the Serious Doctor… who really needs way, way more screen time.

I have to say, Doctor Who is a relatively odd experience for me these days.  There have been many episodes in the Matt Smith episode that have just left me completely disappointed and dislocated from the absorbing storyline of  the Time Lord and his many companions.  To me it has been quite unnerving, because many of the plots have just been ludicrous to the point that I don’t want to ‘take them seriously’ - in other words, I cherry-pick my favourite episodes and try to forget all the below average episodes that don’t fit my vision of Doctor Who. Woah, reading that back to myself… Doctor Who IS a Religion!

But behold, the one episode of Doctor Who in Matt Smith’s era that I actually don’t mind.  Keep note here,  I didn’t say I love it - but it is most definitely an improvement.  That episode is ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’ - and let me tell you what really made this episode for me. THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS.

My Favourite Things

1. “Save her, or we all die.

“It’s no secret that Matt Smith hasn’t played a very serious Doctor in his time on the show.  His incarnation of the Doctor often seems more confused and silly than serious and insightful - I’m not saying that the role of the Doctor shouldn’t be humorous - but there’s a balance needed to persuade the thought that there is over 900 years of Time Lord in that head.  Even Tom Baker, who was without a doubt one of the more silly Doctors, had his balance of seriousness and wisdom. When the Doctor set the timer and locked the scavengers in the TARDIS - telling them that if Clara wasn’t found within the hour the Time Machine would explode killing them all - I, for the first time in ages of watching Doctor Who, laughed in excitement.  That was the Doctor that I’ve always wanted Matt Smith’s Doctor to be.  But it gets better.

For me, the greatest moment in this episode… and I could probably go as far as to say the whole Matt Smith era leading up until now… was the bluff.  Later on in the episode, the Doctor reveals that he was bluffing - saying that you just have to ‘Wiggle a few buttons’ - but most importantly, give them ‘the face’ and say, “Save her, or we all die.”  Absolutely freaking brilliant and so very, very Doctor Who.  It sends shivers down my spine just thinking of the perfect execution of that scene. (They slightly diminished the moment when the dialogue suddenly devolved into ‘We’re in trouble Clara, proper trouble. It needs fixing or we’re toast.’ Nonetheless, that moment is fantastic all the same.

“I just wiggled a few buttons, yeah, the old wiggly-button trick - and the face, you’ve GOT to do the face.  Save her, or we all die. I thought I rushed it a bit but..” - Best Line, Evvver!

2. Ye’ Old References

The references in this episode were pretty abundant.  I smiled when I saw the ‘Eye Of Harmony’ on the screen of the TARDIS console, memories of the Gallifreyan power-source, and the Doctor Who Movie from 1996. To be perfectly honest though - I really wish that it had been the only reference to the Eye of Harmony in the episode.  I’d much have preferred if it were left out of the plot - and just remained an Easter Egg.  Just like the ‘Smiths’ key, the various Gallifreyan audio encyclopedias, the toy TARDIS from Amy.  They even showed us the TARDIS’s swimming pool that we’ve heard so much about but never seen… at any point… ever. I don’t think that a lot of the rooms that Clara bumped into really seemed to fit into the TARDIS… nor did it make sense that she was stopping and taking the time to look at these rooms and smiling while there was a monster chasing her…  These references seemed a bit out-of-place, or unnaturally squished into the episode.

3. Genuine Doctor-ness

Often in Doctor Who there have been times where I felt that the reaction of the characters in the show don’t always seem very expected.  I have to say I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that when the TARDIS went dark the Doctor acted accordingly.  He wasn’t exaggerated and panicky, scared - he was serious and concerned.  I’m probably just pulling this out of the air. =)

I know that the Doctor Who Movie isn’t really cited as a ‘true to Doctor Who’ storyline - being that the Doctor is somehow ‘half-human’ in the movie. But it still irritates me a bit that these two things are … so very different.

My Not-So-Favourite Things

1. The Monsters

During the episode, everyone, particularly Clara, is being chased by these horrid mutant monstrosities. Later we find out that these monsters are in fact the Doctor, Clara and the scavengers from the future - who have been cooked and boiled alive by being exposed to the Eye of Harmony for too long. Considering the fact that exposure to the static pre-black hole is pretty ruddy damaging to… living in comfort… it really makes me wonder why the flip the Doctor decided that it’d be the best time to STOP and EXPLAIN his clever Gallifreyan technology to everyone… WHILE THEY’RE STANDING IN FRONT OF IT. Wouldn’t it have been better to give your tour-guide speech AFTER you’d gotten to safety and were no longer in threat of  being char-grill-zombified!? Come on! Also - if you’re cooked, roasted and liquified I would have thought that you’d be in some pretty serious pain.  I would have also thought that walking around and hunting down yourself in the past would have seemed like a pretty ruddy weird thing to do.  Not to mention… your muscles and bones are… out-of-order… which I assume would make mobility quite difficult in the first place.

Why did the Doctor and Clara NOT turn into monsters even though they were exposed to the Eye for the same amount of time as the scavengers - and why on Earth is the transformation so instantaneous?

