Doctor Who Series Blog – Journey to the Centre of The TARDIS

This week’s episode directed its attention straight into the hidden depths of the TARDIS and it was hard not to scratch your head in wonder and confusion.

We’re used to flying through space and time to far-flung destinations, be it alien civilisations on the edge of the universe, or the slightly more familiar excavations into Earth’s history. Saturday’s episode rejected the external in favour of one of the many great mysteries of Doctor Who: exactly what is in the TARDIS? Having been ‘magna-grabbed’ by a garbage ship looking for scrap metal, Clara is trapped inside the TARDIS whilst it leaks engine fuel. It was up to the Doctor and his unwilling companions to search the labyrinth for her, before it was too late.

From the outside, the TARDIS is just a little blue telephone box with a door and a light on the top. The inside, however, is the most mind boggling spaceship ever imagined that seems to contain the entire universe, and just one or two horribly deformed fiery creatures. What was so brilliant about the TARDIS’s depiction was the seemingly infinite number of mysteries held within its modest blue walls. It was slightly unfathomable how, in one room, there was what appeared to be many strings of metal with a white shining orb at the end that could produce anything the imagination could create, but then again, in the realm of Doctor Who you learn not to question the credibility of these things.

In previous episodes and series, the TARDIS has been presented as a living creature with a consciousness. This was really taken to the extreme when the Doctor announced that it was spinning an endless web of corridors due to one of the salvagers stealing an orb from it. It’s not enough that it can travel anywhere in time and space, but it has to live too. Whilst I’ve always thought that it just consisted of what looks like an air pump from a hospital, we even got to see what really fuels the TARDIS, namely a burning star. The TARDIS seems incomprehensible, but this episode showed that everyone’s favourite little blue box was actually a mini universe, and full of everything you could imagine.

Secrets really were the theme of this episode. In a library that could rival that of the Alexandria, Clara found a book detailing the events of the Time War, something any person who remotely likes Doctor Who would kill for. We’ve been drip fed little pieces of information from the most important event in Timelord history, but it’s never been quite enough to satisfy our hunger. It was hinted that Clara discovered the Doctor’s real name, foreshadowing the end of the series which, it has been announced, will be entitled The Name of the Doctor. Oh, and don’t think the whole Clara-coming-back-to-life-at-various-points-in-history thing has been forgotten about either, the Doctor interrogated her in this episode but, alas, we’re still no further to finding out why she keeps coming back. My theory is that she took out extreme life insurance.

What I really liked about this episode was the fact that it created a universe out of the TARDIS. Most of the time, attention is detracted away from what is possibly the best thing about the show with exotic holidays that never go as planned. It recalled episodes from earlier seasons, like the time Rose Tyler looked into the centre of the TARDIS, into the time vortex, and acted like a badass – bringing people back to life and erasing Daleks into dust. Or when the Master rigged the TARDIS up as some kind of bomb. In this episode, it wasn’t so much an accessory as an integral part of the whole show, capable of sustaining a narrative for the entire 45 minutes. It was action packed and, like Hide, scary as hell at times. You get the sense that everything’s really building up to a finale, a grand unveiling of a closely guarded secret, something of paramount importance to the show.

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, in summary, really gave us what we’ve been craving for: a sense of bigger things to come, of secrets being revealed and our questions being answered. The way it focused on the TARDIS was masterful, spinning a storyline that was believable, given the nature of the enigmatic spaceship. Perhaps we’ll see the entire Doctor Who universe come crashing down in future episodes. We’ll just have to wait and see…