made up the bulk of Doctor Who and even the other major "depth of the TARDIS" story, Castrovalva, was not much more than corridors. The Invasion of Time had a few more rooms but given that they were filming in a hospital and couldn't shoot normal corridors, that makes a bit more sense.

The storyline was a neat idea, but I'm not sure it was executed properly. It feels like the first half of the story is wasted in the hunt for Clara and the horror movie attack of the burnt future selves. Only in the last fifteen minutes do we go for the proper journey to the center of the TARDIS. What's more, you are dealing with a time loop and possible future outcomes attacking the present. I think a couple more minutes of explanation would have been useful there. I also am not overly fond of endings where one timeline intrudes on another to avoid the mistakes made and thus wipes out the prior timeline. It can be done but if rushed, it feels cheap.

I think what I would have really liked is that when the brothers enter the TARDIS, the Doctor locks them down and then notices the engine failure. He tells them that the engines are exploding and that forces them to look for Clara as well as get to the center of the TARDIS. The Doctor could have explained things a bit more as they moved on, consolidating a few scenes which would have given a bit more time for explanations and perhaps even made the ending feel a bit less rushed.

Overall, I'd say there is a fair blend of good and bad. Neither is enough to dominate. I wouldn't say this episode is particularly good, nor would I say that it's particularly bad. You're left with an ok feeling, an adventure that you didn't quite get but was mostly enjoyable with a few rocky moments. I'd say that's a pretty middle-of-the-road course, which isn't bad in the overall scheme of things.

Overall personal score: 2.5 out of 5