An Ode to the TARDIS

Here in the USA, we’re just a few hours from venturing deeper inside the Doctor’s wonderful and amazing ship, the TARDIS, than ever before thanks to this week’s episode of DOCTOR WHO, “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.”

To celebrate, the BBC has put together this wonderful clip package that highlights the TARDIS’ role in the show over the past 50 years. It’s really wonderful to see all the incarnations of the Doctor expressing his love for the machine — the very best spaceship/time capsule in the entire universe… of fact or fiction!

Matt Smith Introduces Tonight’s DOCTOR WHO

It really is bigger on the inside!

Matt Smith (the Doctor) tells us what to expect in tonight’s episode — and why he thinks it’s a winner. (As if the clips we’ve seen haven’t been enough to stoke the fires.)

I really hope this turns out to be a crackerjack episode, because this story is going to be remembered by fans and become series cannon — until another story picks up the premise of the looking at the TARDIS’ interior.

One thing does concern me: In all the publicity I’ve seen for this episode, no one has mentioned the Sontaran patrol that took off into the depths of the TARDIS in the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) classic “The Invasion of Time” and was never seen again. Are those clones still inside?

Perhaps we’ll find out tonight at 8 o’clock on BBC America…

New DOCTOR WHO: Inside the Spaceship!

In this scene, the Doctor has set the TARDIS’ self-destruct system to activate in one hour — and we know he will let it blow, unless Clara can be found. But that won’t stop the Doctor from finding her — and pressing others into service.

By the way, those men are a salvage crew that mistakenly assumed the TARDIS was a junker and set about trying to strip it for salvage. But the Doctor (Matt Smith) would never let happen to his beloved machine.

The clock is ticking, and now everyone’s life is on the line!

Journey to the Center of the TARDIS Gallery

The BBC has released 32 new photos to tease this week’s new episode of DOCTOR WHO, “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS.” A lot of them are lovely pics, so I decided to take a selection of my favorites and make a little preview gallery of my own. Although we have no sense of context, I’m told that these photos are spoilery.

Here is what the story is about:

A spaceship salvage team drags the TARDIS on board, sending its systems into meltdown. As the Doctor marshals the motley salvage crew outside, he realizes 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.

Watch DOCTOR WHO this Saturday at 8 p.m. on BBC America.

3 Journey to the Center of the TARDIS clips

To help get us all fired up for Saturday night’s big episode, which finally centers on the TARDIS herself, here are some video clips.

First, the “next time” trailer from our own BBC America:

Here is the BBC One clip, which is always a bit different from what we see here in the colonies:

First Trailer for Thor: The Dark World

Wouldn’t it be great if the Thor sequel is really good and Marvel continues its cinematic winning streak? The more I see of this flick, the more I like it.

As this bombastic trailer shows, Thor: The Dark World will be full of demigods hitting/throwing/smashing things, Malekith and the evil Dark Elves, shouting, Sif, Odin — and a lot more Jane Foster than I was expecting, given Natalie Portman’s widely reported reluctance to return for the sequel. But I guess the Oscar winner is being a trouper and fulfilling her contractual obligations. On the plus side: Natalie’s unhappiness could translate into real peril for Jane — she might actually be killed off!

This looks like a clever way to inject Loki into the story when the main villain is someone else: Make him the Hannibal Lector of Asgard. Malekith is such a formidable foe that Thor is forced to seek help from the greatest evil the Eternal Realm has ever known: Kenny G Loki!

Look for the movie Nov. 8.

New Star Trek’s Spock vs. the Volcano

Forget this “John Harrison” and whether or not he’s Khan Noonian Singh — watch this clip, in which the crew of the Enterprise tries to prevent Spock (Zachary Quinto) from being barbecued inside a volcano even as he quotes Starfleet regulations to discourage them.

Looks pretty exciting to me, but we’ll all learn how it plays out on May 17, when Star Trek Into Darkness opens.

DOCTOR WHO 7.9: “Hide”

Somewhere, Philip Hinchcliffe and the late Robert Holmes are smiling.

Former DOCTOR WHO producer Hinchcliffe and story editor Holmes (famous for their scary Fourth Doctor horror collaborations, like “The Horror of Fang Rock”) surely would have been proud to have produced “Hide,” the truly terrifying ghost story current producer Steven Moffat seems to have been looking for since he took over. Thank Neil Cross – creator of hardboiled cop show LUTHER and scripter of the unjustly pooh-poohed “The Rings of Akhaten” – and director Jamie Payne for this moody instant masterpiece.

DOCTOR WHO 7.8: “Cold War”

DOCTOR WHO viewers have already experienced “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship,” so why not an “Ice Warrior on a Submarine”? Following a pair of run-ins with both the Second and Third versions of the Doctor, the Martians have not been seen on TV screens in 39 years.

The Ice Warriors are a reptilian race who were forced to become cybernetic to survive when Mars began to get cold. The giant green armor helps the Ice Warriors to live and fight, and while the carapaces may not be sleek and sexy or as menacing as a Cyberman, the Ice Warriors are definitely cool.

DOCTOR WHO 7.7: “The Rings of Akhaten”

I’ve been telling people for a while that the 11th Doctor can be positively mad sometimes, and here we get an episode in which the Doctor is literally barking!

We also get important information about the origin of Clara Oswald: She is… well, nothing special. Which is interesting, because the Clara we know is far from ordinary. It’s not every day we meet a barmaid/governess/soufflé chef/Dalek who has died onscreen twice, right?

Curious, the Doctor (Matt Smith) follows Clara (Jenna-Louise Coleman) in the past and discovers that her parents met cute (her father, blinded by a falling leaf, stumbled into traffic and her mother saved him) and her mother died young, when Clara was a teen. Clara keeps the leaf in her book, 101 Places to See, which belonged to her mother.