Doctor Who (7 page)

5

The TARDIS and Time Travel

“Well, I came up with the name from the initials: Time and Relative Dimension in Space.”

—Susan, from “An Unearthly Child” (1963)

 

In the first official pitch by C. E. Webber, he suggested that the Doctor's time machine be invisible due to light-resistant paint. He believed a futuristic spaceship would put off viewers disinclined to science fiction stories, while disguising the time machine as a common public object, such as a “night-watchman's shelter,” would make it seem too much like a magic door in a fairy tale, putting off adults. Invisibility was his visual compromise.

Newman objected to an invisible spaceship—which Webber suggested be hidden in a van for the opening story—saying the machine needed to be iconic and visually interesting. The idea came that the Doctor's ship would have the ability to change shape, camouflaging itself wherever it landed.

Making the ship capable of disguise and saying it was larger inside (a quality the Third Doctor later described as “dimensionally transcendental”) meant the production crew didn't have to film a large spaceship landing and taking off in each story. It was much easier to have a familiar object simply fade in and out of locations.

Over the years, different stories implied the TARDIS interior was out of synch with the outside universe. The Fourth Doctor called this a state of “temporal grace” and claimed it also prevented weapons from working inside (though this defense feature stopped working by the time the Fifth Doctor came along). Simon Guerrier's novel
The Time Travellers
delved into the ship's design strategy. In one scene, the First Doctor explains to Barbara, “The TARDIS is built specifically not to change history. We can visit, we can observe, and the ship can disguise itself so no one need ever know we were there. But only so long as we never step outside. We watch it all on the scanner.” In the episode “The Parting of the Ways,” the Ninth
Doctor echoes this sentiment, revealing that he becomes part of the local timeline once he leaves the TARDIS doors. This certainly explains why Time Lords, sworn never to interfere, would bother building time ships in the first place.

Susan said she came up with the name TARDIS, but we later learn that other Time Lords use the same term. Perhaps Susan started the trend many years before, when she and the Doctor still lived on Gallifrey. In the Fourth Doctor adventure “The Deadly Assassin,” TARDISes are also known by the technical term “TT capsule,” the initials standing for “time travel.” Officially, the Doctor's ship is a Type 40 TT capsule, a model so old as to be considered obsolete by his lifetime, further explaining the unreliability of the ship's controls.

“It's Alive!”

In the third
Doctor Who
TV story, “The Edge of Destruction,” Ian asks if it's possible that the ship can think on its own. The Doctor admits that it thinks not in terms a human being could understand but more as a computer processing various simultaneous operations. Nevertheless, the Doctor considers the ship a living thing and shows great affection toward it. Starting in his third incarnation, the hero sometimes addresses the ship directly as “old girl,” and lovingly pats the console, particularly if he thinks the TARDIS has suffered insult.

After a few years, viewers couldn't ignore that the Doctor conveniently kept arriving in places where terrible things were about to occur. Many fans concluded that the TARDIS was deliberately taking the Doctor to such situations because it knew his help was needed and understood that he thrived on defeating evil.

“The Doctor's Wife” episode in 2011 confirmed this idea. A rare set of circumstances allowed the Doctor to speak directly to the soul of his ship. By the 2012 Christmas special “The Snowmen,” the Doctor added a section to the TARDIS control console designed to enable more direct communication with his ship.

Broken Circuits

For the opening story, Anthony Coburn thought that the TARDIS should disguise itself as a blue police phone box, a commonly seen object in London and other cities. For decades, police phone boxes provided direct communication with the police department before walkie-talkies. The light at the top flashed to alert police on patrol to call in. Prisoners could also be held inside temporarily, while the police summoned aid via the phone on the door.

As the police box prop was built, the concern arose of how expensive it was going to be to replace the time machine every few weeks with another large object that served no function except to wait for the adventurers to return to it at some point. To save money and time, Verity Lambert decided to keep reusing the police box model, remarking, “We'll just say the controls are broken.”

