Holistic Review: A high-concept idea — so rich with possibility that it made my head swim — develops into a character study that's enthralling, atmospheric, immaculately-plotted, and very sweet.

That was a brilliant idea for a Doctor Who story.

Finally, after 48 years, the TARDIS gets an episode that's entirely devoted to her. I mean, honestly. Why has nobody ever thought to do this before? The TARDIS has practically been another regular character for the entire run of the series, and there have been hints that it was more than just a machine since almost the very beginning. The moment that we see Idris being imbued with the TARDIS' soul, I just thought, whoa... The narrative possibilities absolutely blew me away. There are potentially some ways that a storyline like this could be handled badly, but so many more ways to make it fascinating, and of course with a writer of Neil Gaiman's calibre, "exactly right" is just what we got. This is a story that would have also fit really well in the show's first season, when the audience was still exploring what the TARDIS was, but by waiting until the thirty-second season, there's so much more history and emotion to draw from that it makes the story that much more powerful. What it most reminds me of is the Deep Space Nine episode "Facets", in which the memories of Dax's previous hosts are extracted from the symbiont and placed into the minds of Jadzia's friends, giving her the opportunity to actually interact with them, while at the same time helping us learn more about her. I loved that episode, and I'm likewise passionate about this one.

And what a cheat of a title, huh? How brilliant to completely misdirect us — which is completely true to the spirit of this title, given that it was originally used as a fake title to ferret out leaks in JNT's production office — while, at the same time, referring to the fact that if any woman were the equivalent of the Doctor's wife, it would be the TARDIS, who is his constant companion and helpmate. As Amy says, "It's always you and her, isn't it, long after the rest of us have gone?"

So here, we finally have the opportunity to answer some of those burning questions that have been hanging in the air since 1963: just how sentient is the TARDIS? Does she appreciate the Doctor constantly flinging her into danger? Is she really as loyal to him as events would suggest? And why is it that she's always landing the Doctor and his companions in trouble, particularly since the Doctor seems to be incapable of steering her reliably? Gaiman's episode is a fan's dream-come-true, gleefully seizing the opportunity to ask all of these questions, and making canon a lot of answers that we'd always suspected were true. (Also, Time Lords actually can genderswap. Hello, controversy train! Way to stir the pot, Gaiman.)

This certainly isn't the first example in fiction of "turning a fantastical creature into an ordinary woman"; off the top of my head, The Little Mermaid and The Last Unicorn have similar plots. (Well, I mean, "similar" in only the broadest sense!) But in this instance, it's not just any creature being transmuted into human form, it's the TARDIS, which up until this point has been indeterminately sentient and perpetually mute. It's also not the first instance of a TARDIS in human form; the eighth-Doctor novels had whole arcs devoted to that concept, but they were futuristic TARDISes, not our TARDIS. By putting that soul — and it's telling, isn't it, that TARDISes even have souls? — into a human body, we can finally learn whether the Doctor's TARDIS is intelligent and aware of what's been happening around it. And it answers the question "what would the TARDIS say, if it could talk?" The Doctor's been talking to the TARDIS for years (remember Rose and Sarah giggling over the Doctor stroking the console, and wondering if they wanted to be alone?) but it's always been a one-way street. Now, finally, the Doctor has the chance to have an actual chat with his TARDIS. And Gaiman deftly structures the plot, without it seeming at all contrived, such that the Doctor and the TARDIS wind up alone together, with no-one else to talk to, relying on one another to survive.

