Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
| 236 – "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS[1]" | |||
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| Doctor Who episode | |||
 Official Poster from the BBC Website | |||
| Cast | |||
Others
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| Production | |||
| Directed by | Mat King | ||
| Written by | Stephen Thompson | ||
| Produced by | Marcus Wilson[2] | ||
| Executive producer(s) | Steven Moffat Caroline Skinner | ||
| Music by | Murray Gold | ||
| Series | Series 7 | ||
| Running time | 45 minutes | ||
| First broadcast | 27 April 2013 | ||
| Chronology | |||
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"Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" is the tenth episode of the seventh series of the British science-fiction drama Doctor Who and was broadcast on 27 April 2013. and stars Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor and Jenna-Louise Coleman as Clara Oswald. This episode was written by Stephen Thompson and is about an adventure into the inner depths of the TARDIS. The episode will also include three brothers from an intergalactic salvage crew, played by Ashley Walters, Mark Oliver, and Jahvel Hall.
Plot
Aboard a salvage ship, a space salvage crew, Gregor, Bram and Tricky, spot the TARDIS and deciding it would be worth a lot, salvage it. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Clara are discussing why the TARDIS doesn't like her. As he is teaching her how to operate it, the TARDIS suddenly shuts down and starts being shaken about, as the salvage ship is grabbing it with a magnetic beam, as Clara picks up an object, they are thrown to the ground. As the three men, the Van Baalen brothers and one described as an android, go to inspect their new salvage, they realise it's leaking fuel, they back off and Gregor decides to eject it back into space, only to be interrupted by the Doctor who has escaped the ship, unscathed. Realising Clara is not with him, he tries to get the men to help him find Clara before the ship explodes. Not wanting to have anything to do with the TARDIS, the men refuse until the Doctor strikes a deal with them, telling them they will find "the salvage of the a lifetime" behind its doors. Once on board the TARDIS, the Doctor traps them inside and sets a countdown going. This, he tells them, is the TARDIS' self-destruct mode, and will give the men further motivation. He then reveals that the salvage he was referring to was not the TARDIS, but Clara.
Meanwhile, Clara wakes up in the battered TARDIS with a burnt hand and goes looking for the Doctor. As she wanders through the TARDIS' corridors, she hears something following her and in panic she starts running. While running, she passes many rooms in the TARDIS including the swimming pool and the observatory, then hiding out in a room containing things from the Doctor's past.
While the Doctor and the crew are searching for Clara, using his hand held computer Gregor realises the salvage potential of the TARDIS and orders Bram to go back to the console room to strip it for anything valuable, eventually he climbs down into the consoles innards and is absorbed by an ossified zombie creature. The Doctor, Gregor and Tricky hear his screams but continue to look for Clara. Gregor goes into the TARDIS' architectural reconfiguration system, "a machine that can make machines", and steals from it, causing the TARDIS to become distressed and to start creating labyrinths to protect herself. Clara, meanwhile, finds herself in the huge TARDIS library where she finds the Gallifreyan Encyclopaedia in bottles and at one end of the room, a book entitled 'The History Of The Time War'. After reading an apparently random section of the book, Clara runs out of the library and finds herself back in the console room, relieved.
The Doctor, Gregor and Tricky arrive in the console room and can hear Clara's breathing, but cannot see her. The Doctor deduces that the TARDIS has created 'echoes' of the console room to protect itself. He is able to link the two iterations of the room for a moment and grab Clara from her 'echo' where she has been avoiding the creature who is now mimicking her actions. The Doctor then reveals to the crew that the self-destruct was a deception but soon realises that the engine is damaged. He takes Clara down to the engine room where he realises the leaking fuel is causing rods in the ship to break and fall. As they run, trying to avoid the falling rods, they run into the crew members, where Tricky's arm is trapped by a fallen rod. Urging Gregor to cut his arm off as he could simply grow another, it is revealed that Tricky is not an android but is a human and Gregor and Bram's brother. Gregor deceived his brother so he could become captain as well as well as for entertainment to ease the boredom on the salvage ship. Freeing Tricky, they all run to the TARDIS's engine while avoiding the creatures. Once inside, they attempt to cross over but are trapped as the creatures are behind every door, soon breaking in. The Doctor realises that the creatures, now seen clearly as being ossified, lava containing zombies, are actually their future and the Doctor reveals to Clara that he has met her twice before and she has died both those times. Gregor and Tricky, forgetting the Doctor's instruction, hold onto each other and as a result, transform into Siamese Twin-like zombie creature they have encountered before.
The Doctor and Clara keep running, passing the Eye of Harmony, and have an argument about the Doctor keeping secrets from her. Clara also reveals that she knows the Doctor's name as she read it in the book. They end up in the centre of the TARDIS itself and it is broken and the Doctor doesn't know how to fix it until he sees Clara's palm where the words 'Big Friendly Button' have been burnt onto her palm. Back in the console room the Doctor, with a renewed sense of enthusiasm, grabs an object and climbs through a rift in space and time, in the TARDIS' wall and emerges into the console room where his past self and past Clara are being thrown about in the TARDIS. He throws them the object saying he has seen their future and they need to erase it. Past-Clara picks up the object, which is the remote control to the magnetic beam seen at the start of the episode, and the past-Doctor presses it, thus releasing the TARDIS from the salvage ship's grasp and preventing all that would have happened from happening.
Back in the present, Gregor, Bram and Tricky are seen on their salvage ship, but Gregor treats Tricky decently, suggesting that not everything was deleted. In the TARDIS the Doctor discusses with Clara how safe she feels with him.
Continuity
The Eye of Harmony is seen in its entirety for the first time in this episode. The scene where Bram tries to dismantle the TARDIS features audio clips from An Unearthly Child, Colony in Space, The Robots of Death, "Rose", "The Beast Below", "Smith and Jones", and "The Doctor's Wife".[3] When the Encyclopaedia Gallifreya ‘leaks,' audio from The End of Time is also heard.
Production
Lead writer and executive producer Steven Moffat gave the concept of an episode discovering the centre of the TARDIS to writer Stephen Thompson. Thompson explained that this was because Moffat was "haunted" by the 1978 story The Invasion of Time, which was set on the TARDIS but used hastily-constructed sets.[1] Thompson was also interested in mathematics and remarked, "anything involving multi-dimensional geometry gets me excited".[1] Moffat left the rest of the story to be developed by Thompson.[1]
The read-through for "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" took place at Roath Lock studios on 29 August 2012, during the production of "The Snowmen".[3] Filming took place from 4 to 24 September, mostly on studio sets.[3] However, the scene where the Doctor and Clara enter the defensive front of the TARDIS' engine room was filmed later on 28 November at the Argoed Isha Quarry in the Vale of Glamorgan.[3] The episode finished filming in September 2012. Guest star Ashley Walters was in trouble with the producers on the first day of filming when he tweeted a picture of himself in his costume in his trailer with the word "space". The picture was immediately removed.[4]
References
- ^ a b c d "Stephen Thompson interview". Doctor Who Magazine (454). Royal Tunbridge Wells, Kent: Panini Comics. 15 November 2012.
- ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/18/doctor-who-pi-week-18.html
- ^ a b c d "The Fourth Dimension: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS". BBC. Retrieved 27 August 2013.
- ^ Lazarus, Susanna (22 October 2011). "Ashley Walters on his Doctor Who role: you'll see more of the Tardis than ever before". Radio Times. Retrieved 21 January 2013.
External links