This explanation was easy enough. Though Syndey Newman had initially imagined that the Doctor would not remember how to fly his ship, “An Unearthly Child” established that the TARDIS was not in top form. Moments after the audience first sees the interior, the Doctor mentions needing to rely on an “amateur” spare part to repair part of the machine. After the TARDIS makes its first on-screen flight, the Doctor says that the “year-o-meter,” which apparently helps determine destinations, is broken (then, rather than fixing it immediately, he dismisses it and explores outside). Later on, Susan mentions on-screen that her grandfather often forgets a few steps in the ship's flight protocols, adding to the unpredictability of its flight. In “The Name of the Doctor” in 2013, we learned that the alien scientist had been warned that the ship's navigation system was not working correctly when he stole it, but was also advised that this would make his travels more fun. Which, of course, is why the writers made it an unpredictable time machine in the first place, along with the fact that it prevented the ship from being an easy cure for dangerous situations. If Ian and Barbara were imprisoned, the Doctor couldn't simply teleport the TARDIS into their jail cell because he might wind up on the other side of the universe instead, unable to return.

So with both ship and pilot quickly established as unreliable, it wasn't so surprising in “An Unearthly Child” when, after landing in prehistoric
Earth, the Doctor leaves the TARDIS and is alarmed to discover that his ship's disguise feature has failed, its outer shell still resembling a London police box from 1963.

The dramatic contrivance of such an advanced and seemingly magical form of technology also being imperfect adds to the charm of the show, as does the bizarre imagery of a British police box acting as a spaceship. In the commentary for “The Time Meddler,” Verity Lambert said, “Like a lot of things that you have to do [for budget], I think it turned out to be a rather wonderful thing. The sort of incongruity of that [police box].”

The often beat-up looking police box became a fixed symbol of the program. Many years later, London's Metropolitan Police Service wanted to build new police boxes using this classic design and the BBC objected, saying that they had a trademark on the image. A judge ruled in the BBC's favor, as
Doctor Who
had used it for decades without complaint from the police.

In the 1965 TV story “The Time Meddler,” the ship's disguise feature was called a “camouflage unit.” The 1966 radio play “Journey into Time,” written by Malcolm Hulke and recorded by Stanmark Productions, called it the “electronic chameleon system.” In 1981, in “Logopolis,” the Fourth Doctor called it the “chameleon circuit,” which then became the official name. In a cut scene from 2010, the Eleventh Doctor explains how the chameleon circuit works:

 

Every time the TARDIS materializes in a new location, within the first nanosecond of landing, it analyzes its surroundings, calculates a twelve-dimensional data map of everything within a thousand mile radius, and determines which outer shell would blend in best with the environment. . . . And then it disguises itself as a police telephone box from 1963. . . . Probably a bit of a fault, actually. I've been meaning to check.

 

In the 1981 story “Logopolis,” the Fourth Doctor added that the TARDIS had been in a repair shop when he “borrowed” it in his haste to leave Gallifrey, and the technicians had not yet corrected certain things such as the “chameleon conversions.”

The Fourth Doctor was the first incarnation who tried repairing the chameleon circuit, deciding in “Logopolis” that he wanted to travel more discreetly, but an adventure interrupted his efforts. The Sixth Doctor determined to solve the problem and partially succeeded, but now the ship took on the appearance of objects that stood out even more ridiculously than a police box. Frustrated, the Sixth Doctor let it resume its blue box setting.

Over the years it's become necessary to build a new police box for the program, which has led to minor cosmetic differences. The TARDIS used by the first two Doctors had a
St. John's Ambulance
badge on one of the doors, but this vanished by the Third Doctor's first appearance. It didn't appear on the door again until 2010 when the ship rebuilt itself in “The Eleventh Hour.” Fans and creators alike have joked that the TARDIS exterior occasionally alters because the old time ship tries to change shape again but can't do more than tweak minor details. Simon Guerrier's novel
The Time Travellers
directly references this phenomenon, which also explains why the TARDIS key occasionally has a different design. As the Doctor reveals in “The Sound of Drums” (2007), the keys form part of the TARDIS itself and are connected to its abilities.

