Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS (TV story)
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS was the tenth regular episode of the seventh series of Doctor Who produced by BBC Wales. It was the first time a TARDIS room other than a console room had been seen on television since The Christmas Invasion introduced the TARDIS wardrobe. It afforded by far the most expansive view of the TARDIS interior since the 1996 tele-film. As important to the series' narrative arc, it also contained the first instance of the Eleventh Doctor confronting Clara Oswald about her multiple lives and deaths.
Synopsis
Clara is lost in the depths of the Doctor's TARDIS which is damaged and captured by intergalactic salvage crew Van Baalen Bros., who want to sell it for scrap. However, the Doctor threatens to destroy the TARDIS by putting it in lockdown and activating the self-destruct if the salvage crew doesn't help him find Clara.
Plot
The android Tricky is polishing a part inside the Van Baalen Bros. salvage ship when the system alerts him and Bram that there is salvage to be verified. Bram believes that it's just space junk, but his brother Gregor wants to go for it, anyway. They suit up.
Meanwhile, the Doctor is hounding Clara to attempt to bond with the TARDIS, but she flatly refuses to talk to a piece of machinery. He gets her to agree to try flying it, and to make it easier, he puts it into Basic Mode. She flips some levers and suddenly, the ship shudders, losing then regaining power, and the music that the Van Baalen ship had been playing starts to play. The scanner screen cracks and shudders, and the Doctor starts to work the controls more frantically. He can't get the shields up, and the salvage ship's magno-grab nearly has them. The Doctor forces a lever up, and something in the TARDIS console explodes, throwing them both back. Clara asks him to tell her that there's a button he can press to fix it. He says, "Oh, yes, big, friendly button." Clara asks if he's lying to make her feel better, and he is. A hand-sized metal object rolls towards Clara, who picks it up. It burns her right hand, and she drops it.
The machinery of the salvage ship pulls the TARDIS into a bay, and, believing it to be a derelict escape pod, the brothers attempt to cut into it, but are unsuccessful. Tricky's bionic eyes pick up signs of a living being - a pair of shoes sticking out from under the wreckage. They withdraw, and Gregor is whispering a cover story to the other two when the Doctor pops in, saying it's not polite to whisper. Bram says that they found his ship drifting and the Doctor immediately corrects him, saying an illegal magno-grab broke his ship, which would have been safe if he hadn't disabled the defenses. He shows them that he found the remote to the magna-grab in Gregor's pocket.
The Doctor realises that Clara is not with them. Realising that she's still inside, he bolts for the TARDIS, but Tricky stops him, telling him that the fuel is leaking. The Doctor spots respirators, then talks the salvage crew into going with him, promising the salvage of a lifetime within the ship.
Inside the TARDIS, the Cloister Bell sounds. Clara awakes in a corridor, having been unconscious. She checks the hand that was burned. Coming to a door with a red light, she debates opening it. She regrets deciding to do so, as flames gush out. She runs down the corridor to escape.
In the console room, the Doctor is amused by the reaction of the others to the size of the TARDIS. He uses fans to vent the gas and smoke from the room. As they all take off their respirators, he tells the others that he needs them to help find Clara. They initially refuse, but he tells them he has activated the TARDIS self-destruct. Locking the doors so they can't leave, he informs them that the "salvage of a lifetime" he was talking with was not the ship, but Clara.
Moving around the TARDIS, Clara hears a growling noise. She takes refuge in a very large library. She goes to a large book entitled The History of the Time War. Flipping through a few pages, she pauses and reads something, muttering to herself "So that's who..." She then hears the growling noise again, and hides behind a bookshelf.
Her hand continues to ache from the burn, but she sees the burn marks slowly resolving into letters. She ends up in the console room, finding another ossified creature, mimicking her movements and approaching her.
The Doctor, Gregor, and Tricky reach the console room, and the Doctor senses Clara in an echo of the console room. With the help of Gregor's scanner to identify Clara, the Doctor creates a temporary link and grabs Clara before the creature touches her. Gregor demands the Doctor end the countdown; the Doctor, though revealing the self-destruct was a ruse to get their cooperation, finds the TARDIS engines have become unstable due to the leakage of time caused by the incident, and they must go to the engine room by way of the Eye of Harmony to prevent it from exploding. En route, Tricky is injured and in pain, to his surprise; Gregor is forced to reveal Tricky is truly human and also his brother; after an accident that cost the life of their father, Tricky had lost his memories and had special implants to replace damaged organs, so Gregor had acted as if Tricky was an android so as to claim the captaincy of the salvage vessel. The Doctor comments on Gregor's treatment of Tricky and suggests he can do better.
