The Doctor's TARDIS

"I always took you where you needed to go!" -TARDIS/Idris A TARDIS — sometimes styled Tardis, but also called a TT Capsule or just a timeship — was the primary space-time vehicle used by the Time Lords of Gallifrey allowing them to travel throughout the universe. Beyond their temporal capabilities, TARDISes were known for their dimensional transcendentalism (being bigger inside than out) and their possession of a form of consciousness.

The Doctor's TARDIS is the TARDIS owned by the Timelord known as the Doctor. Each one of the numbered incarnations of the Doctor have had a TARDIS. The Doctor's TARDIS has a mind of it's own, and a bit of a personality, even taking a disliking to Clara Oswald, refusing to give her her bedroom back.

The TARDIS believes to have stolen the Doctor just as much as the Doctor stole her. The TARDIS also regenerates similar to the Doctor, even changing her outside from time to time, though this was rare, and at the most she changed her window size. The Doctor also leaves the breaks on, so that's why is makes the noise all the time, something River Song pointed out with the Doctor, and the Doctor awkwardly saying he loves that noise.

Previous Owners
If it had not been built by the Doctor, the TARDIS was previously owned by "several irresponsible owners" before the Doctor, though accounts differ as to whether the last of them was Marnal or Marianna. After Ulysses and Penelope Gate wiped Marnal's mind and deposited him in 1883 England, they took his TARDIS with them; the Doctor once identified it as a "family heirloom". Some other accounts differed on the TARDIS's status prior to the Doctor's theft of it, and implied that it came from the general, government-controlled "stockpile" of TARDISes after the model had been officially decommissioned.

The Fourth Doctor told Adric that "it was in for repairs on Gallifrey when [he] borrowed it." When Adric countered that he thought the Doctor outright owned the vehicle, the Doctor said, "Well, on a sort of 'finders, keepers' basis, yes."

The Choice of the Doctor
When the Doctor first decided to leave Gallifrey, he had the chance to take a Type 53 but dismissed it as "soulless" in favour of the Type 40. Although he already possessed a Type 50 TARDIS the Doctor needed to leave Gallifrey in a "hurry," according to the Fifth Doctor, and he stole a different TARDIS instead of his first TARDIS. However, he made it clear that if things had gone differently during his escape, he would have taken the Type 50. The Doctor had received a recommendation for this particular TARDIS from a version of future companion Clara Oswald. She actually stopped him from taking another TARDIS, saying that the navigation system on this one was "knackered" but he'd have more fun with it. He took her suggestion and dismissed the other TARDIS to take the Type 40 instead.

When the Doctor stole it, the TARDIS was in a repair shop and two Time Lords were surprised that anyone would want to steal it. The TARDIS herself said she was "a museum piece", though this may have been figurative. The Doctor would not learn until their fourth incarnation that the TARDIS' previous owner Marianna had been aboard for the entire time. Quadrigger Stoyn was also onboard during take off, working as an engineer in the TARDIS engine room.

None of these accounts precluded the possibility that the Doctor had somehow been responsible for its creation. Indeed, another account compromised between theft and creation. It claimed while the Doctor had not built the TARDIS from scratch, he had substantially modified/rebuilt it. According to this view, he achieved control of the TARDIS without using a direct mental link.

This let him bypass the feature on most TARDISes which sent a tracking signal to the Time Lords. As a result, while the Doctor still had a significant mental link with the TARDIS early in his travels, such as when the ship assisted him with his first regeneration, he did not impose his will on it, allowing the TARDIS to go where it wished rather than exerting direct control. The TARDIS herself later stated that her unreliability to go where the Doctor wanted was due to her always going to where he was needed.

These accounts notwithstanding, the most direct commentary on the Doctor's acquisition of the TARDIS came from the Doctor and the TARDIS itself. When the Doctor was summoned to be the defence counsellor to the Valeyard in his trial, he exclaimed to Inquisitor Darkel that he confessed to stealing a TARDIS and running away from Gallifrey. At a later point in the Doctor's life, when House transferred the soul of the TARDIS into Idris, the TARDIS gave its side of the story. It confirmed it had been out of commission, a "museum piece," when the First Doctor met it. It also confirmed that the Doctor had stolen it, denying the Eleventh Doctor's attempt to characterise the action as "borrowing".

