Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis: Ranking - 218

    Journey To The Centre Of The Tardis

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Clara, 27/4/2013, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Stephen Thompson, director: Mat King) 

'Here are the Tardis ventilation shafts. There are a lot of them. watch out for traps too: I keep getting infestations of cybermats. Oh and he's a Sontaron whose been lost in here since 'Invasion Of Time' - I wondered what happened to him! Oh and, err, watch out for Sutekh...' 

Ranking: 218

 

Picture the scene: it’s the first week of March 1978. A sixteen-year-old Steven Moffat is eagerly reading the family copy of Radio Times and being the little Whovian he is turns eagerly to the page for Saturday teatimes to see what happens in the big finale of his favourite programme and the last episode on an adventure named ‘The Invasion Of Time’. And there it is, the single most exciting description of an episode he’s ever heard: ‘The Sontarons break into the Tardis itself. The Doctor must play a dangerous game of hide-and-seek inside it’s many rooms, while desperately trying to find a way of defeating them and saving Gallifrey’. His little Whovian heart burst: like many of us he adored the Tardis and had dreamed of exploring it further and actually seeing all the rooms that had only ever been mentioned till now, while the idea of the Sontarons of all people let loose in this most sacred of places and the Doctor saving his home world seemed built from the book of ‘Ways To Please The Dr Who Fanclub’. Of course if you’ve seen the episode (or read our review) then you’ll know that isn’t strictly what happens: I mean, a Sontaron fleet does chase the 4^th Doctor and Leela down some corridors and into a disused hospital with some paintings on the wall, with a detour into a swimming pool, but it’s not exactly a deadly game of hide and seek and the Doctor basically saves Gallifrey by shooting a gun. I love ‘Invasion Of Time’ to death and think it’s one of the best Dr Who stories ever told, but in a metaphorical symbolic way and then mostly in the first four episodes when they actually have some budget left – problems behind the scenes, with scripts falling through and a TV studio strike means that by episode six everyone is scrabbling around trying to get something useable in the can, not trying to make art. One of the reasons that story is so great is that, fifteen years into the show, the production team remembers that the Tardis is more than just a space-car and instead of just talking about the thousands of different rooms inside it we actually get to see some of them: art galleries, libraries, a giant swimming pool! Even if it doesn’t look much like the bits of the Tardis hinted at in other stories it was never meant to be the whole of it, just a peek at part of it and the thought that we might get to see more of it one day was one of my biggest hopes when the show came back. The young Steven Moffat though was horrified and bitterly disappointed and has said since that this was the day he decided that at some point, when he was a grown up and a famous writer and everything, he would run this show and do this episode properly. So it was that, thirty-five years later, he finds himself commissioning a story with exactly that synopsis (albeit not with Sontarons) and one desperate plea to writer Steve Thompson: ‘Do this story, but properly – the way it should have been done’.

Well, it took a while but ‘Journey’ is finally that story, one that’s set pretty much entirely inside the Tardis this time give or take the opening scenes rather than outside on some alien planet, a story where with the bigger budget and special effects in place, surely means that every door is full of glory and wonder. The thing is, though, I fear the idea of setting a story entirely inside the Tardis is cursed (poor ‘Edge Of Destruction’ from 1964, the only other story with episodes set entirely within the Tardis, got the short straw in terms of the lowest budget Dr Who ever had across it’s sixty years with or without inflation and frequently comes at the bottom of polls even though that’s a seriously under-rated and under-valued story too). I mean, I was too young to see ‘The Invasion Of Time’ without having already heard about the disappointing ending (which really isn’t that bad, honest) but I was old enough to read the ‘What’s On’ TV Guide in 2013 (because the Radio Times was expensive and some of the articles were completely nuts!) and get excited in just the same way. I mean, just listen to this: ‘When the Tardis is taken for salvage Clara becomes lost in its depths and the Doctor must find her before the ship’s engines explode, while both discover insights about the Tardis and each other’. Fabulous, plot of the decade! Only it didn’t quite work out like that. The Doctor and Clara are both acting badly out of character, the discoveries aren’t up to much and the plot means that their memories are wiped out by the end anyway and the unseen rooms in the Tardis amount to a Library with some potions, a tree covered in lightbulbs and lots and lots of running down the same metallic-looking corridor that seems nothing like the rest of the ship. I was quite a bit older than sixteen but in a neat mirror of Stephen Moffat in 1978 there I was, longing to be showrunner of Dr Who one day, so that I could make this story properly. Because there’s a great story in there somewhere, but this really isn’t it.

