For a long time now, I have been wanting to watch Doctor Who where the entire episode is set on the TARDIS. Thanks to Stephen Thompson and his episode, “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS,” that is exactly what we got this week.
SPOILERS BELOW
While teaching Clara how to fly the TARDIS, the Doctor switches the controls to “basic mode,” which also happened to lower its defenses and causes it to crash. The Doctor enlists the help of a salvage team who hopes to strip the ship and sell it for parts to help rescue Clara from the wreckage.
On this trek through the TARDIS, we saw so many wonders that there is almost too much to talk about. Finally, we get to see TARDIS corridors again. Since the reboot, the action has been pretty much relegated exclusively to the control room. The only major exception being “The Doctor’s Wife,” which saw House taunting Amy and Rory through a labyrinth of corridors. Since additional TARDIS interior sets had been built, I assumed they would reuse them; however, the TARDIS remodeled itself in “The Angels Take Manhattan,” so those sets are now obsolete.
In addition to the M.C. Escher-esque hallways, we got to see parts of the TARDIS that have not been seen since the reboot, as well as some things that have been mentioned for years and finally revealed. The pool has been a constant joke over the past several years, but we have never seen until now. The Eye of Harmony has not been onscreen since the movie when the Master possessed Eric Roberts and was trapped inside . . . but let’s not start down that tangent.
While perusing the library, Clara stumbles upon a book titled “The History of the Time War” and begins to read it. During this, she stumbles upon a passage that piques her interest, as it pertains directly to the Doctor. She has discovered his true name! For a while now, I have had a theory that when he ended the Time War, he had to sacrifice his name to construct some sort of seal to close off the Time War in its time bubble, in which case, if his name were ever spoken, that seal would break and the Time War would be unleashed on the universe. This is quite possibly what the 50th anniversary is building up to.
More so than any other episode, “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS” seems to address the larger story arcs. Besides touching on the Doctor’s name, we also got some advancement on the mystery of Clara. The Doctor finally confronted (bordering on berated) her about how he has kept meeting her throughout history. It should be interesting next week in “The Crimson Horror” when Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax return, since they also encountered the Victorian iteration of Clara. Perhaps this episode is the cause of multiple Claras scattered throughout history. The Doctor said that the TARDIS was leaking time, triggering the Cloister Bell (which certainly seems to be ringing a lot during this series). If this is true, then it is conceivable that echoes of Clara splintered out across time due to this leak.
