The Doctor's TARDIS
The TARDIS
 Throughout the history of Doctor Who, the TARDIS has long been the one constant in the show. Companions have departed or died, adversaries have been defeated, destroyed or just never come back to the series, The Doctor rarely visits planets more than once (With the obvious exception of Earth), even The Doctor himself will eventually regenerate... but the TARDIS itself, with its familiar blue Police Box shape, has long remained a constant in the series, right from that moment in "An Unearthly Child" when a pacing policeman shone his torch on the box as it stood in the scrapheap, throbbing slightly, as though alive with power.

 One of the most distinctive aspects of the TARDIS is its vast interior, far larger on the inside than it is on the outside. This is attributed to it being 'dimensionally transcendental', which was explained to Leela by the Fourth Doctor using the analogy of how a larger cube can appear to be able to fit inside a smaller one if the larger cube is further away, yet immediately accessible at the same time. Apart from the obvious feature of the console room, containing the controlling console, the TARDIS interior also includes an art gallery containing some of history's great works (Rescued by The Doctor from disasters which history states destroyed them), a bathroom with a swimming pool, a swimming pool, the architectural reconfiguration system - consisting of multiple glass eggs that allow the ship to make whatever it needs -, a medical bay, several brick-walled storage areas, a vast library, a wardrobe room containing clothes from all eras of humanity (Although The Doctor rarely uses this, preferring to wear the same outfit throughout his incarnation, certain incarnations were prepared to vary some little details, such as the colour of their jackets (the Third Doctor) or the pattern of their waistcoats (the Sixth Doctor)), and, of course, living quarters for The Doctor's various companions. There is also a secondary console room, apparently made of wood, which the Fourth Doctor used for a year before returning to the original model, although he reconfigured it in his seventh incarnation into a more gothic-looking formation, which was used by the Eighth Doctor until the TARDIS interior was practically vaporised by a cold fusion reactor exploding within it in "The Gallifrey Chronicles", thus necessitating its regeneration into the console room used in the new television series. he exact size of the TARDIS has never been specifically confirmed, although when the interior dimensions were mapped onto the exterior it dwarfed even The Doctor's home planet of Gallifrey ("The Ancestor Cell"), the Twelfth Doctor once stated that the TARDIS's true weight could flatten the surface of Earth ("Flatline"), and the Seventh Doctor materialised the entire TARDIS around an alternate Earth to prevent the detonation of nuclear warheads by trapping the entire planet in the TARDIS's state of temporal grace ("Blood Heat").

The TARDIS
The Very First Appearance
The TARDIS is, essentially, The Doctor's only true home in the entire series. Even when the Third Doctor was exiled on Earth, finding a new, if unorthodox, family among his colleagues at UNIT, the TARDIS was still the main reason he stayed with the organisation in the first place, taking a job as Scientific Advisor to the organisation to acquire parts to repair the TARDIS. Although it has been said on many cases that the TARDIS is not fully operational - indeed, in "The Gallifrey Chronicles", Marnel, the TARDIS's previous owner, stated that only ten per cent of the TARDIS's necessary functions aren't working (Including, for some bizarre reason, animal-language translators) -, and it was regarded as an out-of-date model even when The Doctor left Gallifrey - he had the chance to depart in a Type Fifty-Three but decided to take a nearby Type Forty despite its age on the grounds that the 53s were too soulless, his decision also aided by the temporally-displaced future companion Clara Oswald informing him that he would have more fun in this ship ("The Name of The Doctor") -, the TARDIS always seems to have all the necessary features that a space/time machine carrying any possible species would need. These include the ability to protect its passengers during transportation and upon arrival at potentially hostile destinations, to show them where they have landed on a view screen (Although since the screen shows them the absolute positive value of coordinates, it isn't much use in the parallel reality of E-Space where coordinates are negative), to allow them to understand any language - even capable of translating when not dealing in vocally-spoken languages, such as when the Seventh Doctor and his companion Elizabeth Klein spoke with an insectoid race known as the Vrill who communicated by smell, the TARDIS’s translation matrix providing a basic language structure that The Doctor and Klein could use to communicate ("Survival of the Fittest") -, a yearometer (Giving them their location in space as well as time), a food machine - although it simply produced basic food bars that mimicked the taste and nutritional requirements of the food but lacked details like texture; The Doctor has since been said to have installed a proper kitchen in the ship -, a wardrobe, various security precautions to prevent the ship materialising in an environment that would prove hostile to its passengers - such as the heart of a sun or the bottom of an ocean -, and necessary living quarters for its passengers, along with a power source, and, of course, the ability to set coordinates and get from A to B by travelling through the fifth dimension of the Time Vortex with any necessary diversions that might be required during the trip.

The TARDIS
Outside with the First Doctor
 The TARDIS's steering abilities, of course, are one of the prominent points that caused The Doctor to argue with his companions (Although it was recently revealed that temporally-displaced companion Clara Oswald was partly responsible for this error, informing The Doctor as he prepared to leave Gallifrey that he would have more fun in the TARDIS with the broken navigation circuit ("The Name of The Doctor")). For The Doctor's first two incarnations, he was unable to steer the TARDIS to anywhere that he claimed he would get it to; even if the First Doctor reached Earth with Ian and Barbara when he said he was going there, he was always at least a few decades out from his target ("The Time Travellers"), and the Second Doctor was only able to pilot an exact course in the TARDIS when responding to a distress signal by disabling many of the ship’s usual security protocols ("The Murder Game"). In "Heart of TARDIS", the Second Doctor attributed his piloting difficulties to security devices installed by his people which, in the event of a theft, prevent the pilot from getting exactly where he wants to go, although given that he still had some problems in his next few incarnations, when he'd sorted out his differences with his people and his third self's exile had been lifted, it would appear that he wasn't being totally honest, later novels stating that he had never actually passed his basic time travel proficiency test - the Time Lord equivalent of a driver’s licence - in the first place ("Festival of Death"), stating when asked why he never took the tests that he found such qualifications pointless.

