by Sarabeth Pollock:
Doctor Who Recap: “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS”
Original Air Date (BBC/BBC America): Sunday April 27, 2013
Season 7 Episode 10
Before we get to tonight’s recap, I want to wish Russell T. Davies and Jenna-Louise Coleman a very happy birthday. Is it cosmic coincidence that two people wrapped up in the Who-verse would share birthdays like that? I say no…
And now, onto the recap!
A space ship resembling a train with cars full of space junk moves slowly through…space. The sign says it belongs to the Van Baalen Brothers. Indeed, after looking around inside there is a photograph on the wall of what we can presume to be three brothers…only one of the brothers seems to be an android. He’s working while the other two sleep. The ship signals that there is something up ahead but it doesn’t appear to have any value, so they leave it alone. There are some rumblings that suggest unrest among the “crew” of brothers, namely, that the android is lucky that he can’t suffer from boredom.
Aboard the TARDIS, the Doctor pleads with Clara to talk to the ship. It’s important to him that they get along, which makes her think he’s bonkers. After some consideration, the Doctor decides to put the ship in “basic mode” so Clara can fly it and bond with it.
As soon as the TARDIS is in basic mode (which is not because Clara is a girl, by the way), the salvage crew can see that the TARDIS is actually a valuable piece of salvage after all. They launch the magno-grab thingy and latch onto…the TARDIS. The Doctor can’t raise the shields to regain control.
Once the TARDIS is on board the salvage ship, the two human brothers declare that the TARDIS is just a bunch of rubbish. They try to pry the door open but find that they can’t, so the elder brother decides that they should blast it open. That’s when Gregor, the android, realizes that he can feel the ship’s suffering. What’s more is that there’s a body under the pile of junk. Elder Van Baalen brother quickly devises a plan to absolve them of liability. As they whisper, the Doctor approaches from behind and admonishes them for whispering. It’s rude. The brothers tell the Doctor his pod was badly damaged when they brought it in, but the Doctor knows better. Their magno-grab disabled the TARDIS, which is why the devices are outlawed across many parts of the galaxy. And the TARDIS would have been fine had he not shut down the shields to allow Clara to control it…. That’s when the Doctor realizes that Clara is missing. The brothers try to convince the Doctor that fuel is leaking and she’s already dead if she’s onboard, but he grabs a gas mask and heads inside. The brothers are reluctant to help without a fee, but the Doctor promises a “salvage of a lifetime.”
It’s interesting to see just how attached the Doctor is to Clara. The fear that she could be hurt, or dead, is completely terrifying to him.
Clara awakens inside the TARDIS. She’s ok, but her hand stings. There is a light over the door. “Red flashing light means something bad.” (Remember the sonic screwdriver has been emitting a red light since the beginning of the second half of the series) Clara moves through the deserted hallway, finding angry looking scratches on one of the walls. The TARDIS would be a horrible place to be trapped…especially if she didn’t like you to begin with….
The brothers are in a disagreement about whether or not it’s worth it to them to go into the TARDIS to save Clara. Big Baalen says he’s tired of taking orders from his kid brother. The Doctor wonders why Android Baalen needs a respirator if he’s an android, but they cite safety regulations. Clearly something isn’t right with this bunch, but the Doctor presses on. Once they’re inside the TARDIS, and after they express that “it’s bigger on the inside” (“I get that a lot,” the Doctor tells them), the Doctor clears the contaminants from the air and explains that the TARDIS is infinitely large, which means it could take forever to find Clara. The brothers don’t think it’s their job to help find her, but the Doctor makes it their job by activating the TARDIS self-destruct sequence, giving them one hour to find her. He locks the door so they can’t escape. “Don’t get into a spaceship with a madman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?” To further motivate them, he cuts the time to thirty minutes. What he didn’t tell them is that when he said salvage, he didn’t mean the ship. He meant Clara.
Clara walks into a room with stone walls that looks like an old treasury. One of the first thing she finds looks to be Amy’s TARDIS, the one she had in her bedroom. As she spins it around, she finds other treasures, like an umbrella belonging to the Seventh Doctor. While she looks around, it becomes clear that she’s not alone. The shadowy, burnt up creature steps out of the shadows. Clara runs.
