Who Review: The Doctor's Wife

Fan-lore: "The Doctor's Wife" was proposed as an episode title all the way back in 1984. That was never the serial's real title (the real title was The Caves of Androzani); JN-T thought there was a leak in the production office and used the fake title as a means of exposing it.

Needless to say, I assumed something similar was going on here. It's Neil Gaiman, for crying out loud, I thought, it'll just be some celebrity guest-writer with a good plot and probably some throwbacks to the old series.

I was pleasantly surprised. So it's not really his wife, in that the person we meet in this episode is in no way related to Susan Foreman, but aw, bless, what a clever plot regardless.

In a nutshell: something knocks out the TARDIS's soul and puts it in a woman. She goes absolutely ape, but for about 40 minutes we get mad, talking TARDIS. It is mad, mad, mad, mad mad!

In order to save his TARDIS, the Doctor must construct another TARDIS out of the remnants of broken TARDISes, which is a nifty thing. Less nifty is the sub-plot: Amy and Rory do a lot of running around the TARDIS's (that'd be the Doctor's one, or rather, the part of the Doctor's TARDIS that is not currently a woman) corridors while the villain plays tricks on them.

Now, Gaiman is a famous British author, so I kind of assume he's at least somewhat familiar with the old show. He should know that episodes with lots of running around inside the TARDIS are, um, not very good. (The Edge of Destruction and The Invasion of Time are blatant examples, and there's a case to be made for the first episode of Castrovalva as well.) This is the first time we've seen TARDIS corridors in the new series, and the result is... underwhelming. They look like something the proposed 90s show with McGann might have come up with.

Which brings me to my second complaint about the episode. It turns out all the old console rooms are stored somewhere in the TARDIS. This makes sense, and there's precedent for it (see The Masque of Mandragora, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, and The Robots of Death). But I thought it was kind of... odd, really, to go out of their way to get 11, Amy and Rory into the Eccleston/Tennant console room. When they said that all the rooms were stored there, for one fleeting moment I thought we might get one of the classic rooms rendered in a 21st-century budget. And then they said that there were console rooms that hadn't even been used yet, and I thought "awesome!" But no, they trot out the "Coral" desktop, which the BBC has evidently kept in storage for some reason. Come on, guys, that's a massive set! Give it to the fan club and move on.

Third complaint: the minor characters are disposed of entirely too quickly and conveniently. Fourth complaint: the Doctor gets upset when it's clear that Idris is going to die, but he never once seems concerned for the woman Idris used to be before she got a TARDIS rammed into her brain.

Niggling complaints out of the way... I love the idea that the TARDIS stole the Doctor and not the other way around. Or rather both. It's the logical conclusion of the aforementioned disaster, The Edge of Destruction, which happens to be the very first time that the TARDIS's sentience is brought up.

"The Doctor's Wife" is the episode for all the Doctor/TARDIS shippers out there. You know who you are. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad episode, where the last thing you should do is take anything seriously. I didn't think Gaiman could be this lighthearted - the closest parallel in his written work is Good Omens, and I chalked all the lighthearted bits in that up to Terry Pratchett after I'd read more of each author's solo work.

Aside from some random Chekhov's Guns being set up at the end, you could probablyuse this to introduce a Classic Who fan to Matt Smith. It doesn't rely on the season's arc for validity - rather, it relies on the series' mythology, the Doctor/TARDIS relationship in particular.

9 out of 10. A great concept let down by some downright terrible TARDIS corridors, this is nevertheless the greatest TARDIS-centric story ever made.