Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS

    

Chapter The 173rd, which assumes the kids want less of Narnia and more of the wardrobe.

Plot:

The Van Baalen Bros, a three-man team of unscrupulous galactic salvage dealers, try to use illegal scoop tech to grab up the TARDIS floating in space. The Doctor happens to be giving Clara a lesson in the console controls, and has lowered the shields. The resultant damage causes lots of temporal instabilities, with past and future leaking into the present. The Doctor is thrown out of the ship, but Clara remains trapped inside. Her hand has been burned by a grenade-like device that flew into the console room at the moment of impact. Outside, the Doctor hoodwinks the salvage dealers into helping him find her, with the promise of the best haul of their lives. They and Clara wander round the maze-like TARDIS interior, pursued by burnt-flesh zombie creatures that have appeared out of nowhere. Gregor, the de facto leader of the Bros, steals part of the TARDIS architectural configuration system, and the TARDIS defense mechanisms kick in, causing doors to disappear behind them, replaced with impenetrable walls, or corridors that go round in Escher-like never ending circles.

Eventually, they find themselves all together trapped in the Eye of Harmony, power source of the TARDIS, with zombies blocking every way out and the Eye about to blow. The Doctor realises that the zombie creatures are future versions of themselves who got caught in the yet to happen explosion, and their fate is not yet fixed. They escape, and the Doctor and Clara work out that they have a literal reset button - a remote control for the scoop technology which the Doctor took from Gregor early on. This was the grenade-like device that flew into the console room at the beginning - it was a plot device all along. A message carved into it has been marked on Clara's hand reading "TURN STORY OFF NOW" or something like that. To do this, with sense-defying gusto, the Doctor throws the remote control into one of the gaps in the space-time continuum, and it lands at Clara's feet a few hours back. He shouts in to his early self to reset time, and the earlier Doctor hits the button. That timeline is then aborted, but still somehow has some impact on the prime timeline as Gregor decides to be a bit nicer to his two brothers.

Context:

The family are continuing our newly adopted tradition of watching a Doctor Who story every Sunday afternoon through November. Again, it was just me and the kids (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) watching from the series 7 boxset blu-ray. This time - unlike last week's viewing of A Town Called Mercy - all three made it to the end of the episode without getting bored and wandering off. The youngest is now consistently - and mostly correctly - saying "He's definitely going to die" about a particular character, this time it was dopey elder brother Bram, and then saying "I told you he was going to die" if proved right. She was also intrigued by the developing messaging burnt into Clara's hand: "Her hand is trying to tell her something". The eldest opined that there would be mileage in a first-person console game where one played a character trapped inside the TARDIS walking the corridors. I didn't mention to him the 1997 CD-Rom spectacular Destiny of the Doctors, in which you could indeed do such a thing and yet it proved exquisitely dull. The effects work in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is a lot better, of course, and I'd hazard a guess that the videogame aesthetic was one reason why it held attention more than the wild west hokum had the previous week.

First time round:

Watched on the day of its debut BBC1 broadcast in April 2013, just the Better Half accompanying me. The kids would all have been put to bed a few hours earlier. Can't remember anything about that first watch, so as I've started to do when I come up empty of memories (which tends to happen with Matt Smith stories more than others for some reason), I offer a small, random and unconnected memory instead. This one is from the 1990s, the so-called 'wilderness' years when no regular Doctor Who series was being made, but it still seemed to me like an exciting time to be a Doctor Who fan. The videos and DVDs made old material more available, and books, comic strips and audios were creating new stories regularly. Even beyond that, though, there were tangentially connected cultural events of interest in that time. One such was the release of Tom Baker's autobiography Who on Earth is Tom Baker? in 1997, and his book tour to promote the same.

I attended one night of that tour, at Methven's Bookshop in Worthing's South Street, one evening in 1997. This was another regular haunt in those days, and was the place I would go to buy actual books or have a coffee and a read (Volume One up the road was better for videos and certain genre titles). I met the Better Half, and the two of us watched the one-and-only Tom tell some funny anecdotes, then use the Q&A section to tell some more funny anecdotes that were nothing really to do with the question asked (Tom Baker has a politician's gift for spinning a question into whatever he wants to talk about). I marvelled at getting an evening of superlative entertainment for free (I would have bought the book anyway), and an autograph thrown in to the bargain. The BH and I queued for that, and after exchanging pleasantries with the great man, he signed the book to the two of us together. This created a bit of an issue when we decided to 'go on a break' a couple of years later, but as long as the book was in existence, it was destined that we'd get back together. We did, after a couple more years as just friends, and have stayed together ever since. Tom Baker linking us as a couple in writing was just as solemn and binding as any wedding vows: what Tom has put together, let no man put asunder! 

