smith

February 9, 2015

A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard (Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead)

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Credits

The end.

It’s June 7^th, 2008. Rihanna is at number one with “Take a Bow,” having taken the slot the previous week. The Ting Tings, Coldplay, Usher, Madonna, and Justin Timberlake also chart. In news, Manchester United triumph in the first ever all-English European Cup final, defeating Chelsea on penalties. Construction begins in London on the Olympic Stadium, and Barack Obama finally puts the long fight for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination to rest when he defeats Hillary Clinton to, by that point, absolutely nobody’s surprise.

On television, meanwhile, the Doctor is in a library, shouting at shadows. Seething, he tells them to look him up. They do so, and begin to read.

Like anything, it emerged from a number of influences, and its history can in one sense be traced back indefinitely. It does not have a clear and definitive moment of creation – a pristine and bespoke origin story. It is, however, generally agreed to have a creator: Sydney Newman. Newman was a Canadian television producer who caught the eye of Associated British Corporation, a weekend ITV franchise in the North and Midlands of England. Moving there in 1958, he quickly made a reputation for himself, birthing the reasonably successful sci-fi anthology Out of this World, a fairly straightforward knockoff of the American Twilight Zone, and The Avengers, at first a fairly generic crime show, but eventually an international hit. At the beginning of 1963, he was poached by the BBC to become Head of Drama.

Shortly before Newman’s arrival, the BBC commissioned a study to see how science fiction might could work on television. Mainstream critics like Kingsley Amis were drawing attention to the genre, the earliest days of the New Wave, spearheaded by writers like J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, were playing out, and the BBC, committed to making various types of programming in the interest of the public, wanted to try it. The general conclusion was that sci-fi is a literary, adult genre that can’t really be done well for families because of the need for special effects. Time travel was suggested as a potentially strong subject for allowing a variety of low-cost dramas, and the report arrives six months before Newman. Three months after Newman started on the job, a Saturday evening timeslot between a sports program, Grandstand, and a pop music program, Juke Box Jury opened up. The slot called for an all-ages program, appealing to teenagers waiting for Juke Box Jury, adults holding over from Grandstand, and the existing children’s audience for that timeslot. Newman decided the sci-fi program would be perfect, and set to work designing it with C.E. Weber, a staff writer, and Donald Wilson, head of the Script department.

Curiously, the program’s development began with the sorts of characters who should be in it. The idea was a 30-something male protagonist and a younger female one, an older mentor figure, and an aesthetic that combined Victoriana with high-tech shininess.

…

February 6, 2015

You Were Expecting Someone Else Final: The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who

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There are several regards in which the IDW run of Doctor Who comics is an oddity. First and foremost, it is the only substantive body of Doctor Who material to receive no distribution in the UK. Panini, the Italian sticker company that bought Marvel UK’s operations in the mid-90s and, with it, Doctor Who Magazine, had the UK license for Doctor Who comics, and was disinclined to let an American upstart in. And so IDW ended up creating Doctor Who comics almost entirely for the American market.

Unrelatedly, IDW also ended up creating what was mostly a line of fairly crappy comics. They opened with a Tenth Doctor/Martha miniseries by longtime vanguard of mediocrity Gary Russell, continued with the damp and misguided squib of The Forgotten, and stopped off at their one UK-distributed series, and eventually did their Doctor Who/Star Trek crossover (distributed in the UK because they put Star Trek first in the title, meaning it was technically a Star Trek comic and thus not precluded by Panini’s license), skewered masterfully by Josh Marsfelder here, stopping off with various other mostly uninteresting comics along the way.

Of course, as we’ve seen over the years, Doctor Who comics are hardly the area of the series’ life where it has most regularly crowned itself in glory. There are moments of genuine charm, most often in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, and especially in those edited by Clayton Hickman. And there are moments that are interesting as objects of nostalgia – the weird alternate history of the John and Gillian period, the Frank Bellamy imitations of the Pertwee era, early career mediocrities from Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and Grant Morrison, the surreal John Ridgway dreamscapes of the Davison and Colin Baker years, and the criminally under-appreciated Steve Moore run. But for the most part Doctor Who comics have been historical curiosities. The IDW run is mostly the same, although, truth be told, most of it isn’t even that curious.