The Doctor and the brothers walk through the dark corridors. Little Baalen asks his computer what’s onboard that might be valuable, and when he hears the response, he “helpfully” suggests that they split up to cover more ground. The Doctor agrees, taking Android Baalen with him, but he warns them that the TARDIS will get “huffy” if they mess with her. Once he’s gone, Little Baalen tells Big Baalen to return to the console and strip it.
The burnt monster chases Clara. She passes a room that has a device that looks very similar to the Torchwood device that Ten and Rose encounter when they meet Queen Victoria in “Tooth and Claw”, and in another room she finds the SWIMMING POOL!!! Finally! We’ve seen the water, but now we see the pool itself. Finally, she hides in the TARDIS library. “Oh, that’s just showing off,” she mutters. The library extends on as far as the eye can see.
Big Baalen finds the console room and removes one of the panels. Suddenly, muted voices can be heard all around the room. I swear I heard Donna Noble’s shrill “We are in space!” It would seem like something bigger is going on.
Little Baalen uses his scanner to find valuable objects. “Everything,” it proclaims. Apparently, whatever you could possibly want is behind the door. He goes inside and finds living metal. It’s more valuable than any sum of money. This system can build anything you want. Just as he goes to grab it, the Doctor rushes in and prevents him from disrupting it. Little Baalen really doesn’t seem concerned with keeping the TARDIS happy, and he removes one of the glowing nodules, which makes the door disappear. He’s made the TARDIS angry. He tells Android Baalen to torch it, while causes the door to reappear. Little Baalen puffs up like a badass and thinks he’s bested the TARDIS, thinking she’s afraid to fight him. As if.
In the library, Clara finds an old book, “The History of the Time War.” She flips through the pages. “So that’s who…” she begins to say, but she’s interrupted by the burnt monster. It stalks her, favoring what seems to be an injured hand (just like hers). She bumps into a shelf and knocks over one of the little bottles, and an oral history pours out. The voices distract the creature long enough to allow her to escape.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and the brothers are caught in a looping corridor. Why build walls that can be torn down when the TARDIS can simply build another kind of maze for them. Little Baalen can’t accept this, so he walks through one doorway and ends up right where he started. That’s the thing about the Time Lords, the Doctor comments “No dress sense, dreadful hats, but smart.” (Easter Egg: reference to the Fourth Doctor and his hat). The TARDIS is building a labyrinth.
Clara reaches the console room but finds it abandoned. Oddly enough, we know that Big Baalen is also in the control room…but he doesn’t seem to be there. While she looks around, the Burnt Monster finds Big Baalen and tackles him to the ground. His body is consumed with smoke as he burns up.
Little Baalen gets a signal that tells him his brother is dead. However, he doesn’t seem too upset about it and wants to push on to find valuable salvage items. His android brother is more upset than he is. While they bicker, the sonic screwdriver picks up on the other life forms onboard. “You’re not going to like this,” he tells the brothers, because the monsters are right behind them. These are different than the one pursuing Clara. There are two creatures, but they’re fused together. In the ensuing confusion, Little Baalen grabs the glowing nodule he’d stolen and runs off in one direction while the Doctor and Android Baalen go in the opposite direction. Splitting up is probably not a good idea.
In the meantime, Clara is trapped in a console-room-loop. No matter which way she goes, she ends up in the console room.
The Doctor and Android Baalen arrive in the console room as well. It’s the safest place on the ship, he explains, and after a few scans he realizes that the ship has led Clara to the console room as well, only she’s in a parallel version of the room. It’s like a light switch, he explains. The two versions of the console room switch on and off, back and forth. Only they realize that Clara has opened a door and allowed the burnt monster into her version. They can hear her screaming. The open door on their end allows Little Baalen inside, and he demands to be freed from the ship. The Doctor ignores him and modifies his scanner to find Clara’s human signal. It locates her, along with something else that bears a human signature. The burnt creature? Once the Doctor locks onto her signal, he’s able to pull her into their time before she’s killed by the monster. She’s still screaming when she comes through, and he tries to reassure her that she’s safe. She punches him and demands to know what kinds of creatures he keeps on the TARDIS. (So they’re not hugging, he concludes) Good guys, she says, do not keep zombie creatures on their ships.