But, unsatisfied with just giving us a glorious two-hander between the Doctor and his TARDIS, Gaiman also decides to make one of my other deepest fan-wishes come true, by devoting Amy and Rory's plot strand to a terrifying chase through the TARDIS corridors. Since 2005, I've been dying to see some other parts of the TARDIS besides the console room; one of the things I've always loved about the show is that the TARDIS seemed like such a fascinating place to call home, with lots of intriguing rooms to explore. Stories like The Edge of Destruction, The Mind Robber, The Masque of Mandragora, The Invasion of Time, and of course Castrovalva, really helped to sell the idea that this was a near-infinite time machine. Since the revival, we've had implications that the TARDIS is enormous (starting in The Unquiet Dead and as recently as last week's The Curse of the Black Spot) but the only part we've seen, aside from the console room, was a lovely glimpse of the wardrobe room in The Christmas Invasion. To finally get to see shots of Amy and Rory racing down unending corridors is just fantastic! Now, granted, these corridors are a little more claustrophobic and scary than those from the original series — they're dark, heavy and industrial-looking — but the hexagonal shape is cool, and they do match the look of the console room walls. It's also a bit odd that there don't seem to be any doors leading off, but then it's also possible that House has removed them all as part of its little game. (It also seems to have added vertical shafts; Amy certainly doesn't seem to expect to run headlong into one, and it appears to vanish once they cross it, although House's comment about turning off the corridor antigrav does hint that maybe they've always been there.) At least Gaiman tried to include scenes involving the swimming pool and the Zero Room, and for that I love him. Also, he gets additional points for use of the word "doolally".

I actually wasn't familiar with Gaiman's work before his Doctor Who episode was announced. I mean, I certainly knew him by reputation, but I'd never read anything he'd done. So on my way to Brazil last December, feeling that I should at least read something of his before April, I picked up a copy of Neverwhere in the airport bookstore. I found it to be a compelling page-turner, with relatable characters and quirky fantastical settings and plot elements, reminiscent of fairy tales and, of course, Alice's Adventures Under Ground. The Doctor's Wife is in a similar vein, with likewise fantastical settings and characters who behave very oddly according to our social norms. It's fascinating, imaginative, thought-provoking, and also macabre, particularly the detail that House has prolonged Auntie and Uncle's lives by harvesting Time Lord organs and limbs to graft onto their bodies. It's also very well-plotted, with watertight internal logic; I particularly love the way that Gaiman justifies the episode's concept ("the Doctor gets to talk to his TARDIS") by creating a monster that eats TARDISes (another brilliant idea that, for some reason, has never been done) but has to displace the powerful soul in order to get at the artron energy reserves. That also sets up the episode's resolution perfectly, since we already know that the soul of a TARDIS would destroy House if it weren't removed. We've also had hints that a humanoid body can't contain a TARDIS matrix for long — Uncle clearly expected Idris to die quickly — the implication being that the expelled TARDIS soul would simply dissipate if it were released outside a TARDIS shell, or — conversely — be reabsorbed into the TARDIS if the console is nearby, which is exactly what ends up happening. Other writers, take note: nothing in this story occurs simply to move the plot along. What's really fantastic is that, while on one hand we have this very inventive story that feels, in some ways, atypical (if the word "atypical" can ever be used to describe a story in the vastly flexible Doctor Who repertoire), on the other hand, Neil Gaiman is clearly a dyed-in-the-wool Doctor Who fan, who liberally peppers his script with thrilling references. We've got a Time Lord message box, hearking back to The War Games; rooms being jettisoned (including the poor swimming pool, yet again!); the inclusion of the Ood (leading to the Doctor's great line "Another Ood I failed to save."); the Doctor's ability to sense the presence of other Time Lords (even just their recorded thoughts); a mention of his old multicolored umbrella; and a reference to the Eye of Orion.

I must confess, I was slightly worried about Suranne Jones at first. I was hankering for a good heart-to-heart between the Doctor and the TARDIS, and it's challenging to have a heart-to-heart with someone who's ranting incoherently and trying to bite you. In retrospect, however, her first scenes are brilliant; they adroitly convey what it might be like for the time-spanning soul of a TARDIS to be shoved into the synchronic brain of a humanoid, going from a state of experiencing everything at once to a state that requires a distinction between past / present / future. It's no surprise that the Idris-TARDIS muddles up her tenses and starts quoting things she hasn't said yet (with lots of interesting foreshadowing). Over time, we see her start to settle down and adjust, until she finally becomes accustomed to experiencing the linear flow of time, and that's when things really get good. I found myself hanging on every word Jones said. Her delivery, cut-glass yet delivered at speeds that challenge the human ear to keep up, perfectly convey the sense that the TARDIS is hyper-intelligent — moreso even than the Doctor, it would appear — and nowhere near as prone to foolishness or childishness as the Doctor is (which, given that the Doctor can coolly stare down homicidal villains, is really saying something). I started to get antsy again around the time that the Doctor decided to try to build his own TARDIS console, thinking that they still hadn't really talked, but again, I should have had more faith in Gaiman; moments later, we get the wonderful scenes of the Doctor and the Idris-TARDIS finally confronting each other over long-simmering resentments, and then both realizing and embracing the fact that they actually have the opportunity to have a conversation. Jones gets the lion's share of the episode's great lines — which is just as it should be — which include the hilariously illogical "Biting's excellent! It's like kissing, only there's a winner.", "Oh! We have now reached the point in the conversation where you open the lock.", "You talk, and run around, and bring home strays!", "Hello. I'm Sexy.", and, possibly my favorite, "You were about to say all that! I don't suppose you have to now." Her delivery also elevates lines like "I've just had a new idea about kissing!", the computer-like "It means the smell of dust after rain.", "Names are funny.", and "Hello, pretty!" Many more will be quoted below.