But on Christmas Eve 2013, the day before the end of the Matt Smith era, IDW released a one-shot that served as their farewell to the license before it passed on to Titan Comics. It’s been the norm for a few years for one of the Wednesdays around Christmas to get a heavily reduced slate of new release comics, quietly shipped to comic shops a week in advance, with all of the books being fairly high profile, major books. So in 2013, there were a total of eight new releases, with one of them being this – a $7.99 double-length issue to close out the run. Picked for the high profile assignment, in a notable departure from IDW’s usual somewhat uninspiring creators, was Paul Cornell, making what was, by 2013, a rare return to Doctor Who. The premise is a comics classic, and an homage to the “Earth Prime” days of the DC Multiverse – the Doctor falls through universes as he does sometimes, and finds himself in the real world, where his adventures are regularly chronicled in a TV show on the BBC.

…

February 2, 2015

Outside the Government Final: The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot

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Given that The Day of the Doctor was massively successful and immediately catapulted to the top of the “best Doctor Who stories ever” list, it is perhaps no small thing that it was not actually the most beloved piece of the fiftieth anniversary. That honor, of course, goes to the spectacle of Steven Moffat visibly wishing he was sitting in the chair from Terror of the Autons during the botched satellite link-up with One Direction during the BBC Three “afterparty.” But second to the single most sublime moment of television that Steven Moffat has ever provided the world was Peter Davison’s The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot.

It is worth stating, up front, that this is a genuinely sweet and delightful piece of television. It is routinely hilarious, from the brilliant use of the Shada clip to cover Tom Baker’s lack of involvement to the Peter Jackson/Ian McKellen cameo to Sylvester McCoy’s beautiful delivery of “I’d like to go home now” to Steven Moffat playing with action figures in his office to… I mean, this paragraph could go on for quite a bit, couldn’t it? This is a joyous thing chock full of charming moments.

In some ways, actually, that’s the headline. Colin Baker has said in at least one interview that he genuinely was hurt not to be included in Day of the Doctor, especially given that Tom Baker was. This is an old wound, of course – the same one that flared twenty years earlier over the disparity of emphasis in The Dark Dimension. But it’s honestly difficult to imagine that Davison and McCoy didn’t have similar emotions. Of course they were all jealous of Baker and McGann for getting involvement. Wouldn’t anyone be?

And yet this exists, full of warmth and humor and good feelings. On, to be clear, all sides. Moffat is there to send himself up as a disdainful and cantankerous man who has it in for any part of the series he didn’t create. Because, of course, he’d have loved to do The Thirteen Doctors as much as Colin Baker would have loved to be in it. Nobody didn’t want to see all of the classic series Doctors. And perhaps more to the point, in skewering himself so thoroughly, Moffat is tacitly making it clear that he understands Davison, Baker, and McCoy’s disappointments, and, more to the point, is sympathizing with them.

One might, of course, fairly ask why he didn’t just give them parts in the special then. But the reason for that is straightforward: the special still had to, at the end of the day, work as an episode of television and as a narrative. And the available options for trying to craft a narrative featuring all of the Doctors were all, in their own ways, unappealing. Seventy-five minutes is not nearly enough to handle eight leads with their own plot threads – an ensemble of that size needs far more room to breathe. And a chain of cameo appearances would quickly grow dull.

…

January 30, 2015

The Moment Has Been Prepared For (The Day of the Doctor)

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Well, at least it’s just the one who committed genocide and not the one in that
awful coat.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. The hour, in this case, was actually about seventy-five minutes long, commencing at 7:50 PM on November 23^rd, 2013. Martin Garrix was at number one with “Animals,” with Lily Allen, Lorde, One Direction, Lady Gaga, and Eminem also charting. In the six months since The Name of the Doctor had aired, Edward Snowden had created a major international stir when he leaked a significant trove of classified information about the extent of surveillance operations being routinely carried out by the US and UK governments, Mohamed Morsi was deposed as President of Egypt in a military coup, and Typhoon Haiyan struck the Philippines and Vietnam, killing more than six thousand people. The man, of course, was Steven Moffat.

