Doctor Who - The Interstellar Song Contest

Flood Damage

Doctor Who -
The Interstellar Song Contest
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 17th May 2025

Warning: All the big, big spoilers

Hmm... dunno. As I mentioned at the end of last weeks review, the trailer made this episode look pretty unwatchable but, I’m glad to say it wasn’t and a couple of my friends thought this one was really good. As I am writing this I’m still processing some of the big story strokes this one had but, on the whole I thought that it was... an okay episode.

Okay, lets get to it... the last stopping point of The Doctor (played by Ncuti Gatwa) collecting readings from the Vindicator to get Belinda (played by Varada Sethu) home to Earth, sees them landing on a space station broadcasting a future installment of... The Interstellar Song Contest which is what the Eurovision Song Contest apparently evolved into over time, after the destruction of the Earth which, apparently, coincided with the day The Doctor and Belinda left it.  One of my least favourite TV presenters, Rylan Clarke, is released from suspended animation to compère the show and the station even has an interactive holographic version of another of my least favourite television presenters, Graham Norton.

And, of course, Mrs. Flood is also in the audience. I’ll get to her soon enough because, she comes back big time in a mid credits teaser which reveals her true identity. So stick with it.

This one appears to kill off the whole audience, including The Doctor, within the first ten minutes but Belinda and a few others are spared due to their situation and, its not long before The Doctor returns, improbably riding a confetti canon from out in deep space protected by a gravity field, which due to the whole Isaac Newton thing from the opening scene of Wild Blue Yonder (reviewed here), everyone is still referring to as mavity. 

However, the reason The Doctor revives is because of a vision he has in his head while frozen out in the void. That vision being of his grand-daughter Susan Foreman, played once again by the actress who played her in 1963, Carole Ann Ford. Now, this is kind of interesting because,The Doctor originally left Susan on Earth in the year 2164, in the 1964 story The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (reviewed here), which was also made into a movie set in a different year (reviewed here). So where and when these visions are set is... interesting. As is the fact that Susan hasn’t regenerated at all in the last 61 years.

Anyway, as usual it’s another short review for this series with, some nice sequences but with a lot of camp in it (well, it is a Eurovision themed episode so I’m trying to forgive it that) and some nice musical cues from Murray Gold (none of which are of much consequence since his stuff doesn’t seem to be getting any proper CD releases anymore). So let’s get to that mid-end credits scene then...

Mrs. Flood is a timelord, no surprises there. And her identity is not a particular surprise either since... well people have been guessing it right since her introduction a couple of years ago. But what I didn’t expect was that Anita Dobson, who plays the character, would bi-generate just as The Doctor did during his last regeneration. And she bi-generated into... dum dum dum... The Rani. Originally played by the late, great Kate O’Mara opposite the Sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) and the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy), she is now played by both a bizarrely subservient Anita Dobson and newcomer Archie Panjabi. 

Oh... and note to the writers. If you’re going to have somebody new bringing back an iconic character, then maybe don’t have her quoting a Fourth Doctor speech which has echoed through the series as an indication that she’s the ‘definite article’. I’m already not liking the way she plays her. I remember seeing Kate O’Mara playing The Rani on stage in a musical Doctor Who show at Wimbledon, opposite Jon Pertwee returning as the Third Doctor many years later and, all I will say is... Kate O’Mara is to The Rani what Roger Delgado was to The Master. But we shall soon see, I guess.

Two more episodes to go now before, I suspect, Doctor Who will take a long rest or, quite possibly, be cancelled and slowly forgotten. I hope neither of those things happen but, yeah, I reckon it’s on the cards for sure. What with every episode in this season so far garnering the lowest ratings in the 63 year history of the show. Again... we shall soon see.

