TARDIS - The Doctor's TARDIS

The Doctor's TARDIS

In the programme, the Doctor's TARDIS is an obsolete "Type 40 TT capsule" that he unofficially "borrowed" when he departed his home planet of Gallifrey. According to the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, it previously belonged to a Time Lord named Marnal, who was, like the Doctor, something of a renegade. By the time of "The Pirate Planet," the Doctor had been travelling on board in time and space for 523 years and by the time of "The Doctor's Wife", he had been travelling in it for 700 years.

There were originally 305 registered Type 40s, but all the others had been decommissioned and replaced by new, improved models. However, the appearance of the primary console room has changed over the years. The Second Doctor's states in 1972's "The Three Doctors" – "Ah! I can see you've been doing the TARDIS up a bit. I don't like it." The ship has also shown the ability to rebuild and reconfigure itself. In "The Eleventh Hour" the TARDIS completely changes after crashing, and the Doctor's comment "What have you got for me this time?" implies it is not the first time the TARDIS had undergone repairs of its own doing. In the 2007 Children in Need special "Time Crash" the Fifth Doctor complains to the Tenth Doctor that he had "changed the desktop theme!" In "The Doctor's Wife" the TARDIS says she has 30 desktops archived, although the Doctor has only changed it a dozen times "yet".

The TARDIS was already old when the Doctor first took it, but its actual age is not specified. The spin-off media have, on a number of occasions, had the TARDIS wait around for the Doctor for decades and even centuries in relative time. In "The Empty Child" (2005), the Ninth Doctor claimed that he has had "900 years of phone box travel", while "The Doctor's Wife" says they've been travelling together for only 700 years. In the unfinished TV serial Shada, fellow Time Lord Professor Chronotis said that the Type 40 models came out when he was a boy.

In the 2010 episode "Amy's Choice", the Doctor is seen to take various items out of a box, including an egg whisk and a corkscrew, to make a generator in the TARDIS, which is labelled:

TARDIS, Time and Relative Dimension in Space, Build Site: Gallifrey Blackhole Shipyard, Type 40 Build Date: 1963, Authorised for use by qualified Time Lords only by the Shadow Proclamation, Misuse or Theft of any TARDIS will result in extreme penalties and possible exile.

The 2011 episode "The Doctor's Wife" the "soul" of the ship is transferred into the body of a humanoid female called Idris, and enabling the Doctor to have a conversation with his craft. The TARDIS says that she deliberately allowed the Doctor to "steal" her, as she wanted to see the universe itself; in a reversal of the traditional view, the TARDIS claims to have stolen the Doctor. When he accuses the TARDIS of being unreliable, she defends herself by saying that she has always taken him where he needed to go, if not where he wanted. At the end of the episode, the TARDIS' soul is returned to the ship's systems.

In a later episode, "Let's Kill Hitler," the Doctor again speaks to the TARDIS by way of a voice/visual interface. In this instance, after providing options including an image of himself, as well as former companions Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Donna Noble, the TARDIS manifests as an image of Amy Pond as a child. It is indicated, however, that the Doctor is only speaking to the "computer" controlling the TARDIS rather than the "soul" he interacted with earlier.