Geek Syndicate Issue 6 | Page 75

Geek Syndicate
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
The TARDIS has crashed, Clara is lost inside, and the Doctor has 30 minutes before his ship explodes! Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS holds much promise. An epic romp through the ships’ corridor’s and rooms as the Doctor and a team of spacesalvaging brothers seek to locate and rescue Clara before the self-destruct sequence completes, but that’s getting ahead. TARDIS on board. Our favourite blue box gets badly damaged in the process and our regulars are seperated by the Crazy-Random-Happenstance of the Doctor being flung out the doors and Clara being thrown deeper into the ship. From here, the Time Lord ensures the co-operation of the money-hungry salvagers by setting the TARDIS selfdestruct. Then it’s off to find Clara on an epic trawl through rooms right? sort-of stalked by strange zombie-like creatures with grey flesh and red eyes. While these are creepy villains and always kept slightly out of focus by Director Mat King, it’s unclear until late in the story what such entities are doing on board in the first place. I’m afraid I’m going to have to head into spoiler-ville for a while before wrapping up to get some things off my chest. During the course of events, the Doctor and Clara meet up. Shortly afterwards they discover echoes of their past. Later, we learn that the zombie creatures are echoes from the future. Here’s the problem. The echoes of the past are oblivious to events outside their own timeline, so why are the future echoes able to hunt down the cast of characters? This isn’t the first or last plot oddity. Earlier in the episode, Clara enters the Library and casually saunters up to a podium upon which is a book titled “The History of the Time War”. She turns to a page at random and exclaims “so that’s who he is!”. When later, she meets up with the Doctor, no mention is made of whatever this random page has told her. Later she informs the Doctor she knows his name. But no significance is really placed on this. The whole element seemed shoe75
Image © BBC, 2013

First of all, we need setup. We’re introduced to the salvagers and their ship as it trundles through deep space, looking for a haul to bring in. As it happens, they Dark things lurk in the TARDIS Corridors. happen across the TARDIS. Onboard the time-craft, the Doctor seems concerned that Erm .. no, actually. While we do Clara and his ship don’t see see some rooms (mainly from eye-to-eye. It’s important to the outside as Clara passes on him they get along and so in her own attempt to return to order to try and bridge the the Console room) such as the gaps, he decides to allow Clara Swimming Pool and Observaa go on the controls. In or- tory, the only rooms we get to der to make life easy for her, spend any noticable time in he lowers the TARDIS shields. are a storage-type room, the Which seems rather like giv- Library (a very large one!), the ing a first-time-learner driver Architectural Configuration the keys to a brand new Aston hub and eventually, the Eye of Martin, then removing the air Harmony and engine room. bags because a first time driv- The rest of the episode takes er doesn’t need safety getting place in corridors. in the way. Since a race against time This bizarre circumstance al- isn’t enough, Clara and later lows the salvagers to pull the the Doctor and salvagers, are