 It was later explained in novels such as "The Taking of Planet 5" that normally control of the TARDIS is an automatic feature formed by the Time Lord practically ‘imposing’ his mind on the TARDIS via a direct telepathic link, with The Doctor’s piloting problems being partly caused by the fact that, in order to escape the Time Lords after leaving Gallifrey, he was forced to stop himself from forming a full link with the TARDIS to prevent himself leaving an energy signature that could be easily traced. As a result, The Doctor had to construct new controls for the TARDIS out of physical matter rather than the block transfer computations that were normally used, thus preventing him from exerting total control over the TARDIS while also granting them both a degree of freedom beyond what they would have experienced among Time Lord society. Despite the complications involved in this method of TARDIS control, in general The Doctor appears to have overcome any serious problems he might have encountered in controlling the TARDIS by his fourth incarnation, being capable of mastering short ‘hops’ in space without moving anywhere in time ("Full Circle"). However, despite his skills later in his lives, his piloting skills are often somewhat erratic after recent regenerations, such as the Fifth Doctor’s difficulty in returning Tegan Jovanka to Heathrow ("The Visitation"), the Eighth Doctor briefly landing in another dimension ("One Fateful Knight"), or the Eleventh Doctor being two years late to pick up new companion Amy Pond ("The Eleventh Hour") and a month late for a meeting with Winston Churchill ("Victory of the Daleks"). Post-regenerative disorientation aside, by the present time in the series, even with such problems as his eighth self's century-long amnesia following his battle with Faction Paradox in "The Ancestor Cell" and his subsequent regenerations after the loss of his people, The Doctor appears to have mastered how to control the TARDIS when he has a location that he specifically needs to get to, although he still tends to overshoot if there is no overriding need to arrive at a particular location (Hence why the Ninth Doctor materialised at the Powell estate twelve months after he and Rose Tyler originally left as opposed to the twelve hours he was aiming for ("Aliens of London/World War Three")), and generally still appears content to set the coordinates to random and see where the TARDIS takes him ("Planet of the Ood"). It should also be noted that, when it was temporarily transferred into a human form, the TARDIS stated that it takes The Doctor where he needs to go even if it doesn’t take him where he wants to go ("The Doctor's Wife"), suggesting that some of its apparently incorrect trips may be the result of the TARDIS influencing the destination rather than simple piloting errors of The Doctor’s part. This idea was reinforced when the Twelfth Doctor told new companion Bill Potts that he did not 'steer' the TARDIS, but just negotiated with it, with the result that he could travel into the future ("Smile") but ended up going back to the London frost fair of 1814 when he was intending to return to his university office in 2017 ("Thin Ice"), even if he was subsequently able to take the TARDIS on a short spatial hop away from the frozen Thames to park on a nearby bridge. Although future companion River Song once claimed that the noise the TARDIS makes when materialising only happens because The Doctor leaves the brakes on, given that other TARDISes have been shown to make that noise in the series - coupled with it being unlikely for The Doctor to repeatedly make the same amateurish piloting mistake, especially when he was travelling with Romana -, it seems more likely that River merely activated a ‘stealth materialisation’ method that allows the TARDIS to materialise quietly, The Doctor never using this method himself because, unlike Time Lords who used working chameleon circuits to silently observe history, he prefers to be involved in events and attract attention rather than hiding from it. (An idea that was supported when The Doctor used a ‘stealth materialisation’ method in "The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon" when travelling to the Oval Office).

The TARDIS
Inside with the Second Doctor
Outside of The Doctor’s occasional piloting difficulties, the TARDIS's most predominate inoperative feature is, of course, its chameleon circuit. Normally, this device is meant to change a TARDIS into something that blends in seamlessly with its surroundings - or, in the case of the Eighth Doctor’s companion Compassion, who became a living TARDIS due to an unexpected chain of circumstances, assume the appearance of another person ("The Fall of Yquatine") -, but the TARDIS's chameleon circuit has remained a Police Box ever since it left Totter's Lane in 1963 in the pilot episode (Originally, the producers were going to include a working chameleon circuit, but it was deemed to be too expensive to supply all the props necessary for such a feature, and so the idea was scrapped), regardless of what other repairs The Doctor has carried out to the ship. (It was recently revealed that the Eleventh Doctor was responsible for the circuit breaking in the first place, having gone back to Totter’s Lane to damage the circuit so that he could use the image of the TARDIS’s police box exterior as a protective symbol in humanity’s racial memory, thus preventing humanity from being forced to worship a race known as the Prometheans as gods ("Hunters of the Burning Stone")). Typically, Time Lords rely on the chameleon circuit to allow themselves to visit the various times and worlds they travel to in order to allow them to observe the societies in secret, but given The Doctor’s natural distaste for his peoples’ disinclination to get involved he preferred to leave the ship and explore rather than wait inside the ship and observe everything on the screen ("The Time Travellers"), thus limiting his interest in repairing the circuit.

The TARDIS
The Third Doctor
 On two occasions since then, the Sixth and Seventh Doctors have successfully managed to repair the circuit (The Fourth Doctor contemplated repairing it but was distracted when The Master's latest scheme nearly destroyed the Universe and made him regenerate ("Logopolis")), but they both ended up resetting it back to its default Police Box form; the Sixth Doctor ("Attack of the Cybermen") became frustrated at the circuit’s new problem of turning the TARDIS into objects that still simply refused to blend in with its new location - as well as its disguises making it hard for him to find the door, such as when it turned into a Victorian kitchen range -, and the Seventh Doctor ("Conundrum" and "No Future") concluded, after The Meddling Monk hacked into the circuit and nearly gave the TARDIS away, that he preferred a single fixed shape to multiple appearances susceptible to outside influence. Since then, The Doctor has appeared to be satisfied with the Police Box shape; indeed, in "Boom Town", the Ninth Doctor specifically stated that he likes the TARDIS as it is, with the ship's only real change in appearance in the modern series occurring when the Twelfth Doctor was forced to activate a 'siege mode' to protect a shrunken TARDIS suffering from a power drain, converting the TARDIS exterior to a small box with Gallifreyian sigils on it and no visible door until additional power was supplied ("Flatline"). Although he cannot change the TARDIS's appearance under normal circumstances, The Second and Eleventh Doctors have each demonstrated the ability to turn the TARDIS invisible, both by accident and on purpose ("The Invasion" and "The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon"), while retaining its usual police-box shape, although the obvious difficulties in finding the TARDIS in this condition explains why The Doctor rarely uses it.

