Journey to the Center of the TARDIS [7:11]

Years ago, when I didn't know any better, I wrote, in the sense of planned out in my head, a Doctor Who story which might have been called "The Pillars of Hercules".[*] The Doctor, for good and adequate reasons, has to travel further than he has ever travelled before — to the very edge of the Universe, pursued by all his worst enemies, who want to get there first. The Doctor narrowly wins the race, and discovers that the Universe does indeed have a literal, physical edge, marked by a big scary door. He steps through the big scary door (which is blue) and discovers that on the other side is...a junk yard at 76 Totters Lane. The whole of Time and Space has always been inside an old fashioned police phone box. 

I also "wrote" one in which, for equally good reasons, the Doctor has to go on a long journey through the TARDIS. The further he goes, the stranger it becomes, corridors going from white hexagons to bricks and eventually to landscapes and planets, a whole universe in its own right. As he travels, horrible monsters confront him, until he finally gets to the very centre of the TARDIS where he finds a white hotel room, an astronaut and a big blue monolith a four poster bed, asleep in which is a familiar figure in a floppy hat and scarf, endlessly dreaming.

The trouble with both these ideas — the trouble with all self-begotten, masturbatory fan fiction — is that they are not stories. They aren't even ideas for stories. They are just free-floating ideas in the mind of someone who has spent too much of their life immersed in one particular TV show. Suppose the Doctor and the Master were brothers, we exclaim! Suppose Holmes and Moriarty were the same person! Suppose it turned out that Daleks were the human race, way, way in the future! Suppose it turned out the Doctor's worst enemy was actually an evil future incarnation of himself! 

Okay, supposing they were and supposing it did. Why would that be interesting, particularly? What follows from any of it? Nothing whatsoever, so far as I can see. A long journey is a long journey, even if there is a quite a good punch line at the end of it. 

Not that all self-begotten fiction is automatically bad (and not that there is anything reprehensible about fans thinking up new stories about characters they love.) When you have a very well defined "universe", then very interesting stories can sometimes bubble up from inside it; some universes are created specifically as cooking pots in which stories can stew. Tell a writer that a cowardly, dishonest trader has been forced into a marriage of convenience with an obsessively honourable warrior woman, and he could probably develop a rom-com, a tragedy or a farce from that basic idea depending on what kind of writer he was. It doesn't become a less legitimate rom-com, tragedy or farce because you can state the premise as "The one in which a Ferengi has to marry a Klingon." It's perfectly good shorthand; a perfectly good way for viewers and actors and producers to grasp the idea behind the story without pages and pages of exposition. It may even be that if no-one had thought of Star Trek, no-one would have thought of telling that particular story; that "Ferengi" and "Klingon" are conceptual tools which faciliate "The House of Quark" and  "Spock" and "McCoy" are conceptual tools that facilitate "City on the Edge of Forever". 

But Star Trek is — to borrow an expression — a story-making machine. Doctor Who really isn't. "Mad Dalek" doesn't evoke narrative possibilities in the same way that "Klingon Civil War" does.

I am sure that we have all sometimes thought "just how big is the TARDIS; how far does it go; are there parts of it that the Doctor never shows us, parts of it that he himself doesn't know?!" But answers to those sorts of questions are, at best, components of stories, and not even the most important components. They are not stories in themselves, and they are certainly not things you can serve instead of stories. 

Tell me that the Doctor is going to show us parts of the TARDIS that we have never seen before, and my first question is not "What parts?" but "Why?". And you had better have a good answer.

I may possibly be giving out the impression that I don't really  have anything to say about "Journey to the Center of the TARDIS." This is because I don't. For anyone keeping track, it scores 8% on the Ril/Mof scale: I barely made it past the opening credits. I am honestly tempted to type the words "beneath contempt" and pass on to next weeks story. 