The Day of the Doctor did not quite win universal praise. It just won stellar ratings, an impressive 88% AI rating, the distinction of being only the second episode of Doctor Who ever to hit the number one slot in the weekly ratings, and Doctor Who Magazine’s 50^th Anniversary poll for the greatest story of all time. Nothing is all things to everyone, but it is difficult to imagine something coming much closer than The Day of the Doctor did. And yet The Day of the Doctor arrived after an enormously troubled production season, and was hardly an uncomplicated production in its own right, with executive producer Caro Skinner quitting the series a few weeks before shooting began, on top of the entire mess of Eccleston initially expressing interest and subsequently declining to reprise the role. That it avoided being an outright disaster given these circumstances seems a lucky break. That it was an insta-classic seems a small miracle.

At the heart of its success is a script by Moffat that is unapologetically committed to the episode’s grandeur. The episode deploys big set piece after big set piece, rarely waiting long between them. The TARDIS helicopter lift starts at the two minute mark. At seven minutes, we jump into the Time War. Billie Piper shows up six minutes later, David Tennant six minutes after that, at around the twenty minute mark. At twenty-seven minutes, Smith and Tennant share the screen for the first time. The big Zygon awakening/invasion breaks out at thirty-five minutes. Six minutes later is the big “did you ever count the children” three-way confrontation among the Doctors, which, while lacking the immediate grandeur of some of the other instances, is nevertheless a huge moment. The biggest slow period of the episode is the subsequent ten minutes building to the Doctors blasting their way out of Gallifrey Falls No More, bringing us to the fifty-two minute mark. By fifty-eight minutes, all three Doctors are agreeing to commit double genocide. And seven minutes later the thirteen-Doctor montage has kicked off. And six minutes thereafter the Curator shows.

But for all the accelerated pace involved in jumping from set piece to set piece, what’s also striking is the way in which the individual set pieces are generally given room to breathe.

…

January 26, 2015

Dear Santa: The Doctors Revisited (Matt Smith)

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You can tell that we’ve reached the present day quite early on, not least because Matt Smith suddenly shows up to have opinions on the show, having not been interviewed about any of his predecessors. But the real giveaway is the choices of episodes in the first segment, when introducing the character of the Eleventh Doctor. Every previous episode displayed a strong bias towards the earliest episodes for a Doctor. Whereas this pulls almost entirely from Season 7B, unabashedly positioning this as the present day of Doctor Who.

Yes, we eventually look back a few years and do the Ponds, which is somewhat historicized, but there’s no added insight to be had. These are the same talking points from Doctor Who Confidential and endless publicity interviews, dutifully trotted out again. Their context is only altered by the preceding ten episodes of this, which serve to make all of this look like the telos of Doctor Who itself.

With the historical perspective that a year allows us, this is not quite true. The focus on how Matt Smith, while the youngest actor ever to play the part, makes the Doctor seem old is a common talking point, and indeed was brought up in relation to the Capaldi casting, by this time long since announced. More interesting is the segment on Clara, which came at a point where she was widely viewed as a frightfully generic companion. There’s not a lot, but it’s acutely clear that Coleman in particular sees more depth in the character, and has ideas for what to do with her. The argument that Deep Breath doesn’t constitute a soft reboot of Clara but rather the moment when everybody started seeing what was always there has some solid support here.

Elsewhere, we can also see how this is quietly setting up the immediate future. There’s not much that directly tees up The Day of the Doctor, but the features on Madame Kovarian, the Silence, and the Weeping Angels quietly serve as a primer for Time of the Doctor. And, of course, there’s the fact that when this aired, Smith was a lame duck Doctor. His successor had been announced, and indeed, was either a week off from his debut or had debuted yesterday (depending on whether you watched this in the US or the UK – this was the only one to debut first in the UK).

