Mooning: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
All right, everyone, gather up your spelunking gear, we're going to take a trip deeper than we've ever gone before! Careful, there may be monsters.
A salvage ship belonging to Van Halen brothers is doing its Runaround when it picks up the signal of something to salvage. A man with a barcode Tattoo alerts the others, but his other brother says the salvage is Not Enough to be worth it. The brother is identified as... "Tricky"? Okay, I'll call the little one "Tricky", the asshole one "Dicky", and the big one "Doc".
Meanwhile, Clara is still upset that the TARDIS doesn't seem to like her, so this is something that's not just relegated to Neil Cross stories now. The Doctor says he'll let her fly it a bit so the two of them can get along, and turns the TARDIS to "basic mode" because she's a girl. Man, and I was really appreciating going a few episodes without any blatant sexism, especially since Clara is one of the most intelligent and observant companions the Doctor's had in a while, not to mention there's still really been no indication one way or the other if she's lost all her amazing technological knowledge she gained in "Bells of Saint John". Doesn't he remember that this is the person who hacked the entire Dalek network and took control of their minds? And he's still putting it in "basic mode" simply because none of that can overcome the fact that she's a girl? If he she asked "because I'm a human?", I'd buy it. Hell, if he came out and said, "You lost all your technical skills in the wifi reset so you're still a computer dunce, remember?", that would be fine. But, "because you're a girl"?
Putting the TARDIS into Basic Mode, though, reveals the ship to the Van Halen brothers. They're excited, since It's About Time they had a good salvage, and lock onto the TARDIS with a magneto-beam.
Back on the TARDIS, the beam has completely disabled the ship and the Doctor can't regain control of it. When he tries, the console blows up and the monitor starts to crack. A canister rolls into the console room and Clara picks it up, however it burns her hand.
The TARDIS gets sent to the Van Halen salvage dock, where they attempt to cut it up like Poundcake, but to no avail. They then notice a body under the wreckage, and tell each other that if Push Comes to Shove, they'll say it was like that when they got there.
The Doctor pops up and chastises them for disabling his ship with an illegal magneto beam, because they Can't Get This Stuff No More, then realizes that Clara didn't get out with him (though, how the heck did HE get out?). The Van Halen brothers refuse to help rescue her, since the exterior size of the TARDIS doesn't seem like it would be worth more than a few Little Guitars, but the Doctor promises them that the inside of the ship is worth giving it The Full Bug.
Inside the TARDIS, Clara wakes up alone to find the interior in shambles. She finds a door with a big, red flashing light on it, and even though she realizes this means she probably shouldn't open it, she opens it anyway, and is greeted by a fireball screaming "LET ME LOVE YOU!" Clara runs off, though, cuz she Ain't Talkin' Bout Love. She finds some claw marks on the wall, like some sort of wild animal has become Unchained.
The Doctor opens the TARDIS door and everyone goes inside, wondering how they're standing upright if the TARDIS was lying on its side. "The Eleventh Hour" would like to know this as well. The Doctor is a Man on a Mission, though, and sets the TARDIS to self-destruct in 1 hour unless the Van Halen brothers help him. Because... given Series 5, that is totally the responsible thing to do. The brothers tell him that's not fair, so he goes with the Best of Both Worlds and sets the countdown to 30 minutes.
Clara continues to wander the TARDIS and finds a room containing the Doctor's old cot from "A Good Man Goes to War". She pokes at it, And The Cradle Will Rock. The Doctor even has one of those TARDIS cookie jars or USB hubs. She also finds an umbrella, which seems like it should have been Seven's umbrella, but alas.
Dicky Van Halen scans the TARDIS and realizes it's full of rare technology, so tells the others to split up and strip it down, because it's Mine All Mine.
Meanwhile, Clara keeps running from the blurry lens zombie, and comes across the observatory and the pool. Oh, hey, there's that elusive pool! She seeks shelter in the library, which is, alas, now a different room from the pool.
