As best I can figure out it basically serves as a home base for undercover anthropological study.
Some of it is absurdly over-engineered for purpose if it is just a time machine, cars generally don’t have swimming pools and bedrooms etc.
Making them “alive” and sentient seems awfully cruel, especially if you’re going to put decommissioned ones in museums. Not sure what this adds to the function either.
The fact they were mass grown, and each time lord or lady had their own suggests against the scientific study option.
It’s the work of an unimaginably advanced billion-year-old civilization. They made it that complex because they could.
Saying it’s over-engineered because it has a swimming pool is like saying that your car is over-engineered because it has air conditioning. It’s not as if humanity doesn’t make devices far more complex than they need to be - you’re looking at such a device right now.
Why have a TARDIS with a swimming pool? Dunno. Why have a starship with a bowling alley, a gymnasium, an Olympic-size swimming pool, a theatre, an ecumenical chapel, an arboretum, a bar, and holodecks?
Keep in mind, while TARDISes (TARDII?) were common in Time Lord culture, we really only ever see the one on the TV show, and that’s a damaged model owned by a lunatic. We really don’t know what a “regular” TARDIS would look like, or what uses they were most often put towards. Swimming pools may not have been standard.
I’m betting that his is a very old model that was never meant to be in use as long as it has been, and that it has evolved in ways that the original designers could never have forseen.
In Classic Who we saw the inside of (at least the control room) of the Master’s TARDIS and the Rani’s TARDIS. Those rooms looked pretty much the same as the Doctor’s, and the Master stated that his TARDIS was a far superior model.
Why overthink this?
The tardis looks just like a policeman’s call box. …So surely the purpose is to enable the bobbies of 1968 to make their calls. In black and white.
(and did anybody in the general public actually know what was inside those blue booths, anyway?)
Didn’t some classic eps hint that Time Lords were kind of like guardians for the other races in the space/time continuum? Before the writers got caught up with all the Dalek stuff…
Might have been an emergent quality, especially for this “defective” one that was able to detect a kindred rogue soul. And as for the cruelty factor, it seems from the gathered evidence that the Time Lord establishment are never above a dick move.
The Two Doctors (#2, #6, Peri, Jamie) is one of the eps that (IIRC) seem to imply this, if not outright saying it. I’ll have to watch it again sometime to check this out. Between Pretty Peri in Peril, Seville, and the awesome pairing of 2 and 6, this was a pretty fun ep.
Some NuWho episodes mention it too - there’s Eccleston in Father’s Day: There used to be laws stopping this kind of thing from happening. My people would have stopped this
“Chameleon” is the English translation of whatever Gallifreyan word that was used to describe the circuit. We don’t know what it was actually referring to.
For that matter, Time Lord technology could be so different from ours that the word “circuit” could be referring to something we couldn’t possibly understand.
As the last of his race, I imagine that to a certain extent, the inside of the Doctor’s Tardis is kind of like Will Forte’s character’s home in The Last Man on Earth. That is to say, he’s a thousand year old eccentric alien with a time machine that’s infinitely large on the inside. He probably spends a great deal of time filling it up with whatever stupid shit comes to mind whenever he gets bored.
Sure, but did the Rani’s TARDIS have a swimming pool? That’s what I meant when I said we don’t really know what other TARDIS are like. We’ve had tons of little throw away comments about stuff in the Doctor’s TARDIS, and even a few episodes where they go to parts of the TARDIS that aren’t the control room. We don’t have those details for any of the other TARDISes that have shown up in the series. We don’t know how many of those details are standard to all such ships, and which are specific to the Doctor’s.
