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The TARDIS is clearly engineered in the original series (just look at it!)
According to Davies in a DWM column, the TARDIS interior can be “skinned” rather like Winamp — which is probably a function of something like a chameleon circuit, I’ll wager to speculate. Though not ever stated before, this seems at least consistent with the established lore — especially given how easily various Time Lords seem to reconfigure the insides at will.
For the rest of your argument — well, uh. There’s nothing to say there’s no element of engineering in TARDIS construction. If anything, a TARDIS seems largely an artificial construct — one that involves a certain controlled organic development, presumably for the most basic architecture and… “spirit”, if you will. Then things get bolted onto that, taking advantage of more overt Time Lord technology, like the chameleon whatsit and the console controls and whatnot.
I don’t see anything particularly far-fetched for a stage of controlled organic engineering, especially given how far ahead Gallifreyan technology is. If anything, it sort of makes sense, given how complex and seemingly random the darned thing is. The Time Lords never seem to have absolute control over the machines — which probably is due in part to their treating them completely as machines (if partially organic ones), under their will. The Doctor seems relatively unique in having come to terms with the apparent sentience of his TARDIS — though even he often forgets that he’s not always so much in control of the thing as giving it general suggestions.
That his TARDIS is so persnickety — so insolubly “broken” — might, and here I’m wildly speculating, be a result of its will having become much stronger than usual for a TARDIS. It’s too spirited, and doesn’t always obey orders just because they were given by its “owner”. Thus, it’s broken. A flaw in its system. Sounds very Time Lordy to me. There are parallels in many other works of fiction, of course. Popular anime in particular (Ghost in the Shell, Eva) keeps coming to mind.
It only took a push of a button to delete Romana’s room. I always thought of it as being as easily configurable as having a house in the Sims or something. The fans more into the technical details say that there is an outer shell (what you see from outside, the police box) and an inner shell (the inside) connected by a dimensional bridge (allowing you to walk in and out). So the chameleon circuit flaw only pertains to the outer shell, so it’s not a contradiction that the inside can still easily change.
The sentience of the TARDIS was something established pretty early on. I remember a William Hartnell episode (one of the earliest ones in the first season) where the TARDIS was trying to get a message across to the Doctor and his companions.
That the Tardis is alive and has sentience doesn’t necessarily mean it’s organic in the sense of having flesh like us, that is, with cells, tissues, organs, veins and arteries etc (unlike the Moya of Farscape, which is biological, so is flesh-based, or a cyborg ship at least.)
I don’t know it’s established what exactly it’s made of or based on, but I like to speculate that it is at least partially, if not fully, holographic with force fields, like the holodecks in Star Trek or the holoship of Red Dwarf. That would fit well with the easy instantaneous creation, deletion, redecoration and arrangement of rooms. Given that the Doctor simply left Romana and K9 with the plans for building a Tardis, and wasn’t particularly worried about having to give them any base materials, would seem to support this. It doesn’t seem to be difficult for them to build Tardises, such as I mentioned with Romana, and also in various episodes, like one I remember with Peter Davison where the Tardis was in bits and pieces and he had to put it back together again.
Or, as the Gallifreyans are pretty much the top boys technologically, perhaps they find it rather easy (with the correct machines, tools etc) to make things from directly manipulating the basics of reality itself, as the logopolitans do, who are programmers of reality itself.
When people say that the inside of the Tardis is infinite, I assume what they really mean is that it is sufficently large that from our perspective it might as well be infinite, or that it can be increased in size indefinitely, without any cost in performance. I dislike when people easily sling the word “infinite” around, when what they are talking about needn’t necessarily be infinite, only very, very large. I think the same when people talk about a multiverse of infinite universes. I prefer to think of a really, really, huge number of universes, perhaps even to the extent where every possibility exists, but not infinite. I think you can have a multiverse large enough to encompass every possible combination of matter, events etc without necessarily being infinite.
Yeah, basically. That’s a detail I didn’t get into in my original response, mostly from apathy: that being “grown” doesn’t even necessarily imply an organic element. Crystals are grown, for instance. Though since this concept comes from the NDAs, and given what the TARDIS looks like now, I get the impression there is some unclear organic component. Probably not like anything we know. Still, “living” in some sense.
There’s this business about “block transfer computation”, that I don’t entirely understand, that seems to allow — as you say — parts of the TARDIS to be deleted and turned into pure energy, or reformed or moved around. General matter-to-energy stuff. For all I know, that might also have to do with how a TARDIS is initially “grown” — some kind of block transfer algorithm applied to energy from the Eye of Harmony that snakes and branches out and gradually forms this energy-soaked… thing, this pod. Would kind of make sense. Which, of course, the Time Lords would whack away with however they felt, to make it more palatable — interior and external cloaking, installing machinery to harness and direct the pod’s energies.
As for the Romana thing — well. Davies seems to have either forgotten or ignored that. Though again I’m just making stuff up here, the mathematical speculation above might sort of explain part of it. And maybe there would be some equivalent source of E-Space energy for the computations to work on. Maybe she’d not end up with a traditional TARDIS as we know them. Maybe the plans wouldn’t even work at all.
