The Doctor’s Wife: A Junkyard Asteroid and a Woman Called Idris

Forty-eight years, and nobody had done the obvious thing. The TARDIS has been the most important character in this show since 1963, the one constant across every face, every companion and every era, and it took until now for somebody to ask the question out loud: what if she could answer back? The Doctor’s Wife is the best episode of the series so far by a distance, and one of the best the revived show has given us. It’s also, quietly, the most romantic thing Doctor Who has ever done, and there isn’t a single kiss in it.

The TARDIS picks up a distress signal, a Time Lord hypercube, a little glowing box of a kind nobody’s sent in a very long time, from a Time Lord called the Corsair. The Doctor’s reaction is the tell. He’s delighted, in a way that’s honestly painful to watch, because you can see exactly what he’s let himself believe in the half-second before he thinks about it: that somebody survived. I’d seen that face before, the last time he found out another Time Lord was alive, back in Utopia, and it didn’t end well then either. Matt Smith plays the hope and the refusal to look at the hope at the same time, and it’s excellent. So they follow it out through a crack into a pocket of space outside the universe, to a junkyard asteroid where the rules don’t quite hold, and where a small collection of very strange people are waiting to be pleased to see him. The asteroid looks like a scrapyard at the end of the world, all rust and green fog and junk piled up as far as you can see.

Auntie and Uncle are stitched together from spare parts, Nephew is an Ood, and a woman called Idris is being dragged in screaming, biting, and calling the Doctor a thief before she’s ever met him. The Corsair, meanwhile, never even appears and is instantly one of the most vivid Time Lords the show has come up with, a wanderer with the same snake tattoo on every body, who the Doctor mentions was sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. It’s dropped in as an aside, nobody remarks on it, and it quietly changes what regeneration is allowed to do. I loved that.

Idris

House, the asteroid itself, a vast old thing that lures TARDISes here and eats them, has scooped the soul out of the Doctor’s ship and poured it into a human body, because it wants the empty ship for itself. Which means that for one afternoon the TARDIS is a woman, and she can talk. Suranne Jones is astonishing. She plays Idris as something that’s never been stuck in a straight line before and is finding tenses really difficult, answering questions she hasn’t been asked yet, mourning people who haven’t died, biting the Doctor because she’s curious what he tastes like. It’s a performance built entirely out of a being who sees all of time at once trying to squeeze itself down a single narrow corridor of one second per second, and it never once tips into being cute about it. She’s funny and she’s sad and she’s a bit frightening, sometimes all in one sentence, and Smith clearly loves playing opposite her.

And then it does the thing. The Doctor says she wasn’t always reliable, that she didn’t always take him where he wanted to go, and she says, a bit irritated, that no, but she always took him where he needed to go. That one line changes half a century of television for me. Every wrong landing, every malfunction, every time the ship dumped him somewhere inconvenient that turned out to matter, switched in one sentence from fault to intent. She’s been steering the whole time. He stole her, and she let him, because she wanted to see the universe and he was the one mad enough to go. Then there’s the small matter of what he calls her when they’re alone, which she cheerfully points out. “Sexy.” He’s enormously embarrassed, and I laughed out loud, but it’s doing the same job as everything else, telling you this is a very old marriage and only one of the two of them has been fully aware of it.

The corridors

While all that’s going on, Amy and Rory are locked inside the stolen TARDIS with House, and it’s the cruellest stretch of the season. House is a bully with a god’s toolkit, and Michael Sheen voices it as something amused rather than angry, which is worse, and it plays with the two of them by breaking time inside the corridors. All it really wants is to get out of its little bubble and into the real universe, where there’s plenty more to eat, and it’s perfectly happy to kill the Doctor’s friends on the way just because it’s bored. Amy rounds a corner and finds Rory has been waiting for her for decades. She rounds another and he’s an old man. She finds his body, and the walls covered in the words he scrawled while he waited: HATE AMY. KILL AMY. None of it’s real, and all of it works, because the show’s spent a season and a half telling us Rory’s whole thing is waiting for Amy, and House has just taken that and twisted it until it snapped. After the throwaway death in The Curse of the Black Spot, it’s bracing to see the show really frighten me with these two again, by threatening not their lives but the thing between them.

A console made of scrap

Meanwhile the Doctor and Idris, stuck in a junkyard of everything House has eaten, build a working console out of the wreckage of other TARDISes and fly it after their own. Idris gets a line into Rory’s head along the way to tell him where to go, and keeps calling him the pretty one, which is a running joke I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did, and Rory takes it about as well as you’d guess. It’s a gorgeous idea and a gorgeous image, an open platform of mismatched salvage with no walls and no roof, held together by nothing but the fact that a TARDIS is bigger on the inside whether or not it’s got an outside. And there’s a lovely little exchange where he asks if she’s alive and she says yes, and he wants to know why she never talked before, and she more or less tells him she always did, he just doesn’t hear things in the same order she does. From what other fans have been saying, I’m far from the only one who fell for the pair of them. They catch up with the ship in the archived control rooms, and the show hands us the old coral console room from the Tennant years as set dressing, which is either lovely continuity or a small emotional ambush depending on how you feel about that regeneration.

The last two minutes

House is beaten when the TARDIS’s soul goes home to the ship, which means Idris has to die for the TARDIS to live, and the episode is honest enough not to pretend that’s a happy ending. She fades out mid-sentence, and comes back for one last moment, and says the only thing she’s ever wanted to say to him. Not goodbye. Hello. She’s been travelling with this man for seven hundred years and this is the first and only conversation they’ll ever have, and she spends her last words on a greeting. Then she’s gone, and the console room is just a room again, and Matt Smith stands in it talking to the walls, asking her to say something, anything, and she doesn’t, because she can’t, because she never could. I’m not ashamed to say that got me.

What I keep coming back to is how obvious the whole idea seems now that somebody’s done it, and how nobody reached for it sooner. It’s funny and strange and enormously sad in the space of forty-five minutes, and Suranne Jones does a season’s worth of work in that time. I’ll never watch the TARDIS land in the wrong place again without wondering whether it was the wrong place at all, and I think that’s the best thing I can say about any episode, that it changes the ones I’ve already seen. He stole a broken time machine and ran away. She left the door unlocked and let him think it was his idea.

Rating: 5/5. Perfect, and the last two minutes are as good as this programme gets.