The inside's bigger than the outside, and the assembled hordes of Ghengis Khan couldn't get through the door. You'd better believe the TARDIS is a character! Discuss the good old blue box here.

Lol that is true! It is a character! It even has a very important part to play!

I liked how they kept it as a blue box despite the real ones not being around anymore.

It's an icon of the show. The scarf, the Daleks, the Police Box.

I like how they have the police box doors on the inside now. I'm not quite sure why, but I do.

I think the TARDIS' Chameleon Circuit was fixed during a Colin Baker (Dr. #6) story, but of course got broken again by the end of the episode!

I like it just because in the original series, we never got to see what the external doors looked like from the inside (at least I never saw an episode where we did). So, I would wonder how much room there was between the 2 sets of doors, and if someone could get trapped there. I even briefly thought that maybe the white doors were meant to be the police box doors, only they looked different depending on whether you were inside or outside.

With the police box doors on the inside now, such pointless questions are now moot!

I read somewhere (Amazon, I think) that the Beeb bought the copyright/trademark to the blue box after the police stopped using them.

Yes, Areacode, I think it is something like that. Also, the inner doors always seemed wider than the outer doors. That struck me as very strange.

But why? The whole TARDIS concept is inherently impossible so why draw the line at the doors for suspending beleif...or is that disbeleif? I can never keep that straight in my head. My point is - the whole THING is bigger on the inside than the outside so why not the doors too?

Because you walk through the doorway. What happens if you and someone else are walking out side by side? The doorway shrinks, so something very strange and probably uncomfortable is going to happen.

There's an old police box in Sheffield town Centre. It's a different design, and painted green and cream (and isn't used). It just sits there. I took a friend to see it after the series aired last year. He was very happy.

There are quite a few of them near me. At least one has been turned into a coffee stall, which is cute.

There's one on George 4th Bridge in Edinburgh. My son was delighted.

Ah, but Hartnell explained it in "An Unearthly Child": it's like the way we can see an entire building on a little television set...

I don't remember how prominently its mentioned in the 2005 series, but the Doctor's TARDIS is a "she". I don't know if "the old girl" is simply a naming convention that warships are male and passenger ships are female. Though I'm sure there were some bad jokes when the TARDIS was acting finicky.

And then there was the Baker discussion with Leela about forced perspective (in the secondary control room).

Always wondered why there were no more recent attempts to fix the Chameleon Circuit.

Oh cool! I have to check that out! </easily impressed>

Nothwithstanding various Doctorial explanations, basic laws of physics still apply, something that is physically smaller on the outside than on the inside is inherently impossible. Unless you suspend beleif/disbelief.

Boy I was really hoping someone would help me on that suspending beleif thing too!

Oh yes I'd forgoteen TARDIS was a she. *smacks head* and yes it's to do with ship gendering conventions. Passengers ships like women carry passengers.

I think its is supercool if it is true that BBC copyrighted Blue Police Boxes.

There was some speculation (I don't know if it was canon or not) that the inside of the TARDIS was a pocket universe with its own laws of physics. Hence there were entire episodes of the old series where they were just wandering around in the various rooms of the TARDIS. I seem to recall that if the Chameleon Circuit was working the outside of the TARDIS can be alot smaller than a Police Box.

Unfortunately the writers of the old series sometimes forgot what those laws were, so they tended to vary.

It couldn't get too much smaller, since people will need to exit and enter. It would be kind of useless to have doors too small for people to get through!

The Tardis is supposedly a hypercube. Larger inside than out, of course creating and maintaining a four dimensional space like that would require ridiculous amounts of energy. Then there's the whole theory that "time is experiential not linear" to contend with, that says it would be impossible to travel backwards in time because there are no signposts.

Possibly on a quantum level the universe has a "memory" of past events in an information database, so you could model complex simulations based on that stored information, and create an avatar of yourself to interact with that detailed simulation, but you could't physically visit a past event. Of couse you'd need some serious software and a ridiculously powerful computer to decode the "memories" and model all the variables.

Is easier just to suspend your disbelief.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the Time Lords mastered time travel (from their perspective) 10 million years before the Doctor's time. There's quite a few cases where the Doctor contradicts established physics and this seems to be put down to our understanding being primitive and wrong. (In one story the Doctor derides a physicist's claim that neutrons have no polarity as something 20th century humans only think they know)



Well, it is powered by a Black Hole, so that ought to do it!



It's a fairly recent development. For decades the BBC were happy to let it slide and people produced "Metropolitan Police Box" models and toys without a licence. The Police actually forced their hand by attempting to copyright the image themselves. The BBC's lawyers argued that *nobody* looks at a police box and thinks "oooh... one of those phone boxes the police used to use between the 1920s and the 1960s!" but *everybody* thinks "a TARDIS!" Therefore any commercial exploitation of the Police Box image would be a defacto exploitation of the Doctor Who brand. Plus it would have meant the BBC needing to ask permission/pay to use the TARDIS in the new series.

The judges agreed and assigned the BBC a retroactive copyright dated 1963.

So that's how the TARDIS came to be copyrighted!