 Other, lesser-used parts of the TARDIS include among their number the time safe, a permitted temporal paradox that must be used sparingly; unlike normal safes, where things are put in for future use, in a time safe, things are put in later for prior use. To date, the only recorded use of the safe was when the Fifth Doctor and Turlough used to send a diary to their past selves that led to them facing the mysterious beings known as the Vrall on the moon of 1878 ("Imperial Moon") (There has been some speculation that the safe may have been used by the Seventh Doctor to send himself notes about problems he would later face, but this remains only a theory). There is also the Jade Pagoda (Named for its resemblance to Lao Tzu's structure of that name), which serves as an escape pod in the event of the TARDIS running into trouble, and draws the main TARDIS to it when the danger has passed - or, if damage is done to the Jade Pagoda, it returns to the TARDIS when the damage becomes too great - ("Iceberg", "Sanctuary"), as well as other, more basic ‘life rafts’ used to provide the TARDIS with extra space which can be removed from the ship if needed ("City at World's End"), although this can render the ship’s internal dimensions slightly unstable until it becomes used to the absence. One of the more practical components of the TARDIS is the Time Vector Generator (Or the TVG) which resembles an eighteen-inch long gold stick with one white end; when extracted, it causes the TARDIS to lose its link to the interior dimensions, reverting it to a simple Police Box (Or whatever it looks like at the time) until the TVG is reinstalled ("Invasion of the Cat-People", "The Wheel in Space"). A recently-displayed feature of the TARDIS is the ‘voice interface’ program, where it can communicate with its pilot to provide relevant information in cases where the crew either cannot access or cannot see the ship’s monitors by projecting a hologram, apparently creating images of people that it has encountered to inform them of vital information. When initially demonstrated, this feature projected an image of The Brigadier to allow the TARDIS’s ‘dark side’ to communicate with Rassilon, The Doctor and his companions ("Zagreus") amid an elaborate projection of historical events, but the interactive nature of this incarnation may have been aided by the anti-time contaminating the TARDIS. On another occasion, the Tenth Doctor interacted with a TARDIS projection that manifested as his old companions when he was trapped in the remnants of the Time Lord Matrix, buts its apparent reliance on the companions’ personalities suggested that this was more of a psychic defence rather than a direct communication ("The Forgotten"). More recent projections have lacked the interactive nature of the earlier versions, simply focusing on providing The Doctor ("Let's Kill Hitler") and Clara Oswald ("Hide") with relevant information assuming a suitable form (Clara saw herself and The Doctor was presented with an image of Amy Pond as the child he originally met her as, dismissing projections of Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble due to the associated guilt).

The TARDIS
Inside The Ninth Doctor's TARDIS
 Another useful TARDIS component is the HADS, or Hostile Action Displacement System, which causes the TARDIS to dematerialise whenever a weapon is used against it that may cause it damage and reappear a short distance away ("The Krotons", "Mission: Impractical"). However, this function can be difficult to set, with the Third Doctor once accidentally making the HADS so sensitive that it activated when the TARDIS was caught in a regular hail storm ("The Suns of Caresh"), and the Eleventh Doctor’s tinkering causing the ship to travel all the way to the South Pole when he materialised in a sinking submarine stationed at the North Pole ("Cold War"). Whether an additional feature or just an upgrade to the original HADS, by The Doctor's twelfth incarnation the TARDIS's emergency features also include the Hostile Action Dispersal System, which disperses the TARDIS into its component molecules when faced with a potentially destructive attack so that it can reconstitute itself after receiving a suitable signal ("The Magician's Apprentice/The Witch's Familiar").

The TARDIS has also been shown to possess a force field, although this function is rarely used since the TARDIS is strong enough on its own, and, in any case, that function appears to have been disabled following the Time War - beyond the force field required for essential basic functions such as preventing the air being sucked out if the TARDIS doors open in a vacuum ("The Horns of Nimon", "The Runaway Bride", "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End") -, since the Ninth Doctor was forced to wire up an external device to protect himself and his companions from the Daleks in "The Parting of the Ways". The TARDIS also used to possess a Zero Room, an area where Time Lords can go to recuperate after a traumatic regeneration; since the Zero Room is sealed off from the rest of the universe, Time Lords are able to relax and focus on reorganizing their new personality without interference from the outside world. However, The Doctor only used it at the beginning of his fifth incarnation - previous regenerations stabilising outside the ship due to The Doctor’s inability to tell his companions about the Zero Room -, and it was lost in the subsequent escape from Event One when 25% of the TARDIS’s mass was ‘deleted’ to provide the ship with extra power ("Castrovalva"), although the Seventh Doctor reconstructed it shortly before the novel "Deceit". However, one of the few extra features in the TARDIS that actually has an impact on where the TARDIS goes is the Fast Return Switch, a switch that causes the TARDIS to go back to a previous destination if pressed correctly; if used too often, or stuck in one position, as shown in "The Edge of Destruction", the TARDIS can go all the way back to the beginning of the universe itself, at which point the intense gravity can tear the power source of the ship away.

The TARDIS
The Fourth Doctor
 The TARDIS's power source has remained one of the more interesting points in the series. There were hints in the earlier stories, such as in "The Daleks", when it was established that the TARDIS requires mercury for its fluid links in order to travel anywhere, but it wasn't until "The Three Doctors" that it was specifically stated that the time-travelling capabilities of the Time Lords were powered by a trapped black hole, named in "The Deadly Assassin" as the Eye of Harmony, although the TARDIS does require other energy sources to function properly, such as the rare ore Zeiton Seven ("Vengeance on Varos") and artron energy, a form of energy generated by Time Lord minds, apparently generated by the TARDIS during materialisation; during "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith", Sarah Jane Smith’s teenage ally Clyde Langer was able to injure the near-omnipotent Trickster after he came in contact with the TARDIS while it was trying to materialise in a time trap, due to him becoming temporarily ‘charged’ with artron energy. During his exile on Earth, the Third Doctor removed the TARDIS console from the main ship in an attempt to get around the blocks the Time Lords had placed on the ship during his exile ("Inferno"), using the energy of a nuclear reactor to 'jump-start' the ship, but this was only a temporary measure and the console soon ran out of power after only a couple of trips, The Doctor never managing to time-travel more than a few seconds into the future while also making short spatial shifts.