Doctor Who - Planet Of Giants

Putting The Insect Aside

Doctor Who - Planet Of Giants
Airdate: 31st October - 14th november 1964
BBC 1 - Region 0 Blu Ray Three Episodes

Well now, of all the things I was expecting from the BBC delving into Blu Rays of its classic strand of surviving Doctor Who stories, an almost complete set of surviving episodes from Series Two was not among them. But here it is and, I have to say, I am somewhat in awe of such a release, although the inaugural story of this second season, Planet Of Giants, doesn’t exactly set the world alight but, I think that’s probably about my familiarity with this old cliché of a novelty theme more than anything else.

Almost the entire story takes place in just three locations... a back garden, a laboratory which connects to the garden through the pipe in the sink and, for a few brief scenes, a local telephone exchange. Something goes wrong with the TARDIS when it rematerialises and the scanner smashes (a scanner which is somehow miraculously repaired when The Doctor (William Hartnell), granddaughter Susan (Carol Ann Ford), Ian (William Russell) and Barbara (Jaqueline Hill) return to the machine at the end of the third episode.

When they wander outside, they find lots of dead things and inanimate objects in giant sized form. They wonder where they are until they come to the conclusion that they are not on a planet of giants at all but on Earth... Norwich, to be precise. Whatever went wrong with the TARDIS has shrunk them to the size of about an inch each and then shenanigans ensue as two mini groups of them get separated and accidentally stumble onto a plot involving a new, lethal insecticide. A chemical that is a little too powerful but which the businessman behind the development wants released at all costs. Something we learn when he murders a troublesome government scientist in the first episode.

Although The Doctor, Susan, Ian and a very sick Barbara... who has come into contact with the insecticide and whose internal antibodies are too small now to fight off the effects properly... never actually meet or come face to face with the oblivious ‘giants’ who are instrumental in the plot, they manage to defeat them. In doing so they also survive two cliffhanger moments at the end of the first two episodes involving a giant sized (but not really because in reality, it’s just stayed at normal size) cat and water released down a drain that The Doctor and Susan are hiding in.

And I suppose it’s all okay but, with films like The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver and later shows like The Avengers and Land Of The Giants covering similar territory, I have to say that I can’t get all that excited about it. That being said, the performances by the key four cast members are all quite good, despite, I think, a bit of ‘slip up covering’ from Hartnell in a take which maybe the BBC didn’t have time to reshoot and a truly stupid moment when a man says he’s been working on a formula for as much as 60 hours a day... yeah, I think your original script said ‘week’ matey.

So, yeah, it does look stagey with all the oversized props but most of them look fine. With almost everything dead from insecticide the encounters with a large, prop ant are also quite good although, I have to say, the accidental comedy moment of a bee being dropped lifelessly onto the set to feign insecticide death and the truly terrible state of it, leaves a lot to be desired. As do some of the painted backdrops of grass in what looks to me like an entirely studio bound shoot. In terms of the scenery, I had to keep reminding myself that these things were never made to be seen in high definition or at a great size like we look at these things now. So the quality of the transfer on this new Blu Ray certainly doesn’t do the story any favours, I’d have to say.

The Doctor’s costume is interesting... I don’t remember seeing this incarnation in a cape before (although I remember he was depicted this way in some of the BBC Christmas Annual illustrations from this period). I don’t seem to remember him wearing it in the next adventure but, I may be wrong. All in all, Planet Of Giants is not a terrible watch and everyone is quite good in it but... yeah, it’s also a little dull, I think.

As far as the next story in the box, The Dalek invasion Of Earth, goes... well I’ve already reviewed that one in DVD form, which you can find here. Sometime this year is when my review of the big screen adaptation of that story should also see the light of day on this blog. Both this story and the next were hold overs from Season 1 so, although Carol Ann Ford is in both stories, she’d technically already left the show by the time Season Two was under full swing. And I’ll get back to you with my review with the third story in this new box sometime soon.