So what went wrong? Let’s start with Moffat’s decision to farm out a story to someone else that was really close to his heart and one he really really should have done himself. It’s not that Steve Thompson does it badly so much as he was the ‘wrong’ casting for such a fan-friendly and indulgent story like this one. A friend of Moffat’s who’d become the ‘third writer’ on his and Mark Gatiss’ ‘Sherlock’ series (he jokingly called himself the Lestrade to their Sherlock and Watson, tidying up the continuity they didn’t want to bother with) he was enough of a Whovian to submit his own intriguing and detailed prequel to ‘Robots Of Death’ (his favourite story) where Taran Kapel becomes involved in cybernetics, making it contemporary for an era when robots and artificial intelligence was back in the news again. But he hadn’t lived and breathed this series like Moffat and Gatiss and Davies and a handful of others and had never actually seen ‘The Invasion Of Time’. His strengths as a writer, as you can see from ‘Rings Of Akhaten’ and ‘Time Heist’ (his other Who submissions) are the crazy left-field ideas that pushed Dr Who to its limits and found new stories to tell that had never been considered before, not re-hashes of old ones. Moffat thought Thompson would be a good fit for this story because of his background in mathematics (he must be the first Who writer since Christopher H Bidmead to have a degree in something other than English or History or Psychology) and bring a ‘Logopolis’ style dynamic to a tale of police telephone boxes with changing dimensional insides. Sample quote from Dr Who Magazine: he got the job because ‘anything involving multi-dimensional geometry gets me excited’, not a sentence you heart often enough: we need more mathematicians and scientists writing for Who, if only to balance out the arty imaginative creative types). But Thompson is not that sort of a writer – he’s too keen on thinking outside the box to, you know, think inside the big blue box and treat it the way us fans are crying out for.

