11.41: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
In which it all gets a bit ‘90s.
Broadcast: April 2013
Watched: January 2022
“I brought you here to keep you safe, but it happened again. You died, again.”
I really like this one, even though I remember it being incredibly unpopular. It does a better job at making the depths of the TARDIS magical than Invasion of Time 6, or The Doctor’s Wife, come to that. Love the grand library and the shot of the swimming pool, plus the gratuitous disembodied voices from past episodes. The bit where everyone’s trapped by their mutant future selves is genuinely creepy (although it is not remotely clear why the hell getting burnt a bit would turn you into a zombie). The idea the older brothers have wound the youngest up by convincing him he’s an android is hilarious.
From what I recall people’s problems with it were
a) the guest cast, who are not great, especially Mark Oliver as Bram; and
b) the way it ends with a literal reset button. But that really doesn’t bother me? It allows them to do a no-win situation, and play the confrontation about who Clara is without it dominating the rest of the season. It’s also really well done, with the exchange of secrets: Clara forces Doctor to tell who the monsters are, so he corners her and demands to know who she is.
Also, both regulars are great in this one: Smith saying he’ll blow up the TARDIS if the Van Baalen’s won’t help him, then *halving the time*, is properly brilliant, as is the confession he made it up to put pressure on them.
All that said... this steals half the plot of an New Adventures book (Time’s Crucible, which also has multiple timezones in the same physical space, and monsters who are the cast from the future), then produces it with a weirdly Red Dwarf vibe (the all black guest cast, the industrial spaceship, the rock soundtrack), so it’s kind of laser targeted pretty much at me.
Other things:
There’s a nice bit of direction in the pre-credits, where they’re just walking round and round the console.
Clara does a lot of BF-style talking to herself alone in the TARDIS, but it works on TV in a way it wouldn’t on audio.
I like the gratuitously Germanic names.
At the start, if the TARDIS is locked why is Doctor outside it?`
Clara reads A History of the Time War and says, “So that’s who...?” What on earth could it mean?
Gregor is an absolute prick, just doesn’t care when Bram is dead... but then he does care about Tricky? Which I think is probably on [writer] Steve Thompson rather than Gregor, to be fair.
The idea of console room echoes, which are somehow the same space but also somehow not, feels like utter nonsense. But it does allow a subtle tip off that something has gone weird when Clara walks into the console room we just saw Bram in and he’s not there.
At time of writing, Ashley Walters is the only one of the 623 members of So Solid Crew to have starred in Doctor Who. I learn from the TARDIS Wiki that K-9 once went on tour with them.
I seem to recall the reason this has a poor reputation was based on the fact that some read it as subtly racist at the time. As it's possibly the only Matt Smith episode I only watched the once (I thought that honour belonged only to A Town Called Mercy, but I forgot about this one, plus I rewatched Mercy recently), I couldn't say what the angle was.