Doctor Who - The Pilot

Fore Play

Doctor Who - The Pilot
Airdate: 15th April 2017 BBC 1

Well this was a very strong start to the latest series of Britain’s most popular science fiction export (arguably more popular than Professor Quatermass, although I really don’t think it could exist without the good Professor clearing the path in the first place, so to speak). This episode introduces a new companion or, quite possibly, an old companion (yeah, alright, I’ll get to my silly speculation bits later) in the shape of lesbian character Bill Pott’s, played by the really very good Pearl Mackie, and also brings back the current ‘sort of’ companion Nardole, as played by Matt Lucas (who is also good... which shouldn’t surprise me but it does). This is the episode which had a preview scene released quite a while ago (over a year?) but I noticed there’s a heck of a lot less dialogue coming from Bill in the version of the scene as it was presented here so I can only assume that the character has undergone some ‘tweaks’ since she was first written in... well they’ve had a very long time between series’ to tinker with her, I guess.

So the episode starts off strongly for me, personally, because we have The Doctor, now seen to be a lecturer at Bristol University, explaining to students as to the nature of time. Time, he says, is an illusion created by seeing lots of static bits placed in such a way that the perception of them experienced one slice after another gives us a sense of a journey over ‘time’. This is nicely demonstrated with a moment which seems like it would better fit right in with Moffat’s other hit TV show, Sherlock, in that the film itself (although we’re really watching digital, right?) is sliced up before us as a metaphor for the explanation of the true nature of time. I’ve been telling people they’ve been looking at time all wrong for years... as a fluid rather than a static state accessed in a specific way we are mostly cursed with looking at it... it doesn’t exist. So it’s good that the universe’s premiere timelord has finally gone on record as saying this.

Okay, so we have a really good opener because it does what Doctor Who does best... gives us a mystery to work on. In this case there’s more than one because we have the introduction of Bill and the mysteries surrounding her and The Doctor’s mysterious ‘secret vault’... and we also have the writer running through the wet paint very fast to distract us with the mystery which gives the story its name. That of The Pilot... who appears as a manifestation of a permanent puddle which can chase you through time from one end of the galaxy to another and reflect your image back as a feedback the right way around, rather than a true reflection. This in itself is good stuff and this underlying plot, which I won’t detail here, helps explore the sexual diversity of the new companion and does it in a romantic way, full of wonder. So that’s all good then.

We also have another encounter with the Daleks which, fortunately, is only a minor appearance and doesn’t hook in with the main plot. There’s one of a few nice little nods to the history of the show which are found in this episode here in that the Movellans are seen with them. I couldn’t believe it because the last and, I suspect, only other time we saw them was in the Tom Baker serial Destiny Of The Daleks back in 1979. My joy was slightly tempered by the fact that the Daleks we see with them are a more updated design than they were when the Movellans were around but... oh, well... that BBC budget thing is getting in the way of authenticity, I suspect.

Another nice and, I suspect, ‘more important than they’re letting on’ reference came up in the scene where The Doctor was persuaded not to use a memory wipe on Bill. The implication of him falling victim of the very same thing in the last episode to feature Jenna Coleman as the deal breaker here was beautifully re-enforced by composer Murray Gold using his old companion Clara’s theme to support those moments... lovely stuff.

But there’s more than one mystery her to solve and, as is usual for the rebooted Doctor Who stories since the time of Christopher Eccleston’s reincarnation of the character, there’s an underlying puzzle thread to be solved which will obviously be an arc for the entire series. We know that Peter Capaldi will be leaving soon, allegedly during the Christmas special but, I suspect, the transformation may be a little sooner than that... after all the Mondas cybermen who are returning for the last two episodes of the series and who haven’t been seen in the show since 1966 saw the death of the William Hartnell incarnation of the character (who I suspect Bill is named after by the writer, in an affectionate tribute) and it would be a nice, fearful symmetry if they were to cause the death/regeneration of the latest incarnation too. But this is not the real mystery and nor, I suspect, is the vault which The Doctor is apparently guarding. He would know better than to have something precious locked up, surely? He’d hide it in plain sight I would have thought. It could be a TARDIS or a nursery even but, I suspect, something timelordy (especially if The Master is making a return) and so I think it’s about time I went into the ‘wild speculation’ section of this review. So I apologise if all this turns out to be silly...