 Despite Gallifrey's destruction in "The Ancestor Cell", and thus also the loss of the Eye of Harmony, the TARDIS has somehow managed to keep going after it finished repairing from the energy drain it had sustained in the destruction of Gallifrey (""Escape Velocity"), suggesting that it has been fitted with an alternative source of power to the Eye; indeed, in "Boom Town" and "Utopia", The Doctor parked the TARDIS over a dimensional rift in Cardiff to refuel, confirming that it now operates independent from Gallifrey, with Cardiff being used as a ‘pit stop’ to top up its power. However, given that in "The Gallifrey Chronicles" the TARDIS still seems to be linked to a black hole, it seems a fair assumption that there are still some aspects of the Eye in existence that the TARDIS can access, but the TARDIS must periodically tap into another source of power in order to maintain the connection between it and the Eye fragments now that the direct link to Gallifrey has been lost.

The TARDIS
The Fifth Doctor
 During "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel", when the TARDIS was briefly transported into a parallel universe, The Doctor stated that the TARDIS actually draws its power from the universe as a whole, and it was thus inoperative in parallel realities (Although this was never a problem when the TARDIS was sent to multiple alternate worlds during the "Fractured Reality" saga when the actions of the Eighth Doctor's foe Sabbath resulted in the barriers between parallel worlds being broken down from "Time Zero" to "Sometime Never...", this was most likely because these alternate realities had temporarily ‘replaced’ the ‘true’ reality rather than The Doctor having travelled to a different universe). The 2006 Christmas Special "The Runaway Bride" also revealed that the TARDIS's power source is connected to Huon particles, a long-lost source of energy that is naturally inert unless they catalyse inside something alive but unravel the atomic structure if exposed to them on a long-term basis, but the importance of Huon energy to the ship's operation on a daily basis is unclear. When The Doctor was pitted against the beings known to fans as the 'Weeping Angels' - beings who fed off the energy of lives they'd sent into the past - the Angels sought to acquire the TARDIS to feed on the time energy within it, but this attempt was averted thanks to the actions of Sally Sparrow, a young woman in the present who'd acquired video footage of The Doctor based on information he'd acquire from her in the future.

 Although the TARDIS is easily capable of travelling through time in our own universe, its ability to go to other universes where history diverged from our own has varied on some occasions. In "Battlefield", the Seventh Doctor revealed that travelling into parallel universes is referred to as travelling sideways in Time, but it has also been stated that the TARDIS has various safety blocks that prevent it from materialising in a universe other than our own. Although these features were briefly disabled in "Heart of TARDIS" (When the Second Doctor was trying to get rid of the blocks the Time Lords had installed that prevented him from taking the TARDIS where he wanted to go) and "Inferno" (When the Third attempted to bypass the blocks the Time Lords had installed again that prevented him from dematerialising during his exile), The Doctor always restored them, and remained content with being 'limited' to this universe. Apart from the obvious exceptions of history in the 'prime' reality being altered by outside forces (Such as "Timewyrm: Exodus", "Timewyrm: Exodus", or "Timewyrm: Genesys"), The Doctor's only other visits to parallel realities occurred during the events of the 'Fractured Reality' saga and "Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel", when the ship fell through a crack in the Time Vortex that took the entire ship into an alternate reality. Although it commonly travels from place to place by dematerialising and travelling through the higher dimension of the Time Vortex, "The Runaway Bride" demonstrated that the TARDIS was capable of 'flying' through the air almost like a regular spaceship, but such a feature is clearly draining for the ship - judging by the fact that it was subsequently out of action for a few hours - suggesting that it was never designed to operate like that.

The TARDIS
The Sixth Doctor
 Another matter for debate in the series is a simple one; is the TARDIS alive? At the start of the series, the First Doctor rejected the merest suggestion of such a concept, regarding the TARDIS as a mere machine ("The Edge of Destruction"), but, eventually, he began to acknowledge that it was far more than that, even telling his companion Steven Taylor, at the conclusion of their meeting with Dodo Chaplet and their battle with the so-called 'Gods of the Latter-Day Pantheon' ("Salvation"), that he would do well to remember that the TARDIS had a mind of its own. By the time he was in his fourth incarnation, The Doctor was acting as though the TARDIS was self-aware on a regular basis, some of his companions doing the same, such as K9 once referring to the TARDIS as 'a very stupid machine' due to its inability to speak ("The Invasion of Time"). Even before the TARDIS’s sentience was fully established, it is clear that The Doctor and the TARDIS share a particularly powerful bond; when the Master attempted to undo The Doctor’s history by planting a conceptual bomb that would destroy the TARDIS by erasing it from existence ("The Light at the End"), this one act negated all of The Doctor’s travels in time and space rather than history simply adjusting as The Doctor now took a different ship, suggesting that the TARDIS has played its own role in influencing The Doctor's destinations where other ships would not have taken The Doctor where he needed to go ("The Doctor's Wife").

 As time went on, however, the TARDIS began to demonstrate a greater sense that it was an individual in its own right rather than just The Doctor’s means of transport. By the time of his sixth incarnation, the TARDIS was shown to have likes and dislikes, to the extent that it actually ‘refused’ to protect Charley from the mysterious Mila when she was infected by Mila’s viruses and turned invisible, apparently due to the TARDIS’s dislike of the temporal paradoxes Charley had caused in her time with The Doctor ("Patient Zero"). By contrast, Melanie Bush had a strong feeling that the TARDIS was saying goodbye to her when she once contemplated leaving The Doctor ("The Quantum Archangel"), the same adventure seeing the TARDIS briefly terrified to let The Doctor near it after it was almost forced to Time Ram its own past self by a nanovirus planted by The Master. On a later occasion, the Seventh Doctor briefly acquired an alternate version of his TARDIS when he was separated from the original and was forced to start travelling in a version of it from a timeline where his third incarnation had been murdered ("Blood Heat"), with the new TARDIS taking a while to trust him, to the extent that it showed more sympathy for his companion Ace than The Doctor himself ("The Dimension Riders"). Despite this, The Doctor was eventually able to bond with the ship, The Doctor travelling comfortably in the ‘new’ TARDIS until his original ship was restored to him ("Happy Endings"), the TARDIS’s bond with The Doctor remaining strong ever since.