LASTLY,  the Doctor… is a Time Lord… We’ve all established this.  Now correct me if I’m wrong.  But if a Time Lord’s body is brutally injured or damaged beyond healing… there’s a certain little trick they’ve got called ‘Regeneration’ - I would have really thought that liquified cells, burning skin and strange glowing-eyes would be classified as pretty significant bodily damage.  Oh well, perhaps there’s a point where a Time Lord’s body can be too far damaged for the cycle to work.

2. The Name of The Doctor

Quite an interesting inclusion was the ‘History of the Great Time War’ book - then again the fact that Clara learns the real name of the Doctor… only to forget it when time is rewritten (more on that later) seemed a bit pointless, (I guess you could claim the whole episode pointless considering it technically never happened. Hmm.) It was cool to see - but poorly implemented.  Clara walks up and instantly flips to the exact page where the Doctor is mentioned by his Gallifreyan name?  How does she even know that its him that book is referring to?  I. Don’t. Know.  All I know is that this is a major teaser to the season finale more than anything.

3. TARDIS Engine Explosion?

What? The engine of the TARDIS explodes - the TARDIS decides to freeze it in time and prevent it from causing any problems. Just curious, it seemed like a very odd place for an engine.  A white vast empty space… and it… exploded upon ‘impact’ with the scavenging ship?  Lovely durable Gallifreyan technology right there, I’m surprised the black hole being held in stasis didn’t suddenly break free of its captivity and start swallowing everything up.  But never fear, you can fix all damaged done to the TARDIS by just jumping back in time…inside the time machine… and reclaim your time machine from before it broke. It’s all very strange.  

4. Mountain Climbing

Why is there a large cliff inside the TARDIS?  I guess it’s a similar scenario to what we saw in Tom Baker’s era, where he was walking around corridors of the TARDIS which were quite obviously the hallways of an abandoned hospital.  Yes it added more variety to the episode - and the Doctor described it as ‘snarling’ at them to scare them away because it was vulnerable.  Well it seems more than just ruddy vulnerable if the engine has exploded…  Seems like it’s ‘in proper trouble.’  

Conclusion

The writer, Steve Thompson, who also brought us the rather… ordinary… ‘Curse of the Black Spot’ episode, has done really well here.  By far my favourite Matt Smith episode - however I feel that the ending was very rushed, and because of this you come away after watching it pretty unfulfilled.  The feeling of fulfillment has been pretty rare with Doctor Who in recent times - but this episode was so close to being perfect! For what I got from this was 40 minutes of pretty decent, genuine, fan-boy Easter egg filled adventure… that was all swept under the rug and destroyed because the Doctor stopped it from ever happening in the first place.  The conversation the Doctor had with Clara about who she was? Never happened.  Clara’s journey through the TARDIS and finally getting to know her? Never happened.  ’The Big Friendly Button?’ Whaaat?

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS had some really great elements - but I just come away from it wanting more.  The ending was too quick and contributed nothing to the long-term storyline of the Doctor and Clara because they won’t remember any of it.  The zombified monsters that are really themselves… which means they’re attacking themselves for some strange reason… some family dilemmas between some of the scavengers - which you kind of suspect at the start of the episode anyway. Certainly my favourite episode in this era so far - lets see though if Neil Gaiman can win me over with his ‘Nightmare in Silver’ episode.  Have to say, I’m quite worried about the episode entitled: “The Name of the Doctor” - but I doubt that Moffat would reveal the name of the Time Lord… I hope…   Well there, long post - probably ambiguous in nature and filled with contradiction… nonetheless.

See you later,

Ben.

Check out the guy being crudely interviewed by yours truly, right here.

Ben: Today we have with us an inspired and very, (very) good literature driven Australian, who has so many online blog posts, and so many online book reviews that you could be reading all night.

In 2011, he went in the Australian Poetry Slam, where he went into the finalists, and eventually the runners up.  In 2012, he set off to travel 2224 kilometres, the same distance that Frodo travelled to Mordor in the Lord of the Rings series.  And recently he’s been reading lots of children’s books, because he’s part of the Children’s Book Council of Australia, which requires you to read every children’s book released in the past 12 months, about 400 books.  So Lyndon!

Lyndon: Hi!

Ben: Thanks for being on the show!

Lyndon: Thank you for inviting me.

Ben: So what inspires or introduced you to literature, and what about it keeps you pursuing it?

Lyndon: I think for me it probably began… I was really lucky that I grew up in the Harry Potter generation and so when I was a kid, Harry Potter came out and I was probably in Grade 2, and I read it and it was new and exciting and of course I’d like to say that now because ah look *I was ahead of the trend.*

But I read it, and I was completely in love with it.  And then as the years went by, everyone else read it and everyone else fell completely in love with it and the movies came out. And it was probably the first time… and in fact it’s still used as a benchmark for… it’s about as big as a book can get. And I think when you grow up through that it often has an effect on you, the things you grow up with… so for me…

Ben: Kind of the fact you get to watch it grow and expand.

Lyndon: Yeah that’s it, there was no convincing me that books weren’t important when you see something like that happen. So yeah.

