Perhaps the most surprising thing about a TARDIS is that it’s inside and outside, although connected, exists in different dimensions. The outer shell is designed to change form so that it blends in with the local environment, thus a Time Lord could arrive on a planet without fear of discovery. Even if a TARDIS was located, the outer shell is both virtually indestructible and protected by a powerful force field; Time Lords are a cautious race.

 

The interior of a TARDIS is large, very large, and can be reconfigured to suit its owner's whims, though if left to its own devices tends to favour pale grey-white with roundel covered walls, at least in the case of the Doctor's ship.  A TARDIS travels by dematerialising its outer shell from one place and moving it through the time-space vortex to a new location where it rematerializes. The arrival, and departure, of a TARDIS is usually accompanied by much wheezing and groaning, as its engines move it across dimensional boundaries.

 

Each TARDIS draws its power from the Eye of Harmony, a black hole engineered by the legendry Omega and harnessed by the founder of Time Lord Society Rassilon, located at the core of the Time Lord home world, Gallifrey. The console room houses a hexagonal control unit with a column at its centre, the time rotor, which moves up and down when in flight. It is not uncommon to configure supplementary console rooms, possibly as a safety measure, with the main doors routed to whichever one is in use.

 

A TARDIS possesses a sufficiently developed intelligence to be regarded as at least partially sentient and develops a beneficent symbiotic relationship with its crew which via its telepathic circuits is thought to assist in allowing them to communicate in an extended range of languages.

As noted at the beginning of this article, the Time Lords designed their ships to change their external form to match in with the local surroundings. Whether the TARDIS would ‘look around’ and choose a suitable form on arrival or if it would have to be manually reconfigured has never been made clear. Certainly when the Doctor noticed the TARDIS had not changed form, his manner suggested it should have changed, however we have seen the Master’s TARDIS change form after arrival, and it seems that on at least some occasions the form was pre-chosen. My guess is that the option is there for either method.

However if that is the case, why does the Doctor’s TARDIS look like it does? The Doctor is believed to have left Gallifrey under less than ideal conditions. While he was able to secure the Validium living metal (used as a defensive weapon, and which would become the Nemesis statue in Silver Nemesis) and Omega’s Remote Stellar Manipulator (The Hand of Omega, as coveted by the Daleks in Remembrance of the Daleks) and also presumably pick up Susan (who certainly believes the Doctor to be her grandfather and with her knowledge of Gallifrey and minor telepathy is most likely a bona-fide Gallifreyan, if not a Time Lord (er, Lady) herself), but he was not able to appropriate a ship through conventional means. As a result the Doctor ‘acquired’ his TARDIS from the workshop; it was in the process of being repaired.

Conventional wisdom says that the Doctor stole his TARDIS, however I wonder if perhaps it was his TARDIS that was under repair – may be it was being repaired as a ruse to facilitate an easier exit. After all from what we have seen of Gallifreyan security, TT Capsules (TARDISs) are routinely monitored and tracked, but if one departed from the workshop would it have slipped through? Whatever the background, it appears that the Doctor’s TARDIS probably spent some time parked on the streets of the United Kingdom in the first half of the twentieth century. As a result the TARDIS assumed the form of a Police Box, the form which it has retained ever since.

 

 

The Police Box is now, more or less, a forgotten piece of street furniture. Before the widespread use of personal radios (and of course cell phones today) the only way to communicate with the Bobby on the beat was to use the Police Box.  Apparently, and this may be slightly apocryphal, the light on top of the box would be lit if there was a message, and when an officer saw the light, he would ring in to the local station for the details. Of course the box also allowed members of the public to contact the police in case of emergency and it provided a secure area to store equipment and perhaps the occasional criminal.  I believe that they also acted as a first aid station and of course I am sure that more than one crafty copper sheltered from the rain! There however was one new Police Box built in the 90’s. The Metropolitan Police (of London) built a hi-tech version of a police box, located out side Earl’s Court Tube Station, including CCT cameras and the expected link to the police for the public. As an interesting twist, the BBC is now the copyright holder of the appearance of the Police Box, and so if the police want to make any more, they have to ask Auntie first……

Of course, once the Doctor had completed his business (stashed the Hand at the funeral parlour, enrolled Susan at Coal Hill School) he moved his TARDIS to the yard of I.M. Foreman, in Totters Lane. That the TARDIS did not change form at this point may not have aroused any suspicion as it was still within the same era. Interestingly enough there have been a few attempts to repair the chameleon circuit, and as a result the TARDIS has changed form briefly, however it has always returned to the form of the old blue box; perhaps it finds it comfortable.

 

 

Evolution of a Time Machine: from hi-tech through steam-punk to techno-organic

 

Over the years the Doctor’s TARDIS has evolved. When it first appeared in An Unearthly Child the console room was seen to be large and adorned with roundels. The console was hexagonal with a central column that rose and fell when the ship was in transit and spun slowly on materialisation. The console was a picture of advanced technology (though of course nothing dates faster than advanced technology) and it stayed more or less in this form throughout the 60’s. With the arrival of the third Doctor’s and colour in the 70’s the TARDIS was initially rarely seen but with the Doctor’s exile being ended the  TARDIS interior became more common. Again it retained the basic layout of the hexagonal console, though the central column was now a little less spectacular (it also no longer rotated on arrival simply retaining the rise and fall in transit). The wall retained the idea of roundels, though in a slightly more exaggerated form.