I also love Jones' spirited retort (to the Doctor's incredulous description of her as "My TARDIS!") of "My Doctor!" which raises the valid question — and not for the only time in this episode — of who in this relationship owns whom? I think it's really cool that, from the TARDIS' perspective, she's the one who stole the Doctor. (As she says, "What makes you think I would ever give you back?") It makes so much sense: why they're so bonded, why they always leap from adventure to adventure, why the TARDIS never protests when the Doctor flings them into trouble, and why they so often ended up in trouble even when the Doctor wasn't able to steer her properly.

Matt Smith and Suranne Jones are fantastic together, perfectly portraying the relationship that the Doctor has always had with the TARDIS: respect, care, tenderness and frustration. I love the moment when the Doctor finally realizes what a rare opportunity he has, to actually talk to the TARDIS, his constant companion, with whom he's always had a relationship and obvious chemistry; and he switches from being annoyed and short-tempered to being tender and caring. He even starts calling her "old girl" again — which, it turns out, the TARDIS has always liked! Aww. For the second episode in a row, Smith is forced to deliver a line that no Doctor should ever be asked to tackle ("Come here, you scrumptious little beauty!"), but that aside, Gaiman has given him a gem of a script to work with. While I'm not sure I would have been able to restrain my fury as well as the Doctor does — given that Auntie and Uncle did, after all, apparently murder dozens of Time Lords and their TARDISes even before the Time War started — his sadness and deep disappointment are what really shine through in the scene when the Doctor learns of their deception. The eleventh Doctor is getting a lot of "here's a helpful example, but it's entirely inaccurate" speeches, but I guess Tennant got a few of those too. And his delivery of "the long-dead" is a bit strange. But I do love his "be quiet" gesture to Rory as he says "I'd love to" meet the House. And we finally learn the Doctor's first-ever words to the TARDIS; what a cool revelation.

Overall, Amy is written appealingly this week, particularly the way that she gives the Doctor her full support in his search for other Time Lords, and her instinctive fear of the Ood is nice. She's also no slouch in the smarts department, being the one to figure out that as the TARDIS communicates telepathically, the passkey must be telepathic too. I love that, when the Doctor asks her to congratulate the House on being a worthy opponent, Amy throws herself right into clapping along with him, despite clearly having no idea what he's up to. For the third episode running, Gillan is asked to portray Amy's grief over a dead friend, and for the third episode running, Gillan delivers a performance worthy of dear Lis Sladen, who I believe still holds the record for "number of 'weeping over the Doctor's apparently-dead body' scenes". The buildup to this scene is so tense, and Gillan's anguished screaming and sobbing is so gut-wrenching and believable, that this becomes a very intense moment, even though we know that there's no way Rory's actually dead. Amy looks as though she can't decide whether to sob or be sick, to bury her head in Rory's mummified dead body or to back away from it in horror and disgust. She also does a beautiful job of portraying Amy's shock and relief when Rory turns up alive, as she rushes over and bearhugs him. I do, however, find it odd that, having just been separated from Rory for two hours (from his perspective), Amy allows him to lag behind again (or, more accurately, she races ahead of him), which of course results in them getting separated yet again. And there's a typical moment when, having utterly failed to come up with a reason why House should keep them alive, Amy shoots Rory a look as if to say that he dare not fail to come up with one himself!

