Spotlight on The TARDIS

Since the very beginning, Doctor Who has been identified with a single iconic image—a battered blue police box. The TARDIS. Time and Relative Dimension in Space. Bigger on the inside, and capable of traveling practically anywhere and anywhen. It's the very first thing we see in the very first episode, all the way back in 1963. It's become so identified with Doctor Who that in 2002 the BBC famously won a legal battle with the London Metropolitan Police over who owned the trademark.

The First Doctor once claimed to have built the TARDIS himself, but as we all know, the Doctor lies. Every incarnation since has admitted he stole the TARDIS, although in The Doctor's Wife, it's revealed this was actually a mutual theft. The TARDIS wanted to see the universe so she stole a Time Lord of her very own. 

She was already obsolete when they first met, an ancient, unreliable Type 40 that's never quite worked properly, and, especially at first, never exactly took the Doctor where he wanted to go. She's always had a keen personality all her own, sentimental, temperamental, and a magnet for trouble. Even before Suranne Jones brilliantly portrayed her in The Doctor’s Wife, the TARDIS has been personified in the extended universe. In the Eighth Doctor Adventures, she occasionally appeared in the Doctor's dreams as a woman in a blue dress, dancing at the edge an ocean of time. The comics have personified her as well, in the form of Martha Jones and various other companions in The Forgotten. And in the Big Finish audio Zagreus, the TARDIS was rather bizarrely portrayed by Nicholas Courtney. Yes, that's right. The Brigadier has played the TARDIS. And what an evil, jealous TARDIS he was. 

Throughout the years, the Doctor has continually repaired the TARDIS as she's slowly fallen apart, practically keeping her together with a kettle and some string. The state of grace, for example, which prevents weapons from being fired within the TARDIS, hasn't worked for centuries. 

In fact, she's been destroyed more than once. In the Fifth Doctor serial Frontios, the TARDIS exploded and became embedded across a network of tunnels that traversed the planet itself. In the Eight Doctor novel series, the TARDIS appears to have been destroyed at least twice, and isn't restored until several books later.  Each time we get to see how truly incomplete the Doctor feels without her. By Series 5, the destruction of the TARDIS becomes a major plot point, and creates an explosion big enough to make the universe collapse. We haven't yet quite figured out exactly how it happened, but it's part of the many mysteries that will hopefully be resolved in Series 6. 

The TARDIS isn't just a ship, it's the Doctor's home. Nearly infinitely large on the inside, it holds all of the Doctor's possessions, and has more rooms than the Doctor himself knows about. The interior is a maze of corridors, and it has contained at the very least a swimming pool, a library, a vast wardrobe, the cloister room, a study, a butterfly room, a medical bay, a kitchen, and numerous bedrooms. And when it lands, it makes the most wonderful sound in the whole universe. 

If the Doctor has a soul mate, it's the TARDIS. Throughout a lifetime of loss and disaster, the TARDIS has been the Doctor's only constant, his one true love. And now that Gallifrey is gone, his only link to his ancestral home. 

Like Peter Pan, the Doctor refused to grow up, so he ran away to find adventures elsewhere. While Doctors and companions might come and go, the TARDIS is forever. At its core, Doctor Who is the story of a madman with a box. And it might just be the greatest story ever told. 

Written by Funtimevash

Posted in: doctor who,tardis,the TARDIS