It also stated that it had stolen him, and had no intention of ever giving him back. It was unlocked and had deliberately let him steal it because it wanted to explore the universe and sensed he would be an ideal match. When it asked the Eleventh Doctor what his first incarnation said upon seeing it and touching the console, he recalled saying "you were the most beautiful thing I've ever known". The TARDIS was shown to be very fond of him, admitting as Idris that she had always wanted to say a proper hello to him, but was unable to.

Model and Type
The precise model number of the Doctor's TARDIS was a matter of some confusion, particularly when it was compared to those of other Time Lords. The dematerialisation circuit of the Master's TARDIS was a Mark II, compared to the Doctor's Mark I. When the Teselecta scanned the Doctor's TARDIS, its records stated the timeship was a TT Type 40, Mark 3. The record also stated it had been reported stolen. The Scrolls of Gallifrey indicated that the Doctor's TARDIS was a Mark 1. During a visit by the Fourth Doctor to Gallifrey, the Doctor's TARDIS was unambiguously called a "Type 40". At that time, it was made clear that all other Type 40s had long since been officially decommissioned and replaced by newer models. The fact that the Doctor's TARDIS was a Type 40 was not common knowledge, even to the Castellan. This designation was used with greater frequency afterwards. It was even used by the Eleventh Doctor as an excuse to Winston Churchill for his tardy response to Churchill's summons. When the TARDIS had the opportunity to speak to the Eleventh Doctor in the body of Idris, it called itself a "Type 40" without any qualification. River Song defined it a "Type 40 Mark". The Eleventh Doctor appeared to know his TARDIS' date of manufacture, as one chronicle indicated that he celebrated "her birthday".

Mass
The TARDIS' exterior was always lighter than the "true weight" of its interior. According to the Twelfth Doctor, "If the TARDIS were to land with its true weight, it would fracture the surface of the Earth." The TARDIS was said by Romana II to weigh fifty thousand tonnes in Alzarius' gravity. "[S]eventeen thousand tons of thrust" was jettisoned for the TARDIS to escape Event One. One time, when the TARDIS mapped its interior dimensions onto its exterior ones — making it the same size outside as inside — it was larger than Gallifrey.

Consle Room
The control or console room of the Doctor's TARDIS was the space in which the operation of the craft was usually affected. It was dominated by a large, hexagonal console, typically in or near the middle of the room. The room held a scanner for viewing the outside and offered immediate access to the exterior through a set of doors. According to one source, the trip from the console room to the outside required the passenger to step through the real world interface at the heart of the outer plasmic shell. Many other accounts demonstrated that the doors were just doors, though the TARDIS was cocooned in a breathable atmosphere.

On one occasion, when the TARDIS' exterior dimensions shrank, so did the door on the inside. On another occasion, when the extrapolator shielding could easily be breached by the weaponry of the New Dalek Empire, who were "experts at fighting TARDISes", the Tenth Doctor described "that wooden door" at that point as being "just wood". Queen Elizabeth I once pointed out that while the Tenth Doctor's TARDIS was bigger on the inside, the door wasn't, and her head was nearly taken off when the Doctor rode out of the TARDIS with Elizabeth on a Zygon which took on the body-print of a horse.

There were many variants of the Doctor's control room. Indeed, the Doctor's TARDIS had more than one control room, the TARDIS itself claiming it had over 30 different versions in storage; being a different kind of temporal being, it could "archive something that hasn't happened." Idris telepathically told Rory how to go to one of the old console rooms, which, in this case, was the Ninth Doctor's console room.

Library
There was a library in the TARDIS. Its books included Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Jane's Spaceships, Every Gallifreyan Child's Pop-Up Book of Nasty Creatures From Other Dimensions, The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, Robinson Crusoe, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (signed first printing, with last page missing), War and Peace, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The I-Spy Book of British Birds,, Can You Forgive Her?, the James Bond novel You Only Live Twice, A History of the Varaxil Hegemony, the Encyclopedia Gallifreya, The History of the Time War, Wisden, A Brief History of Time, Ludowig's Histories of the Dalek Imperium, and the only signed copy of The Quarry in the universe.