Despite having to be written into the original storyline, Rory does quite well out of this episode. He cleverly comes up with an answer to that dreaded question, "Tell me why I shouldn't kill you right now." and he does it by logically extrapolating why the House kept Auntie and Uncle alive all this time. Nicely done! I'm not sure I would've been as quick-thinking. I love the look on Darvill's face as Rory tries to persuade House to keep them alive longer; he makes it pretty clear that, as Rory is talking, he begins to realize that "killing us quickly wouldn't be any fun" is basically asking House to torture them slowly, and is starting to regret where his logic has led him. Darvill also gives an outstanding performance as the aged Rory, twisted and bitter and furious... yikes. The scene is so powerful that I didn't even find myself objecting to the fact that they killed Rory for the fourth time, perhaps also because I was under no illusion that it would stick. Darvill does a great job voicing House-as-Rory, mainly because there's not a hint of guile or menace in his voice (as in "I, I just banged my head. Just keep coming."). Fake-Rory sounds exactly like real Rory, so Amy's willingness to go along with what he says is believable, and it makes the scene that much creepier. I also love (and appreciate) the fact that the TARDIS thinks of Rory (rather than Amy) as "the pretty one". I know this is meant as a joke, and therefore a backhanded compliment to poor Arthur Darvill, but it still makes me want to gloat a little.

Elizabeth Berrington and Adrian Schiller embody "kooky" and "creepy" as, respectively, Auntie and Uncle. They're an inscrutable pair of characters, particularly Auntie, who on one hand mothers people and calls them "sweets", but on the other hand is chillingly indifferent to Idris' suffering ("I expect so, dear"), not to mention the Doctor's. Uncle is somewhat more outright repulsive (although he initially claims to wish he could take Idris' place to spare her pain, he immediately follows it up with "Nah, I don't, 'cause it's really gonna hurt!"), but until we learn that they've been happily allowing the House to kill people in order to prolong their miserable lives, it's easy to assume that they're both just slightly batty but basically decent folks. Given that we've just seen them throw Idris to the wolves, this should come as no surprise, but Berrington and Schiller are very successful at wrong-footing us with their performances. Berrington has an endearing absent-minded-but-lovable delivery (reminiscent of Paradise Towers' Tilda and Tabby), yielding lines like "It's your fault, isn't it, sweets?" and "House can't feed on them if there's none more coming, can he?" Schiller, meanwhile, slurs all of his lines in a dazed, slightly inebriated-sounding Slavic accent, which makes him sound that tiny bit more unpredictable, as on lines like "And I'm Uncle, I'm everybody's uncle." and the awkwardly-hilarious "Actually, I feel fine." right before he keels over. Nephew (embodied as usual by Paul Kasey) marks a welcome return for the Ood, and is well utilized as both "misunderstood alien" and "dangerous possessed enemy", with House-affected green eyes making an interesting change from the usual red. And then we have the true villain of the piece, the House, who never appears onscreen (though the Doctor charmingly describes its physical form for us as a "big squashy oogly thing") but is conveyed by the rich, warm vocal inflections of Michael Sheen. Sheen's voice has a lovely reassuring tone, which makes it all the more jarring when House turns menacing (which, as it turns out, suits Sheen's rich warm voice equally well). Incidentally, given that this episode featured characters called Auntie, Uncle, Nephew and House, I'd wondered whether we might be in for a tale inspired by Lungbarrow!

It's interesting, I'm beginning to suspect that there's a correlation for any given episode between the quality of writing and the quality of Murray Gold's score. He seems to do his very best work when the episode in question is truly special, and The Doctor's Wife is no exception. His music throughout is effective and evocative. In particular, during the scene of Amy exploring the TARDIS corridors on her own, the score is reminiscent of Cube.