In the first episode of the spin-off show
Torchwood
in 2006, the character Jack Harkness refers to the TARDIS as having a “perception filter.” This was then mentioned in the
Doctor Who
program itself as a feature that influenced people to not notice the ship, unless it's brought to their attention, they're already familiar with it, or they're directly watching the spot where it lands. Like everything else about the TARDIS, this feature doesn't work perfectly, so some people might still notice the ship after it's fully materialized.

The perception filter sounds a lot like the “Somebody Else's Problem” field used in the book
Life, The Universe and Everything
by Douglas Adams, a technology that influences people to ignore a bizarre spaceship. A fitting connection, as Douglas Adams served as a writer and script editor on
Doctor Who
in the 1970s.

The Sound

Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop created the famous wheezing, groaning sound of the time engines, often depicted in comics and novels as “VWORP.” As he explained in the documentary
The Story of Doctor Who
: “I took my mother's front door key, and I put it down the bass strings of an old piano we had. We took the sound, we speeded it up, we slowed it down, we cut them together, and it became one of the great icons of sound effects.”

The sound has remained relatively the same over the decades, married to the image of the TARDIS itself. In the 2006 episode “Love and Monsters,” it is referred to as “the sound of the universe.”

In 2010, time adventurer River Song tells the Doctor that the ship isn't supposed to make a sound when it lands, and that this results from not turning off the parking brake. But the classic
Doctor Who
program played the sound every time another TARDIS left or arrived. Perhaps the ability to travel quietly was an improvement made to TARDISes during the Last Great Time War, an update that the Doctor ignored. Perhaps River was just teasing, as she often does.

Speaking of sound, the question occasionally arose as to why so many people across the universe all seem to speak English—and with British accents, at that. In “The Space Museum,” an alien display even had a sign with the word “Dalek” written in English. The original explanation for this particular sign was that the museum used a telepathic translation system for visitors, letting them hear and see what language they wished, but the dialogue revealing this was cut. This basic idea was later used in “The Mask of Mandragora” (1976), when the Fourth Doctor tells Sarah Jane that her ability to understand all languages is a Time Lord “gift” that he has extended to her. In the 2005 episode “The End of the World,” the Ninth Doctor finally explains that the TARDIS's telepathic circuits extends a field that translates for its crew.

The Control Room and the Console

The control room was a strange sight from the beginning, with walls decorated by roundels and a hexagonal console that held a cylindrical time
rotor at its center, beneath which lay the TARDIS's heart, a power source of dangerous energy, as we learned in “The Edge of Destruction.” Originally, the room could hold a dozen people comfortably, and had a small section divided by a transparent wall that housed computer banks. This set proved too large to constantly rebuild—delaying filming and taxing the budget—so it soon shrank.

The console, though designed quickly, immediately stood out from traditional depictions of spaceships. In many films and TV programs, space ship controls occupied different areas of a room, similar to a naval vessel with separate posts. But the Doctor and Susan faced each other when they operated different sections of the console, indicating the ship was meant to have as many as six people operating in a communal manner, and tie-in materials said that this was definitely the case. The supposition became official in the 2008 episode “The Journey's End.” No wonder the Doctor has so much trouble flying the ship, he's doing six jobs! (Not to mention, as we learn in “The Shakespeare Code,” he failed his pilot's exam.)

According to William Russell, William Hartnell actually mapped out the console's controls and did his best to keep consistent with their use, believing that children would notice if the Doctor's operation of the ship showed no rhyme or reason. In later years, designs for the TARDIS console were released for fans, allowing them to build their own versions, complete with vector trackers, vortex loops, horizontal holds, dimensional stabilizers, dematerializers, force field generators, scanner screen controls, a fast return switch, mustard and ketchup nozzles, and other vital technology. Matt Smith has memorized the controls of his own TARDIS console.