We are used, over the last ten years or so, to seeing references to the previous episodes of the show and they are usually very brief, blink and you’ll miss them, shout outs. However, we have here a Doctor who has a picture of his 'late' wife River Song on his desk at the University along with a photo of his Grandaghter Susan Foreman, as seen in the first year or so of the original series. She was played by Carol Ann Ford and she left the show in the 1964 story The Dalek Invasion Of Earth, which I reviewed towards the end of last year here. And The Doctor keeps coming back to these photos throughout the episode rather than just have this as a throwaway shout out so... the writer wants us to notice something here.

Now I have several theories on the subject but this is my pet one at the moment. I’m betting on something similar to this but, please remember, I’m only one episode in so the pieces of the puzzle might not all have been revealed as yet...

What’s missing from this set of photos? We have The Doctor’s wife and The Doctor’s granddaughter... no Doctor’s son or daughter... whichever that was. That element is decidedly missing. We also have a new companion called Bill who The Doctor has suddenly taken an interest in and whose mother died when she was born. When she is now given some photos of her mother before she died, she spots the reflection of Peter Capaldi’s Doctor in a mirror taking the photo in one of them. And then she, and we, are all promptly asked to forget about it as the ‘puddle story’ takes up the heat for most of the rest of the episode...

However, if we don’t let ourselves get distracted we have the idea that we have The Doctor who knew Bill’s mum before she died and the idea of memory wipes represented. So my number one theory at the moment is that Bill’s mum was The Doctor’s daughter and, since Pearl Mackie doesn’t seem to be expecting to be staying around past this current series, I’m guessing her mind will be wiped a little and that she is The Doctor’s granddaughter and, when she regenerates into the familiar Susan Foreman incarnation of the character through televisual trickery at the end of the show, she will be left with an earlier incarnation of The Doctor (aka William Hartnell) and he will take her to Coal Hill School, sometime shortly before the very first Doctor Who story, An Unearthly Child, takes place.

Well, that’s my most favourite conclusion at the moment, anyway. Although, if that really does prove to be the case, then the LGBT community will want Moffat’s head on a stick for having a lesbian character who regenerates into a character who runs off with a man at some point. So maybe not. But I like the idea that the new companion ‘may’ be Susan or, at the very least, in some way related to her so... lets see if she’s revealed to be in possession of two hearts anytime soon, eh?

And that’s that for me. Great opener and I can only hope the show continues at this quality. I guess I’ll find out next week.

Doctor Who - The Edge Of Destruction

Quo Tardis

Doctor Who - The Edge Of Destruction
8th and 15th February 1964 BBC1

Okay, so The Edge Of Destruction is one of those old Doctor Who serials that I’ve wanted to see for a long time because it’s unique in a lot of ways. As far as I can remember, this was the first and only two part story until 18 years later, with the broadcast of the Peter Davison story Black Orchid. It’s also the very first bottle neck episode in the history of the show which, considering it’s only the third story in, could be something of a record for TV bottlenecks. In case you don’t know, a bottleneck episode is a show which is made on a very limited budget, to compensate for overspend on other episodes of a TV show. They’re very cheap and you can usually tell when you’re watching one within five minutes because, often, the episode will consist of an excuse to gather just a few of the cast in a single room where they reminisce about things that have happened recently. The episode would usually then quickly devolve into a series of clips/highlights from previous episodes of the show so the running time is padded out completely and, hey presto, you’ve hardly spent any money on that edition.

Bottlenecks weren’t a new thing even back in 1964, of course. I know the theatrical serials from the 1930s to the 1950s, such as the Flash Gordon serials, would also tend to contain a similarly lower budgeted episode where the good guys would stop and take stock of their current situation. I don’t know what year the phenomenon came to television, though. I do suspect, however, that the producers of the show were in a tight spot after presumably spending a good chunk of their money on the prior story, which was the debut of The Doctor’s most famous adversary, The Daleks.