The thing is though I’ve seen bits and pieces of the original draft script for this story and it’s much much better, with all the fan-pleasing references you would hope for. There’s a whole cut scene, for instance, where Clara stumbles into a cupboard that’s bigger on the inside and discovers lots of boxes and filing cabinets that she doesn’t understand but we at home do. It’s a collection of all the belongings left over by the companions who’ve come and gone over the years, lovingly catalogued by the Doctor and stored just in case his friends ever come back on board and need them one day. There’s a description of the camera lovingly lingering over a large pile marked ‘Amy and Rory’ and a box over-spilling with objects recently seen in the series, as well as a bed covered with all the Doctor’s past sonic screwdrivers laid out. Even just on paper it’s really moving, but because it wasn’t directly related to the plot it got cut, just like so many planned scenes in ‘Invasion Of Time’. Instead we get the Doctor’s cot, something that had only been seen recently in ‘A Good Man Goes To war’ (so the props team didin’t exactly have to search for it) and…that’s it. The other problem is that ‘Journey’ got hit by just as much behind-the-scenes problems as ‘The Invasion Of Time’ had. Of all the 21^st century seasons series seven is the one most hit by the credit crunch and crashing inflation and the BBC’s fear that austerity meant the Conservatives were coming for their television licenses and funding and that they had to prove that each programme they made had ‘value’. The series had already had to be cut in half and spread across two years for ‘accountancy reasons’. As the Tardis-bound story that didn’t have much in the way of special effects directly impacting the main plot ‘Journey’ became the runt of even this underfed litter, used to mop up the overspends on nearby stories like Thompson’s own ‘Akhaten’, the submarine-fest ‘Cold War’ and the CGI-heavy ‘Name Of The Doctor’, not to mention the big 50^th anniversary special looming round the corner. Everything extraneous got cut and while that wouldn’t matter for most plots here the extraneous fan-pleasing stuff was the whole point and exactly why Moffat had commissioned this story in the first place. Even the parts of ‘Invasion Of Time’ that had made Moffat cringe, the big ugly swimming pool and the corridor with some books and paintings in them, were better than what we got here: a rather tiny little library complete with some science-defying ‘magic potions’ containing the Gallifreyan equivalent of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in liquid form (how the heck does that work? Do you take a sip and become brainy or do you have to mix it to get a specific paragraph you need? Not terribly useful in a hurry I wouldn’t have thought), with only just enough room for Clara to hide behind a lone bookshelf. The brief of the Tardis being a ‘magical’ place was taken far too literally in a scene everyone compared to ‘Harry Potter’ but is actually far more like ‘The Gummi Bears’, with their book of knowledge about their secret potion left over from some past civilisation (I remain convinced that the 7^th Doctor, created about the time when the Disney show was on the air, was based on Zummi Gummi, a brilliant magician trying to keep the universe safe who also happens to be a clumsy bumbling idiot everyone treats like a child. Even the children). We know the Doctor is well-read so it’s nice to actually see it on screen: honestly if this was my library, with all those worlds to learn about, I’m not sure I’d ever leave the ship and go outside. You’d think there’d be a lot more books than this, though (with location filming not in a real library, as per ‘Silence In The Library’, but the much smaller reading room at Cardiff Castle) what with all the universe’s libraries to choose from (and we know from ‘The Infinite Quest’ that the Doctor has accrued hundreds of library book fines, even with the ability to time travel!) And then there’s the scene of the tree with lights, which would look disappointing in a school disco, never mind after a salvager has stood outside the door consulting his computer for scrap metal and being told of all the many ‘impossible, wonderful, priceless things’ behind the door. I mean, most of this story’s budget must have gone on 40 watt bulbs, which is impressive if you’re walking into a hardware story but not that great for the single best piece of transport in fiction. It’s all so disappointing: we were told, not just in the TV Guides but in all the behind-the-scenes hoo-hah how special and fan-pleasing this story was going to be and how we were going to properly understand The Tardis as a proper organic thinking spaceship at last and how it was going to match our visions of it for the first time. All I can say is that the Tardis is much bigger on the inside of our imaginations than in the tininess of the TV box, however widescreen the sets or equipment.

The biggest problem with ‘Journey’ though is the plot, which might as well not have happened - indeed  there’s a rather funny two miunte edit of it on Youtube which runs the entire story as it happened when the timelines were put right, when basically there’s a big crash, a sudden explosion, Clara picks up a button and the Doctor presses it and grins: hardly enough material for a short story or one of Dr Who Magazine’s ‘Brief Encounters’ never mind a TV episode. Having the rest of the episode basically wiped out by the recovered timeline is a bit of a cheat even for the era of Dr Who when this was the norm. You see, the extended metaphor for the Tardis in this story is a car crash, with our home from home damaged seemingly beyond repair, with the hint of one of those ‘insurance claim’ hit and run jobs that’s maybe taking the idea of the ordinary hitting the extraordinary just a little too far.   It turns out that the Doctor is teaching Clara to fly the Tardis, on her say so, which is very out of character for both of them (the Doctor never ever let anyone near the controls in the past, never mind someone he doesn’t quite trust, and now every Tom Dick or Harry Sullivan is having a go, no matter how inept or apparently untrustworthy – and what possible interest can Clara have in flying? Had they written in a character trait of being interested in motors I’d understand it more. The episode starts off with the Doctor concerned that the tardis doesn’rt seem to like Cllara so he wants to ‘introduce’ them to each other, but surely if the Tardis is telling him not to trust her then the last thing he should do is pass control of his time-travelling best friend over to a relative stranger he can’t work out. Seriously, this might well be the single most out of character thing the 11^th Doctor ever does, especially after ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ the previous season revealed just how right he was to trust his intuition and that the Tardis is ‘speaking’ to him, such as she can. And this isn’t the 6^th or 10^th Doctors, sure of their actions, this is one whose always trusted his intuition and read signs before). During the quick flight there’s an accident (caused by the Doctor letting down the Tardis defences to fly her – why? You’d think he’d put more defences up with an unknown driver and given the amount of accidents when he himself pilots her) and a big crash as the Tardis ends up being picked up by three salvage hunters. An explosion flings the Doctor outside in front of the strangers’ astonished sight, while Clara is flung deeper inside the Tardis (why? They were standing next to each other). To get her back the 11^th Doctor then does two things that are just as much out of character: he offers the Tardis as ‘scrap metal’ (which even as a ruse to greedy salvage hunters is totally not what he’d be doing in any other story – he’d be comforting his friend and apologising for hurting her) and threatening to blow the Tardis up if the strangers don’t help him find Clara in time (other regenerations might be this manipulative but not usually the 11th. And the crash really was his fault more than theirs). So most of the plot becomes a big run around across lots of corridors (ones that. weirdly, seem to be based on the Daleks’ Skaro model rather than the usual Tardis architecture: I thought there’d be more roundels and doorways the Doctor could walk through without ducking) with time running out and even the fact they’re in the Tardis doesn’t make that any more interesting. Even the ‘quest to find Clara’ is a bit of a cheat, given the others simply bump into her.