As with his work in The Lazarus Experiment, Richard Clark's direction is solid without being flashy. There's a wonderfully subtle shot of Auntie's manly hand when she caresses Amy's hair; from the way it was framed, I knew that I was meant to notice something off about Auntie's hand, but I couldn't pinpoint it at the time. I also love the shot of the Doctor, Auntie and Uncle framed by the cabinet of glowing Time Lord message boxes; the Doctor and Idris cresting the hill to see a valley of dead TARDISes, and, at the end of that scene, the way that Clark holds the shot long enough that we see the Doctor skip off to get started while the Idris-TARDIS is still staring sadly at the corpses; the creepy camera movements as Amy wanders the menacing TARDIS corridors; the freaky moment when an aged Rory comes into focus behind her; the Idris-TARDIS imbuing the junkyard TARDIS with (artron?) energy; Amy stumbling onto the horrific scene (with due credit to the set dressers) of Rory's dead body surrounded by his apparent hatred of her scrawled all over the walls; and the racking shot from Nephew in the background, with glowing green eyes, to Amy picturing the TARDIS' passkey in the foreground.

My highest praise must go to Clark's use of flashbacks; rather than giving us a five-second clip of the Doctor looking at the Corsair's message box, as many other directors would have done, Clark remembers that we've only just seen it, and gives us a quick half-second flash of the image. Not only is this more efficient and less annoying, but in context, it looks appropriately like the Doctor's just had a flash of memory. Very nicely done. Similarly, I love love love the way he actually shows Amy thinking about the passkey to the old console room, particularly the shots of her eleventh birthday party and her wedding-day delight; such a great way to personalize the moment and give us a glimpse inside Amy's head. Perhaps most impressively, Clark — and Gold — turn the TARDIS, for once, into a very unsafe and frightening place to be. That's happened very rarely in the series' past, and it's unsettling to see home turned into a place of such danger. Yet it's so appropriate in an episode that's already TARDIS-centric, particularly since this machine lacks the TARDIS' soul; so there's a very clear message here about why the TARDIS usually feels so safe and reassuring.

The effects this week are stellar. The blue dimensional rift looks great, as does the junkyard TARDIS console dematerializing and whooshing through space, and the shots of House from space. There's clever visual continuity in the fact that everything possessed by House glows green, which enables Clark to use a subtle shorthand, as in the comparable shots of the planetoid glowing green when the TARDIS approaches it, and blue as the junkyard-TARDIS heads away. (Oddly, there's also a moment on the planet's surface when the Doctor's sonic screwdriver is glowing blue again; I suspect an error by the overeager visual effects department. I don't think the Doctor's sonic screwdriver was ever possessed by House!) It's amazingly reassuring when House's green glow fades away from the console room, to be replaced by the TARDIS' familiar yellow aura. I like the updated design of the glowing Time Lord message box too, although it's a shame that Matt Smith turns it around so that the unlit side is toward the camera! Whoever was responsible for the old-age makeup on Rory deserves an award; it's incredibly realistic. As sound effects go, I love the air whooshing up the TARDIS corridor-shaft as Amy and Rory cross it.

I'm also delighted that finally, Sarah from Lancashire's winning TARDIS console design has turned up! And in Neil Gaiman's episode, of all places! Now I get why we didn't see it last year, since this story was originally scheduled for the 2010 season and had to be bumped for budgetary reasons. It must be said that the console in this version bears not-a-lot of resemblance to her drawing, but I do love the inclusion of the shaving mirror and the coathanger. No doubt she'll be thrilled when it comes out as a toy playset!

Minor points:

• Doctor Who Magazine, for some reason, seemed to believe that the big surprise (presumably, the moment when we realize that Idris is the TARDIS) wasn't revealed until "page 23 of a 59-page script". But this revelation is abundantly clear from the end of the teaser, assuming that one possesses the capability to put two and two together.

• Who, exactly, is Idris? She's clearly newer to House than Auntie and Uncle, with a young body and apparently no surgical upgrades; perhaps she was the companion of one of the murdered Time Lords? Yet she seems to trust House enough to let him use her as a vessel for a TARDIS soul. Although that could be because she doesn't know that this soul-swapping procedure will ultimately (and, most likely, almost immediately) kill her. Whereas Auntie and Uncle do, so they've clearly been keeping secrets. If House has killed "hundreds" of Time Lords, then it must have found hundreds of people like Idris to use as vessels (if, as the episode implies, the procedure inevitably kills the host). So, by extension, what makes Auntie and Uncle and Nephew special? Why are they continually "repaired", and not used to house TARDIS souls? (Perhaps the House is keeping them alive as backup, in case a TARDIS arrives and there's no equivalent of Idris at hand? Rory thinks they were just kept around to satisfy House's sadistic desires, but I'm not sure I'm convinced by that argument, even if it does prove true enough to save his life.) For that matter, we don't know who they were, or where they originally came from, or how they wound up living on House, either. But they seem to have been around for a very, very long time, if they've been repaired so much that there's little-to-nothing left of their original bodies, and if they've (apparently) long-forgotten their real names.