BTW, this is a very good site on the history of the Doctor Who Police Box, pointing out the different versions that have been used, how the design evolved over time and how they're different from 'real' Police Boxes.

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~trekker/policeboxes/

The Master's TARDIS has appeared as a variety of things, including an Ionic pillar and an iron maiden (I always liked the sheer audacity of disguising a ship as a torture devise).

True, but those all still were large enough to squeeze in and out of.

The smallest outside disguise I can think of was the Monk's TARDIS in The Time Meddler, which, as a three-foot high sarcophagus, meant that you had to crawl to get in and out of the thing. You probably wouldn't want to get too much smaller than that...

hehe - makes running into the TARDIS as a last second escape a little more complex - but more humourous I admit. And if it had happened to the 9th Doctor I shallowly admit that to see CE's and JB's bums as they wriggled into a small TARDIS would have been squee-worthy.

Theoretically, you could make a TARDIS the size of a manhole cover and set it on the ground...

That could work for someone who has the ability to shrink down to a few mm like say, Drax did in "The Armageddon Factor". Then once inside, you could revert to normal size. Although the feasibility of one to shrink/grow upon entering/exiting is lost on me.

I would like to voice my smiles at hearing the good 'ole TARDIS sound fx tonight. I watched when I was a little girl and the swoosh-rush took me right back.

*sigh*

For the TARDIS sound FX, I was just stoked that in later episodes (this is in no way a spoiler!) they used all the old materialisation/dematerialisation sound effects, all the weird blips and blops and worps that the Radiophonic Workshop came up with before and after the familiar 'slowed-down key scraped over a piano string' groaning noise. In other words, all the strange background noises that 99% of people wouldn't even notice, but geeks like me cherish.

Many years ago the local television station that was running the Tom Baker era of Who had this festival in a nearby park where they gave away balloons and stickers and stuff and the best display was this exhibit where you went in the TARDIS and you saw memorabilia, The way it was set up you could only see the front of the TARDIS and when you went in the center was a trailer and then the exit looked like the front of the TARDIS but the entrance wasn't visible from that end to give the illusion the inside was bigger than the outside. It was really cute.

BTW as a recall the TARDIS had feelings. Leela once had to apologize to it for making a derogatory remark about it, in order to encourage it fix a malfunction (something like an uncontrolled dive) that was threatening to kill kill Leela and the Doctor.


I know the chamelion circuit is still stuck but in the old series did they ever fix its controls? As I recall several of the doctors but mostly the Tom Baker doctor had trouble controlling where it went. This doctor seems to be able to get it to stop on a dime.

ETA I remember that the Master's TARDIS also was the Malkor(spelling?) which was I believe the size of a suit of armor.

Well usually but not always. In fact the next episode "The Unquiet Dead" features the first incident of the TARDIS not ending up quite where it's supposed to.

I find suspending disbelief on radically advanced/irrational technology in science fiction much easier than buying into more "realistic" technologies pushed beyond existing limits. Tell me your story has a chemical rocket from modern-day Earth that will reach the Moon in one stage and I'll roll my eyes. But tell me you've got a space/timeship that's arbitrarily small on the outside while infinitely big on the inside that was created by an alien race millions (billions?) of years ahead of us, and I'll stay in the story. The inverse of Clarke's Third Law for me is that if you're going to have magical-seeming technology, you better credit it to sufficiently advanced science.

At the other end of the advancement spectrum though, and still part of the Tardis, is its broke-down exterior and the sometimes outlandish manual controls. It's beat-up and lived in, it's temperamental, it's "earthy" in personality. It's the perfect extension of the Doctor himself and of the show -- an apparently disposable, mundane, but quirky facade that conceals an infinity of wonders. Oh, and dangers.

I hope at some point the show can give us a tour of the Tardis beyond the control room. I always liked the few classic episodes that did that and gave some hint of what living day-to-day on board would be like.

As to Tardis doors, I seem to recall in one of the Master episodes where his Tardis disguised itself as a pillar or something, and entering and exiting consisted of walking "behind" it. Entering and exiting a Tardis is going to take you at a right angle to 3D space anyway, so cheap camera tricks are actually the closest to what it would seem like in reality.

The TARDIS wardrobe room is shown in The Christmas Invasion, and quite impressive it is, too!

Aptly enough this month's Focus, which is a science magazine, talks about the science of Doctor Who. It points to the research of a physicist who postulates that because of the way Relativity allows space-time to warp you could 'line up' bubbles of time behind each other to create a space that was had a much larger volume than the exterior area. Most interesting, of course, is that it places transdimensional engineering and time travel as directly related sciences.

I remember at the time TCI was on someone told me that in the wardrobe room you could see some of the costumes from old Doctors/Companions, but I couldn't make any out - did anyone else notice any?

In terms of the chamelion circuit, the fourth Doctor made an effort to fix it in Logopolis, and started off the train of events that lead to his death. The sixth Doctor also tried to sort things out in Attack of the Cybermen, but this simply lead to the TARDIS assuming a variety of even more ludicrous shapes, so he eventually gave the whole thing up as a bad idea.