I suppose I had better cover the things I liked about it. I liked the title, although I am fascinated by the theory that a target audience who are assumed to be spooked out by Scooby-Doo ghosts are also wryly amused be references to Jules Verne. I liked the big spaceship; I liked the idea of a space salvage team; I liked the Aliens-out-of-Red-Dwarf imagery; I thought that the characters had a little bit of potential and wouldn't mind seeing them in a story where they actually had things to do. I quite liked the way parts of the TARDIS seemed to be quite like Hogwarts School: the idea that a Time Lord encyclopaedia is something you drink rather than something you read. I believe that the Great Big Story Arc that started in the final Sly McCoy season and was partially completed in the first few novels would have turned Gallifrey into Gormenghast. I started chucking things at the screen when the TARDIS was inside the big spaceship being manipulated by big mechanical claws. 

When Doctor Who was a 60s throwback, an embarrassment to the BBC made on a shoestring budgie and kept running only because cancellation would generate adverse reaction from people who hadn't watched it for years, aberrations like "Time and the Rani" and "Timelash" were perfectly understandable. When Doctor Who is such a major part of the BBC brand, hailed on Radio Times covers and Christmas idents and expensive exhibitions in Cardiff, you would imagine that someone would be making some kind of attempt to control quality a little bit. I can only assume that the Power That Be have a genuinely phobic reaction to science fiction — they don't understand what it is about or what it is for, can't focus their mind on it for more than a couple of minutes, and assume that The First Men in the Moon, Ben 10, and Do Andrews Dream of Electric Sleep really are all pretty much reducible to "Mr Gobbledegook was walking down the road." Since none of this stuff makes any sense, why should they care that this particular bit of stuff doesn't make any sense? 

Oh well. Very little harm was done. At least there weren't any Big Revelations. There is always a danger that a Terrible Writer will introduce a Terrible Idea that other Terrible Writers feel the need to follow, and suddenly "Time Lords Have Twelve Lives" or "The Doctor Is Half Human On His Mother's Side" is one of those things about Doctor which everybody knows. (There are still fans who seriously believe that Matt Smith's successor will be the final TV Doctor because someone once said that Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times and that can't be unsaid.) I suppose we got to see the engine room and the Eye of Harmony (which was actually kind of cool) but there is no reason to think that the Engine Room and the Eye of Harmony will look anything like that the next time we see them. When a show has been running for fifty years, we sort of accept that the sets and the costumes will not be completely consistent from decade to decade; but I think it was a shame to enshrine the idea that the TARDIS interior looks like whatever the Doctor wants it to look like quite so explicitly in the story-internal series mythology. The tension between "rickety old box of tricks" and "most advanced ship in the universe" is one that it would have been better not to have resolved. The Series 1 - 4 console room was rather nicely re-imagined as being made of coral — because TARDII are grown rather than constructed; but it had lots of random bits of anachronistic technology stuck on because as the Doctor travels, naturally he repairs it from what's available The insight that the TARDIS is like a camper van, both a vehicle and a home — was a spot on observation. Now we have to pretend that he had merely configured the desk top to look like that.

Back in 1964, in the twelfth and thirteenth ever episodes of Doctor Who, it was established that the TARDIS was intelligent, sort of, and there has always been a yummy ambiguity about whether the Doctor personifies the TARDIS in the way sailors sometimes personify their boats, or personifies it because it actually is a person. Neil Gaiman, generally accepted to be the Second Greatest Living Author [**] contributed a silly story last season in which the TARDIS accidentally becomes incarnated as a dippy goth chic with a crush on the Doctor whose one-liners aren't quite so good as Delerium's. Like a lot of things in New Who, it was a clever twist on the established mythos that we should have grinned at and then never spoken of again. Instead, it's become another of those things which everyone knows and which has to be smirked over in every subsequent episode. The Doctor would make a good Dalek, ha! The Doctor once wore a fez ha-ha. The Doctor and the TARDIS are like an old married couple, ha-ha-ha! 