Ben: So in the Australian Poetry Slam that you went in, in 2011, how was your experience with that? And for those that haven’t seen it, maybe you’d like to explain what your poem was about?

Lyndon: Yeah, so my poem was a little bit controversial, it was based on a true story about… it dropped into fantasy… but it was a true story about Jehovah’s Witnesses coming and door knocking on my door. And it was sort of about the attitude they have when they come to your door - because I find it a really strong and terrifying attitude, ‘cause I’m not the sort of person who thinks that the world is ending… you know… and that we’re all going to die.  So for me, to wake up in the morning in your dressing gown, to go to the door, and to just be immediately hit with that is a really funny experience. So I wrote about that and performed it in Launceston and eventually got to take it to Sydney… and that was really scary. I performed on the stage at the Sydney Theatre where, obviously I wasn’t in a play, but people like Jeffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett and lots of really famous Australian people have performed there - and I didn’t get to take my family with me, so I was all alone, in front of this massive Sydney audience.  Which is nothing like you’d see here,  but it was amazing.  It was a room of thousands of people screaming and cheering over poetry… which is kind of nice.

Ben: Which audience do you think took your poem the best, the Launceston or the Sydney one?

Lyndon: I think probably the Sydney one. (The) people in Launceston are probably a bit more tentative about coming up and talking to you afterwards, and maybe it’s part of being in a small crowd, that they have people they came to the show with, that they’ll talk to them. But even as I was walking up the stairs after finishing it, people were trying to grab me and say, “My mum’s a Jehovah’s Witness and I need a copy of that poem so that I can show it to her, and she’ll find it really interesting.” And that was really exciting. Yeah, that was nice that people wanted to share that.

Ben: So quite a journey of course from Launceston to Sydney, not quite  as big as your 2224 kilometre trip. On the fan forums, the Internet, it said that apparently it’s estimated that Frodo took about six months. How long did it take you on your journey?

Lyndon: Yeah, I decided to try and walk the… it’s often confusing for people so I will explain. I didn’t try to go into the wilderness and take bread wrapped up in leaves or anything like that in the Lord of the Rings books.  But what I tried to do was, just to get a sense of how far that really is, how far that journey is.  I started on January the 19th 2012, and I wanted to finish by the day that the Hobbit came out, which was boxing day. And so I made it… but all I had to do to keep up with that was six and a half kilometres a day. But yeah, it took me twice as long as it took them.

Ben: Do you have any plans for literature driven journeys in the future? Not necessarily exercise based.

Lyndon: I would love… on that front, I’ve had lot’s of friends say, “Can we walk around Westeros?” which is the Game of Thrones world, and I would love to work that out.  But I was really lucky with the Lord of the Rings people, who have really nutted out all of those details. Tolkien inspires people to get really obsessive about tiny details, and so I was lucky that I actually had someone who had done most of the maths for me, I just had to convert it into kilometres and work out where I would have to be at each point to actually chart the whole journey of the books.  

But in terms of my own literary journey, what I’m doing next, I’m trying to write a book. Which is probably much more scary than walking. Yeah, so I’ve finished a first draft but what’s interesting about books is that first drafts often aren’t anywhere near ready. So it’s still hiding from the world at the moment.

Ben: Okay, and finally your a member of the Children’s Book Council of Australia… what’s it like reading 400 children’s books?

Lyndon: *Laughs* Really interesting! So what the Children’s Book Council do every year, they give, and you may have seen them, their little medallions that they put on the books.  So they get a gold, if they’re considered the best of that year, across various categories.  And then there are honoured books, and notable books.  So I signed up and asked it I could perform that process for them, without really thinking the quantity of books you’d have to read.

I mean it’s logical that if you want to choose the best book that this country produces… you have to read every book that this country produces.  And I should have thought of that.  But sure enough, pretty much every two weeks, until very recently,  I get about 30 books in the post, and I go through them and make notes on them and send them off - and they gradually fill up all the space underneath my bed.  But it’s really hard, sometimes you get a box of picture books, and you know, it’s stories about babies and food and stuff like that and they take 5 minutes - but sometimes they are really big novels.

But one of the really good parts of the experience, is finding terrible books… and Australia produces very few really bad books, but everyone who wants to write - should read bad books.  Because when you read a bad book, firstly you teach yourself what’s wrong with it, and you know, some of the books I’ve read I start to see problems and I go, “Oh, that might be a problem in the book that I’m trying to write.”  And the other thing that’s really good about it is that you really get a sense that… (if a ‘bad book’ gets an award, that perhaps your book has a chance in it all.)

Ben: (Thank you) So this of course is Lyndon Riggall! You can check out his blog at lyndonriggall.com for more, maybe the rest of that sentence will come to light on the blog.  Thanks so much for watching, and we’ll see you all next time.

bermud-4:

That thing that cats do that when they are being controlled by satan.

THE FUCKING LAST ONE

Someone call a vet….I think the last one is having a fuckin seizure LOL 

i laughed for like 3 fucking years 

(Source: hotrobb, via princess-beemo)