Admittedly it is more interesting than the usual runarounds go with one particularly inspired idea here. You see, taking the car crash analogy on a stage this isn’t a vehicle that just crashes in the present but in the past and future as well. There are ‘time leaks’ here,  with sounds of the past and visions of the future both here for the Doctor plus salvagers and Clara to bump into. There’s a frustratingly short but fan-warming scene where we get to hear all the past Doctors talking about the Tardis and while the dialogue doesn’t make a big thing of this I like to think of it this passage really does feel like the Tardis dying and time flashing before its eyes as it remembers all the good times it shared with its ‘best friend’ The Doctor and all the moments when it felt most ‘proud’: Susan talking about coming up with the Tardis name (clearly a lie given later stories where all timelords use it, but hey ho!), the 3^rd Doctor explaining the Tardis to Jo, the 4^th Doctor talking about ‘trans-dimensional engineering’ with pride, the 5^th Doctor talking about changing ‘the desktop theme’ (from Children In Need special ‘Time-Crash’ if you can’t place it), the 9^th Doctor boasting to Rose about the assembled hordes of Genghis Khan trying to attack the Tardis and failing and the 11^th Doctor calling Idris ‘you sexy thing!’ plus the admiration of Martha and Amy on walking inside her doors for the first time. It’s a sweet nod to the past that tells us, without telling us, that the Tardis is so much more than a machine and really is ‘alive’.
Better still the writers have turned the Tardis into a sort of cosmic version of the ‘Home Alone’ film franchise crossed with a haunted house, so that the Tardis – usually the one reliable and comforting sight in the series – has been turned on its head and made scary (just like the better parts of ‘The Edge Of Destruction’). Behind every door is a potential threat or a lethal trap, namely the ‘time zombies’ running round the ship stalking Clara, who look as if they’ve been covered in lava. The Doctor doesn’t know who or what they are, with the story bringing up all sorts of intriguing questions about who they might be – and where the story all falls apart again. I mean they look pretty darn great, far greater than the budget should ever have allowed for, like melted pools of rock that have been left to sizzle and would have been worthy (if lumbering) monsters in any other story, except this one. There’s a moment in ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ when the Tardis crew start debating what’s going on: it turns out that (spoilers) they’ve gone too far back into the past and are heading towards the big bang but the Tardis, which refuses to be destroyed, has been trying to warn them and making them act funny. Before Barbara cottons on to what’s going on there’s serious discussion of whether something might have invaded the ship and everyone looks scared – to this day people talk about what a thrilling story that might have made. Well, Thompson tries it again here: who are these mysterious zombies and where have they come from? Could they be an alien race hiding at the heart of the Tardis that have just been set free?(Modern viewers since 2024 might want to imagine where Sutekh is in all this, possibly hiding and chortling with glee). It turns out that (more spoilers) nope: they’re the ghost-futures of the five people who’ve fallen into the eye of harmony that powers the Tardis and have become fused together in one great burst of heat and they’re not threatening our famous five just asking for help (well, it is a star I suppose: it’s a wonder they survived long enough to start walking around as much as they do). Clever and very visual and all, but a bit of a cheat after hinting at being something else. It’s also never made clear just why they lumber around threateningly instead of speaking or writing what’s going on as a warning to their younger selves or even simply blocking the door to the eye of harmony so nobody goes through it: the script is ambiguous whether they are reaching out in a threatening manner when they’re actually trying to help or are trying to offer a warning that gets lost in translation (though the mirror with the hand-holding at the end suggests the former). It would have helped the resolution if the extras had copies Matt Smith’s and Jenna Coleman’s highly distinctive walks too: even watching back with the answers it’s hard to equate two of these figures with our friends or even work out which zombies they’re supposed to be. 

