Series Info » TARDIS » TARDIS Description

Thanks to Simon Skupham

The TARDIS on Earth
The Doctor enjoys the TARDIS's new form as a Pipe Organ in Attack of the Cybermen
The TARDIS discusied as a Police Box
in Logopolis
The Doctor enjoys the TARDIS's new form
as a Pipe Organ in Attack of the Cybermen

The Cloister Room features for the
One of the Lakertians attempts
The Cloister Room features for the
first time in The TV Movie
One of the Lakertians attempts
to enter the TARDIS

The TARDIS Stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space

A TARDIS is a typical product of Gallifreyan technology. It is a machine capable of moving through space and time, to any place, and any time period.

The Doctor admitted he borrowed the TARDIS to explore the universe and help people in need - by the time of the War Games, it was revealed he stole the machine.

The Timelords discovered this and were not happy with this so they sent the Doctor on Exile to Earth thus erasing his memory of the TARDIS functions. This led him to use the Dematerialisation Circuit, which had been broken and which he attempted to fix to help him escape from Earth with no success. At the end of the Three Doctors his memory was restored as a way of saying thank you from the Timelords for defeating Omega.

The exterior dimension is connected to a device called the Chameleon Circuit, which, when functioning properly, interacts with the location in which the TARDIS lands, allowing it to change shape to resemble the local landscape - for example if it was on a Rock landscape it would be a rock or one of the things around it.

The Doctor's Chameleon Circuit got stuck in the form of a police box. However in Attack of the Cybermen, the Doctor managed to fix the circuit and the ship changed it's form through out the story. It's first appearance was a Decorated Cupboard then it changed into a pipe organ and finally a gateway on Telos. The mechanism became faulty again at the end of the story and The Tardis reverted to being a police box.

During the Doctor's travels, the Master and the Rani were around and their TARDIS changed their form each time the Doctor met them. The TARDIS is dimensionally transcendental which means it's bigger inside than outside.

There are many rooms in the TARDIS which allow the Doctor to look round discovering new ones all the time gradually getting to know his way round the machine He also needed to teach himself how to fly the Tardis again. Many rooms were mentioned in the shows but never appeared on TV and there have been more in the Comics/Audio plays.

The most famous room in the TARDIS is the console room which contains the main control panel. The Cloister Room features for the first time in Logopolis The designers changed the appearance of the console room several times. It stayed in its original form up to Inferno with Jon Pertwee. After that it was an HG Wells wooden style room. By the time Peter Davison ended his term as the Doctor the machine became a more modern computer design.

In later series the Doctor seemed to gain more knowledge of the machine and thus the interior scenes were used less and less. By the time of the TV Movie the producers had decided to go back to an old fashioned model - with a console similar to the one introduced in the Deadly Assassin and with an old style monitor. Several new features were included and we see the Cloister Room for the first time, which contained the Eye of Harmony.

By the time of the TV Movie the producers decided to go back to an old fashioned model - with a console similar to the one introduced in the Deadly Assassin and with an old style monitor.

Several new features were included and we see the Cloister Room for the first time which contained the Eye of Harmony.