While traveling through the Eye of Harmony, the four are trapped by ossified creatures. When Gregor scans them and finds one similar to Clara's biology, the Doctor confesses that these creatures are themselves from the future due to the time leak, and tries to prevent that future from happening. However, Gregor and Tricky are unable to avoid contacting themselves and become the conjoined ossified creature, seen earlier, before the Doctor and Clara's eyes. The two flee towards the engine room, but come across a chasm with no way across. The Doctor, thinking that they are going to die, asks Clara to explain who she is and how she could have died twice before. Clara doesn't understand, and the Doctor realises she has no knowledge of their previous encounters and is simply a young woman. The Doctor and Clara then leap across the chasm believing that it is just an illusion and reach the engine room.
In the engine room, they find the engine has already exploded but the TARDIS has placed the room in time stasis as a safety measure. The Doctor is aware the TARDIS is trying to tell him something, but cannot figure out what until Clara looks at her hand, the burn marks fully formed into words - "big friendly button". The Doctor realises that they need to go back to the point of the disaster and activate the magnetic beacon - the device Clara picked up - to stop the magnetic tractor and prevent the disaster. They race to the console room, where the Doctor takes the discarded beacon and prepares to travel through a time rift. Clara asks what she will remember and says she knows the Doctor's name from reading the Time War book; the Doctor promises her that she will remember nothing. The Doctor successfully crosses the rift and warns his past self. The past Doctor, understanding the warning, grabs the beacon from Clara when she picks it up - the letters "big friendly button" inscribed on its side - and hits the button.
Time resets to before the events of the episode. The Van Baalens ignore the TARDIS and continue, though in this new timeline, Gregor has become more appreciative of Tricky having recalled the Doctor's words. In the TARDIS, the Doctor asks Clara if she feels safe with him, and she readily agrees.
Cast
- The Doctor - Matt Smith
- Clara Oswald - Jenna-Louise Coleman
- Gregor Van Baalen - Ashley Walters
- Bram Van Baalen - Mark Oliver
- Tricky - Jahvel Hall
- Time Zombies - Sarah Louise Madison, Ruari Mears, Paul Kasey
References
Books
- The History of the Time War appears to be a book unfolding the history of the Last Great Time War. Clara read the book while in The TARDIS' library. She later implies that the Doctor is mentioned in it by name.
- The library also contains the Encyclopedia Gallifreya, which is knowledge in liquid form.
The TARDIS
- Tricky mistakenly describes the TARDIS as "some kind of escape pod."
- The TARDIS' sentience is alluded to yet again; and when the salvage team tries to open it, Tricky senses that she seems to "suffer".
- The Doctor tells Clara that the TARDIS is not like a cheese grater.
- The TARDIS display that declares "Engine Status: Overload" also mentions the console room, Eye of Harmony, library, observatory, and Arch-Recon. These rooms are all seen in the episode, although Arch-Recon is named fully as architectural reconfiguration system.
- Clara sees the swimming pool while wandering through the TARDIS.
- The Doctor states that the TARDIS is "infinite."
Individuals
- Tricky thinks he's an android, as this is what his brothers told him as a means of relieving boredom.
Story notes
- The name of the episode was influenced by the novel Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
- This is the first televised story to include the word "TARDIS" in its title.
- This episode aired on Jenna-Louise Coleman's 27th birthday.
- At seven words long, this episode shares the record for the longest televised story title to date with The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, which also is a title inspired by a book/film.
- Sarah Louise Madison, Ruari Mears and Paul Kasey (Time Zombies) are credited on-screen, but not in Radio Times.
- Although the action was normal in the classic series, this is the first time since the series restarted that the Doctor has closed the TARDIS doors from the console, rather than manually shutting them.
Ratings
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Filming locations
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Production errors
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| How could this lettering… | …have come from this prop? |
- In a way totally unexplained by the narrative, the magno-grab remote prop has a different font to the scar it left behind on Clara's hand. Though it's not noticeable while watching the episode at normal speed, screen grabs make it immediately apparent that the letters just don't match up in any way. Most obviously, the prop's lettering is centre-justified, while the writing on her hand is left-justified. The error reveals a lack of continuity between the make-up department (or possibly VFX, if the scar was inserted digitally) and the art department.
- When the magno-grab pulls the TARDIS in, the TARDIS is handled by several large mechanical arms before being dumped onto the pile of junk that Tricky sees a pair of legs in, legs that presumably belong to the Doctor. In order for the Doctor to have been thrown free in the way implied in the story, he would have had to be hanging on to the outside of the TARDIS unseen as it was being passed from one large mechanical arm to another and then somehow gotten underneath a pile of junk that the TARDIS was deposited on top of. This is most likely a result of a lack of continuity between different art departments.