 

Reaction:

Part of Steven Moffat's showrunner job was to keep finding new and interestingly different takes on Doctor Who, week after week. He did keep coming up with the goods, and he had to do it for the longest time. Even if one didn't like the stories as they turned out, it couldn't be argued that they weren't distinct on paper. Perhaps by this, his third series in charge, it was getting a bit more difficult, though. He'd done a western in the same run, something that, as pointed out in the blog post for A Town Called Mercy, didn't turn out well the last time it was tried in Doctor Who; he'd brought back the Ice Warriors, reportedly against his better judgement because Mark Gatiss had twisted his arm, and with this story he commissioned a script set almost wholly within the TARDIS. Years before, in a 1999 interview about the possibility of Doctor Who coming back as a going concern, he'd said that such a story would be a terrible idea, with a quote along the lines - I can't find the exact quote online annoyingly - that kids want more of Narnia and less of the wardrobe. That was many years before, and he's free to change his mind, of course, but I think he got it right the first time. The TARDIS is balanced on a fine line between science and magic. When kept vague and secret, its workings do seem tantalisingly intriguing. Expose them, though, and you risk making them prosaic and boring, or - if you try to go the other way - esoteric and silly. Perhaps it's better not to risk opening up this box at all?

In Journey, writer Stephen Thompson leans heavily in the more magic direction: the scene with liquid encyclopedias in the TARDIS library is pure Harry Potter. The effort is put in with the aim to leave the TARDIS mysterious and unknowable even after this adventure, but that means nothing really has any consequences. The entire story takes place in an aborted timeline that gets reset, people die and come back to life. I don't think it's a cheat or cop-out, as reset buttons can be, as it's already been established that the initial accident has put time out of whack - how could it be otherwise if the monsters are forms of the regular and guest characters from the future - but it is frustratingly woolly. What are the rules of how past and future can interact? It seems that it's only possible future timelines that are bleeding through, and that the Clara and the Van Baalens we see searching within the TARDIS are just one of any number of alternate timeline versions. But somehow, because of Time Lord superpowers let's say, the Doctor is a constant throughout, and is able to reimpose a prime timeline at the end by talking to his previous self. But who threw in the remote control first time round, if not the Doctor? My brain hurts thinking about this, which is not a problem in itself as all time travel narratives can be like that. What's disappointing is that there's no satisfying moment where it all clicks together, as you get in the best of time travel narratives. It's just messy. The speed everything moves at stops one from dwelling too much, but it adds up to a generally confusing experience.

When time can be rewritten at the press of a button, it's hard to care very much about the impact to the characters. This doesn't harm this particular story, though, as the characters are difficult to empathise with anyway. We only have the three Van Baalen boys aside from the regulars to feel for, and they are a pretty unsympathetic bunch. This isn't the fault of the actors who all do well. It's wrong on the page, and the director's chosen to embrace what's on the page rather than softening it. Gregor is shown to be aggressive and profit-obsessed, when it would probably be better if he were a more lovable rogue, who can't help but be greedy and take the vital TARDIS component that causes the trouble. Tricky is supposed to be the character we invest in emotionally, I think, but he's not exactly a universal everyman. He's instead a person who's been brainwashed into thinking he's a robot by his brother, having become part-bionic following an industrial accident. What was the point of creating such an odd character set-up anyway? It doesn't integrate well with the story and damages Gregor's character further that he would do such an extreme thing to his brother just for a laugh. If he's cruel as well as avaricious, why would an audience sign up to spend time with him?

 

Maybe the whole Tricky as a robot subplot was introduced to allow a visual representation of the tiny improvement to the timeline at the end, shown in the photo of the three boys together with their Dad. The problem for me was that I missed this completely. If one is not paying attention - and it is a blink and you'll miss it moment right at the start of the episode - you won't see that the photo pinned up in the Van Baalen spaceship has been ripped along one edge and is only showing two of the brothers and Dad. At the point you see it, you haven't met any of the characters yet, and it doesn't easily register that one of the figures in the photograph is older than the others. I've watched this a few times and missed it every time until this most recent watch. As such, I've always previously been surprised that Tricky doesn't know he's related to the other two when it is revealed. The outfit is called the Van Baalen brothers, and Tricky looks and acts like a brother to the other two. He's obvious partly or wholly robotised, but that doesn't mean he isn't their brother. As such, the final slight redemption of Gregor, and the photograph being intact, didn't land for me, as I'd missed the set up. If you did notice and take in the detail of the photograph, though, you'd know something was amiss anyway and work it out long before the reveal. As such, maybe they should have dispensed with that subplot, and built a less difficult relationship between the brothers, which still can be improved by the end. I like to think they could be pitched at the level of the Trotters in Only Fools and Horses, dodgy dealers always having a go at one another, but with affection underneath.

Other points of note: it's visually very interesting; there's some good effects work and production design on display in the action within the TARDIS, with good use of sets and locations. Some of the CGI of the salvage spacecraft looks lower than the usual standard, though. The music is excellent throughout, with composer Murray Gold producing cues that are his most electronic yet (not a bad thing to my mind). Matt Smith gets a few good moments to act, particularly with him being a bit wild setting the TARDIS self-destruct to fire the brothers into action. And the whole things moves fast, probably because it has to; it has lots of kinetic energy at the very least.