The TARDIS
The Seventh Doctor
 Although the TARDIS is The Doctor's closest friend, it has had to experience some very traumatic events in its time with The Doctor. One of the worst was in "Frontios", when it was literally destroyed by a meteor storm triggered by gravity-controlling insects known as 'Tractators', but it was pulled back together when the Fifth Doctor tricked the head Tractator - known as the Gravis - into pulling it back together; since the interior then existed in its own separate dimension, the Gravis was cut off from the other Tractators, and all of them were shut down, as the Gravis was the source of their power. In many ways, the Fifth Doctor is The Doctor who was most careless with the TARDIS; although he still cared for his ship, he had a great deal of trouble inside it in this incarnation, problems ranging from something as simple as forgetting to close the door ("Warriors of the Deep") to being attacked by hostile androids ("Earthshock", "Spare Parts" and "Planet of Fire", among others), and even losing it twice during the search for the Key to Time when it was ejected into hyperspace after landing on spaceships, The Doctor only regaining it due to the unintentional machinations of The Black Guardian ("The Judgement of Isskar", "The Destroyer of Delights", "The Chaos Pool"). By comparison, the Sixth Doctor was far more careful with the TARDIS, with its worst experiences in this lifetime being a temporary power drain after being caught in the Rani's plan to replace her own lost console ("State of Change"), although it also endured a traumatic near-time-ram of its own past self while facing enraged Chronovores ("The Quantum Archangel").

 However, the TARDIS endured some of its most bizarre experiences after The Doctor regenerated into his seventh incarnation, one of the earliest recorded incidents being when a cannonball struck the ship with such force that it damaged the outer casing ("The Angel of Scutari"). While it regenerated from the damage, the 'prime' TARDIS assumed a white version of its usual exterior shell, The Doctor using its regeneration to create a smaller black-exterior TARDIS to hunt a series of Elder Gods while keeping his current companions safe ("Black and White"), the storyline ending with both TARDISes reintegrating via symbiotic propulsion in preparation for the final confrontation with the restored Fenric ("Gods and Monsters"). Even after it was restored to its blue appearance and full potential, the TARDIS experienced further trauma after an attack by an alien parasite caused the TARDIS to collide with an early Gallifreyian Time Scaphe, resulting in the TARDIS being spread out into a vast city, torn between three different timelines, haunted by the Seventh Doctor's ghost and populated by early Gallifreyians who believed that The Doctor had stolen their future. Although the TARDIS managed to help Ace restore The Doctor to normal, two different versions of the parasite teamed up with a rogue Gallifreyian to try and kill The Doctor, with The Doctor only being saved when he tricked the parasite into killing its infant self, restoring the Gallifreyians to their proper places in time. However, when The Doctor finally managed to repair his ship, the TARDIS was infected by a shard of demonic protoplasm in the process, resulting in the TARDIS’s interior becoming warped, with a corridor stretching to infinity or arton energy strands being tainted with streaks of green along with various other malfunctions, as well as The Doctor becoming increasingly withdrawn from Ace and his new companion Benny due to his telepathic link to the ship. Unable to get rid of the infection as it always knew what he was doing, The Doctor was forced to spend several months reprogramming the tertiary console to the new Zero Room without consciously thinking about it, thus allowing The Doctor to cut himself off from the universe and wait until Ace - who had recently left the TARDIS - returned to him to help restore his memories ("Deceit"). Shortly after it was cured of the virus, the TARDIS was also lost in an alternate Earth created by the Meddling Monk after it crash-landed into a tar pit ("Blood Heat"); indeed, the Seventh Doctor genuinely thought that the TARDIS had been destroyed, subsequently travelling in the alternate TARDIS of that other reality - the Third Doctor of that universe having been killed by the Silurians and his regeneration interrupted by the Meddling Monk - until it was returned by the mysterious Muldwych ("Birthright"), who revealed it had escaped the destruction of that alternate Earth by riding on a Fortean Flicker, a temporal anomaly that displaced people and objects from their proper places in space and time ("Happy Endings"). The alternate version of the TARDIS was given to Muldwych, and The Doctor departed for more adventures in his old ship, grateful to have his old home/friend back with him. The Doctor and the TARDIS were later separated once again when The Doctor’s current companion Elizabeth Klein - a Nazi from an alternate timeline that The Doctor had tricked her into erasing, The Doctor attempting to reform her - literally stole the TARDIS to recreate her own history ("Survival of the Fittest"). Klein’s temporal interference proved to be so serious that The Doctor was forced to provide the Nazi resistance in that timeline with a device that permanently severed the TARDIS’s connection to its interior dimensions, essentially ‘killing’ his old friend in order to stop Klein, although the TARDIS was restored to him when he passed the Time Lords’ sentence against Klein and erased her from history, thus undoing all that she had done ("The Architects of History").

