Yeah, we are too. For us it’s the whole puzzle thing. The way the show has turned into a game. Steven Moffat versus the audience instead of The Moff trying to bring joy to the audience.
For io9.Com’s Charlie Jane Anders, it’s something else:
We’re mighty sick of Doctor Who stories where time travel is magic
by Charlie Jane Anders
Ever since Steven Moffat took over as head writer of Doctor Who, the show’s been trying to be a “dark fairy tale.” And the main sort of magic in Moffat’s fairy-tale Who has been time-travel, with its arbitrary rules and get-out-of-jail-free cards. But after tonight’s episode, I’m finally tired of “jargony-wargony” writing.
Spoilers ahead…
Seriously, while watching “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS,” DO NOT TOUCH YOUR NOSE THREE TIMES. Anyone who touches their nose a third time during the watching of this episode will intubate their time nexus and super-circumvent their own synchronicity. The aforementioned makes about as much sense as most of “Journey to the Center of the TARDIS” did to me — there’s actually a whole scene where the Doctor stands around yelling at the guest stars not to touch each other, “or time will reassert itself.”
I’m going to be worried from now on about ever touching other people — because I’m absolutely terrified that time might reassert itself. Time is already quite assertive enough as it is, in my experience.
I quite liked bits of the “evil wifi” midseason opener, and liked about half of “Rings of Akhaten,” all of “Cold War,” and almost all of “Hide,” except the ending. So this episode is a bit of a disappointment, after a moderately decent run of episodes. And a big part of the disappointment comes from the overuse of the time-travel bafflegab.
Timey Wimey=Mumbo Jumbo
The notion of time being this magical thing, with absurd rules, has been played up a lot in the Moffat era. The Doctor has to be assassinated by a Lake in Utah by River Song, rather than just being shot on a random streetcorner by some dude with a gun, because that’s a magical time-spot. The Doctor can’t just go to New Jersey in 1934 and then take a train to Manhattan to grab Amy and Rory, because there’s a magical time thing. (And River Song has to write a whole detective novel explaining what’s happened, because of timey wimey, too.) It’s all gotten a bit arbitrary.