Well, The Edge Of Destruction doesn’t contain any flashbacks to previous episodes but it does limit itself to the only four regular cast of the show at that time, comprising William Hartnell as The Doctor, Jaqueline Hill as Barbara, William Russel as Ian and Carol Ann Ford as The Doctor’s granddaughter, Susan. And it’s all a very simple, studio bound set as, for the only time I can remember in the show, the entire story is set inside the TARDIS, in just two rooms... mostly the main console room. A few years ago there was another ‘mostly’ TARDIS set story called Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS (which I reviewed here) but while the majority of that story took place in The Doctors favourite mode of transport, not all of it did. There were some significant sections set outside the TARDIS whereas this story has absolutely no external setting at all, apart from what is seen on the TV monitor in the background of the set. Running at about 50 minutes for the two episodes, it’s also a bit longer than the more modern story too.

One of the reasons I’d always wanted to check this one out is because the drama of this one strips away the way the characters present themselves to each other, to a certain extent, as they all turn against each other to try and figure out just what is going on. They all wake up with temporary amnesia and go into almost a trance state at times, often cowering in pain as they try to approach the central control panel. There is even a moment where Susan tries to attack Ian with a pair of scissors, instead letting them rip and tear into a couch she’d been resting on. I noticed, at this point, that the music illustrated her actions with stabs of tone which, although they weren’t performed here on strings, I suspect owed a certain debt to Bernard Herrmann’s similar musical shenanigans in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, already. Susan also later threatens Barbara with these same scissors and it’s interesting to see these characters suddenly so paranoid about each other at such an early stage in the show’s run. Although it’s a bottleneck story, I’m guessing viewers at the time must have been riveted to this one. Similar hostility is shown in the end of the first episode’s cliff hanger... which concludes with Ian, who was supposedly drugged by The Doctor, attempting to strangle the time lord where he stands.

The fallout in terms of character’s relationships with each other in this one is that, after the story has concluded, Barbara does quite a bit of extended sulking, The Doctor finally apologises to her and tells her that she is a valuable contributor to his accidental crew. So the episode does go some way towards building the characters and the way they approach each other in future episodes.

The reason The Doctor realises her value is because, at some point in the second episode, Barbara realises that there’s some kind of pattern to various strange things that have been happening in the TARDIS and this leads The Doctor and Ian to eventually conclude that the problem is that the TARDIS is stuck going backwards and forwards in time between the start of the universe and, presumably, the planet Skaro, where our heroes had been to in the prior episodes of the season. So once The Doctor works out what’s wrong, he manages to put things right and then go on to explain that, although the TARDIS is a mechanical device, the funny shenanigans such as clock hands disappearing are the machine trying to warn them. And it’s here that we get the first idea that, despite The Doctor’s protestations in this episode, the TARDIS is actually a conscious, sentient entity and, of course, this would be picked up in the Russel T. Davies era of the show, culminating in the Steven Moffat produced episode, written by Neil Gaiman, The Doctor’s Wife (reviewed here).

Unfortunately, as far as I’m concerned, this explanation makes not one lick of sense as to why anything has been happening at all in the story and goes down as one of the most ‘WTF?’ moments in Doctor Who history. Seriously, a time loop means everyone keeps going into a trance, losing their memory, getting headaches and then pinching pains in the back of their neck... not to mention large, unhealthy doses of paranoia. It’s a poor explanation for what has been, up until this point, a fairly interesting story.