The TARDIS
The Television Movie
The next two occasions where the TARDIS faced its own death, however, are almost proof that the TARDIS is sentient; indeed, it could almost be assumed from these that the TARDIS is in love with The Doctor! In "Neverland", the Eighth Doctor was forced to materialise the TARDIS around an anti-time 'bomb' to prevent it contaminating the universe and save the life of his companion Charley. Although the risky manoeuvre worked, the results were horrific; The Doctor and the TARDIS were infected by anti-time, their minds splitting into two personalities. The Doctor's anti-time side - named "Zagreus" after an old Gallifreyian nursery rhyme - was merely a destructive maniac, but the TARDIS's evil side based itself around a more specific emotion; jealousy at the fact that The Doctor was willing to sacrifice it, his oldest friend, to save a foolish girl who shouldn't have been alive in the first place. Forming an alliance with Rassilon, the TARDIS's Zagreus-side nearly destroyed The Doctor's mind when it had its old shell melted down, but there was enough good left in the TARDIS to give Charley (Along with former companions Leela and Romana) a chance; with the aid of three holograms based on the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors, The Doctor/Zagreus was able to fight off Rassilon and overcome the Zagreus part of him, although he then exiled himself to the anti-time universe for a while until the infection was removed. During his time in the anti-time universe, The Doctor was briefly separated from the TARDIS and trapped on a planet divided into various ‘zones’, forcing him, Charley, and new companion C’rizz to work with a mysterious entity called the Kro’ka to travel through the zones to track down the TARDIS, until they arrived in a maze and the TARDIS was able to send The Doctor a message. With the TARDIS restored to him, The Doctor departed the anti-time universe with his companions, leaving the deceitful Kro’ka to its fate.

After that, the TARDIS's next case of near-destruction could be traced all the way back to the Third Doctor, although the effects only caught up with The Doctor in his eighth incarnation while he was travelling with Fitz Kreiner and Compassion. In his third incarnation, The Doctor's history was altered by the group known as Faction Paradox, who, by tricking the Eighth Doctor, lured the Third onto the distant planet of Dust, where he was shot in the chest and forced to regenerate ahead of schedule. As a result (Due to it having been released earlier), the Faction's biodata virus was able to infect The Doctor while his biological defences were focused on helping him regenerate, although it would take some while to take effect. Indeed, at the very least, his fourth, fifth and sixth incarnations would definitely be the same as they were in the original history, and the seventh had a good chance of turning out fine as well, but the virus would have definitely affected the Eighth Doctor if the TARDIS hadn't taken the virus into itself when the Third Doctor regenerated inside it, realising that history had somehow gone onto the wrong track. Desperate to restore history, the TARDIS even managed to hold itself together after it was destroyed when it got caught between the reality barriers between this world and the Land of Dreams ("The Shadows of Avalon"), latching on to a power source in the form of a Universe in a Bottle and regenerating itself around it over the course of five thousand years in the Vortex. After spending centuries trying to get the infection under control, the TARDIS eventually appeared over Gallifrey - the source of the Bottle - in the form of a vast Gallifreyian flower of remembrance, its interior having been mapped onto its exterior so that it was the exact same size inside and outside. Appearing to be made of bone due to the Faction virus inside it, the TARDIS manifested defences against intruders in the form of giant bone spiders, a connotation to the timeline it was trying to restore ("Planet of the Spiders"), and, at the console room, the dust particles assembled themselves into the form of the Third Doctor - or at least, the 'temporal ghost' of the Third Doctor who should have been before the Faction messed with his history.

The TARDIS
The Ninth Doctor (with Rose)
In a final confrontation on the twisted TARDIS, where the Eighth Doctor and the Third's 'ghost' faced off against Grandfather Paradox, the twisted future version of The Doctor that would be created by the virus, the Eighth Doctor drained off the TARDIS's energy by firing its long-dormant weapons systems, thus forcing one timeline to become real; fortunately, it was the uninfected one, although The Doctor then had to erase his own memory to transfer the Time Lord Matrix into his subconscious while the TARDIS collapsed down to the size of a snuff box. Taken to late nineteenth-century Earth by his friend Compassion, The Doctor was left to recover from what he'd had to do while the TARDIS regenerated itself, the two of them leaving Earth in 2001 ("Escape Velocity"), accompanied by old companion Fitz Krienier and new companion Anji Kapoor, ready for new adventures. Although The Doctor’s piloting skills at this point were fundamentally limited due to his lack of memory, he generally managed to operate it by instinct enough to get around in the universe, steering the ship through various gravitational anomalies around a strange planet ("Vanishing Point"); even if he failed to take his companion Anji back to 2001 like she requested for some time, he demonstrated the ability to take the TARDIS on short hops when the situation was necessary, such as moving the ship to airports ("Trading Futures") or materialising around a planet-destroying bomb ("The Book of the Still"). He even had a brief encounter with the TARDIS's original owner, Marnal, a Time Lord agent who was exiled to Earth after his actions caused a fly-like race called the Vore to evolve into a race of parasitic nomads rather than the benevolent species they would have been, Marnal briefly trying to take the TARDIS back and put The Doctor on trial for Gallifrey's destruction before he died during the Vore's subsequent invasion of Earth.

The TARDIS
The Tenth Doctor (with Rose)
Since then, Fitz and Anji have gone their separate ways, The Doctor's memories have been restored, and he has regenerated once more, his ninth incarnation being joined in his travels by new companion Rose Tyler... and, for the first time in the show's history, The Doctor has specifically said 'The TARDIS is alive', rather than just making enigmatic comments or simply treating it like it was alive. This occurred in the story "Boom Town", when his old adversary Margaret Blaine, really a Slitheen in disguise, tried to destroy the Earth by channelling the TARDIS's energy through a device that would enlarge a rift in time. However, knowing Margaret was trying to destroy it, the TARDIS, tapping into her thoughts and desires, revealed the Time Vortex to Margaret, turning her back into an egg and giving her a second chance at life, away from the criminal influence of her Slitheen family.

Shortly after this, the TARDIS's link to the Time Vortex was again accessed, this time by Rose Tyler, who had been sent back home in the ship while The Doctor and new companion Captain Jack Harkness faced off against an army of around half a million Daleks. Eventually, when everyone else on the satellite where the battle had been waged was dead, the only way The Doctor could stop the Daleks was by triggering a delta wave, which would fry the brain of every living Dalek... but, unable to refine the wave in the time he had, The Doctor would annihilate all life on Earth as well. Just as The Doctor was about to be exterminated, Rose returned, now imbued with the power of the Vortex... and, with this power, she turned the entire Dalek fleet to dust, before The Doctor took the energy into himself to save her life at the cost of his ninth incarnation. For a brief time after The Doctor's regeneration, the TARDIS was forced to devote all its power to keeping the Tenth Doctor stable, resulting in a temporary shut-down of features such as the translators, preventing Rose from understanding alien languages until The Doctor woke up.