 

Connectivity: 

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS is another Matt Smith story from the same season as A Town Called Mercy. It doesn't feel like it, though, as the season in question was split into two sub-sections each broadcast in a different year with a substantial gap between them. A Town Called Mercy was in the first sub-section and this story in the second. The TARDIS team has also changed with Clara replacing Amy and Rory. Journey is now the fourth 21st century one part story on the trot for the blog, all of them mid-season makeweight stories - I yearn for something different, if I'm honest. 

Deeper Thoughts:

The Doctor Who Marie Kondo. The Van Baalen Bros are not the only people in the universe who are keen to acquire anything that crosses their path; Doctor Who fans can give them a run for their money. The latest Doctor Who Magazine, issue 558, is themed around merchandise, collectibles and memorabilia. Maybe these three words appear to be synonymous, but I think there are shades of meaning within them, and perhaps shades of snobbery too. I've probably been guilty of such snobbery on many occasions over the years. If it is of nothing but ornamental use - unlike, say a book or a video, or even a T-Shirt at a push - I couldn't see why anyone would bother cluttering up their life with it. So, my collecting has been specifically within the merchandise area, and has been selective even there. I collect Doctor Who on home video formats, as I am keen to keep and rewatch the stories, plus documentaries about the stories and other value added material, in the highest possible quality format. I collect books about Doctor Who because I'm interested in it; these are mainly non-fiction now, as I don't have time to read Doctor Who fiction. I'm not exhaustive, though, as even just the non-fiction Doctor Who books that have been published over the years would fill up any remaining storage space in my house and leave no room to breathe. The other thing I collect is Doctor Who Magazine itself. Ironically, subscription copies of issue 558 were significantly delayed by a postal issue. When it hadn't arrived for a couple of weeks, I was becoming worried that the issue about collections might end up becoming a collector's item itself, and might end up one of the very few issues I didn't have in my own collection.

If you couldn't read it or watch it, though, I didn't see the point. I'd possibly buy a Doctor Who Easter Egg, but I would not hesitate to eat it, and I wouldn't keep the box. My interpretation of collectibles is anything like that egg with a Doctor Who connection, but that's not necessarily official merchandise of the show. So, tie-in chocolate and sweet wrappers, cards given away in cereal packets, that sort of thing. The connection could be tenuous too. Someone who accumulated anything to do with police boxes could have a lot of collectibles, but they might not all be Doctor Who merchandise. It can be where the smart money is. A lot of merch is mass produced, and so isn't that rare on the market; complete collections of things like old sweet cigarette cards, if well looked after, can be rarer and appreciate more in value. I could never understand the marketplace angle though, unlike my sixth-form mate Bill. Bill liked to tell tall stories about himself. Everyone has a friend like this, I'm sure; he made many claims over the years and I'm pretty sure most of them - he almost certainly wasn't SAS-trained at age 17 for example - were false. One time, though, when he'd claimed to have one of the largest collections of Star Wars related items in the UK, it turned out to be 100% true. I remember walking into his spare room and boggling. He had two copies of most action figures, one in the box, one not. He had enough stormtrooper and imperial guards to recreate movie scenes with loads of extras, like they used to in the 1980s adverts. Merchandise or collectibles, he had the lot. He managed to make a lot of money out of the collection in the end, but only by flogging it off to other people who wanted to build up collections of their own. Collecting begat collecting, sustaining itself; the money seemed to me just to be a measure of this collective insanity.

Memorabilia has an even wider scope, it probably includes both collectibles and merchandise, but more besides, as it is anything that one collects that is connected to the memory of something else. The bus ticket I purchased to take me to Worthing town centre on the evening I met Tom Baker and he signed my copy of his autobiography (see First Time Round section above for more details), had I kept it, would obviously not have been merchandise, and wouldn't have been a collectible to anyone but me, but it would have been memorabilia. This is where I realise my absolute outlook has been flawed all these years. Something can be useful even if its use is only to bring back to mind a happy memory, like my reminiscence of an audience with Tom Baker. or just the more general happy memory of the favourite thing in general. It also now comes to mind that this is not an original idea, it's the basis of a very memorable scene in Throw Momma From The Train, a 1987 comedy film, where Danny Devito and Billy Crystal disagree as to what constitutes a coin collection. I also realise I am becoming the Doctor Who equivalent of Marie Kondo here - if it sparks joy, keep it, otherwise make some space.

Stop press: talking of things that spark joy, I just saw the new trailer for Revolution of the Daleks, this year's festive special. It's looking very good, and I greatly anticipate seeing some old friends and old enemies appear in the story. The only problem is that it's on New Year's Day again. I'd hoped the impact of Covid, and the possible dearth of big tentpole material suitable for December 25th telly, might have meant that Who was promoted back into the big day's line-up again. No such luck. I'll just have to wait until next year as patiently as I can.  

In Summary:

Superficially exciting and fun enough as a first-person video game come to life, but too flawed to remain the centre of attention for long.