Doctor Who: 10 Unpopular Opinions About Everybody's Favourite Episodes

2. It Doesn't Say Anything Worth Listening To - The Doctor's Wife

The entire premise of Series Six's The Doctor's Wife is that viewers get to meet the TARDIS on a human level and hear what she has to say. Sorry, but were fans clamouring for that? Actually, it's more likely that fans were rooting for the exact opposite. Over the decades, fans have generally hated any attempt to give the TARDIS a "voice" or a human-type personality, preferring that her consciousness be depicted as something essentially beyond human comprehension because - actually - that's far more intriguing. It's always more interesting when things aren't explained or dragged down to the level of the anthropomorphic. But The Doctor's Wife commits that cardinal sin. Yes, it commits the sin in a very skilled way, and the poetic nature of the episode almost makes it an exercise worth carrying out, but it's still doing something that's best not done in the first place. The TARDIS is a universe in a box - ultimately, what can she say that would be meaningful to a lesser scale of intelligence? Apparently, if Neil Gaiman is to be believed, the TARDIS-as-Idris can say "goodbye" and "hello" back to front because a timeship gets things like that muddled up. No, the concept of the TARDIS isn't being reduced to something silly in a scene that's just a vomit-inducing excess of sentimentality, is it?