Continuity
- Clara briefly learns the Doctor's true name but then forgets it when the Doctor rewrites the entire adventure. This makes her the second person (other than the Doctor himself) in the televised series who is explicitly stated to know the Doctor's true name, the first being River Song. (TV: Forest of the Dead)
- Amongst its other rooms and chambers, the TARDIS has an observatory with a telescope that resembles the light chamber from Torchwood Estate. (TV: Tooth and Claw)
- Until this episode, Clara didn't know that she had had two other lives. The Doctor mentioned the Dalek Asylum and their battle against the Great Intelligence in Victorian London. Clara forgets their conversation when the Doctor rewrites time. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks, The Snowmen)
- Clara glimpses the TARDIS swimming pool. (TV: The Invasion of Time, The Eleventh Hour, Day of the Moon)
- Clara hides in the TARDIS library. (TV: The Eleventh Hour)
- Inside the library, the Doctor has kept The History of the Time War, a book outlining the history of the Time War. (TV: Rose, The Unquiet Dead, The End of Time)
- Clara comes across the Doctor's cot. (TV: A Good Man Goes to War, GAME: The Gunpowder Plot)
- Clara picks up an apparently wooden model of the TARDIS. Amy made several models of the TARDIS, one of which appears identical. (TV: The Eleventh Hour, TV: Let's Kill Hitler)
- As the TARDIS leaks the past, several voices can be heard. They are, in respective order:
- The voice of Susan Foreman says, "I made up the name 'TARDIS' from the initials: Time and Relative Dimension In Space." (TV: An Unearthly Child)
- The Third Doctor saying, "The TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental" and his companion, Jo, asking "What does that mean?" (TV: Colony in Space)
- The Eleventh Doctor saying, "You sexy thing!" then Idris (the TARDIS in human form) replying, "See, you do call me that! Is it my name?" followed by the Doctor's exclamation of "You bet it's your name!" (TV: The Doctor's Wife)
- The Fourth Doctor saying, "That's trans-dimensional engineering. A key Time Lord discovery." (TV: The Robots of Death)
- The Ninth Doctor saying, "The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn't get through that door, and believe me they've tried." (TV: Rose)
- Martha Jones saying, "It's just a box with that room crammed in!". (TV: Smith and Jones)
- Amy Pond saying, "We're in space!" (TV: The Beast Below)
- Ian Chesterton asking, "A thing that looks like a police box, standing in a junkyard, it can move anywhere in time and space?" (TV: An Unearthly Child)
- The Fifth Doctor asking, "You've changed the desktop theme, haven't you?" (TV: Time Crash)
- This is the third time the Doctor has forced others into helping him by threatening to blow the TARDIS up, once again admitting that the TARDIS self-destruct is a hoax. (TV: Attack of the Cybermen, Victory of the Daleks)
- The Seventh Doctor's umbrella appears. (TV: Paradise Towers)
- The Eye of Harmony is seen within the TARDIS. (TV: Doctor Who)
- It is a star caught at the moment of collapse into a singularity. (TV: The Deadly Assassin)
- Tegan Jovanka and Nyssa reported feeling increased gravitational effects as they approached the centre of the TARDIS. (TV: Castrovalva)
- The TARDIS's cloister bell tolls after the TARDIS is pulled out of flight and suffers heavy damage to the console room. (TV: Logopolis, Castrovalva, Resurrection of the Daleks, Doctor Who, Hide)
- The Doctor steps through a time rift in order to undo the TARDIS' crash, much like how he previously walked into a crack in time and space in order to prevent the TARDIS from exploding and erasing all of reality. (TV: The Big Bang)
- Despite time being rewritten, Gregor remembers something that the Doctor had told him not to forget. (TV: The Big Bang)
- The Doctor states that the architectural reconfiguration system is made from living metal. (TV: Robot, Silver Nemesis)
- The TARDIS reconfigures its internal architecture. (TV: Logopolis, The Eleventh Hour, et. al.)
- The TARDIS has "echo" copies of the control room. (TV: The Doctor's Wife)
- The Doctor closes the TARDIS doors from the console. (TV: An Unearthly Child, Pyramids of Mars, The Five Doctors, et. al.)
- The Doctor comments the Time Lords had "dreadful hats". (TV: The Deadly Assassin, et. al.)
- He further mentions that they had bad fashion sense, but were very, very smart.
- The Doctor interacts with a past version of himself. (TV: The Big Bang, Space/Time, Last Night)
- The Doctor uses the extractor fans again, this time activating them from the console rather than by vocal command. (TV: Let's Kill Hitler, The Angels Take Manhattan)
- The plot, involving a damaged/destroyed TARDIS and a setting in which the past, present and future have collided, with enemies which are future selves of the characters, is similar to PROSE: Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible.
Home video releases
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External links
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