Day 795: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

The TARDIS is one of the best science fiction creations ever conceived. It's a time machine disguised as a blue box, that whilst it looks fairly small on the outside, inside it is infinity itself. And stories where we go inside the TARDIS have typically been rather interesting, just for the joy of seeing that infinity after being confined to the console room for so long. In these corridors, you can see all manner of splendid and odd rooms, suggesting that the TARDIS is even stranger and more magical than once thought, creating unforgettable stories.

So, with all of that in mind, I was actually quite looking forward to Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS. The chance to see TARDIS corridors and rooms, an ability to get a handle on what is at the very core of the TARDIS itself, all of these things excited me and made me anticipate this episode when it first aired. And, unfortunately, the story ended up being a bit of a disappointment. There are a lot of ways in which this story proves to be a let down, from the acting of Mark Oliver as Bram Van Baalen, who manages to be completely unconvincing, even when he's falling off a ladder. There's the fact that the entire story is literally fixed with a reset button, undoing all of the events of the past half hour or so, including a crucial development in the Clara story arc that, at this point in the series, is beginning to drag a little bit as everyone's come to the conclusion that Clara is in fact a perfectly normal person and not the weird space time event that the Doctor thinks she is (at least, not yet). And there's the scene where a man has to debate cutting either a piece of metal embedded in his brother's arm, or cutting his brother's arm off, which is a debate that really doesn't need to happen (it does happen, though, because of the fact that the man doing the cutting has convinced his brother that he's an android for a variety of reasons, none of which are at all acceptable). It's just not a very good story.

But, I still kind of like it for what it does well. There are time zombies that rampage through the corridors of the TARDIS, that are eventually revealed to be future echoes of the Doctor, Clara and the salvage team helping them, but with destroyed bodies. That's a fantastic idea, using the temporal weirdness of the TARDIS to great effect, and the reveal of this is a surprisingly strong moment. I also love that, as written, if quite achieved on screen, writer Steve Thompson tries to do cool things with the TARDIS interior, showing off weird rooms and playing with the idea of the TARDIS as an ever-shifting labyrinth. But, as much as I like these things, I still can't truly enjoy this episode.

At the heart of Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, we have an episode that should have shown the TARDIS as something weird and wonderful, but ended up showing the TARDIS as something average, with all sorts of problems that distract from what could have been something interesting.