Little Baalen has had quite enough. The Doctor has the girl, so now he can cancel the self-destruct and let them go. Shrewdly, the Doctor informs him that there never was a self-destruct sequence. He made it up to trick them into helping to find Clara. Clara, in the meantime, stands off to the side with her head hung low. Something is going through her head, but it’s impossible to tell what it is. As the Doctor shows the brothers that the engine isn’t going to blow up…the console informs him that the engine is going to blow up unless they fix it. “We’re in proper trouble,” he tells Clara. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a big button that will save the day. Rather they must journey to the center of the TARDIS.
During the trip through the TARDIS, the group realizes the burnt creatures have followed them. Clara can tell there is something about these creatures that the Doctor isn’t letting on. Some things, he says, are better left unknown. Clara runs off and finds herself separated from the group. As she calls out for the Doctor, she sees herself walking down the hall talking to the Doctor. They appear to be having the same conversation we heard at the beginning of the episode. Clara’s hand burns her again, and writing is appearing on her skin. When she turns around again, the TARDIS projection of her is standing there and it expresses hope that she’ll be able to fix this. Then the Doctor appears, but he doesn’t respond when she talks to him. Another Doctor comes up from behind her and tells her that there seems to be a small tear in time on the ship, and the TARDIS is leaking little bits of the past all over. They see themselves walking down the corridor, and then the burnt creature appears. Clara asks if it’s real, and the Doctor decides to err on the side of caution and they run away from “her.” Clara asks why he said it was a “she” and again he warns her that it’s best she not know certain things. The burnt monster decides to chase the alternate versions of themselves.
Once they’re in the clear, they hear a noise that sounds a lot like distressed metal. The Doctor explains that they’re directly under the engines and if the fuel cells have leaked, the rods have weakened and could break. Case in point, one comes shooting through the walls of the corridor in something that is quite reminiscent of the Indiana Jones movies. They run as fast as they can while the rods shoot all around them. Suddenly they hear a scream and they find Android Baalen pinned to the wall with a rod through his arm. He tells Little Baalen to cut his arm off—he won’t feel it at all. But Little Baalen can’t do it. “You don’t understand,” he tells the android. “Tell him,” the Doctor orders. As it turns out, Android Baalen isn’t a robot at all. He’s human, with synthetic eyes and a voice box. Little Baalen admits that it was a joke to relieve the boredom. They gave their brother a new identity to keep themselves entertained. The Doctor orders him to cut the rod to free his brother so they can keep moving.
They reach the center of the TARDIS but the Doctor explains that they can’t be exposed to the power inside for more than a few minutes or else their skin will start to burn. He goes inside to assess the situation. As expected in such scenarios, there is a walkway that connects one door to another. He runs across and opens the other door. Outside in the corridor, Little Baalen is forced to explain that Android Baalen is really his little brother, but he was badly injured in a salvage accident and lost his eyes, his voice and his memory. But he was always the smart one, and their father had wanted him to be captain. Android Baalen lunges at his brother in anger, believing that he tricked him just to become captain himself. The Doctor returns at that moment to keep them from tearing each other apart.
The four of them enter the center of the TARDIS and the Doctor explains that the giant exploding star is trapped in stasis to provide continual power to the TARDIS. Unfortunately, the fused double-trouble burnt creatures have found the door they need to get through, and the single creature is at the other door. They’re trapped. Clara stops the Doctor and demands answers. Now is not the time for secrets. “Secrets protect us. Secrets make us safe,” the Doctor tells her. “We’re not safe!” she cried. The Baalen scanner starts spewing out readings. It turns out that the creature is Clara. She’s burning. The Doctor looks completely defeated as he explains that he brought her there to be safe, but she dies again. “Again,” she wonders. It’s not just the past that’s leaking, it’s the future.
Suddenly, the Doctor realizes that if they disrupt the timeline, the future won’t happen as planned. He tells the brothers not to touch each other, but by pulling them away from the door they let the creatures inside. They’re able to fight them off and send them into the fiery pits below the walkway, but another set comes into existence, as part of the never ending loop, and comes at them again. The Clara monster breaks through the glass in the door and reaches out for her while Android Baalen pushes the new set of burnt creatures over the side. In the process, however, he falls over the railing and his brother rushes to save him. When they touch, they fuse together and the loop starts over.
