Doctor Who this week features an in-depth look at the revamped TARDIS. So why mess with success and change it? Show runner Steven Moffat explains.
This Saturday is the long awaited episode ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS”, which, as the name would imply, features probably the most iconic item from the show: the TARDIS itself.
The official synopsis reads:
A spaceship salvage team drags the TARDIS on board, sending its systems into meltdown. As the Doctor marshals the motley salvage crew outside, he realises Clara is still trapped within his malfunctioning ship, pursued by a dangerous group of ossified monsters. He has just 30 minutes to find Clara and save his TARDIS before it self-destructs.
The thing is, the TARDIS has evolved over the years. Why the changes, and are these changes for the better?
When Jenna-Louise Coleman stated in the above video that she was on Doctor Who for four months before stepping into the TARDIS, I instantly thought, “How could that possibly be?” Then I started thinking back on the recent episodes, and I realized how relatively little time the viewers have spent in the TARDIS since Rory and Amy departed. Virtually no time at all was involved in “Cold War” and “Hide,” and “The Bells of St. John” and “The Rings of Akhaten” were mostly exterior shots. The episode where the most cumulative time was spent in the TARDIS was the Christmas episode.
Given the level of destruction featured in the newest promo video for this Saturday, it does make you wonder if more changes are still pending.
In explaining his decision to revamp the TARDIS, it’s clear that Steven Moffat was not a fan of the quirky, coral cave meets steam-punk look that he inherited in the reboot era. When he spoke to Digital Spy earlier this year, he stated:
“I thought we’d been getting progressively whimsical with the interior of the TARDIS. I started to think, ‘Well, why is that? It’s not a magical place. It’s actually a machine’. And actually potentially, as you’ll see more spectacularly later, quite a scary place sometimes. We make a lot of use of that.”
It also seems that Moffat wants anyone who is considered as a writer for Doctor Who to love the series and the TARDIS. There’s a sort of test to see how big a fan they are including how much they want to explore the set.
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