Day 68: The Space Museum

The Doctor and co. encounter themselves, bringing a
new meaning to the term, take a good look at yourself

The TARDIS malfunctions in this episode, and time travel based hijinks ensue. For a show that deals with time travel, this sort of scenario hasn't really occurred, so it's nice to see the show try new things out. Ad so what we get is an episode where weird things happen, and we are forced to figure out exactly what has gone wrong, and like previous stories of this vein, The Edge of Destruction and Planet of Giants, we learn these things alongside the characters, which is fun, because it gives the audience something to do, instead of just sitting back and enjoying the ride. But if there's one thing that makes this episode stand out from any other, it's through the following. Time travel has never been used in such a way as it is now as a driving force in a plot. To explain, near the conclusion of this episode, the Doctor and co. discover their bodies in glass cabinets, and realise that they are viewing their own personal futures. So it now becomes their job to rewrite their futures and prevent what they have seen from coming to pass. So don't rewrite history, not one line, except when the plot says so. But it's more than that. We are subverting the very nature of televisual serials themselves, choosing to have our characters witness the end and then have that as a driving force as something to build up to. It's like peeking at the last chapter of a book, to find out what happens to the characters. You now know what will happen, but you don't know how, or why. Time travel changes that, because, unlike books, which tend to stay the same every time you read them, timelines can be in flux, and so we see a possibility of a last chapter, a possible conclusion. And so we now have something to drive the plot, to make sure that what will happen does not come to pass by changing history, and by rewriting not just history, but also the script.