And so there’s an odd dualism here. On the one hand, this does what one always suspected it would: presents the Moffat era as the ultimate in Doctor Who. Of course it does. The point of all of these sorts of specials is promotion of the show, and has been since Confidential. But on the other, it leads the show right up to the brink of a known transition. There’s a triumph as we reach the present, but also, and in some ways more importantly, a sort of “right, on to the next half-century” attitude. Which is a good place to be after fifty years.…

December 29, 2014

Time Travel Is Always Possible In Dreams (The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang)

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TARDIS Erootitorum

It’s June 19^th, 2010. Shout is at number one with “Shout,” which lasts both weeks of this story. Kylie Minogue, Eminem, David Guetta, Lady Gaga, and Baddiel, Skinner, and Lightning Seed also chart, the latter with a hilarious belief that England might not crash pathetically out of the World Cup. Spoiler: the day after this story wraps, they do. Also in news, David Cameron apologizes on behalf of the government for the Bloody Sunday Massacre, and George Osborne presents a budget statement full of austerity. Also, on June 26^th, the entire universe ends.

There is no point in pretending that my opinion here is anything other than what it is. I think this is decisively and thoroughly a good thing. I love the Davies era dearly, but the Moffat era is, for my money, the pinnacle of the show. Indeed, it’s basically this pair of episodes that’s why TARDIS Eruditorum exists: because I could not get them and their implications out of my head. I have been looking forward to this post since I started, and the observations I want to make about this story are, ultimately, the observations that I created the blog to make. Although, having now gotten to it, it seems like so much of what I could say is stuff I’ve made obvious, and that nobody reading this needs to have pointed out. In many ways, everything I’ve said in TARDIS Eruditorum and the entire critical apparatus for looking at Doctor Who that I’ve built exists so as to make this story the most self-evident and explicable thing imaginable. If you’ve any understanding of how the thought processes of TARDIS Eruditorum work, you can figure out most of what I like about this story without effort. Its metafiction, its alchemy, everything about it is so thoroughly in line with the approach I take to Doctor Who that there’s almost nothing to say. By spending four years building to it, I’ve left such a clearly defined piece of negative space that filling it seems unnecessary.

Let’s, then, do the obvious thing and approach it in the context of Season Five. Much of Season Five, viewed through history’s lens, has felt, understandably, like an extended exercise in incremental change from the Russell T Davies era. Which is understandable – it’s easy to forget that the gap between The End of Time Part Two and The Eleventh Hour was only three months. To people who don’t pay attention to who the writer of an episode is, which is to say, to roughly 100% of the population, a period of bedding in was important. And so we had a season that retained numerous structural elements of the Davies era: a present/future/past triptych to start the season, a thirteen episode season consisting of seven single episode stories and three two-parters, et cetera. Yes, there were some changes – the first two-parter was, despite the presence of familiar monsters, the more adult and weird of them, while the second one filled the “for kids” brief.

…

December 27, 2014

Guest Post: The Impossible Girl

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Caitlin Smith is, so far as I can tell, the world’s leading expert on Clara Oswald. And yes, I’m counting Steven Moffat and Jenna Coleman. She’s also, generally speaking, one of the most insightful and interesting Doctor Who bloggers I know, and I’m honored to have her do a guest post for me. She blogs regularly on Tumblr, and is pretty much always this clever.

Oh, and if you missed it Friday, I’m doing my annual post-Christmas sale on books.

When Phil asked me to write a guest post on the Impossible Girl arc, I was surprised and honoured …and completely lost on where to begin. It’s a relatively simple arc, after all. The Doctor is fascinated by who Clara is and how she can be twice dead and yet still alive, and he focuses on solving the problem of Clara, often forgetting the person behind the mystery. He gets called out on this several times over the course of the series – by Madame Vastra, by Emma Grayling and by Clara herself. And of course in the end it turns out that the Impossible Girl is just a construct by the Doctor, and Clara-the-ordinary-girl is the important one.

Simple. There are of course interesting things to say about how the audience is complicit in the Doctor’s mystification of Clara, particularly as a response to the common complaint that Moffat’s female characters aren’t ordinary enough. We, like the Doctor, are unable or unwilling to look beyond the surface, and thus our judgements are as flawed as we are accusing the work to be.

But what I find particularly interesting, especially in light of series 8, is that the Impossible Girl isn’t just a construct of the Doctor, nor of the audience. It’s also a creation of Clara herself. It’s the first we see of the control freak, of the ego maniac needy game player. The Impossible Girl is the version of Clara that she most wants to be in Series 7.