The Doctor pulls Clara through the doorway and locks them inside. They have reached the engine room, only it’s a ledge that leads to a bottomless chasm. Clara asks if they’re outside, but the Doctor explains that they’re still on board the TARDIS. She wonders if he has a plan. The Doctor wants to know who she is. Why does he keep running into her? Every day he looks at her and doesn’t understand why she exists. Clara is more scared of him at that moment than anything on the ship. He explains that he saw her in the Dalek asylum, then as a governess. Then he ran into her again. But why? Clara insists she doesn’t know, which makes the Doctor very happy. He hugs her (she admits the hug is very welcome) and then he says they’re not going to die. The TARDIS is trying to keep them from the engine room by scaring them. They need to jump. He tells her she needs to trust him, just this once, which makes her grin considering all the times she has trusted him so far. They hold hands and the Doctor whispers “Geronimo!”
The Engine Room of the TARDIS. The heart of the TARDIS. Only it looks like it has exploded already. The room is stark white with debris held in stasis floating around. The Doctor realizes that the TARDIS has always been there for him, but he doesn’t know what to do to fix this. Everything will explode eventually. Clara grabs his hand to comfort him, and that’s when he notices the burn on her hand. Overjoyed, he kisses her hand and thanks the fact that she’s human with frail human skin. They return to the console room and find the tear in time, which looks a lot like the one that followed Amy Pond around the galaxy. He pulls out the explosive device and recalibrates it, explaining that he will need to go through the rift and give the explosive to himself to reset the timeline. Clara doesn’t want to forget what she saw. She wants to retain the memories of her past, and future, and she tells him that she saw the library and the book that bears his name. “You call yourself the Doctor,” she says, “but you have a name.” He stops her before she can say it, then he disappears into the rift.
One the other side, the TARDIS has just been caught up in the magno-grab. Clara asks if there’s a button he can push to save them, and that’s when the other Doctor appears. He calls out to the other version of himself and tells him he needs to reset the timeline. He tosses the explosive device but it falls on the ground. Clara picks it up before the Doctor can stop her. The device burns her and she tosses it to him. The words “Big friendly button” are written on it, which is what was on her hand all along. The other Doctor grins and pushes it.
Back on the salvage ship, the TARDIS disappears from the screen and the brothers continue their lives. Big Baalen orders the Android to make him some food, but Little Baalen steps up and defends the robot, telling his surprised older brother that he has a sudden urge to treat the android better. On the bunk, a new picture shows the three brothers with their father looking on proudly.
Back on the TARDIS, Clara emerges with wet hair and a towel draped over her shoulder. Was she showering or swimming? Don’t know. She says she feels tired, and the Doctor tells her it’s because she’s had two days crammed into one. When she points out that doesn’t make sense, he dismisses it by saying that he just says random things. But one thing is on his mind. He wants to know if she feels safe being in the box with a madman. She expresses that she does feel safe, and she likes the adventures with him. Plucky Clara. She knows he’ll keep her safe. “That’s what I’m counting on. Push the button.”
Tonight’s episode was like a roller coaster ride. It had nonstop twists and turns, and it revealed a lot about the nature of the Doctor’s feelings for Clara. He doesn’t understand her, but he feels a great need to protect her. I liked the look on his face when she admitted she liked his hug. It was like he remembered that he’s still a married man.
With all the little references to the past and the Easter Eggs linking us to bits of Whovian trivia, I think we’re building toward the end of the season and the big 50th anniversary episode in the fall. I read on Twitter that there has been a reference to each of the Doctors in each of the episodes of the second half of the series, and tonight’s reference was to the Fourth Doctor (bad hats) and the Seventh Doctor (the umbrella). What other gems have you found in the episode?
As always, I welcome your comments below. Until next week!
Sarabeth Pollock is a contributor for DarkMedia. She covers True Blood, Doctor Who, and American Horror Story, as well as the True Blood comics and whatever movies and books happen to catch her fancy. She’s an avid writer, reader, and pop culture fan, with interest in everything from True Blood to Doctor Who to Anne Rice to Deborah Harkness. Follow her on Twitter at @SarabethPollock and check out her blog at http://sarabethpollock.wordpress.com
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