Doc goes back to the console room and starts taking it apart, but starts hearing the voices of Susan, Ian, Nine, and a bunch of others that I couldn't quite make out.
Dicky, on the other hand, discovers a room that contains the One I Want. He Feels So Good about that, and walks in to find a room full of Black and Blue glowing testicles. After his handheld sensor tells him that the giant glowing nads will produce anything he wants, he starts to cut one off, but the Doctor stops him, saying the TARDIS will be cross if castrated. Dicky wants to Finish What Ya Started, though, and rips off the TARDIS nad, anyway.
The TARDIS removes the door to the room so they can't leave, so Dicky tries Fire in the Hole to blow open the wall, and the door appears again.
Clara, in the meantime, wanders the library and discovers a prominently-displayed book containing the history of the Time War and all of the Doctor's Secrets, including his name. Because, you know, most important secret in the universe, the best place for it is a book left out in the open that automatically opens to that page. Before she can read any more, though, she gets chased off by a blurry lens zombie.
The Doctor chases after the nad-grabber, however the TARDIS has locked them in a corridor that infinitely loops. Tricky phones Doc to tell him not to touch anything, but Doc has crawled under the console and found the jackpot, so Don't Tell Me What Love Can Do. The ladder burns him, though, and then one of the blurred lens zombies shows up to eat his face off.
Clara finds the console room and is relieved, but is dismayed to find that the door outside is not there. So... she leaves the console room, because that's smart. The TARDIS seems to realize she's being a moron, so puts her in another infinitely looping corridor that keeps taking her back to the console room.
Tricky and Doc...tor make their way back to the console room, but it's a different console room than where Clara is. The TARDIS has replicated numerous copies of the console room on top of each other, and they're in two separate ones. The Doctor wants to get Clara into the one he's in Right Now, so steals Dicky's scanner to locate her in the other echo chamber and pull her across.
Clara punches him, wondering why the Doctor has blurry lens zombies on his ship and if he's actually Runnin' With the Devil rather than a good guy. He introduces her to the Van Halen brothers, telling them that She's the Woman they'd been looking for. Dicky tells him to cancel the self-destruct countdown now they've found her, but the Doctor reveals that it was a lie. However, the engines are actually about to blow up, anyway.
They all crawl into a service tunnel, but the blurry lens zombies are still there. The Doctor refuses to answer what they actually are, so they run away and Clara manages to get separated from everyone again in a single corridor. Also, how did Dicky manage to join up with them, anyway, since he's still carrying the glowing nad that had kept him trapped in the endless corridor before?
Clara runs into past versions of herself and the Doctor wandering the hallways, and the current Doctor finds her again and tells her that the TARDIS is leaking the past all over the ship, and it's a bitch to clean up.
The fuel rods start breaking, and the Doctor and Clara have to Dance the Night Away to avoid them, but Tricky wasn't so lucky and gets impaled. He tells Dicky to cut his arm off since he's an android, but it turns out Dicky was lying to him his entire life and he really is Humans Being. So, they cut through the... fuel rod... that's impaling him instead, since apparently that's safe.
They make it to the Eye of Harmony room, where Clara says "I'll Wait" while the Doctor goes inside. Dicky scans Clara and is impressed that his sensor can detect Beautiful Girls. Tricky accuses him of growing up on Mean Street since he's such a jerk, and Dicky confirms they were just messing with him since he lost his memory. The Doctor comes back and intervenes in their fight, saying that all it proves is that Dicky Can't Stop Lovin' You.
They all enter the Eye of Harmony chamber, however blurry lens zombies are blocking both doors. The scanner reveals that one of the zombies is Clara, and the Doctor explains that the future is leaking all over the TARDIS as well, and the zombies are their future selves, meaning Clara dies again (this is now, what, death #6 for her?). The Doctor then realizes that facepalm zombie is himself and pulls the Van Halen brothers apart so they don't become the two-headed zombie. When Tricky falls off the platform, though, Dicky says he won't go Without You. The Doctor and Clara escape, but Tricky and Dicky become too Hot For Teacher and fuse into Tricky Dick.