When we meet Clara, she seems so very perfect. She’s clever, pretty and compassionate. She stands up to the Doctor, but not to the point of getting annoying. She’s confident, but not arrogant. She’s kind and loyal in how she stays to help the Maitland children. She ticks pretty much every box for what many people would consider perfect, and she definitely plays up to the societal expectations of her gender. All of these traits are the results of decisions Clara has made about the person she wants to present to the world. It would be so easy to believe that was the real Clara, because she makes herself so easy to like.

That was the first mask of Clara’s we saw, but it definitely wasn’t the last. For the rest of Series 7 we see her hero persona growing and blending with the ‘perfect’ mask of pre-Doctor Clara. She defeats a sun god with a leaf in “The Rings of Akhaten”, revealing not only how much she enjoys being the hero (complete with a deus ex machina), but also how much meaning she can give an ordinary object with the power of her determination.

…

December 22, 2014

Some Mercury Left Over (Nightmare in Silver)

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Figure Who Even Knows: Matt Smith’s Doctor Who faces down
himself with a facial prosthesis in front of a menacing green screen
projection.

This is an excerpt from a future chapter of The Last War in Albion, the precise placement of which remains ambiguous. Think of it as our “The Yesterday Gambit.”

Previously in The Last War in Albion: At the same time that Gaiman was working on The Ocean at the End of the Lane, he was also writing his second Doctor Who story, Nightmare in Silver, where he brought back the Cybermen, the very same monsters that featured in Black Legacy, Alan Moore’s first professional publication as a writer, and that Grant Morrison had employed in his early-career Doctor Who Magazine work…

“Dreams!! Visions!! We are Cybermen, Medic… we do not run from shadows!” – Alan Moore, “Black Legacy”

Gaiman had considerably more affection for Doctor Who than either Morrison or Moore (who was known to suggest that all of the actors to play the part after William Hartnell made Doctor Who seem like a pedophile). And so it is not, in this case, his mentor’s take that he turned to, but rather his own memories of the Cybermen from childhood. Indeed, they were the series’ iconic monsters for the period when The Ocean at the End of the Lane is set, due to some curiosities with the rights to the show’s usual iconic foe, the Daleks, which meant that Doctor Who couldn’t use them for several years. Gaiman’s seventh birthday fell on November 10^th, 1967, two months into Patrick Troughton’s second season as Doctor Who, a season that both opened and closed with a Cyberman story, and the book’s main action takes place during the season’s penultimate story.

Indeed, this is much of why Gaiman returned to the program to do a second episode, as there was little reason for him to otherwise. The BBC’s pay was, by his standards, meager, especially for the amount of time The Doctor’s Wife took. But that script had been one of the highlights of his career over the previous few years, winning him a Hugo Award and considerable acclaim. He’d had, for that story, a rare thing in one’s career – an editor who was as skilled a writer as he was, and the collaboration had sparked him to heights that his late career work had not consistently attained. But most of all, Moffat dared him to “make the Cybermen scary again,” and he couldn’t resist it.

Unfortunately, perhaps because Gaiman had time for fewer drafts, perhaps because Moffat was too occupied with other projects to edit as extensively, Nightmare in Silver harkens back to mediocrities like 1602 and Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader in which Gaiman offers a fairly hollow riff on pop culture nostalgia. Where The Doctor’s Wife had been progressively refined at Moffat’s urging to give more weight to its most interesting idea – Doctor Who being able to communicate verbally with his Tardis – Nightmare in Silver never settles down on one particularly interesting idea about the Cybermen.

…

December 19, 2014

The Green One and the Not-Green One (The Crimson Horror)

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I don’t know that I’d call it a crimson horror, really. Really, it’s
more a rosy horror. Incarnadine horror at best.

It’s May 4^th, 2013. Daft Punk have gotten lucky and made it to number one. Calvin Harris, Nelly, Macklemore, and, in a stunning feat of horror, will.i.am and Justin Bieber also chart. In news, James McCormick is jailed for ten years for selling fake bomb detectors, Labour and UKIP do well in local elections, and three more people are arrested over the Boston Marathon bombings.

On television, meanwhile, The Crimson Horror, which is very possibly the most self-evident pairing of writer and concept in the history of Doctor Who. More than hiring David Whitaker to handle introducing a new Doctor over a backdrop of Daleks, more than giving Paul Cornell the small and personal story in the debut series, more even than giving Malcolm Hulke the giant lizards story, tapping Mark Gatiss to write the Victorian penny dreadful is simply a case of hiring a man to do what he’s good at.