I get the impression, sort of, that in the current series the interior chameleon circuit (or whatever similar technology) is simply busted altogether — revealing the “skeleton” of the ship and forcing the Doctor to cobble together many of the surface elements on his own — the grating and tire pumps and paperweights. Very much a raw, “burned-out” interior.
That Hartnell episode is “The Edge of Destruction”. What’s interesting is that the original series didn’t really get back to that in so much detail — the occasional anthropomorphic comment aside. I’m really fond of the way Davies has gone back to the beginning of the show for much of his mythology, and much of his concept of the series.
To clarify, the original post was in response to some guy on a forum who was making lots of noise about the comment in “The Impossible Planet” about how the Doctor can’t simply build a TARDIS as they’re grown, not constructed. Some of the stuff here might help to explain that comment — especially if they’re grown out of the Eye, which… seems to be of indeterminate status, in the new series.
Hey. Being grown out of the Eye might also help to explain why apparently (as in the TV movie, and later tie-in fiction that tries to explain its inconsistencies) each TARDIS has a “link” to the Eye as a power source. Someone said elsewhere that he kind of got the impression that actually it’s that constant link to the eye, each TARDIS sort of overlapping it in contemporary time-space, no matter where else it travels, which explains in part the “constant present” status of Gallifrey, where Time Lords are unable to travel to their own past or future.
Of course, in the new series the Doctor’s TARDIS doesn’t seem to have that link anymore. He’s said it gets its energy “from the Universe”, and he’s had to do things like park the TARDIS on the Cardiff Rift to refuel. I wonder if this is the first TARDIS cut free of its tether.
When I actually thought about the TARDIS construction in the past, I’d always thought of the control room piece. That is the constant.
I guess I’d pretty much figured once you got that, and maybe a few other pieces that are seen less, a TARDIS would effectively build itself. A Tardis interior could be as infinite as it bothered to build, though it might be constrainted by some limits (such as how big it could manage or control.) As it builds, it could also expand itself. After a point, if the core wasn’t already somewhat sentient, you got something complex enough that it could become sentient. Plus, with the wonky reality of the interior, it could presumably overcome certain size restrictions that would eventually cripple any city or world sized computer that we might build.
It would make giving plans a bit more reasonable, as well as the Doctor’s constant tinkering. You build and maintain the core, and the core builds and maintains the rest. Only in certain circumstances might you directly intervene on the rest. Though the Doctor has had his share of times when he’s ripped out a wall panel to work…
Which is pretty much what you’ve said, anyway…
You could even go with the controller controlling its being built/grown out of the Eye. And the Doctor’s tinkering, combined with his TARDIS’ personality, combined with the occassional catastrophic event inside his TARDIS, eventually led to his TARDIS becoming fully self-sufficient. (Throw in his half the time rogue status, and he’d even have a reason to look towards that option anyway. Or at least his TARDIS would have reason.)
To clarify, the original post was in response to some guy on a forum who was making lots of noise about the comment in “The Impossible Planet” about how the Doctor can’t simply build a TARDIS as they’re grown, not constructed. Some of the stuff here might help to explain that comment — especially if they’re grown out of the Eye, which… seems to be of indeterminate status, in the new series.
Hey. Being grown out of the Eye might also help to explain why apparently (as in the TV movie, and later tie-in fiction that tries to explain its inconsistencies) each TARDIS has a “link” to the Eye as a power source. Someone said elsewhere that he kind of got the impression that actually it’s that constant link to the eye, each TARDIS sort of overlapping it in contemporary time-space, no matter where else it travels, which explains in part the “constant present” status of Gallifrey, where Time Lords are unable to travel to their own past or future.
Of course, in the new series the Doctor’s TARDIS doesn’t seem to have that link anymore. He’s said it gets its energy “from the Universe”, and he’s had to do things like park the TARDIS on the Cardiff Rift to refuel. I wonder if this is the first TARDIS cut free of its tether.
Yeah, I got the idea that I was reading one half of somebody else’s conversation. Wasn’t the Eye of Harmony inside Gallifrey itself, which has now apparently been blown up or something? That would explain needing a new power source. You’re discussing an episode I haven’t seen yet, by the way. I’ve just been watching them as they come out on the ABC, even though I’ve downloaded some episodes.
Circumstances would seem to suggest that, yeah — though as usual, no mention has even been made of the Eye, much less what’s become of it.
As for the episode: well! It’s pretty good, for what it is.
Christopher Bidmead seems to have had the idea that the TARDIS was in some sense an abstract mathematical object, composed of information (he was trained as a mathematician, I think, and I’ve often wondered if he was partly inspired by Norman Kagan’s “The Mathenauts”). Hence, “block transfer computation” (I suspect the name was inspired by Douglas Hofstadter columns about computer graphics).
But most of the other writers never picked up on that.