And talking of cheats there’s the big one, the single biggest and most blatant re-set button in arguably the series history – because it is a button. You know, I’ve re-watched this part of the story so many times and I still can’t quite work out what happens. I mean, I get what happens: There’s a big explosion and immediately Clara notices a fragment of something (described as a ‘grenade like device’) flying towards her so she picks it up – turns out that it’s her future self sending her a ‘big red button’ that imprints into her hand, that the Doctor uses to send the Tardis back into the past and repair all the damage. It is, after all, a remote control for the tractor beam, the device that the Doctor accidentally switched off so Clara could fly the Tardis. The Doctor does, after all, ask the Tardis for a ‘big red button’ originally so he can put things right again shortly before it rolls at Clara’s feet. But how does this work physically? I mean, the Tardis is sentient enough to do this sure, but the Tardis doesn’t have hands. This object doesn’t simply appear, it’s chucked. And if it wanted the Doctor’s attention that badly then it would have chucked it directly at his he had, surely, not Clara – a character that the story establishes the Tardis never entirely trusts – and not at her feet where she might have missed it (there is a ginormous explosion going on after all). Given ‘The Edge Of Destruction’, where the Tardis offers clues in a more metaphorical symbolic sense than a ‘big red button’,  you think there would have been an hour of melted clocks and salvage leaflets pouring through the ceiling fans and a ginormous ‘L’ plate with a cross through it appearing on the Tardis windows or something. This isn’t how the Tardis or the series usually work and it feels like the biggest cheat going. I mean, I know the story’s in the journey and not the destination (much like the Jules Verne source material) but it’s still a cheat. You can’t help come out of this story and not feel that 1) it’s all been pointless  because nobody remembers it and 2) that we’ve been manipulated (as well as 3) How much better it would have been if any other solution than this one had been found, one that comes out of nowhere, albeit right at the beginning out of nowhere before we know what to look for).

Talking of cheats, Clara learns a lot about the Doctor in this episode, things that even we don’t know, but then forgets them again because of the events of this story. In the library she picks up, of all things, a book on the time war and learns about the Doctor’s past as a great warrior: oddly she’s not as scared by this as perhaps she ought to be. She also hones in on the Doctor’s great secret, the one that runs across this season: his name, opening the book to just the right page (handy that). Sadly she doesn’t have time to tell us what it is, just enough to confront the Doctor about it later in an emotionally charged scene that’s one of the episode’s best. The Doctor, too, takes the fact that they’re about to die as an opportunity to confront her about who she really is: after all, she’s just (inadvertently) wrecked his ship and he knows the Tardis well enough to trust her instincts to people over her own, plus there’s the fact that she keeps turning up as different characters and dying all over the place. Who is she?! He almost has Clara dangling off a ravine before he realises that she really is every bit as ordinary as she says she is and (in a line lifted from ‘Dalek’) that she’s more scared of the Doctor than anything else going on right now. And why are they dangling off a ravine? Well, that’s the one part of this story that lives up to its billing, because of course there’s a ravine inside the Tardis. It turns out that at least someone making this story has understood ‘Edge Of Destruction’ after all as it’s presented as the Tardis’ self-defence mechanism, fiercely guarding the wound where the salvage equipment got in and disguising the way in. The Doctor’s decision to take a leap of faith and having to backtrack hastily and get Clara to trust him enough to jump into oblivion is the key scene of this story, even if its wiped from both of their memories a few minutes later.