That being said, if you’re going to do a bottleneck episode, this is the way to do it. It’s got a nice, claustrophobic feeling to the two episodes and even when Susan and Barbara go outside the TARDIS to lead us into the next episode, they are only viewed by Ian, The Doctor and ourselves through the scanner in the TARDIS so... yeah, all set in the TARDIS. Good stuff. This is certainly one of the favourites of the, admittedly few, Hartnell stories I’ve seen and, though I wouldn’t start with it if you’ve never seen any of this era of the show’s stories, I would certainly include this one in on a viewing list. In fact, those first three Hartnell stories are definitely worth seeing in order, I suspect, as the characters and their relationship to each other are properly set up over the course of many weeks. Despite the sheer lunacy of the ‘answer’ to the mystery of the story, it’s a pretty good entry in the series and, possibly, even goes into Sapphire And Steel territory at one point. Definitely worth taking a look at this one.

Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion Of Earth

Hello, Dalek!

Doctor Who -
The Dalek Invasion Of Earth
21 November - 26th December 1964 BBC1
BBC DVD Region 2

“One day, I shall come back. Yes, I shall come back. Until then, there must be no regrets, no tears, no anxieties. Just go forward in all your beliefs, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mine.”
The Doctor, The Dalek Invasion Of Earth

Well, it’s been a while since I personally watched the original version of the Doctor Who story The Dalek Invasion of Earth. My previous experience of this classic William Hartnell tale dates back to the days of VHS, when I probably borrowed it off my cousin. Of course, this 1964 adventure was remade two years later by Amicus studios as Daleks - Invasion Earth 2150AD, following the success of their 1965 remake of the 1963 Doctor Who serial The Daleks, entitled Dr. Who and the Daleks, for the big screen.

Now, while I quite like this original version of the story, I have to say I much prefer the big screen version a whole lot better with its crazy music, vibrant colours and more condensed, pacey version of the plot points. However, this version runs for six, 25 minute episodes instead of the 84 minutes of the movie version, and both have good things and bad things to offer the casual watcher of a story like this.

The first episode starts off strong with a slightly disturbing moment as a robo-man’s brains are finally scrambled enough by the device he’s wearing so that he throws himself in the river to drown, his floating body used in this and subsequent shots. Then the TARDIS materialises, not with the sound we know these days but with much less fuss. Interestingly, it’s not a model but a life size prop and... it’s looking a hell of a lot more authentic in this incarnation than it has done on many occasions in the intervening years. It even has two of its windows tilted open... not something I remember seeing before (or should that be since?). The TARDIS is still carrying its original crew who first set off in their adventures the year before, namely William Hartnell as The Doctor,  Carol Ann Ford as his grandaughter Susan, Jacqueline Hill and William Russell... as Coal Hill School teachers Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton. Of course, we shall be hearing more about Coal Hill School later in the year when the BBC launch their new Doctor Whoniverse spin off Class.

The four seperate into two groups after Susan sprains her ankle (no, really) and the TARDIS is accidentally buried under a falling bridge. Ian and The Doctor go to a warehouse, where they encounter the robomen while Susan and Barbara are picked up by the resistance. They soon discover that they are in the year 2164... which is 200 years after the episode was broadcast, of course. For some reason unknown to me, the big budget movie remake was set in the year 2150 so... I don’t know, maybe the producers of the movie version just liked rounded numbers.

At the end of the first episode, where Ian and The Doctor are cornered by robomen alongside the Thames, we get treated to the famous, classic reveal, cliffhanger shot. As they turn to hurl themselves into the river Thames and escape, not the best choice anyway if you don't want to get killed by the polution (in any century), we see a ripple on the surface and then a Dalek reveals itself as the main enemy of this story, slowly trundling out of the water and onto the bank of the river. Good stuff. This was only the Daleks second appearance, the first being just under a year before this in the second Doctor Who adventure but... I don’t think it’s too much of a leap to conclude that if series producer Verity Lambert hadn’t broken from her 'educational, history programme’ brief for the show in the second story... the series may not have continued running for too much longer. The Daleks were a huge hit on their first appearance and even more so with the release of more Dalek stories... as Dalekmania shook Britain in much the same way that Beatlemania had a year or two before.

