Sci Fi Log #14: "It's bigger on the inside!"

For this log, I’ll discussing ANOTHER Doctor Who-related object: the TARDIS. The TARDIS (Time and Relative Dimension in Space) is a time machine and spaceship in Doctor Who, and its associated spin-offs The Sarah Jane Adventures, and Torchwood.

A TARDIS is a product of the advanced technology of the Time Lords (the Doctor’s alien race). It can transport its passengers to any point in time or any place in the universe. The interior of a TARDIS is much larger than its exterior, which can somehow blend in with its surroundings using the ship's "chameleon circuit". TARDISes also possess an ability of knowing, which has been expressed in many ways, including implied personality and free will. They also provide their users with additional tools and abilities including a telepathically-based universal translation system.

The Doctor's TARDIS. 

In the series, the Doctor pilots an apparently unreliable, obsolete Type 40, Mark 1 TARDIS. Its chameleon circuit is broken, so it is stuck in the form of a blue 1960s-style London police box after one visit to London in 1963. The Doctor's TARDIS was, for most of the series' history, said to have been stolen from the Time Lords' home planet, Gallifrey, where it was old and decommissioned. However, during the events of the episode, "The Doctor's Wife" (2011), the ship's consciousness temporarily inhabits a human body named Idris, and she reveals that she left of her own free will. During this episode, she flirtatiously implies that she stole the Doctor rather than the other way around, although she sometimes does also refer to him as her "thief" in the same episode.

The unpredictability of the TARDIS's short-range guidance (relative to the size of the Universe) has often been a plot point in the Doctor's adventures. Also, in "The Doctor's Wife", the TARDIS reveals that much of this "unpredictability" was actually on purpose. It is usually done in order to get the Doctor where he needed to go as opposed to where he actually wanted to go.

Doctor Who has become a big part of British pop culture. Not only has the shape of the police box become more immediately associated with the TARDIS than with its real-world inspiration, but the term "TARDIS-like" has been used to describe anything that seems to be bigger on the inside than on the outside.