Fifty years of a machine that is bigger on the inside, and the show has almost never gone in. There’s a swimming pool somewhere. There was a library. Occasionally a corridor appears when the plot needs one. So an episode that promises to take us properly inside the TARDIS is promising something the series has been dangling since its very first episode, and for about half an hour it delivers, in a hot, molten, genuinely strange way. Then it presses a button marked “Big Friendly Button,” and none of it happened.
Salvage
The setup is efficient. The Van Baalen brothers run a salvage ship, they snag the TARDIS in a magno-grab, and the collision cripples it: engine breach, Clara lost somewhere inside, and about half an hour before the whole thing goes up. The Doctor’s response is to lie. He fakes a self-destruct countdown and tells the brothers that the only way to save themselves is to help him find her. It’s a decent bit of pressure, and it makes the protagonist the least trustworthy person in his own episode, which is a fair place to start. The brothers are the weak link. Gregor is greedy, Bram is barely there, and Tricky is an android who does the dangerous jobs, except he isn’t. He’s human, and the android business is a lie his brothers told him after an accident, initially as a joke and then as a convenience, and they’ve let him believe he isn’t a person for years. That’s a good, cruel idea, and it’s exactly the sort of thing that should rhyme with a story about a machine that turns out to be alive. It doesn’t, quite, because the script never has time to connect them, but it’s the most interesting thing the guests do.
Inside
The interiors are the reason to watch, and they’re better than I expected on this budget. The library is beautiful, vaulted and endless, with a swimming pool somewhere above it and bottled specimens on the shelves. The architectural reconfiguration system is a lovely idea, a room where the ship rebuilds itself, laid out like a plan of a house drawn in light. And the Eye of Harmony is genuinely spectacular, an exploding star suspended mid-detonation in the heart of the ship, powering everything, blinding to look at. There’s real awe in these sequences, and the show gets some good mileage out of the idea that the TARDIS is not a vehicle with rooms but something closer to a landscape, and that it is actively rearranging itself to keep the intruders away from the parts that matter.
The time zombies are the best monster idea in it: burnt, shrieking, half-melted things stalking the corridors, which turn out to be the crew themselves, future versions cooked by the engine breach and folded back into the present by the damage. A monster that is what you are about to become is a properly good horror engine, and the moment Clara works out what she’s looking at is the episode’s high point. The ship’s characterisation is the other thing that half-works. Since she borrowed a body and spoke to him in The Doctor’s Wife, the TARDIS has been an established personality rather than a set, and this episode leans on that. She’s frightened, she’s injured, and she’s defending herself by making the interior hostile. There’s a good scene where the Doctor explains her to the salvage crew, not as a machine they’ve damaged but as someone, and it’s the closest the episode gets to an argument. It’s a pity the plot then treats her mostly as a countdown timer.
And then it doesn’t count
Two smaller things land better than the plot. First, Clara finds a book, The History of the Time War, and reads the Doctor’s name in it. She doesn’t tell him. He doesn’t know she knows. It’s the most consequential thing that happens, and it happens quietly in a library while other people run down corridors. Second, the TARDIS itself remains hostile to her, continuing the strange, unexplained grudge from Hide. The ship locks doors in her face. It rearranges routes to lose her. Whatever it knows, it has known for several episodes now and is refusing to say. The Doctor’s lie deserves more attention than the episode gives it, too. He invents a self-destruct to coerce three men into a rescue, and when it’s exposed he’s unrepentant, because it worked, they helped, nobody died. But it’s the same instinct on display in A Town Called Mercy: a man deciding unilaterally what other people are permitted to know about their own situation, on the grounds that he’s the cleverest person present. Nobody calls him on it here. The episode is too busy admiring its own corridors, which is a pity, because a story about a ship that hides things from you is sitting right next to a protagonist doing exactly that.
Then the ending, which is the problem, and it is a very large problem. The Doctor gets Clara to the console room, reaches through a crack in time to the moment of the crash, and throws through a device labelled, in handwriting, “Big Friendly Button.” Past Gregor sees it, presses it, and the magno-grab is never fired. Which means no breach. No time zombies. No exploration. Tricky learns he’s human, and then doesn’t, because it never happened. Clara reads the Doctor’s name, and then doesn’t. Every consequence in the episode is deleted, and the two characters walk out having lost precisely nothing except the audience’s investment. I don’t object to a reset in principle, since the season finale of the last run turned on a similar trick. I object to this one because the episode’s entire pitch was consequence: a ship that hurts, a crew being turned into the things chasing them, a woman learning a secret she shouldn’t have. Undoing all of it with a labelled prop is the writing equivalent of the Big Friendly Button itself. It’s the same failure that sank The Curse of the Black Spot two years ago, a good premise given a resolution that arrives from outside the story rather than out of it. The one thing that survives is a look. Clara doesn’t remember the book, but the Doctor now knows that in some erased version of the afternoon she read his name, and he watches her a little differently afterwards.
Rating: 2.5/5. Visually the most ambitious the show has been all season, with three or four ideas any other episode would have built itself around, and a genuine sense of the TARDIS as a place rather than a prop. It squanders every one of them on a reset that makes the preceding forty minutes explicitly not count. Watch it for the library and the star; expect nothing to survive the credits. A ship with a burning star in its chest, corridors full of what you’re about to become, and a name in a book that nobody remembers reading. Then somebody pressed a button, and none of it was true.