Oh, All Right

Re: the thing that's even worse than the Doctor running around with a ray-gun.

To be honest, it's not atypical for Neil Gaiman to take something innately complex and shape it into something incredibly crass and attention-grabbing: if you can turn Death into a goth pin-up, then the TARDIS isn't going to stand a chance. The obvious thing to say at this point is that in a phase of the series where the only impressive thing the Doctor can do is flirt, and where every scene has the emotional depth and maturity of Han Solo saying "I know" before being pushed into the carbonite, the TARDIS was inevitably going to become the latest in a line of inflatable dolls posing as female characters. But the more important point is that everyone who's reading this probably will, and definitely should, know someone more interesting. The banality of the TARDIS-as-person is part of the design, of course, because it makes us feel that - hey! - we ourselves aren't that much smarter, wiser, or well-travelled. Gaiman's mind-trap, like Moffat's, is that nothing should appear to be cooler than the viewer... except the writer.

It's an obvious irony that this comes in the same week as BBC4's repeat of "Hand of Fear", in which a TARDIS without legs has more personality than the version with a face. No, worse still: even Bob Baker and Dave Martin, reviled by many as the hacks of the '70s, gave the supporting characters a life outside the frame. If Doctor Who still pitched itself as drama, rather than a checklist of egregious fan-wank, then you'd care about Uncle and Aunty more than anything else in the episode. We're not supposed to care, because LOOK, THE TARDIS IS A WOMAN!!!

But I don't recognise that as the TARDIS, any more than I recognise this Buck-Rogers-in-a-Bow-Tie version of the Doctor as the character I used to believe in. The TARDIS is meant to be better than this. So is her pilot. So is the programme.