The Doctor and Clara emerge on a ravine, since apparently the TARDIS engine room is the same as the one in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship". Since they're going to die, anyway, the Doctor demands Clara tell him who she really is, since he met her twice previously and she died both times, and apparently it's never occurred to him that those could be future versions of her so obviously this Clara must be hiding something. Clara tells him he's being a creepy asshole, and I jump for joy at finally having a companion who reacts to him in a sane manner.
The Doctor then decides that the engine room is off the cliff, and all they have to do is Jump. Even though he was just attacking her 30 seconds ago, Clara trusts him and they jump off the cliff into the engine room. The explosion of the engine has been frozen in time and there's no way to stop it. Clara holds his hand, but the Doctor examines the burn on her hand and realizes it's a message he sent himself.
They make it back to the console room, somehow bypassing the Tricky Dick zombie on the way, and the Doctor pulls out his handy Reset Button. He locates the source of the time leak and says that if he fixes it, all this will be forgotten, including his attack on Clara and her reading the Doctor's name. It will all just be Dreams.
He goes through the time leak to deliver his other self the Reset Button, and everything pops back to normal and none of it ever happened. The Dream is Over. Strangely, it seems to have reset a lot more than just that one day, since Dicky now has a shred of decency, and Tricky is no longer torn out of the Van Halen family photo. Hooray for resetting the entire universe again!
This episode felt kind of like wasted potential, since it was just running around the TARDIS without anything really being accomplished. And, of course, the magic Reset Button solution that then erased the entire episode from history. How did that even work? When the Doctor grabbed that controller at the beginning, he said it was the controller for the magneto-beam. I can understand how having the ability to turn off the magneto-beam would free them before the damage was done, but how did it fix the console room and the photograph, too?
Next week, back to Victorian England, because we love that era even more than World War II, apparently.
A salvage ship belonging to Van Halen brothers is doing its Runaround when it picks up the signal of something to salvage. A man with a barcode Tattoo alerts the others, but his other brother says the salvage is Not Enough to be worth it. The brother is identified as... "Tricky"? Okay, I'll call the little one "Tricky", the asshole one "Dicky", and the big one "Doc".
Meanwhile, Clara is still upset that the TARDIS doesn't seem to like her, so this is something that's not just relegated to Neil Cross stories now. The Doctor says he'll let her fly it a bit so the two of them can get along, and turns the TARDIS to "basic mode" because she's a girl. Man, and I was really appreciating going a few episodes without any blatant sexism, especially since Clara is one of the most intelligent and observant companions the Doctor's had in a while, not to mention there's still really been no indication one way or the other if she's lost all her amazing technological knowledge she gained in "Bells of Saint John". Doesn't he remember that this is the person who hacked the entire Dalek network and took control of their minds? And he's still putting it in "basic mode" simply because none of that can overcome the fact that she's a girl? If he she asked "because I'm a human?", I'd buy it. Hell, if he came out and said, "You lost all your technical skills in the wifi reset so you're still a computer dunce, remember?", that would be fine. But, "because you're a girl"?
Putting the TARDIS into Basic Mode, though, reveals the ship to the Van Halen brothers. They're excited, since It's About Time they had a good salvage, and lock onto the TARDIS with a magneto-beam.
Back on the TARDIS, the beam has completely disabled the ship and the Doctor can't regain control of it. When he tries, the console blows up and the monitor starts to crack. A canister rolls into the console room and Clara picks it up, however it burns her hand.
The TARDIS gets sent to the Van Halen salvage dock, where they attempt to cut it up like Poundcake, but to no avail. They then notice a body under the wreckage, and tell each other that if Push Comes to Shove, they'll say it was like that when they got there.
