It's an interesting idea, to set an entire episode inside the TARDIS -- something that the 20th-century version flirted with, but this episode is more Castrovalva than The Invasion of Time. We admittedly got a little bit of this in "The Doctor's Wife", but here it's the main focus of the piece, as we explore the interior of the TARDIS, in the name of finding Clara before something else does.
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| The Van Baalen brothers don't want the Doctor to halve the time on the self-destruct again. ("Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS") ©BBC |
Of course, the problem with discussing "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS" is that it's essentially one long chase sequence -- we get lots of scenes of people exploring the TARDIS, and while these scenes are nicely done, they don't advance the plot that much. Still, it's fun to explore the TARDIS, and things like the Architectural Reconfiguration System are wonderfully lyrical in their presentation -- and Gregor's decision to take one of the circuits leads to some marvelous camera work as the Doctor and the others start walking in circles ("If you walk out of here with that circuit, the TARDIS will try to stop you," the Doctor had warned). And there are nice touches to the past -- a swimming pool, a vast TARDIS library, the Eye of Harmony inside the TARDIS (in what seems to be a reference to the TV Movie), and lots of whispered snatches of dialogue from previous episodes (including the first episode, "An Unearthly Child" -- appropriate in an anniversary year). But nevertheless, it's just a chase sequence, rather than us learning anything new. Well, except for the nature of the "zombies" stalking the corridors of the TARDIS, which is actually rather clever.
And we also get some nice tensions between the Doctor and Clara. Clara starts it off ("What do you keep in here? Why have you got zombie creatures?" she demands to know), but the Doctor gets his own jabs in ("Well, there's no point now. We're about to die. Just tell me who you are. ... I look at you every single day and I don't understand a thing about you. Why do I keep running into you? ... What are you, eh? Are you a trick? A trap?"), only to find that she doesn't understand a thing he's talking about.
So as disaster movies go, this is a good one in claustrophobic tensions, with only a couple problems (the reveal that Tricky is human, not an android, falls apart the moment you start to think about it -- how could he not have known? It's not exactly up to the level of The Android Invasion's "you had your eye all along!", but it's approaching it, and that's not a good thing) and some nice clever moments. It's sad that the resolution is to reset everything so that the TARDIS isn't damaged and no one dies after all (oh look, another thing this story shares with "Grace: 1999"), as it removes a lot of the dramatic punch this episode had -- what's the point of the Doctor directly confronting Clara over her nature if neither one is going to remember it? But for most of the episode, this is a solid, if not exactly outstanding, story.
At the very least, surely we can at least all agree it's a whole lot better than Stephen Thompson's last script for the show, "The Curse of the Black Spot"?