It’s an interesting story and, as the groups of protagonists get further divided and find each other over the course of the six episodes they, independently of each other, all make their way with other characters to a mining operation using human slave labour in Bedford, to uncover the Dalek’s master plan of destroying the Earth’s core so our planet can be piloted around the galaxy like a huge spaceship. Fair enough, I guess.

There are quite a few differences from the film other than the obvious cinematic shorthand used in the later production. For a start, there’s certainly not an abundance of posters in post invasion London which are advertising the popular breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs like there are in the movie... where you can hardly look at any exterior shot without finding a Sugar Puffs poster at some point. The film version is, of course, very much an example of exclusive product placement gone mad and shattering the illusion of reality... unless mankind in the future really are subsisting on a diet of Sugar Puffs like they’re chowing down on Soylent Green.

The robomen are a very different beast here too. In the serial here they’re wearing very cumbersome, top heavy helmets and whatever clothes the human who was converted was wearing at the time. In the movie version it’s a much more military, deliberately Nazi-like affair with black, shiny uniforms and a sleek helmet not entirely unlike a German stormtrooper from the Second World War. It’s safe to say that the movie is pushing a slightly different commentary on the robomen than the no less sensitive but, certainly less demonised, versions in the serial. Also, I know these were being primarily watched on small, fuzzy screens which showed none of the detail you get these days but... it’s kind of hilarious when you realise the actor playing the roboman who throws himself into the river at the start of the first episode plays a roboman in various locations throughout the six episodes... and dies a fair few deaths too. Great stuff.

Other takeaways I got from this show was that, while the Daleks do say their trademark “Exterminate” a few times, it hadn't quite got the status it later achieved and, more often than not, they’ll just talk about people being killed instead. I also noticed one of the resistance fighters talking about striking a blow to give Europe a hope... so I guess by 2164 we must somehow be on very good terms again with our fellow Europeans after all this Brexit fuss... at least according to Doctor Who.

The ending of the final episode is quite dramatic and, surprisingly moving. The Doctor’s grandaughter has fallen in love with one of the resistance fighters but she has to leave him to carry on with her travels. However, The Doctor gets wind of this and locks her out of the TARDIS, abandoning her to a more stable future away from all his time travelling shenanigans. This is where the famous, farewell, ‘no regrets’ speech which I quote at the top of this review comes from. Even if you’ve never seen this episode, you’ve probably seen the speech because it is always used in documentaries about the show and in flashback sequences within the show itself. This was the very first time a companion had left the show but Carol Ann Ford would, of course, briefly return to the role opposite Richard Hurndall (standing in for the long dead Hartnell) in the 20th anniversary show, The Five Doctors.

And that’s that, I think. Doctor Who - The Dalek Invasion of Earth is something of a classic of the Hartnell era and definitely one to contemplate watching if you ever feel a hankering to watch a First Doctor adventure. Dated but kinda fun... but don’t count the movie version out just yet.

Doctor Who - Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS

Fiddling While TARDIS Vernes

Doctor Who - Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS
Airdate: 27th April 2013. UK. BBC1

Warning: New spoilers waiting to be discovered as you journey to the centre of this article.

For a long time now, Doctor Who fans around the world have been given occasional little audio and visual glimpses of other parts of The Doctor’s famous time and space travelling machine, TARDIS, besides the main console room which features in a lot, although not nearly all, of the stories. But rarely are we given a real chance to see what the rest of the TARDIS is properly like and even just the sound of the cloister bell, a famous chime in the Doctor Who universe, is enough to light up fans' eyes en masse (first used in Tom Baker’s last story Logopolis and still used in the Matt Smith series more than it ever was in the past, strangely enough).

So it was with much trepidation that I embarked on this episode with the Jules Verne inspired title of Journey To The Centre Of The TARDIS... after 50 years of not having enough budget to show us much else of The Doctor’s good vessel (in spite of at least one Hartnell story taking place in its entirety on board this ship). I was really not wanting to see much else of it in all honesty.

