Topic: A question about "The eleventh hour" episode of Doctor Who

[341gerbig]

So he gets a brand new TARDIS and screwdriver, brand spanking new!

Is that an effect of his regeneration? Or is it brought from somewhere? If so, who delivers it now that all the time Lords are dead save the eleventh doctor?

Just a nagging afterthought that wont go away.

[Chandler]

Keep watching, and when you finish "The Doctor's Wife" you'll know that there's more to the TARDIS than what meets the eye.

[341gerbig]

Keep watching, and when you finish "The Doctor's Wife" you'll know that there's more to the TARDIS than what meets the eye.

Oh ive watched that, so is that implying that the TARDIS re-created herself to better suit her newly formed pilot?

[Chandler]

That's my take on it, at least.
Let's also not forget that the TARDIS had just had a violent regeneration occur inside that destroyed much of the console room and led to the TARDIS crashing. The regeneration of the console room made it take on another appearance. There have been several console rooms throughout the times, so I didn't think it so far fetched that the TARDIS (or the producers) would change up the room from time to time.

[goodthink]

The Tardis is a living organism. It chooses the timelord and bonds with them in a symbiotic relationship. They are always linked psychically, that is how the psychic paper and universal translator work.


No one made the tardis, they grew and are another species.

[Frank]

It's not a new Tardis, it's a new...'desktop theme'. It's the same, sexy Tardis.

The screwdrivers newdriver though. But popped out from the Tardis console, IIRC. It's been done before in Smith and Jones, if memory serves. Ten busts up his screwdriver technobabbling the MRI (?) machine, but gets a new one right away.

What isn't obviously accounted for is the origin of River Song's edition of the screwdriver in Silence in the Library.

Toodle-oodle!

[Ah.hell]

Whatever, they eventually recreate the entire universe. 

[azinyk]

So he gets a brand new TARDIS and screwdriver, brand spanking new!

Is that an effect of his regeneration?

It was this time, because the writers decided it would be so.  In the other 9 regenerations, the Tardis didn't change just because the Doctor changed.

It's not a new Tardis, it's a new...'desktop theme'.

I consider this just a throw-away joke.  In previous episodes, the Doctor was shown repairing and modifying the Tardis the old-fashioned way, with a wrench and soldering iron.  If he wanted to change something, he'd have to do it himself.  I call the new style "Star Trek repairs", because on the new Trek series, they always fix things by pressing buttons or waving a device that lights up over the console.  They almost never take things apart with their hands.  To be fair, the Doctor "jettisoned" some of the Tardis rooms just by pushing buttons as far back as 1982 (Castrovalva).  Also, the Doctor did seem to be doing some serious manual labor on the Tardis at the end of "The Doctor Dances".  And the Tardis exterior has always been software-reconfigurable, if the chameleon circuit worked properly.

The screwdrivers newdriver though. But popped out from the Tardis console, IIRC. It's been done before in Smith and Jones, if memory serves. Ten busts up his screwdriver technobabbling the MRI (?) machine, but gets a new one right away.

When the Doctor needed a new K-9, he pulled it out of a shipping box (he gave one to Romana and two to Sarah-Jane).  The magic screwdriver dispenser in the console is a fine way to furnish a new one, but if the writers had wanted to do more work, the Doctor presumably would have to travel somewhere to get one, or build one of his own.  He remarks that he once destroyed the factory that made sonic disruptors like the one Captain Jack carried.

The Tardis is a living organism... No one made the tardis, they grew and are another species.

In the original Doctor Who, the Tardis was quite mechanical - definitely a piece of technology.  There were several cases where the Doctor had to go on an adventure to replace a broken or missing Tardis component.  That was written almost 50 years ago, though, by different writers.

Rather than trying to make consistent sense out of an inconsistent show, I just accept that it's fiction and that I have to suspend my disbelief.

[Frank]

I find the Tardis thing to be more of a 'designed machine' which incorporates many living aspects, perhaps up to including artificial intelligences. E.g. perhaps there was a life-for, like a whale, which is similar to the creature of a Tardis, but which had some sort of odd relation perhaps to the untempered schism on Gallifrey - e.g. had a 'natural' affinity with the odd nature of time and space.

The Gallifreyans 'saddle' these creatures with the mechanism of a Tardis, making them...cyborgs.

But perhaps the 'saddle' is more than just cyborg-iness, perhaps it requires artificial life, gene-engineering or outright changing the basics of these conjectured creatures: so that the final Tardis both 'has to be grown' and is indeed a machine. A 'living creature' which has been engineering in such a way to present a 'mechanical' interface?

(Which given that they're bigger on the inside, allows for a lot of 'under the bonnet' complexity and bizarre 'wet' mechanics.)

To that extent, it seems sort-of plausible (if you don't think about it too much) that the Doctor has to do properly technical repairs to it, but that it's vastly more (conceptually) complex than the image of HG Well's Time Machine's Time Traveller's time machine!

As for the screw driver replacement - yep, I found it to be lazy/unambitious to a startling degree. There's an immense opportunity for self-reference and exploration there...but they ignored it thoroughly. Humbug!

[azinyk]

Apparently in some of the novels, Type 103 Tardises can manifest as senient, people-shaped time machines (the Doctor has a Type 40).  It kind of reminds me of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Mk 2, which manifests itself not as a book, but as a time-traveling, parallel-universe-crossing raven.

The "mind" of the Type 40 Tardis could be a reflection of the time lord's mind, or something manufactured as by computer technology or genetic engineering.  I don't think the Tardis was meant to be sentient in the original series, because the Doctor is pretty rough with it.  He sometimes talks to the "old girl", but he also talked to his car and gave it a name (Bessie).

I imagine the manufacturing process as mostly mechanical, even though in Journey's End the Doctor gave his meta-crisis duplicate a chunk of Tardis coral that he could apparently use to grow a new Tardis.  In the 4th doctor episode "The Invasion of Time", the Tardis is represented as having a huge, city-sized interior, with secondary power stations, art galleries, warehouses, swimming pools, and miles and miles of corridors.  I figure that those parts of the Tardis are either scooped up out of reality, or copied from reality, rather than generated by software.

[Vincegamer]

The tardis has always had a swimming pool. It's not shown until the 4th doctor but others mentioned it and it's jettisoned by the 5th doctor but gets rebuilt. The Tardis can rebuild/regrow parts that were previously tossed. It was always a joke though that the type 40 was prone to mechanical failure - the Master had a type 50 IIRC, and the Meddling Monk had a type 41 - whose parts were not perfectly compatible with the Doctor's.
For a while there it was mentioned that there were alternative console rooms and the doctor chose which one to use on a whim. I thought that meant like down the hall, but maybe he actually chooses like choosing wallpaper and swaps it out.
Also, the 3d doctor removed the console from the TARDIS and moved it around on the back of a pickup and was still able to use it to travel by hooking it to a nuclear reactor, but it was even less manageable that way than before. I think the 5th doctor also once traveled in just the console room without the rest of the TARDIS.

I always thought the Time Lords just did not realize the tardis was actually sentient. Or they thought it was nothing more than computer AI in their arrogance.  It wasn't until the Doctor's Wife episode that even the Doctor had to come to grips with the TARDIS as a life form.

If the screwdriver is so easy to replace then why did the 5th doctor go without for years when his was destroyed?

I'm not criticizing, I'm just asking for speculation cause I enjoy this kind of thing. I don't mind inconsistencies in the background elements because they aren't ever fleshed out in depth - but I really hate inconsistencies in details about the main characters of a show (anyone remember Family Ties?).