As for the other controls, the last time the TARDIS made a random landing in the original series was The Kings Demons. Since then, every landing the TARDIS has made has either been under the control of someone else or somewhere the Doctor was aiming for. He seemed to spend most of his fifth incarnation trying to take Tegan places - originally Heathrow, then either to visit assorted family members or to take in Earths history or future. I think he was so fed up with the gobby tart he was desperate to be shot of her - "You want to see Earths future? Fine, I'll take you to 2084. If you like it, don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. Not to your taste, huh? OK, how about we go visit some of your relatives? Then I can sneak off while you're catching up, and you can mooch of them, you freeloader!"

Pooki, all I could make out was the Fourth Doctor's scarf and a generic blue jacket that could belong to the Third.

HauntedBathroom, Logopolis and The Kings Demons just so happen to be among the few old Who's I've seen. I found the TARDIS within a TARDIS from Logopolis very interesting.

Yep, there were complete outfits or at least parts of outfits from each of the previous Doctors there, although you need to freeze-frame the scene a few times to see them. That's exactly what several fans did - then they posted pictures with the appropriate items circled. Unforunately, I don't remember exactly what was there other than the Fourth's scarf. The only companion outfit that people caught was Steven Taylor's striped sweater from The Celestial Toymaker - but then again, this was obviously the men's wardrobe, so a lot of the more well-known outfits worn by female comapnions over the years wouldn't have been there.

That sweater totally rocks too.

Maybe it would be kind of fun if Rose ended up wearing something an old companion had worn at some point - as we see in ‘The Unquiet Dead’, she does have to dip into the TARDIS wardrobe at some times - like one of Romana's many outfits. Or Tegan's awful lilac flight attendant uniform! Er, then again, maybe not!

Regarding the wardrobe, this is a not-quite-exhaustive list of what's in it (you can see different things from different camera angles)...

The Seventh Doctor's umbrella, one of the Fourth Doctor's scarves and his hat, the Fifth Doctor's hat, the First Doctor's walking stick, the Third Doctor's cloak, the mirror from "Castrovalva", the golden column that stood in the First Doctor's console room and Steven Taylor's striped jumper from "The Celestial Toymaker". There is also a reference to David Tennant's appearance in the film adaptation of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire"; a Gryffindor scarf (red and yellow) can be seen in one shot. One of Tennant's costumes from Russel T. Davies's "Casanova" TV series can also be seen.

Another piece of Wardrobe Room trivia: The "Fourth Doctor" scarf seen in the Christmas Invasion is actually one knitted many moons ago by a certain Mrs. Collinson for her nine year old son, and Doctor Who fan, Phil - who grew up to be producer of Doctor Who in 2005. Bless.

I always like episodes where the Doctor had explore within the TARDIS. Over the years there have been auxiliary and back-up control rooms...one as I remember was very Jules Verne with lots of Victorian brasswork....there was the Cloister, several defunct swimming pools, several bedroom suites for companions...oddly no library or lab facilities....nor and wardroom or galley. And apparently the TARDIS can reconfigure itself internally and re-arranges the corridors when upset....so accomodations sometimes vanish and reappear in another episode.

Robert Heinlein had an sentient air-car in one of his novel-series that was TARDIS-like...the Gay Deceiver. "Gay" was 6-dimensional and had a trans-dimensional starboard 'fresher that was an ordinary luggage-locker on the outside, and a palatial bathroom and guest-suite complex inside...including an olympic-sized heated pool. It could also double as an airlock since outwardly she was just an air-car...not a spaceship.

I think there was library - or at least a reading room - in the 1998 TV movie.

Not if it was the assembled hordes of Ghengis Khan - sometimes you don't really want people to get through, although in that case, they probably just followed convention and "assembled" in single file to attack. ;-)

The 3rd Doctor mentions that the TARDIS has a laboratory in Spearhead from Space, but we don't get to see it.

Question: where is the TARDIS and what is it doing when the Doctor and his Companion(s) are not traveling? Does it just sort of hover in time/space, or does it just come to rest in whatever location they were visiting, and we just never see them sleep in it (I assume Time Lords need sleep)?

When in flight, it simply rolls around the vortex until the Doctor commands it to land. When landed, it sits there until commanded to take off again (which can be any length of time; five years in one of the Eighth Doctor books).

Thanks, Mondodude! So I guess it wouldn't be in any danger of 'hitting' anything while it rolls around in the vortex, then?

Can it just roll around endlessly in the vortex without a specific destination? Like the Doctor doesn't have to enter in a destination before flight? Are there windows? Because with the whole Horsehead Nebula in "World War Three," I'd want some windows to look out of if I were going to watch some awesome explosion in space.

I think 'the TARDIS hitting something' plot has been used. But I can't remember which story. But yeah, I think it can happen.

As for windows, no. But it does have a kind of camera thing. In one story - I think the TV movie - the whole ceiling of the console room becomes a giant hologram. That said, the Doctor rarely uses it. Or else he'd get to where he was intending to go more often.