When we see it the disintegrated engine room is a thing of beauty too, the Tardis throwing a time loop around the explosion so that it’s frozen in mid-air. The scene was Moffat’s idea, replacing a simpler idea in Thompson’s script, and directly inspired by an art exhibition he’d just seen at the Tate National, Rebecca Horn’s abstract work ‘Concert For Anarchy’, in which a piano was chopped up and the parts suspended in space (thus making this story only the fourth story in the Whoniverse to be directly inspired by a painting and, weirdly enough, only the second of those not to be inspired by the Mona Lisa). It looks amazing, metal objects strewn around a giant room as if a toddler was creating an abstract painting and while the still photographs and behind-the-scenes footage reveal how everything is cleverly held up with wires it looks amazing in the context of this episode. It actually feels like something The Tardis would do too, a desperate last gasp bit of sacrifice so that its best friend would escape unharmed.

The centre of the Tardis then (in as much as an ever –changing multi-dimensional vehicle like The Tardis can ever have a centre, which is a bit like saying ‘Terminus’ is the centre of an ever-growing and shrinking universe) is the centre of the story and worth getting to. Unfortunately to get there you have to navigate several cul-de-sacs that take you absolutely nowhere. The biggest one is the salvage team and the way they’re treated, a bunch of brothers who act as part-strangers and part-bullies towards each other. Bickering I can understand, competition between each other who can get the most salvage sure, but just look at the way poor Tricky (short for ‘Electricky’ in the script but not on screen) is treated here. It turns out, in one of the silliest Dr Who plot revelations of them all, that the sensitive brother with the big heart, whose empathetic to those around him, isn’t really the android his brothers say he is. I mean who’d have guessed that someone caring actually had, you know, a real heart? His brothers meanwhile have no heart at all: it turns out there was a big accident Tricky can’t remember in which he nearly died in an explosion and had to be put back together again. Given that he was the elder brother and due to inherit the salvage business his younger brothers teamed up to freeze him out and convince him that he was only an android and thus not entitled to anything. It’s daft: I mean I’m willing to believe anytjing of the Human race when money is involved but 1) Tricky still has feelings and parts of him that work as Human, wouldn’t he ever once stop to question this? and 2) This is a tiny salvage company that really isn’t doing very well, not a multi-million business. Surely his brothers would have been better off buying him out of his meagre share or clubbing together to vote him out of being boss? It shouldn’t take a lie this monumental. The ruse is only found out when Tricky is pinioned to the Tardis wall by a bit of flying corridor and asks his brother to cut his limbs off to save him. Surely, given the dangerous line of work they’re involved in something similarly dangerous would have cropped up in conversation by now? Or simply though an android having an entirely different view of life if they know they can simply be rebuilt? I mean, Ricky seems the sort that would have climbed every last robotic tree to rescue the neighbourhood cats with no thought of safety or stopped a relative from being run over in a spaceship docking bay, or working part-time as a space lollipop lady. What did they think they were going to have to say on Tricky’s deathbed? ‘Sorry, son, you can’t simply replace your heart with a rovotic one because you’re Human and as able to die as the rest of us, sorry should have warned you about that. have some grapes. And, oh yeah, all this time you were able to eat and that gnawing hunger in your tummy isn’t just your robotics talking, sorry about that’. Also, we know the Doctor’s good at reading people but if he can read a person is really a person and not an android within minutes then surely it wouldn’t take people living and working around Tricky all that much longer to work it out? I mean, the Doctor has quite a long list of reasons as to why he’s real’. It’s almost as if they didn’t think this part of the script through and added it at the last minute because nothing was happening. Honestly, this family is pure evil. At least when Dr Who scripts usually do this there’s a turning point where the victim learns the truth and puts it right, confronting those who hurt them, but the nature of this script means that everyone’s memory is wiped and Tricky walks off still thinking he’s an android without the Doctor ever commenting. Also, if Tricky’s arms really are real then how does he ever get out of being permanently stuck to the Tardis wall and free to turn into a zombie? He should at the very least be dripping blood (in another plot hole, given what we know about the Tardis engine and the eye of harmony, shouldn’t everyone be cooked to death even if it was frozen in time? It’s clearly still hot around the tardis engine room as everyone is sweating).

