Okay, so he’s got shelter covered by having the TARDIS, which I assume has a place to sleep and a bathroom and stuff. It does not, I assume, magically generate food and clothes and stuff. And the Doctor doesn’t have a job, at least not in the ‘something that provides a paycheck’ sense.
And yet, I know for a fact that he threw out a pair of shoes once and has not been running around barefoot since then, so he presumably obtained a new pair? Did he steal them? Do the various people he save give him money? Where, exactly, would a Time Lord go to cash a check if someone wrote him one?
This is bothering me, now that I’ve thought about it.
At least in one of the very first episodes they have a machine that generates food but unfortunately I don’t remember whether it was replicated or just prepared from stored ingredients.
He has a huge wardrobe of clothes, which you can see in the first Christmas Special. The TARDIS is considerably larger and more comprehensive than you usually see. There’s more to it than just the Control Room.
As GuanoLad says, there’s the wardrobe room in the TARDIS, and as the Doctor is 900-whatever years old he’s had all that time to collect various clothes and end up with his absurdly large collection. He can probably use his sonic screwdriver to get things to fit- the various Doctors certainly aren’t the same size.
At least in the new-Who, the Doctor sometimes eats in the places he is visiting- Satellite 5 slushies and school lunch in “School Reunion,” certainly.
I have this horribly wonderful image of the Tenth Doctor not actually eating food, just maintaining a variety of salt, mineral, and protein licks. He licks so many other things that it seems appropriate.
Back when Peter Davison was driving, it used to have a swimming pool. And cloisters. He had to jettison a large part of it though, so it’s not as big as it used to be.
I’ve always wondered about this… is the TARDIS infinitely big? If so, when they jettisoned 25%, that must mean that it still is infinite. Even if you lose every fourth room (all the way out to infinity), 75% of infinity is still very, very roomy.
I used to love it back in the Davison era (“You were my Doctor”) when you’d see their bedrooms. Tegan and Nyssa sharing… Turlough complaining that’s Adric’s looks like “a kid’s room”.
As to the OP, there’s a food replicator in the TARDIS too, or at least there was in the days of the First Doctor.
Plus, the Doctor’s pockets are bigger on the inside, so he can probably carry around the odd sandwich with him.
In “The Empty Child” they mentioned having to regularly stop off on Earth for milk, so presumably the food replicator’s gone bung: I like it better when they don’t explain stuff like “where does he get money?” with a writer’s handwave. He’s the Doctor: he can do anything.
I was really uncharacteristically annoyed that he happened to have a stethoscope on him in the recent “Planet of the Ood” episode. Really? You land, at random, on an alien planet, go for a walk in the snow and you happen to bring along a functional 20th century Earth stethoscope? Whatever for?
I think he just has LOTS of stuff in his pockets. In the classic series I’ve seen them do the joke a few times of someone telling him to empty his pockets and he just starts pulling out all sorts of random stuff, far more than should really fit in there.
What DCTrekkie said, and of course, he is a doctor (THE Doctor, in fact. “The definite article, one might say”) so a stethoscope’s not the most unlikely thing for him to carry around. He has it with him again three episodes later, so it’s fairly established as something he has in his pocketses – which are bigger on the inside, anyway, leaving plenty of room for jelly babies, yo-yos and clockwork mice.
He tends to pick up resources on planets if he is running low. In one episode he had bags of gold dust in the storage room. I think it was supposed to contain most materials he’d need to do repairs on the TARDIS, and the fact that he runs out is why he has to such for certain elements. You would think when you land on a planet of gold, you would just load up on the stuff right. Then again it was the only way to kill the cybermen for almost the whole series. The first doctor ate replicator food and water, but I haven’t seen it used since him. Since then you see everybody eating out when they stop. I think they live a bit like a family on vacation with the car, stopping at resorts, and gas stations, but having to occasionally drive through the bad part of town where the car then breaks down. Tom Baker showed the Doctor’s propensity to pick up items as he walked quit well.
This series alone he’s had the aforementioned stethescope and mouse, but also had a telescope, and a water pistol, and he has had the 3D glasses. None of these things were strictly doing what you’d normally expect of them.
Well, sure, but you have to suppose someone (something?) somewhere, sometime, has come up with a better listening device than a 20th century stethoscope, no? If I had those pockets, I’d keep at least a portable vitals monitor in 'em.
(Thanks, actually, I feel a bit better about it. I wasn’t really aware of the pocket gag; I’ll pay more attention in the future.)
With the Doctor, I think it’s a style thing: the seventh Doctor had a pocket watch that functioned as a scanner/multi-meter, and the ninth had powerful electronic binoculars that looked for all the world like antique folding opera glasses. It may look like a 20th century stethoscope, but it probably picks up sub-molecular vibrations, performs an ultrasound scan, and has a built-in MP3 player.