The Doctor also possessed a copy of Christie's Death in the Clouds published in the year 5 billion, which they kept in the C chest, a complete set of all 11 Harry Potter novels and a book entitled Advanced Quantum Mechanics that had an image of the TARDIS in its police-box camouflage on the dust jacket. The Doctor's library also had books by Capek and Capote. Unknown to the Doctor, the library also contained books documenting the Doctor’s own adventures, which had been written by the TARDIS itself.The Doctor also kept their Five Hundred Year Diary in the library.

Sometimes, small items other than books were also stored in the library. For instance, the Eighth Doctor kept his secateurs there, filed under "B" for Capability Brown. During his travels with the Doctor, Adric had every book on mathematics in the TARDIS library. During the time of the Tenth Doctor, there was a specific desk that, no matter where it was moved, always got rained on by a cloud layer in the upper stacks. The Doctor placed a saucepan on the desk to catch the water and keep psychic paper from mouldering because it produced psychic mould that would eventually turn into psychic mushrooms.

By the time the Eleventh Doctor was recovering from regeneration after-effects, the pool fell into the library after a crash-landing but was later removed when the TARDIS had finished regenerating itself. Clara Oswald also hid in the library when she was running from time zombies. The console room had a library at the end of the Seventh Doctor's life and the start of the Eighth Doctor's. The Twelfth Doctor showed similar taste, refurbishing his console room with bookshelves. He often took out a book relevant to a situation.

TARDIS wardrobe
The Doctor kept clothing from their previous incarnations, as well as clothing for other people, in the TARDIS wardrobe. Its appearance changed over time, appearing as either a small closet, a storage room, or a proper walk-in closet. The War Doctor talked about "wardrobes", suggesting there could be more than one. Some of the clothing in the wardrobe was picked up during travels or left by ex-companions. It contained clothing from various times and environments, to suit where and when the TARDIS' occupant(s) found themselves. The Tenth Doctor explained to Gabby Gonzalez that the TARDIS shopped on her own by landing in stores after hours, collecting clothes to make copies of, and returning the originals to avoid theft.

These proved useful on numerous occasions for the Doctor's companions, many of whom left on their travels without bringing many clothes of their own. The Doctor has often availed himself of its selection when attempting to define a style for himself, post-regeneration; and possibly Romana as well. The Fifth Doctor, however, discovered his wardrobe in an unidentified anteroom.

At least some of the clothes had pockets that were bigger on the inside. By the time of the Doctor's fifth incarnation, the TARDIS was equipped with replicator technology, which allowed it to copy clothing. Jo Grant once spent approximately two hours going through the wardrobe trying on different outfits. She considered many of them "groovy".

During Ace's time in the TARDIS, it was apparently right next to the control room. The War Doctor once, having forgotten where the wardrobe was located, ended up giving incorrect directions. When the Ninth Doctor was in Cardiff on 24 December 1869, he gave incredibly long directions to Rose Tyler to get to the wardrobe; her being able to remember them was nothing short of a miracle. When the Tenth Doctor was travelling with Gabby, the wardrobe was located next to the laundry room. While walking to the laundry room, Gabby asked if the boot cupboard was the wardrobe, to which the Doctor explained that the "wardrobe's next door along -- I think. Might've moved it."

By the time of the Eleventh Doctor's date with River Song following the TARDIS' repair, it had changed location. The directions that he gave River were considerably shorter. The Twelfth Doctor, having landed in 1814 at the height of the last Frost Fair, gave directions similar to the ones his ninth incarnation gave to Rose, this time to his companion Bill Potts. The Tenth Doctor once noted that there was a very limited range of women's clothing in the wardrobe. This was further backed up by the Thirteenth Doctor, who noted that she had not had to buy women's clothes in "a while". In the Eleventh Doctor's second console room, he gained easy access to the wardrobe through a chest on the sub level. The Doctor once changed out of his soaked outfit and into a fresh set of clothes incredibly fast, and when asked by Clara how he changed so quickly, he replied "wibbly-wobbly wardrobe". By the time of the Twelfth Doctor, however, entry to the wardrobe required travelling further into the ship. According to the Thirteenth Doctor, there was a wardrobe hall in a lower substrata of the TARDIS, just off the control room.