• Great line, and a great deadpan delivery by Karen Gillan, as Rory begins to doubt the Doctor's big-fish stories:

  Rory: "Do you believe any of this stuff?"
  Amy: "I was there."

• The only part of the episode that really feels out of place is the "we saw him die" / "yeah, 200 years in the future" requisite continuity reminder. Really, do we have to have one of these every week?

• From the way the console column is moving, it would appear that the TARDIS is in flight, not simply hovering in deep space, so how is the message box knocking on the door?

• I wonder what exactly the Corsair's message box said that persuaded the Doctor to track him down? The other comparable message that we hear, when Nephew's communication sphere tunes into their broadcasts, is "If you are receiving this message, please help me. Send a signal to the High Council of the Time Lords on Gallifrey. Tell them that I am still alive! I don't know where I am, I, I'm on some rock-like planet..." Not exactly a heartwarming invitation; the Doctor himself describes them as "cries of help from the long dead".

• Poor swimming pool! Jettisoned again! Actually, you'd think after it was vital to saving River's life two stories ago, he might not be so quick to get rid of it.

• Surely the Doctor shouldn't be quite so surprised that the TARDIS power has drained? The last time he ventured outside the universe, it did the same thing. (Although it was fine in E-Space, so maybe there's some crucial difference between a bubble universe and a parallel universe.)

• Cute, and a nice delivery from Gillan, who dials down the snark:

  Amy: "So what kind of trouble's your friend in?"
  Doctor: "He was in a bind, a bit of a pickle, sort of distressed."
  Amy: "Aw, you can't just say you don't know?"

• As much as I would have loved the Doctor to stumble upon a colony of Time Lords — the mere prospect filled me with glee — I have to admit that I love the sad turn that this plot thread took, mostly because it's just written so well, and the revelation that they're all dead becomes pivotal in how we perceive the rest of the episode.

• A really great moment for Amy, and a lovely bit of scripting, as she recognizes the Doctor's pain and backs down from being confrontational. I also love that the Doctor doesn't try to hide his motivation; he honestly admits that Amy's right, and bares his soul a little in the process.

  Amy: "You wanna be forgiven."
  Doctor: "Don't we all?"
  Amy: (clearly touched) "What d'ya need from me?"

• I wonder if House keeps the leftover bits of the Time Lord bodies in cold storage until parts of them are needed? Or does he just use what's immediately needed and discard the rest? In which case, Auntie, Uncle and Nephew probably have to bear with their broken and failing parts until House can lure another Time Lord to its dimension.

• Why is Amy claiming that Rory believes there's a perfectly innocent explanation for the Doctor's behavior, and she's the one who thinks she's lying? In House, Amy was the one who was happy to trot back to the TARDIS, and Rory was the one whose eyes were narrowing as he interrogated the Doctor about his missing sonic screwdriver and second identical jacket.

• Not gonna tack an "always" onto that, Pond? You know you want to.

  Amy: "Sometimes I hate being right."

• Interesting; so even the TARDIS doesn't really believe that the Doctor ever actually intended to return her, eh?

  Doctor: "I borrowed you."
  Idris-TARDIS: "Borrowing implies the eventual intention to return the thing that was taken."

• Ha! Very clever. And she's right, too.

  Idris-TARDIS: "Are all people like this?"
  Doctor: "Like what?"
  Idris-TARDIS: "So much bigger on the inside!"

• When the Doctor dials Amy in the TARDIS, he starts talking the moment that he hits 'send' (or, more likely as he only presses one button, speed-dials the TARDIS). Does he really expect the signal to go through, and Amy to pick up, that fast?

• Brilliant! I'm still not sure how comfortable I am with the idea of the Doctor as a sexual being, but if I can adjust to that, then this is hilarious. (Also, kudos to Gaiman for not assuming — as RTD and Moffat did, in The Empty Child and hinted at in Aliens of London — that the Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for all of his 900-plus years.)

