The TARDIS

A time machine with an attitude!

The TARDIS is the Doctor's time machine. The letters T A R D I S stand for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. These space/time machines known as TARDISes are the crowning achievement of the Doctor's people, the Time Lords. The outside or real world interface has the ability to change its appearace to blend in with its environment. The inside, on the other hand, exists in another dimension, making the TARDIS dimensionally transendental, which simply means that it is bigger on the inside than on the outside. The TARDIS has the power to materialize its real world interface anywhere in time and space. The Time Lords have created many different models of TARDISes over the millenia and the Doctor's is an old type 40, now considered obsolete, and is the only one of its type still in service! Although newer models may be more reliable and streamlined with more stablity than the Doctor's TARDIS, the old type 40 has a number of interesting features that are missing on more recent models.

The TARDIS Travels through the time/space vortex, which touches all of time and space at some point. When the TARDIS dematerializes, it enters the vortex. When the operator enters the space/time coordinates for the destination, the vehicle then travels through the vortex to the point in which it intersects with the place and time period desired.

The energy required to perform such feats require an almost infinite amount of power and expends nearly limitless amounts of energy. In order for this to be possible the TARDIS has a unique energy source, a black hole known as the Eye of Harmony! This massive black hole was captured and placed under the control of the Time Lords by the legendary founder of Time Lord society, Rassilon.

Some speculate that the only way it can be possible for the Eye of Harmony to power a TARDIS is for the Eye itself to be located in the actual structure of the TARDIS it is powering. This may well be true, as the Doctor's TARDIS does include a structure in the cloister room known also as the Eye of Harmony, seen in the FOX televison movie, known as Enemy Within. The only way possible for one structure to coexist simultaneously in more than one place is by the use of temporal physics, the science of Time Lord technology.

The TARDIS has been stuck in the shape of a police box since the Doctor's very first adventure, over 33 years ago! As has been stated before, the real world interface is able to change its outer appearance to whatever the operator chooses, which in theory should allow the vehicle to blend in with its surroundings. This is accomplished by the so called chameleon circuit. The Doctor's TARDIS has a fault in its chameleon circuit which causes the real world interface to remain frozen in its present form, that of a blue Metropolitan Police Call Box of the type once common on the streets of London just a few decades ago.

The Doctor has only tried twice to fix the faulty circuit and each time he has failed. The first time the Master interfered and the Doctor was nearly destroyed for his efforts. The second time he was able to get the circuit working, but his meddling only resulted in even more bizarre and out of place forms before it shifted back to the police box form and froze once again. It seems that now the Doctor has grown fond of the police box shape of his TARDIS, and has never attempted to fix the chameleon circuit or change the form of it's outer appearance in any way since.

The Doctor's TARDIS is more than just a machine for him to travel in, it is an artificial-intelligence in its own right and seems to have some sort of empathic connection to the Doctor. The TARDIS is the Doctor's friend and companion, albeit a tempermental and stubborn one. When the Doctor aquired his TARDIS it was in for repairs, but it has never been stated in any episode exactly what the nature of the problem was. Some have made speculations that it was perhaps because of the faulty chameleon circuit or because the steering mechanism was broken. It is my opinion, however, that it was in the repair depot because the artificial-intelligence circuits had aquired a sentience! In the early years of the program, it seemed as if the Doctor didn't know how to operated the TARDIS or that it was broken and unreliable anyway. Could this have been because the TARDIS had not yet accepted the Doctor as its operator and was refusing to cooperate with him in his efforts to control it? We may never know for sure, but I feel that not only is the TARDIS the Doctors mode of transport and his home, but it is his friend and companion as well.

One of the first rooms encountered by someone when they enter the TARDIS is the main control room. At the center of the main control room is the control console. This console has six stations in a hexagonal shape with the large time rotor dominating the center. When the TARDIS is in motion through time and space the time rotor rises and falls to mark its flight through the vortex. Most if not all of the operations of the TARDIS, such as entry of space/time coordinates are done from the control console. The Doctor has changed the layout of the control room and has updated the console several times over the years. Each of his seperate incarnations have decorated the control room to their various likings.