And correspondingly, in many regards The Crimson Horror is exactly what you’d expect. A ranting villain, a classic Doctor Who plot, broad gags. But as with Cold War, the details on this are all spot on. Yes, you’ve got a standard issue raving lunatic Doctor Who villain, but she’s played by Diana Rigg, whose appetite for scenery is gloriously boundless. (Surely there’s not a single person on the planet who does not love the line “the wrong hands.”) Strax irrevocably hits the “one note joke” point here, yes, but he also has his best gag with “horse, you have failed in your mission,” and to be fair, the bit where Vastra sends him outside because he’s gotten overexcited is, in fact, a new trick for the character, even if it’s basically the last one he ever gets. Neve McIntosh relishes getting to be the Doctor for a large swath of the story. The period stuff all looks great. And there are some lovely directorial flourishes, most notably the grainy film look used for the Doctor’s flashback exposition of how he got captured.

And, yes, Gatiss deserves some specific praise here. This is not necessarily a story that’s long on logic, but everything moves along gracefully by dint of the fact that all the elements just go well together. And that speaks to a slyly good sense of judgment on Gatiss’s part. There’s no obvious reason why bright red bodies, the eyes of the dead holding images, Diana Rigg ranting, and Victorian finery should magically click together so as to make a coherent story in the absence of any significant plot logic, but they absolutely do. The Crimson Horror was never a contender for season-best, but it was tremendous fun when it aired – much more fun than you’d expect given that it seems like it should be very standard issue.

Indeed, this is the first story of Season 7B to be almost completely unfazed by the passage of more than a year since it aired.

…

December 12, 2014

The Advantage of my Antiquated TARDIS (Journey to the Center of the TARDIS)

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I’ll be honest, I don’t have anything funny to say about this image.
I was just scrolling through the Google Image Search for this episode
and thought “you know, that is pretty…”

If you missed it, we had a post on The Game yesterday.

It’s April 27^th, 2013. Rudimental is at number one with “Waiting All Night,” with will.i.am, Daft Punk, Nelly, Pink, and Psy also charting, the latter not with “Gangnam Style.” In news, the US stock market loses 1% of its value momentarily due to the AP Twitter feed getting hacked and releasing false news of a terrorist attack injuring President Obama, and, erm, that’s about it.

On television, it’s Journey to the Center of the TARDIS. As with much of Season Seven, it’s strange how a year has changed this. At the time, it seemed an oddly disjointed story that was in need of another draft. Now… well, it still seems like that, admittedly. The “they convinced their brother he was a robot” twist is infamously absurd, although I admit, I’ve always felt like it’s a marvelous return to the completely bonkers legacy of a program that was unafraid to be ridiculous. I admit that I’ve never quite gotten over the moment, about half an hour in, when I was completely convinced the time zombies were going to turn out to be an origin story of the Silence (of course they’re forged in an exploding TARDIS!), only to have a wildly less interesting reveal. And the fact that the story can be summarized as “the TARDIS is hijacked by a bunch of black men because the Doctor let a woman drive” is, to say the least, unfortunate.

And, of course, it is the story in which the complaint that Moffat is fond of reset buttons really does acquire legs. This is one of those cases where the one time something really doesn’t work ends up making all the times it did weirdly conspicuous and slightly suspect. It is true that there are a solid few times that Moffat does the “and at the end of the story we undo everything that happened” trick, but generally he avoids the extent to which this is a frustrating twist that’s too similar to “it was all a dream” by making it so that our main characters remember it both ways, allowing the significant consequences of the adventure to still count. Yes, The Big Bang and The Wedding of River Song both get undone at the end, but notably, they don’t get undone for any of the major characters within them.

That’s not, unfortunately, how this one works. Journey to the Center of the TARDIS completely undoes the adventure for Clara. Which is immensely frustrating, because it actually has some very good character development for her. On one level, this is just a crass delaying tactic. It’s a way for the season to have its cake and eat it too, paying lip service to developing the Impossible Girl arc further and, in effect, spending a whole episode rehearsing the finale.

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