You could have done something with the idea of the TARDIS being violated by salvage men. I think they probably needed to be cosmic salvage men from a higher dimension who regarded Time Lord technology as mere junk. The amount of gobbledegooks that had to be invoked to create a situation where three ordinary guys with a big spaceship could, or thought they could, steal bits of the ship made it hard to even think of the thing as a story. Turning off the TARDIS's indestructible button so Clara could learn to fly it? Setting the TARDIS for self destruct? Pretending to set the TARDIS for self destruct? Stealing bits from the special cosmic TARDIS Christmas tree room? I really wish writers would take the trouble to rub out their construction lines. Yes, in the first Alien movie there is a human who surprisingly turns out to be an android, and the look and feel of the space craft today is a little like that in Alien so of course one of the characters is an android who surprisingly turns out to be human. Possibly because his comrades have tricked him into thinking he is as a black joke, or to steal his inheritance.  

So, all that is left is two bits of information about the extremely interesting and fascinating great big story arc.

1: Clara's Thing

The Doctor asks Clara why she keeps dying and coming back. Clara doesn't know. No-one really expected Clara to know. So we can ignore that bit. (I am pretty sure that Clara's thing will turn out to have something to do with the TARDIS, because there have been so many references to the TARDIS not liking her. Perhaps she is the reincarnation of the Master's TARDIS.)

2: The Doctor's Thing

Clara reads a passage from a book which Aslan has specifically told her not to read from. The book reveals the Doctor's (oh, god) True Name. She is mildly surprised and asks him about it; he is mildly surprised that she is mildly surprised but there is a big red reset button and everyone stops being surprised and forgets. So it appears that:

a: His name isn't "Doctor" or "Who", which were my first and second bets

c: It is a name which means something to Clara: he has an identity, he is someone other than who he claims to be.

c: It isn't a name which is significant within established mythos — he isn't Rassilon or Omega or The Other because Clara would have no reason to recognise those names. 

d: It's got something to do with the something he did in the bloody Time War.

Ho hum. I admit to being intrigued as to where Moffat is going with this; he's been at it for years (since the story which introduced River Bloody Song, in fact) so he is obviously going somewhere. The "who is River Song" reveal was quite cleverly handled, sort of; I suspect he has got either a very clever answer or (more likely) a very clever twist about why we aren't going to here the answer after all. 

But the trouble is, like the episode, it's self-generated fan-fiction. "What is the Doctor's name" is the kind of thing, like "Who ws Susan Foreman" an "What happened to Peter Parker's Mum and Dad" which is only interesting to someone who is already quite interested in Doctor Who. And it's not like it's really a "secret". It's not like every produce for 50 years has known the Doctor's names and origins but not told us, and when the secret is revealed we will see all the previous stories in a different light. It's not even as if a secret sealed manuscript by Sydney Newman has been discovered and opened in the presence of twenty four bishops. No-one knows the Doctor's name because he hasn't got one. Moffat is going to make something up. If it's a very good thing, then it will become a true thing, like the Doctor being a Time Lord, and no-one will really believe that there was a time when we didn't know it. If it's a silly thing, then everyone will just ignore it and the series will carry on as before.

It's just such an amateur, sophomoric way of writing. "There's this thing called the TARDIS. No-one knows how big it is" "Then let's do a story in which we find out how big the TARDIS is!" "There is this character called the Doctor...no-one knows his name" "Then let's reveal his name! It will be the Biggest Thing Ever! And while we are at it, let's give Harpo a speaking part, and introduce us to Conan's Mummy and Daddy and take Judge Dredd's mask off, reveal the name of the second Mrs De Winter; write a prequel to Watchmen."

Why only twelve disciples? Go out and hire thousands. 

Beneath contempt. Move on.

[*] As everyone knows, the Pillars of Hercules stood at the very edge of the Ancient World. Spanish Pieces of Eight had an engraving of the two pillars with a serpent wrapped around them: that is where the US dollar sign comes from.

[**] Terry Pratchett