That’s a long list of complaints, then, and honestly if we’re comparing like for like then I’d take ‘Invasion Of Time’ over this episode in every area: yeah that last episode never delivered on its promise but at least we had the joke for the first time that there were huge great bits to the Tardis we never usually saw and at least it capped a really good story that pushed the Doctor further than he’d ever been pushed before. After reading the synopsis I was hoping for something a lot more tangible, more 'real', as the Tardis became a character in its own right (like ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ again in fact where the Tardis felt more like a person and less like a cryptic crossword puzzle – had we not had that story this one would have seemed like a step forward in making the Tardis a ‘person’ again but with it ‘Journey’ feels like a step back and sadly none of the future eras of the show dared go near the idea of making the Tardis a ‘character’ rather than ‘transport’ again, even though it’s a good one with so much unexplored potential). This story is just a car crash, in all meanings of the word. There’s not much extra depth or emotion to this story at all and what there is becomes swept away by the re-set ending that means it’s like it never happened. ‘Journey’ could and should have been so much better given that we had the single best sandbox for generating ideas to play with and a script that could have done literally anything (for instance I much prefer Thompson’s first idea, of having the Tardis collide with another ship and get wrapped around it, even if that’s a bit too close to the plot for ‘The Armageddon Factor’ ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ and ‘Timecrash’, even if his second, of the Tardis crashing into a school, just like the one where Thompson used to work, was plainly silly and rightly rejected by Moffat). I like to think that, perhaps in the year 2048 when we’re up to Doctor 27, a Gallifreyan-alien hybrid whose trans-gender trans-species and ginger, following another thirty-five year gap, someone somewhere will come along and do this story properly, the way it ought to be told, with a plot that isn’t undone and fan-friendly scenes galore (maybe with an actual invasion this time: I’m sure there must be some remnants of Sutekh lying around there somewhere, never mind the missing Sontaron trooper from ‘The Invasion Of Time’).

For all that, though, this isn’t a terrible episode, just a disappointing one. Unlike the very worst Dr Who stories, which can be terrible from first scene to last, there’s an atmosphere that’s really good and intense, the way the lighting sets and costumes all suggest intense heat and the way the tension gets higher and higher. Honestly had there been more scenes like the one where the Doctor breaks down to Clara and talks vulnerably about how he’s damaged his best friend forever and doesn’t know how to fix her, after all those years of her taking care of him, then ‘Tardis’ would have ended up in my top hundred. There are a lot of really good subtle little bits in this story: I love the way, for instance, that in a story all about the distances we keep from each other and the guards we put up to protect ourselves from being hurt (what all the characters are doing to a extent, playing their own mind games with each other – although being the Tardis it’s physical not metaphorical) when letting other people into our hearts, our centres, could help us heal quicker is a brilliant idea that’s very Dr Who. We all have our traps and ghosts and wounds from the past and fears of what might be in the future that keep us damaged in the present to different extents and ‘Journey’ is a great metaphor for how the healing of scars is relative and doesn’t keep to a timetable.  Just look at how the ending is resolved with a neat bit of mirrored hand-holding: the brothers trying to rescue one another and putting time on the ‘right’ track, while the Doctor works out how to put things right with the ‘big red button’ after Clara comfortingly reaches for his hand and he notices the lines etched onto her skin. There are lots of little great moments like that, moments that make you feel you’re in the hands of a really clever storyteller – it’s the basic storytelling that goes a bit off-centre. There’s a great story to be salvaged here, in other words, with scrap metal other stories would kill for. They just built a flimsy storey out of great foundations, like so much of series 7B (the weakest by far of Matt Smith’s run, with Moffat distracted by the behind the scenes budget drama and the 50^th anniversary special both). Really Moffat should have been writing this himself, as an uber-fan for other uber-fans: then it would, I suspect have been great.