  Doctor: "Ooh, sorry, er, do you have a name?"
  Idris-TARDIS: "Seven hundred years, finally he asks."
  Doctor: "And what do I call you?"
  Idris-TARDIS: "I think you call me... sexy."
  Doctor: "Only when we're alone!"
  Idris-TARDIS: "We are alone."
  Doctor: "Oh. Come on then, sexy."

• Me too, Rory. Meeeee too. (How come Buffy never used this as a plot idea? They did "must win at all costs" coaches twice, but never this?)

  Rory: "That's what Auntie and Uncle were for, wasn't it? Someone to make suffer. I had a PE teacher just like you."

• A beautiful exchange; the TARDIS is portrayed so well in this story, sensitive and capable. (But how insensitive is the Doctor?!)

  Doctor: "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"
  Idris-TARDIS: "I'm thinking that all of my sisters are dead, that they were devoured, and that we are looking at their corpses."
  Doctor: "Ah, sorry, no, I wasn't thinking that."
  Idris-TARDIS: "No. You were thinking you could build a working TARDIS console out of broken remnants of a hundred different models. And you don't care that it's impossible."

• While I love that Gaiman is enough of a fan to have thought about this, surely "Pull to Open" actually refers to the little phone cubby, not to the main doors? (I actually saw someone online get ripped apart and accused of extreme stupidity for pointing out this same issue, so I realize I take my life in my hands by suggesting it, but I think I'm right! Officers respond to urgent calls, so pull open the door to make one; police boxes weren't open and unlocked for just anybody to wander into, surely?) Besides, I don't think the TARDIS doors swing both ways, so the Doctor couldn't have opened them by pulling.

  Idris-TARDIS: "And you never read the instructions."
  Doctor: "I always read the instructions!"
  Idris-TARDIS: "There's a sign on my front door. You have been walking past it for seven hundred years. What does it say?"
  Doctor: "That's not instructions!"
  Idris-TARDIS: "There's an instruction at the bottom. What does it say?"
  Doctor: "Pull to open."
  Idris-TARDIS: "Yes, and what do you do?"
  Doctor: "I push!"
  Idris-TARDIS: "Every single time, seven hundred years. Police box doors open out the way."

• And here we finally get confirmation of the theory that the TARDIS, intelligently, can sense problems and plop the Doctor down exactly where he needs to be to solve them, regardless of where he wants to go. Fantastic performance by Jones here.

  Doctor: "You know, since we're talking, with mouths, not really an opportunity that comes along very often, I just wanna say, you know, you have never been very reliable."
  Idris-TARDIS: "And you have?!"
  Doctor: "You didn't always take me where I wanted to go."
  Idris-TARDIS: "No, but I always took you where you needed to go."

• Another great delivery by Jones; and does this hint that the entire bubble universe was created and maintained by House? I wonder why... if it fed on TARDISes, why not set up shop in the universe where they all existed, rather than lying in wait like a trapdoor spider?

  Doctor: "Using a console without a proper shell, whew, it's not gonna be safe."
  Idris-TARDIS: "This body has about eighteen minutes left to live. The universe we're in will reach absolute zero in three hours. Safe is relative."

• Hilarious line, and it feels so true to the series, as the Doctor unveils his cobbled-together TARDIS console:

  Doctor: "Perfect, look at that! What could possibly go wrong?"
  A component sproings off and hits the floor.
  Doctor: "That's fine, that always happens."

• This one made me cheer. So sweet!

  Doctor: "I've got nothing."
  Idris-TARDIS: "Oh, my beautiful idiot. You have what you've always had: you've got me."

• If the Idris-TARDIS is communicating her thoughts to Rory via telepathic messaging, how come the Doctor can duck into it as though there were a camera? (Maybe there is, and it's just the image that's being transmitted telepathically?) I mean, obviously in plot terms, it has to happen so that Rory knows to trust this strange woman, but it still feels a bit odd.

