10 Doctor Who Episodes That Had The Balls To GO THERE
5. It Takes You Away
It Takes You Away stands as one of the Thirteenth Doctor’s most experimental stories. Moving away from standard alien-invasion tropes, the episode becomes an existential fairytale and an examination of grief.
The story opens in a secluded Norwegian cottage, where the Fam meets a blind girl hiding from an unseen creature. Inside the house they find a mirror acting as a portal between realities; the Doctor and her companions cross the deadly “Anti-Zone,” in order to get to the other side.
From a technical standpoint, to demonstrate how we’re now within a mirror, this other reality is entirely flipped, which is a very cool detail that adds to the strange vibes and rewatchability of the episode.
It Takes You Away works brilliantly as a much-needed character study, asking questions about accepting what you want to see versus what is actually there, and how one might need to give up a world that has something they’re missing.
It features one of the most surreal concepts in recent Doctor Who memory: the Solitract, a sentient universe incompatible with ours, which lures grieving individuals by projecting perfect imitations of their deceased loved ones, resulting in the Doctor emotionally reasoning with a cosmic universe taking the form of a talking frog.
It’s bizarre, bold, heartbreaking, and quintessentially Doctor Who.