+ POSITIVES: Matt Smith. This is a funny old script foer the 11^th Doctor, a bit out of synch with all the others. It starts with the Doctor bickering with Clara (quite unlike their ‘besties with a tendency to want to impress the other’ relationship in most other stories; she compares his need to have the Tardis like her to ‘one of those guys who has to have their mother approve of their girlfriend’ and in the story’s best line points out ‘Good guys do not have zombies running around their house – rule one of basic storytelling!’), has him threatening a bunch of total strangers with explosion (something the 6^th Doctor did in ‘Attack Of The Cybermen’, which was in character for him but not for Dr 11), sees him oddly unaffected at the death of the Tardis that he mourned so brilliantly in ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ and not much of the old-man-in-a-young-person’s-body antics Matt is so good at. And yet he covers all the cracks in the script by finding ways to soften the approach to make it more in keeping with ‘his’ Doctor. Matt’s always doing bits of ‘business’ in this story that weren’t in the script: to name just three look at the funny ‘yeah right’ smirk face he pulls behind Clara when she asks if he’s being rude about her driving skills, immediately wiping it off his face when she looks round (she is a teacher after all!) Or the moment when he reveals to the outraged salvagers that he was lying about the bomb and starts running the top of the nearest one’s head in a ‘haha, only kidding, we’re friends right?’ playground way. Or the moment when he realises Clara is ‘normal’ and exactly who she says she is and starts squeezing her cheeks and squeaking her nose, much to her befuddlement. You can tell how good the lead actor is by whether they can salvage a dodgy script just with the way they perform it: this story, as much as the acclaimed brilliant performances in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’, to name but two, are why I rate Matt higher than Peter Capaldi (who only comes alive when the scripts are worthy of him generally) or Jodie Whittaker (who only comes alive when the scripts are worthy of her Doctor in particular). Jenna Coleman has an even more difficult sell as Clara, given that she has less scenes and less people to talk to (and a lot more screaming to do: she barely ever screams again but she does it a lot this story), but her scene with the Doctor at the ravine where she turns from scared to angry to comforting in seconds is one of her best (and is really good considering how ill she was during filming – one of the reasons there’s less Clara in this one is that she was taken poorly and had to cram most of her scenes in at the end, while the Director filmed extra corridor running around with the salvage team, although nothing of any great importance was actually cut). 

NEGATIVES - The three salvagers are some of the weakest drawn guest roles in Dr Who. They’re all incredibly thick with the Doctor treating them as such (with reminders of the bad old days when he was travelling with Romana and all Humans seemed like idiots). One of Van Baalen brothers dies before we get to know them and the others seem oddly unphased by this), one is just your stereotypical bully and the other is an android-who-isn’t. They’re supposed to be amongst the best or at least the most experienced salvage workers going and yet…they’re all of them too young to have been doing this job for very long (either we manage to slow down the signs of aging in the future or this story was written for a much elder team of brothers than the actors who were cast). Between them the three bumble around like The Chuckle Brothers before running off like they’re in Scooby Doo while being as stereotypically economically driven as Fagin’s gang in Oliver Twist, past the point surely when anyone would be pleading to go home. You don’t feel anything for them even though, from their point of view, they’re exactly the sort of aggrieved innocent parties someone like The Doctor would normally be helping: there they were, enjoying a normal day at the space-office, when a large blue box interrupted their salvage. Next thing they know there’s a shouty man in a bow tie threatening them and asking for their help with a promise of money. Then they discover it’s all a ruse and they’ve been put in danger, only to then find that’s a ruse and it was all a lie for bow-tie man to get their way. The Doctor’s taken out whole civilisations for less lies than this. And yet none of them react a normal way, with anger or annoyance or distrust or shock (none of them are at all surprised by the Tardis’ interior) or anything much really, a combination of poor acting and poor scripting. I mean, are they all androids or something?! (A twist that falls flat when all three are acting weird so Tricky doesn’t seem in any way different). Instead they’re just after the metal, even though it’s clear they’ve been conned. The only thing they don’t try to salvage in this story is their dignity. Mind you it could have been worse - the salvagers were more flipping Coal Hill students in the second draft of the script, so I’m glad that didn’t happen.

BEST QUOTE: Clara: ‘I think I’m more scared of you right now than anything else on this Tardis’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Go straight to ‘The Edge Of Destruction’, do not pas go, do not get lost in a timeloop using the fast-return switch, do not pass £2000  

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