7. Reorienting Physical Space
Its not just time that Doctor Who is playing with, space is also rather fluid. In Flesh and Stone (series 5) the Doctor, Amy, River and a group of soldiers are winding their way through a Maze of the Dead in search of a rogue Weeping Angel, after the crash of the starliner Byzantium. The maze itself is like something out of an Escher print, full of blind alleys and stairways that lead nowhere. The group is pursued by menacing Angels until they eventually find themselves below the ships wreckage. When the Doctor tells everyone to jump they are grabbed by the ships gravity and suddenly the ceiling becomes the floor. Their orientation, their sense of where they are, is determined by their frame of reference. But since the groups perception of up and down keeps changing, there is no truly reliable way to label these directions. The concept of chaotic space also appears in God Complex (series 6). The hotel the Doctor, Amy and Rory are trapped in is ever fluid, expanding and contracting, adding and deleting rooms, stretching and compacting corridors. In Doctor Who space and time are unreliable because they are infinite possibilities. The only way to survive with sanity intact is to accept this and go with the flow. When a potential companion walks into the Tardis we can judge whether they will be able to travel with the Doctor by the way they react to the fact that it is bigger on the inside than the outside. If they react with nothing but rigid fear theyre in trouble but if they are filled with wonder at discovering something new theyll probably be just fine.