Steve Thompson

Fifty years of a machine that’s 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 when an episode like “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” promises to take us properly inside, straight off the back of Hide, it’s 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. I was properly into it. And then it presses a button marked “Big Friendly Button,” and none of it happened, which is why this one’s going to get a lot less love from me than it could have.

I’d rather be upfront about that than pretend the ending’s a surprise. It’s an episode that spends forty minutes building up consequences and then deletes every one of them in the last minute, and I came out of it feeling cheated. Because the first two thirds are the most ambitious the show has looked all season. There’s a real sense of the TARDIS as a place rather than a prop, and I’d happily have taken a whole season of that. Which makes the ending sting more than it would on a lesser episode. Clara spends most of it running, working things out and being properly frightened, and Jenna-Louise Coleman is good at all three, so there’s plenty here that I enjoyed on the way to being let down. Matt Smith gets to be brisk, bossy and a bit ruthless for most of the hour too, and it suits him, and that’s exactly why I wanted the story around him to be worth it.

Salvage

The setup is efficient. The Van Baalen brothers run a salvage ship, they snag the TARDIS with 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 Doctor 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 supposedly 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. I wanted more of the three of them arguing in the dark and a lot less of them being shouted at, because they’re a decent bunch of salvage-crew types and I’d have liked them to matter. Instead they mostly exist to carry the Doctor’s lie and to be killed off one at a time. The one thing it does give them is a reason to be there at all, and it was a good reason for me to keep watching.

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 it fits perfectly with a ship that’s constantly rearranging itself to keep intruders away from the parts that matter. 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. Whatever else I say about this episode, I’d happily rewatch every one of those rooms.

The time zombies are the best monster idea in it: burnt, shrieking, half-melted things stalking the corridors, which turn out to be future versions of the brothers themselves, caught in the engine’s blast and folded back into the present. A monster that is what you’re 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 personality 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 character 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.

The Doctor’s lie

The Doctor’s lie deserves more attention than the episode gives it. He’s calm and quick about it, with a countdown that isn’t real running over a ship that’s actually in trouble, and the three brothers rush about after a woman they’ve never met because he’s told them their own lives depend on it. It’s a neat piece of manipulation and I enjoyed watching it work, right up until I noticed nobody was going to make anything of it. 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 he cared about 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 sits right next to a Doctor doing exactly that. I’d have swapped a few of the corridor chases for one proper argument about it, and I think the episode would have come out better. Clara’s the obvious person to have it, and she’s barely given the chance, because she spends most of the episode lost, and when she does find the Doctor again there’s already a ship coming apart around them. And that’s a shame, because a companion who can look at the Doctor and tell him he’s lying to three frightened men is the kind of scene I’d have remembered, and I can’t point to a single moment in the episode that stuck the same way.

And then it doesn’t count

Then the ending, which is the problem, and it is a very large problem. Clara burns her hand on a strange egg-like device, and the burn spells out the words “big friendly button.” The Doctor works out what it’s for, hands the remote to his earlier self at the moment of the crash, 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. Every consequence in the episode is deleted, and the two of them walk out having lost precisely nothing except my investment. I don’t object to a reset in principle. 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 getting closer to something she shouldn’t. Undoing all of it with a labelled prop is the story equivalent of the Big Friendly Button itself, and 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. Clara doesn’t remember any of it, and neither do the brothers, so the only people left holding the episode are us.

Rating: 2.5/5. It’s got a library, a burning star and corridors full of what you’re about to become, and I was properly let down. I’ll rewatch the first half again, and probably switch it off before the end.

If the episode had let just one thing survive the reset, which would you have kept: Tricky finding out he’s human, or the zombies? Tell me in the comments.