Don’t be alarmed, but next week we are going… to the north. We might want some scissor grenades, limbo vapor, triple blast brain splitters, and the fleshy boy named Jenny. Anyway, that’s enough about one of my favorite Mark Gattis episodes. Let’s get to this week’s review of Doctor Who. This is an episode that’s just a bit naff despite its attempts at adventure, sci-fi, and far too many references of the series and seasons before it.

That big salvage ship from “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” is the image painted in my head of the 1st Doctor story, “A Big Hand For The Doctor.” It is a story of a mad fool who doesn’t age, saving children along with fighting pirates on the rooftops around Kensington Gardens. Most saliently though, he puts J. M. Barrie in that very park watching it all unfold two years prior to the release of The Little White Bird. It is the first appearance of Peter Pan. I don’t know why that story from the anthology book 13 Doctors 13 Stories (or its prior editions), with that particular chapter written by Eoin Colfer, sticks out for this one episode, but it does.

It involves a great big salvage ship that defines a little blue box made of wood as nothing more than scrap. I’m going to take Clara’s words from the last episode, “you grumpy old cow!” Though speaking of that, once again we’re in the business of telling Clara quite literally, “you are a special flower:” All the way up to the Doctor getting angry at her for keeping some kind of secret from him. I said it before, it is the mystery wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a sausage roll. She’s paradoxically both the most amazing thing in existence to a 1200+-year-old alien that travels through time and space, and yet, she’s just a normal human. This is confirmed by basic space junk all throughout this episode.

None of which is to say that Stephen Thompson’s writing is particularly bad. I’d say it was similarly solid with minor flaws in comparison to his other episode “The Curse of the Black Spot.” Maybe this episode has another monster that could have been explained better, maybe even sooner. I don’t think it is his influence that is rubbing me up all the wrong ways though, it is mostly Steven Moffat’s hand that does that here. I’ll admit, the plot of the salvage crew and their own secrets keeping them both distant from each other and close at the same time is a little strange. Once again, it isn’t a Moffat episode, but it has some heavy handprints of his conspiracy-style writing all over it.

It isn’t necessarily a thriller as it teases out details and tugs the string along. Yet it almost certainly puts mystery after mystery in front of you in what can only be explained as an attempt to confuse. Yes, that is a theme of the episode, as the TARDIS goes in a huff and she starts throwing rooms about after the salvage crew steals one of her orbs from the Architectural Reconfiguration System. Basically, it is the cupboard where the Star Trek replicators get the infinite materials to replicate and produce everything. Between that and the magno grabby claw-thing causing her to leak fuel, the whole episode is an excuse to have a sci-fi labyrinth maze of danger, secrets, and a library that is oddly dry.

This is a critique of Moffat’s wider style, but there are just too many references and otherwise thrown at you. Meanwhile, the TARDIS is trying to mess with everyone: how are you supposed to care? Why, at this point, am I supposed to care that Clara finds a book describing the history of The Last Great Time War and features the Doctor’s name (presumably) when the episode ends with a memory wipe? I’m going to skip over the fact that the Doctor’s greatest secret and the biggest of the Doctor’s regrets are sitting on a pedestal in plain view in the middle of the library, because let’s just say that it is the TARDIS that does it. It is still a mystery set up to be nothing more than a mystery that goes nowhere.

“Oh, but the Great Intelligence!” No, memory wipe. What happens later in this series doesn’t matter because it is a self-contained episode that sets us back to square one when the Doctor goes through the crack in the universe to stop the salvage ship from ever noticing the TARDIS for more than a second. Am I angry about this? Maybe I am. Last I checked no one loved a deus ex machina, but I don’t hate the episode. It is a fun romp through the largest ship in the universe as it flicked its own switch that stabilizes the rooms. The more horror-centric elements feel a little too teased for something so mundane.

Well, as mundane as Doctor Who gets: Your own charred self chasing you to the point of your own death at the hands of the Eye of Harmony. The eye is a collapsing star, suspended between the point of burning out (and becoming a Black Hole) and heating a solar system, used to power the TARDIS. I like that dark twist of your own future self bending back in time to be the one who traps you in your place of death, burning to a crisp. Yes, I do believe my therapist will have a lot of work to do this week, thank you for asking.

I’d have liked the Van Baalen brothers to have not been completely stupid, almost to Classic-Who levels of ignoring the wise old space tramp. Their own mystery was as well sign-posted as John O’Groats. Arguably the whole episode lacks any nuance, so to expect that here with any degree would be foolhardy. Once again, it feels like another piece of an oddly complex puzzle for what it is. The ones that are a single gradient and half a million pieces. It is just there so we can feel for them by the end, feeling like we got a personal look at these three people we’ll never see again.

Ultimately, every reference using archived lines by prior Doctors or little props of preceding episodes is a fun adventure for fans through nostalgia. For what is described as “casual” Doctor Who fans, it is another adventure touching upon some long-standing things that may go over some heads. It is not an episode worth your burning hatred like “In the Forest of the Night,” but it is no “Blink,” “Amy’s Choice,” “Love & Monsters” which I still love, or anything else. It is just a fine episode of no consequence, and thus is only remembered as that episode with the stupid brothers and a stomp through the TARDIS. Next week, we’re on to Yorkshire!

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Doctor Who "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS"

6

Score

6.0/10

Pros

• A fun, stupid adventure through the TARDIS.
• The dark backstory of the monsters.

Cons

• Deus ex ma-Clara.
• There is just too much going on.
• The brothers story is a little forced.