Moving into the time of the forth Doctor, the console retained its form, until the disclosure of a second console room complete with wood panelled walls in season 14. This room had a much smaller and compact, wooden, console with what sometimes appeared to be a shaving mirror in place of the old central column. Roundels were present, but in the form of stained glass windows. This console room was square (a simpler set by far) and featured a definite step from the doorway to the console itself. This new image was in its own way quite charming, if a tad low budget, and had a slight air of H.G. Wells about it. However after relatively few appearances the older white roundel walled hexagonal console room was restored, just as well as the arrival of K-9 would have caused problems with the step and doorway.

 

When the Doctor next returned to Gallifrey, during The Invasion of Time, much more of the TARDIS interior was required on screen, and due to, I believe, industrial disputes, an old power station was used to double for the corridors and a swimming pool for the bathroom. This was a little eccentric to say the least, however it did establish that the TARDIS interior could be changed just as the exterior couldn’t. Things settled down after this with the TARDIS interior remaining more or less unchanged until the 20^th anniversary year and the unveiling of a new updated, but still traditional, console. Now when extra rooms were seen on board, they were complete with roundels, and matched the console room in general appearance. The corridors too had roundels, and indeed there were in the time of the fifth Doctor, many scenes showing the many corridors, all looking the same. Two rooms were however different; the pink toned zero room (later jettisoned) and the cloister room, which had the appearance of being in a slightly run down and neglected garden. It was presumably the cloister room which included the cloister bell, designed to ring at times of extreme danger.

 

Nothing much changed then until the TVM which totally redesigned the TARDIS interior. Now the roundels were gone, though a few circular cut-outs were left on the edge of some of the girders. The new interior was dark, and large with a library wall, complete with easy chair and reading lamp, a compartmentalised storage wall, and the new, much smaller console. In many respects it looked like the TARDIS had been invaded by a selection of teams from Real Rooms and House Invaders. The new console was still hexagonal, and it had a central column that rose and fell while in transit, however the controls were very Wellsian, and the central column was connected to the ceiling. The console itself was located on a raised platform, with enormous steel arches leading up to the central column which would have made Isembard Kingdom Brunell extremely happy. In all this console room was very different, but still retained the general idea of the original. Additional to the console room was the cloister room which included galleries and stone staircases arranged around something identified as the Eye of Harmony, which resembled a stone eye. It is probable that this ‘eye’ was the point that connected the TARDIS to the ‘eye’ on Gallifrey, but this was never mentioned on screen. No mention was made about the constant repetition of the Seal of Rassilon, that adorned virtually every surface – perhaps the TARDIS has themes like a modern PC, in this case the Doctor had selected one called Rassilon Steam-Punk!

 

So we finally reach the new series, and a brand new TARDIS interior. While it has been established in The Unquiet Dead that the TARDIS still has multiple rooms we have so far seen only the console room, and very different it is too. The new console room is on several levels, a ramp leads up from the external doors, which now appear as part of the console room complete with telephone (in a direct homage to the Peter Cushing films where the interior of the TARDIS was a tangle of equipment and scientific apparatus with the reverse of the doors set into a wall), to the raised console area – handy if K-9 should pop by for a visit, thought the grill that comprises the floor could cause him problems.  There is also a raised maintenance platform around the central column, though we haven’t seen this used as yet. The interior is now dome shaped, resembling the interior of an igloo, with the walls lined in roundels, which now exist in modular blocks and are set into darker hexagonal recesses. The roundels are lit. The ceiling of the console room is semi-translucent and designed to let in light reflecting conditions outside. Around the edges of the room are six branched struts which both support the maintenance deck and the ceiling itself. These ‘ribs’ like much of the new interior appear to be more organic than manufactured. The console itself is no longer strictly hexagonal, but is now round and constructed of a translucent and illuminated glass like substance, complete with an uneven, almost cracked or melted surface. The base of the console is now formed by six struts that fold round the console, dividing it into panels and forming the familiar hexagonal form. The struts continue up to the ring at the base of the central column, which itself disappears into a housing attached to the centre of the ceiling. The console room in many ways resembles the one from the TVM, but almost as though it has been grown rather than built.

 

The reasoning behind the new design is that during the Time War,  the TARDIS went through a lot of nasty experiences and as a result it has been forced to ‘regrow’ itself. In addition the Doctor has been forced to effect repairs using available resources (pram wheel, bicycle pump, chess pieces – all have been adapted to fit into the jury rigged controls) he has had to sacrifice style for function – though the functions he puts things to are often vastly different to their original purpose. Another result of this bodged technology is that the automatic systems that enabled the Doctor to pilot the TARDIS alone (a crew of three having been decided upon as the optimum) have been compromised, therefore while she might get you where you want to go the journey is not exactly smooth. Its also worth noting that the journey styles have changed: Where previous Doctors have entered co-ordinates and set the TARDIS in motion, then retired to games of chess, tinkering with equipment, arguing with Tegan or Peri, indulging in keep fit or some other hobby, safe in the knowledge that when she gets there, the ‘old girl’ will materialise and maybe even announce it with a pleasant chime, now the Doctor has to adopt a hands on approach to the controls, even roping in Rose to operate some of them, until the destination is reached. The journey times are therefore thankfully much shorter, albeit more turbulent, and external observation indicates that rather than spinning through the vortex from point A to point B the TARDIS now seems to travel through colour coded (red shifted and blue shifted?) time tunnels that are accessed by entering real space when a change in temporal or physical direction is required. Whether this is as a result of the Time War or changes the Doctor has made to the TARDIS systems has not been revealed.