The Doctor pops up and chastises them for disabling his ship with an illegal magneto beam, because they Can't Get This Stuff No More, then realizes that Clara didn't get out with him (though, how the heck did HE get out?). The Van Halen brothers refuse to help rescue her, since the exterior size of the TARDIS doesn't seem like it would be worth more than a few Little Guitars, but the Doctor promises them that the inside of the ship is worth giving it The Full Bug.
Inside the TARDIS, Clara wakes up alone to find the interior in shambles. She finds a door with a big, red flashing light on it, and even though she realizes this means she probably shouldn't open it, she opens it anyway, and is greeted by a fireball screaming "LET ME LOVE YOU!" Clara runs off, though, cuz she Ain't Talkin' Bout Love. She finds some claw marks on the wall, like some sort of wild animal has become Unchained.
The Doctor opens the TARDIS door and everyone goes inside, wondering how they're standing upright if the TARDIS was lying on its side. "The Eleventh Hour" would like to know this as well. The Doctor is a Man on a Mission, though, and sets the TARDIS to self-destruct in 1 hour unless the Van Halen brothers help him. Because... given Series 5, that is totally the responsible thing to do. The brothers tell him that's not fair, so he goes with the Best of Both Worlds and sets the countdown to 30 minutes.
Clara continues to wander the TARDIS and finds a room containing the Doctor's old cot from "A Good Man Goes to War". She pokes at it, And The Cradle Will Rock. The Doctor even has one of those TARDIS cookie jars or USB hubs. She also finds an umbrella, which seems like it should have been Seven's umbrella, but alas.
Dicky Van Halen scans the TARDIS and realizes it's full of rare technology, so tells the others to split up and strip it down, because it's Mine All Mine.
Meanwhile, Clara keeps running from the blurry lens zombie, and comes across the observatory and the pool. Oh, hey, there's that elusive pool! She seeks shelter in the library, which is, alas, now a different room from the pool.
Doc goes back to the console room and starts taking it apart, but starts hearing the voices of Susan, Ian, Nine, and a bunch of others that I couldn't quite make out.
Dicky, on the other hand, discovers a room that contains the One I Want. He Feels So Good about that, and walks in to find a room full of Black and Blue glowing testicles. After his handheld sensor tells him that the giant glowing nads will produce anything he wants, he starts to cut one off, but the Doctor stops him, saying the TARDIS will be cross if castrated. Dicky wants to Finish What Ya Started, though, and rips off the TARDIS nad, anyway.
The TARDIS removes the door to the room so they can't leave, so Dicky tries Fire in the Hole to blow open the wall, and the door appears again.
Clara, in the meantime, wanders the library and discovers a prominently-displayed book containing the history of the Time War and all of the Doctor's Secrets, including his name. Because, you know, most important secret in the universe, the best place for it is a book left out in the open that automatically opens to that page. Before she can read any more, though, she gets chased off by a blurry lens zombie.
The Doctor chases after the nad-grabber, however the TARDIS has locked them in a corridor that infinitely loops. Tricky phones Doc to tell him not to touch anything, but Doc has crawled under the console and found the jackpot, so Don't Tell Me What Love Can Do. The ladder burns him, though, and then one of the blurred lens zombies shows up to eat his face off.
Clara finds the console room and is relieved, but is dismayed to find that the door outside is not there. So... she leaves the console room, because that's smart. The TARDIS seems to realize she's being a moron, so puts her in another infinitely looping corridor that keeps taking her back to the console room.
Tricky and Doc...tor make their way back to the console room, but it's a different console room than where Clara is. The TARDIS has replicated numerous copies of the console room on top of each other, and they're in two separate ones. The Doctor wants to get Clara into the one he's in Right Now, so steals Dicky's scanner to locate her in the other echo chamber and pull her across.
