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Time travel can, in the right hands, be an immensely powerful storytelling device, one which can serve any number of styles and genres. If you want to see how it can be used effectively for comedy, thrills or queasy dread, you only need to watch Back to the Future, Twelve Monkeys or Primer. Alternatively, you could just watch Doctor Who, a series which, owing to the nature of its protagonist, has had ample opportunity to employ time travel to those ends and more besides. Some of the best, most innovative episodes in recent years have used time travel to great emotional effect, particularly in episodes like "The Girl in the Fireplace," which emphasized the fatalism at the heart of a good time travel story. It's an intriguing, haunting conceit to give someone the ability to jump around in time at will, then reveal that ultimately there are some things that can't be changed.

But there is a dark side to time travel, and I don't just mean in the way it killed the late Ron Silver in TimeCop. No, the dark side of time travel lies in the temptation it presents to writers who might be looking for an easy way to resolve a plot by basically wiping the slate clean. Killed off a character you liked? Just travel back in time and save them. Revealed some potentially story-altering secrets? Just change the past so no one remembers them. Trapped the cast in a deadly situation that they can't get out of? Just hit the reset button.

That may be the most infuriating part of "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS", an otherwise fun and inconsequential episode; it not only uses time travel to erase its events entirely, but does so with a painfully real, though admittedly friendly, Big Red Button, which is as close to a literal deus ex machina as you can get without God actually showing up to sort everything out. I mean, there's lazy, then there's several layers of just not giving a shit, then you finally arrive at the level where writing a script which actually features a physical reset button is something you would ever think of doing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself: there's an entire episode (which didn't actually happen) before the button makes an appearance. To begin with, The Doctor and Clara are wondering why The TARDIS doesn't seem to like Clara. As we all know, The TARDIS is a living, thinking device which responds to the people around and inside it, and The Doctor doesn't like the idea of the two women in his life not getting along. In order to fix the issue, The Doctor sets The TARDIS to "basic mode" so Clara can fly her and get better acquainted, an action which proves to be unfortunately timed since it's at that exact moment that a salvage ship detects them and decides to beam them up.

The combination of powerful magnets and a TARDIS with its defenses down makes everything go a bit Irwin Allen and causes massive damage throughout the little blue box. As well as causing it to leak power and time, the accident separates The Doctor and Clara, with the former being trapped outside and the latter getting hurled into the dark recesses of the TARDIS, where she soon finds that she is not alone. Not one to be deterred, The Doctor convinces the three-man salvage crew (played by Ashley Walters, Mark Oliver and Jahvel Hall) to enter with him, promising them a great reward. Being something of a trickster, he leads them inside and pretends to activate a self-destruct system which will supposedly destroy them all if they don't find Clara, though the damage proves more severe than anticipated and The TARDIS' engine actually does threaten to detonate and cause some series trouble.

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