Moffat does like to change things and tinker with the established myth of Doctor Who more than The Meddling Monk and sometimes that can get quite interesting (when confined to certain acceptable parameters) and other times that can just seem quite arrogant, unnecessary and, frankly, leaving a downright tragic aftertaste in the mouth. I’m dreading what is going to be revealed in four weeks time at the end of the current series, for example... he’s already made some horrible references to The Doctor’s name in some scenes that really didn’t work in the last series and onward and... well... let’s all wait and see.

So, did the episode which was advertised to be an exploration of some of the parts of the TARDIS we’ve never seen before prove to be an interesting and respectful look at the space/time vehicle of this beloved show’s history or... did it fall flat? My expectations were not really going too much in either direction, well... with the exception of aforementioned trepidation, that is... and I can say now that this episode proved to be...

Okayish.

There was, as I’m sure a lot of us were all expecting, a lot of running down corridors and some of the rooms (and you really didn’t get to see much more than the corridors for most of the running time) looked like cheap CGI backgrounds as opposed to actual sets... but the episode certainly wasn’t anywhere disrespectful to the shows of the past and, considering it was presumably the “bottle neck”* episode of the current series, it was mostly quite entertaining too (Bottle neck episode is a term for an episode of a TV show which is deliberately “written cheap” to allow money allocated to be used for other episodes when unexpected costs happen. These episodes frequently feature few sets and often a lot of flashbacks to previous episodes, to the extent that many people also refer to them as “flashback episodes”. Many shows have them and they’re often not very hard to spot.).

This episode offered a few tantalising glimpses of things every fan would want to explore further, such as a Gallifreyan library with a certain book charting The History Of The Time War which gave Clara a mini moment of epiphany in regards to The Doctor’s name and his place in the universe, so to speak. Unfortunately, the episode also managed to cop out on all these little things because the way our heroes got out of this week's story was, frankly, a big time and space reset button which erased the versions of our characters out of history after they’d saved themselves from earlier folly, thus rendering the majority of the characters (at least the important ones) without a memory of the episode. So that was a bit pointless.

And, yes... we got to hear the cloister bell again. Briefly.

Nevertheless, although there was some hellish imagery used in the story, there were also some wonderful, visual delights, with a very diverse set of colour palettes used from scene to scene... especially the moment when The Doctor and Clara went from running through orange and green lit corridors to the side of a “snarling” plateau which used colouring more reminiscent of the Pertwee era. Pertwee, in fact, was also heard in this episode... as were a few Doctors and companions, since the removal of a panel on the TARDIS console triggered a series of sound bytes from the shows past, starting with a sample of The Doctor’s grandchild Susan Foreman (as played by Carole Ann Ford) explaining the TARDIS acronym from the very first episode of the very first story, An Unearthly Child. 

And talking of children, and possible grandchildren, it was also nice to have a glimpse, once again, of Melody Pond’s (aka River Song’s) cot from the A Good Man Goes To War episode too. Nice touch and one is still wondering, or at least I am, if Clara will eventually be revealed as the daughter of River and The Doctor at some point... or is she a future incarnation of The Doctor’s Daughter perhaps, ripped from David Tennant’s DNA in his third series as The Doctor. That’s another of my many theories this week... I’m hoping Moffat’s got something a little more clever planned for his big reveal though.

It wasn’t a fantastic story, it has to be said, but it certainly wasn’t a big letdown like the five episodes which comprised the first part of “Series Seven” were either, so that’s okay. It kept me interested and it really feels like the producers of the show are working up to something big. Now I’ve been twice bitten by that already with this series over the last couple of years so I’m not going to get my hopes up just yet... especially with Moffat now threatening that this year will somehow change the show.

What I will do, though, is look forward to next weeks Victorian London shenanigans with the return of my favourite lesbian Silurian, my favourite Sontaran and Bond/Avengers gal Diana Rigg in it. Wish I could leap seven days into the future and check it out now.