• As soon as Idris told Rory that she was sending them to one of the old control rooms, all I could think was "SQUEE!" I was, I must admit, more than a little disappointed that they wound up in the Eccleston/Tennant control room, rather than one of the JNT-era ones, but it was still really cool to see them in it. And anyway, we did get some cool roundelled walls similar to the classic-series console room behind the junkyard TARDIS.

• It's only because of this line that I can handle them having jettisoned the swimming pool again (not to mention, apparently, 60% of the TARDIS, between entering and leaving the rift). In fact, this line — and Gaiman's original intention to include a zero room scene — retroactively makes me feel better about Castrovalva too!

  Doctor: "There aren't any old control rooms! They were all deleted or remodeled!"
  Idris-TARDIS: "I archived them, for neatness! I've got about thirty now."
  Doctor: "But I've only changed the desktop, what, a dozen times?"
  Idris-TARDIS: "So far, yes!"
  Doctor: "You can't archive something that hasn't happened yet!"
  Idris-TARDIS: "You can't."

• I love the idea — which is cleverly reinforced by Clark's direction — that House can play with their perceptions as well as with reality, so we've got Amy (but not Rory) seeing Rory's corpse in the corridor, and Rory (but not Amy) able to see as they approach the old TARDIS console room.

• Perhaps the only genuinely troubling scripting issue: how is it that Rory is knocked unconscious by Nephew (and not killed?), yet is bounding awake and rescuing Amy moments later?

• Why doesn't Amy see the light from Nephew's translation sphere glowing green in the dark? Is that House's influence on her perception again?

• Sticking your bare hand into a mass of slimy Ood tentacles would be nasty. That is all.

• First the House wants to kill Amy and Rory outright; then it wants to keep them alive for entertainment; then it apparently decides it wants to keep them on as its servants (why does it need servants, exactly? to help it capture TARDISes?), and then it decides just to kill them after all. Wishy-washy!

• Probably the funniest line of the episode (even if it does lead to yet another "shut up"):

  Amy: "She's the TARDIS?!"
  Doctor: "And she's a woman. She's a woman, and she's the TARDIS!"
  Amy: "Did you wish really hard?"

• Heh! Go Doctor!

  House: "Why would you tell me this?"
  Doctor: "Because we wanna get back to our universe as badly as you do. And I'm nice."

• I really like the neat plot justification that "living things from rooms that are deleted are automatically deposited in the main control room." The first time I watched the episode, I thought the Doctor said "any things", and I was like, wuh? swimming pool? don't remember that ever happening!

• I wonder how the TARDIS manages to generate a hologram of Idris to talk to the Doctor one last time? Or is it using Idris' actual body? And whatever it's doing this time, why can't it ever do this again? Of course, none of this takes away from the fact that this exchange is the sweetest and most tearjerking of the entire episode:

  Idris-TARDIS: "I'll always be here. But this is when we talked, and now even that has come to an end. There's something I didn't get to say to you."
  Doctor: (sadly and reluctantly) "Goodbye."
  Idris-TARDIS: "No. I just wanted to say... hello. Hello, Doctor. It's so very, very nice to meet you."

• Amy has now described something as "spacey-wacey"? Hee! Love it.

• Hmm, so, an intriguing future hint with "the only water in the forest is the river". Only time will tell...

• Oh wait, when I said the "wish" line was the funniest, I was totally forgetting about this howler:

  Doctor: "I should probably make you two a new bedroom! You'd like that, wouldn't you?"
  Amy: (after consultation with Rory) "Okay, um, Doctor, this time, could we lose the bunk beds?"

• And after all this revelation, there's still some mystery left, as Rory asks — but does not get an answer to — the question "Doctor, do you have a room?"

• At the end, a very cute moment when the TARDIS clearly decides their next destination, making sure the Doctor knows that she can hear him! (It would've been perfect if he'd called her "sexy"!)

The words "instant classic" come straight to mind. Is there anyone in fandom who won't love this story?! I can't imagine how. It's just so sweet. And to think, Gaiman was worried that we might think he was turning the series on its head! Indeed not, kind sir: what you have done is finally turn the spotlight on the series' unsung hero, giving her an hour of long-deserved glory and the opportunity to have a real heart-to-heart chat with her beloved Doctor... not to mention, unbelievable as it might sound, character development. Incredible. So, we're hiring you to write a story every year, right?