The TARDIS
The Eleventh Doctor
Even after the Tenth Doctor stabilised, however, the TARDIS’s time under the Tenth Doctor’s control was far from easy; not only was it briefly trapped in a parallel universe after it fell through a crack in the time vortex- causing it to shut down until The Doctor could 'recharge' it due to it drawing power from our universe ("Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel") -, but it was also stolen by the newly-regenerated Master, who, unable to pilot it anywhere but early 21st-century Earth and the end of the universe after the Doctor locked the coordinates, cannibalised it to create a Paradox Machine that created a massive rift above Earth, before Jack Harkness destroyed the machine and The Doctor subsequently restored the TARDIS to normal ("The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords") (Although it did take a brief knock when it collided with a younger version of itself ("Time Crash") and a starship based on the Titanic due to The Doctor having forgotten to turn the shields back on ("Voyage of the Damned")). On an interesting note, however, The Doctor’s connection with the TARDIS has greatly improved in this incarnation, The Doctor learning that he can now open and close the TARDIS doors merely by clicking his fingers without the need for a key ("Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead"), while on another occasion he was able to shift it a second out of sync with the universe merely by aiming his key at it, thus concealing it from anyone who might try to steal his ship ("The End of Time"). Although the Tenth Doctor’s subsequent regeneration caused serious damage to the console room, forcing the TARDIS to reconstruct itself to repair the damage, the Eleventh Doctor appears to be perfectly happy with his new console room - the TARDIS even providing him with a new sonic screwdriver after his old one was damaged during his confrontation with Prisoner Zero ("The Eleventh Hour") -, continuing to travel comfortably in the TARDIS (Although the new controls have resulted in The Doctor missing his target when travelling more than once, such as being a month late for a meeting with Winston Churchill ("Victory of the Daleks") or landing in England when he was aiming for Rio ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood").


The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
During this time, The Doctor briefly believed that the TARDIS was destined to be destroyed in a temporal explosion on 26th June 2010 that would cause cracks in reality after he discovered a fragment of ‘shrapnel’ in one crack in the form of a piece of the TARDIS’s door ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood"). This ‘prediction’ eventually came true when the TARDIS was diverted to that date while future companion River Song was attempting to pilot the TARDIS to The Doctor while he was investigating the mysterious legendary ‘Pandorica’ underneath Stonehenge - said to contain the most dangerous being in the universe, later revealed to have been designed by The Doctor’s enemies to imprison The Doctor himself to stop him causing the cracks -, the resulting explosion destroying every sun in the universe by triggering a total event collapse of every moment in history except the interior of the Pandorica. Fortunately, the TARDIS was able to preserve Earth by locking itself in a time loop at the moment of its ‘death’, the power of its destruction serving as a substitute sun to keep Earth warm and its history intact until The Doctor arrived in the present. By taking the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, The Doctor was able to use the remaining few billion atoms of the original universe that had been preserved inside the Pandorica to ‘jump-start’ the universe - the equivalent of cloning a body from a single cell -, restoring the universe to existence, even though he believed that the subsequent explosion would erase him from existence. Despite being caught at the heart of the explosion - which should have supposedly ensured his erasure from history -, Amy’s memories of The Doctor proved sufficient to restore him and the TARDIS to life along with her erased family (Although the mystery of what caused the explosion in the first place remains to be solved, even after The Doctor’s confrontation with The Silence ("The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon")).

The Doctor's Wife
The Doctor's Wife
After a close call involving the TARDIS being nearly stolen by the renegade Shansheeth as part of a plan to rewrite history and undo death ("Death of the Doctor"), The Doctor experienced a particularly personal encounter with the TARDIS when its soul was transferred into a human body as part of a plan by the malevolent entity House to consume the TARDIS, removing the TARDIS’s soul so that its destruction wouldn’t destroy House himself while leaving the exterior saturated with the artron energy that House could feed on. Although the TARDIS initially had trouble communicating with The Doctor due to its inexperience with a physical form and the strain of its essence being compressed into such a small form, The Doctor realised the truth just before House transferred himself into the TARDIS to travel back to The Doctor’s universe to find a new food source, leaving him to assemble components from the TARDISes that House had previously eaten into a makeshift console that he and the TARDIS could use to follow the main ship.
Assimilation2 - Issue 1
Assimilation2
Issue 1
Although the TARDIS had trouble expressing itself verbally at first - and even seemed to have trouble with the concept of names, to the extent that it thought that Rory Williams was the ‘pretty one’ of he and Amy Pond, and called itself ‘Sexy Thing’ because The Doctor had referred to it as such on occasion -, it/she eventually gained a better understanding of its/her new body, commenting to The Doctor as they assembled a new console that she had wanted to see the universe just as much as him when they first departed Gallifrey, noting that, while she rarely took him where he wanted to go, she always took him where he needed to go. As House tormented Amy and Rory using his control of the TARDIS interior to lead them through shifting corridors and generate illusions, the TARDIS was able to make telepathic contact with Rory (Although The Doctor had meant for her to reach Amy) and direct them to an old console room that the TARDIS kept in ‘storage’ so that they could shut down the shields and allow her and The Doctor to return to the ship. Although the TARDIS’s human body began to die from the strain, The Doctor was able to save her by tricking House into deleting the room they were in; an automatic safety feature of the TARDIS transferred its passengers into the main console room, allowing the TARDIS’s soul to return to its rightful place and banish House from itself. Using the last of the energy in its borrowed body, the TARDIS used its last moments of speech to thank The Doctor for everything that he had done for her, assuring The Doctor that he would never be alone as long as she was with him (The TARDIS briefly assumed a human form when The Doctor travelled into the Star Trek universe ("Star Trek: The Next Generation/Doctor Who: Assimilation2"), but this was only a temporary measure, the ship transferring its consciousness into the android Lieutenant Commander Data to protect itself from a Borg attempt to assimilate the TARDIS, allowing the Data/TARDIS to force the Borg away from its console so that Rory Williams and Data's friend Lieutenant Worf could dispose of the Borg).