Clara punches him, wondering why the Doctor has blurry lens zombies on his ship and if he's actually Runnin' With the Devil rather than a good guy. He introduces her to the Van Halen brothers, telling them that She's the Woman they'd been looking for. Dicky tells him to cancel the self-destruct countdown now they've found her, but the Doctor reveals that it was a lie. However, the engines are actually about to blow up, anyway.
They all crawl into a service tunnel, but the blurry lens zombies are still there. The Doctor refuses to answer what they actually are, so they run away and Clara manages to get separated from everyone again in a single corridor. Also, how did Dicky manage to join up with them, anyway, since he's still carrying the glowing nad that had kept him trapped in the endless corridor before?
Clara runs into past versions of herself and the Doctor wandering the hallways, and the current Doctor finds her again and tells her that the TARDIS is leaking the past all over the ship, and it's a bitch to clean up.
The fuel rods start breaking, and the Doctor and Clara have to Dance the Night Away to avoid them, but Tricky wasn't so lucky and gets impaled. He tells Dicky to cut his arm off since he's an android, but it turns out Dicky was lying to him his entire life and he really is Humans Being. So, they cut through the... fuel rod... that's impaling him instead, since apparently that's safe.
They make it to the Eye of Harmony room, where Clara says "I'll Wait" while the Doctor goes inside. Dicky scans Clara and is impressed that his sensor can detect Beautiful Girls. Tricky accuses him of growing up on Mean Street since he's such a jerk, and Dicky confirms they were just messing with him since he lost his memory. The Doctor comes back and intervenes in their fight, saying that all it proves is that Dicky Can't Stop Lovin' You.
They all enter the Eye of Harmony chamber, however blurry lens zombies are blocking both doors. The scanner reveals that one of the zombies is Clara, and the Doctor explains that the future is leaking all over the TARDIS as well, and the zombies are their future selves, meaning Clara dies again (this is now, what, death #6 for her?). The Doctor then realizes that facepalm zombie is himself and pulls the Van Halen brothers apart so they don't become the two-headed zombie. When Tricky falls off the platform, though, Dicky says he won't go Without You. The Doctor and Clara escape, but Tricky and Dicky become too Hot For Teacher and fuse into Tricky Dick.
The Doctor and Clara emerge on a ravine, since apparently the TARDIS engine room is the same as the one in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship". Since they're going to die, anyway, the Doctor demands Clara tell him who she really is, since he met her twice previously and she died both times, and apparently it's never occurred to him that those could be future versions of her so obviously this Clara must be hiding something. Clara tells him he's being a creepy asshole, and I jump for joy at finally having a companion who reacts to him in a sane manner.
The Doctor then decides that the engine room is off the cliff, and all they have to do is Jump. Even though he was just attacking her 30 seconds ago, Clara trusts him and they jump off the cliff into the engine room. The explosion of the engine has been frozen in time and there's no way to stop it. Clara holds his hand, but the Doctor examines the burn on her hand and realizes it's a message he sent himself.
They make it back to the console room, somehow bypassing the Tricky Dick zombie on the way, and the Doctor pulls out his handy Reset Button. He locates the source of the time leak and says that if he fixes it, all this will be forgotten, including his attack on Clara and her reading the Doctor's name. It will all just be Dreams.
He goes through the time leak to deliver his other self the Reset Button, and everything pops back to normal and none of it ever happened. The Dream is Over. Strangely, it seems to have reset a lot more than just that one day, since Dicky now has a shred of decency, and Tricky is no longer torn out of the Van Halen family photo. Hooray for resetting the entire universe again!
This episode felt kind of like wasted potential, since it was just running around the TARDIS without anything really being accomplished. And, of course, the magic Reset Button solution that then erased the entire episode from history. How did that even work? When the Doctor grabbed that controller at the beginning, he said it was the controller for the magneto-beam. I can understand how having the ability to turn off the magneto-beam would free them before the damage was done, but how did it fix the console room and the photograph, too?
Next week, back to Victorian England, because we love that era even more than World War II, apparently.