The Snowmen
The Snowmen
Following Amy and Rory's departure ("The Angels Take Manhattan"), the TARDIS went through another reconfiguration, its new interior being smaller than the 'steampunk'-esque version used during The Doctor's travels with the Ponds, with blue lighting that was dimmed when the ship was empty and a more functional, straightforward control console, most likely intended to reflect The Doctor's bleaker mood after the loss of his friends. The Doctor initially kept the TARDIS parked on an artificial cloud during his 'retirement' to the Victorian era to keep himself removed from the rest of the world - access to the ship was facilitated by a ladder that could be concealed by a perception filter from a certain height and lowered only when The Doctor needed it -, the ship's exterior even looking somewhat weathered from the conditions it had been exposed to, but the ship returned to its usual pure blue when The Doctor sprang back into action.
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS
After The Doctor began to travel with the mysterious Clara Oswald, the ship began to demonstrate an erratic relationship with her (Possibly motivated by Clara’s paradoxical nature ("Asylum of the Daleks", "The Snowmen" and "The Bells of Saint John"), much like its dislike of Charley when she travelled with the Sixth Doctor ("Patient Zero")), the ship taking a while to translate some alien languages during Clara’s first trip to an alien world and not opening for her when she attempted to take a child to safety inside the ship without The Doctor present ("The Rings of Akhaten"), although it was willing to help Clara rescue The Doctor when he was trapped in a pocket universe despite its initial dislike ("Hide"). When the TARDIS was briefly depowered and claimed by a crew of salvage operators when they attempted to catch it with an illegal magno-grab, the resulting damage as The Doctor attempted to escape resulted in Clara being trapped in the TARDIS interior as the ship began to leak fuel. Having pretended to activate the TARDIS self-destruct to force the crew to help him search for Clara, The Doctor travelled deep into his ship, Clara discovering a monstrous creature deep within the TARDIS as one of the scavengers attempted to strip the console, only for the ship to burn him before he was attacked by the creatures. As it began to break down from engine damage, the ship generated ‘echoes’ of the console room as the safest location on the ship, The Doctor, Clara and the android scavenger being drawn to the console rooms as part of the TARDIS’s attempt to protect them, but this plan was complicated when a rift in the TARDIS created a time rupture that caused parts of the past to leak’ into the ship, resulting in The Doctor, Clara and the scavengers being attacked by burned, twisted figures that were later revealed to be what Clara and the scavengers would become when they were badly burned by the collapsing TARDIS. However, The Doctor was able to undo this catastrophe by travelling to the TARDIS’s damaged engine room and using the temporal rift to return to the moment when the accident occurred and prevent it by sending his past self the means of resolving the damage.

The Name of The Doctor
The Name of The Doctor
During a final trap by The Great Intelligence, The Doctor was forced to visit his own grave, revealed to be the TARDIS itself, grown to giant size as the dimensional link keeping the interior and exterior dimensions separate broke down ("The Name of The Doctor"), the younger TARDIS attempting to keep The Doctor away until The Doctor shut down most of its power. This tomb could only be opened when The Doctor’s true name was uttered - the doors were opened by River Song’s ‘ghost’ speaking the name while everyone present was distracted -, the tomb manifesting as a TARDIS console room overgrown with various plants, a spiral of energy where the console had been representing the scar tissue left by The Doctor’s presence in the universe.
Flatline
Flatline
The Intelligence attempted to infect The Doctor’s timeline by entering the scar tissue, but Clara was able to negate its influence by entering the scar herself, undoing the damage caused by the Intelligence until The Doctor entered it to save her.

This version of The Doctor’s death was later undone when Clara managed to make contact with the Time Lords (Sent to safety after all thirteen Doctors froze Gallifrey in a parallel pocket universe during the Daleks’ final assault ("The Day of The Doctor")) to ask them to change the future when The Doctor was about to die on Trenzalore after a prolonged war with the Daleks, the Time Lords sending The Doctor the energy necessary to begin a new regeneration cycle, allowing The Doctor to regenerate once more and continue his travels ("The Time of The Doctor"). Having upgraded the console room to add various homely details such as chairs, chalkboards, and bookcases ("Deep Breath"), the Twelfth Doctor has continued to travel in the TARDIS with no problems. The only difficulty the ship has experienced to date was during the confrontation with the mysterious 'Boneless', two-dimensional beings whose attempts to infiltrate this universe resulted in them draining energy from the ship's exterior and interior dimensions, reducing the TARDIS exterior to the size of a toy and causing The Doctor to lose power, to the point that the TARDIS was damaged just by being dropped down a sewer, with The Doctor expressing concern that the ship could be destroyed if it was hit by a train until he activated 'siege mode'. With life support running out as the ship's power ran low, the Doctor was only saved when Clara was able to trick The Boneless into supplying the TARDIS with the power needed to regenerate its lost dimensions, allowing the Doctor to create a force field to repel The Boneless and send them back to their own dimension ("Flatline"). Although The Doctor was forced to steal another TARDIS to return to Earth after he was taken to Gallifrey by a complex trap ("Face the Raven" and "Heaven Sent/Hell Bent"), he soon set out to search for his original ship. Although Clara and the immortal Ashildir took the 'new' TARDIS after it was trapped in the form of a 1960s American diner, they left The Doctor's TARDIS behind, The Doctor appreciating the painting Clara's friend Rigys had done to turn its outer shell into a memorial for Clara before resuming his travels.
 
An Unearthly Child
An Unearthly Child
An Unearthly Child
An Unearthly Child
Marco Polo
Marco Polo
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
       
The Highlanders
The Highlanders
The Faceless Ones
The Faceless Ones
The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Tomb of the Cybermen
The Web of Fear
The Web of Fear
       
Spearhead From Space
Spearhead From Space
The Ambassadors of Death
The Ambassadors of Death
The Time Monster
The Time Monster
The Green Death
The Green Death
       
Revenge of the Cybermen
Revenge of the Cybermen
The Masque of Mandragora
The Masque of Mandragora
The Masque of Mandragora
The Masque of Mandragora
Logopolis
Logopolis
 
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The TARDIS

Parts of this article were compiled with the assistance of David Spence who can be contacted by e-mail at djfs@blueyonder.co.uk
 
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