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Doctor Who: How The TARDIS Is The Key to Everything in The Series

Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memories of an Impossible Blue Box is an important reminder that the TARDIS is the key to everything in the series.

As you might know, there's a new Doctor Who book out in the UK now, Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memories of an Impossible Blue Box, as told to longtime Doctor Who novelist Steve Cole. It's been said before that the TARDIS might be the true hero of the show, and the real love story has always been between The Doctor and the TARDIS. It was part of the fan fiction style hints in the Virgin novels of the 1990s. it became canon in the series during Steven Moffat's tenure since romantic love has been a central theme in Moffat's work in general.

BBC Books released an excerpt from I, TARDIS: Memories of an Impossible Blue Box that evokes all those thoughts again, not that hardcore Doctor Who fans need an excuse not to think about the odd and coolest implications of series lore.

Excerpt: Doctor Who from the TARDIS' Point of View

"The picosecond I am thumped into existence, my diagnostics kick in. I have sprung from the old but I am the same. Everything I had, I still possess.

Everything.

And, once, the old must have been new.

Scrutiny checks hum and flutter over hardware, firmware, wetware and software. Systems and registers. Controls and conceptions. My fault locator counts on its fingers and wrings its hands. There's so much of me. I'm still building, spiralling outward. The new dark star at my centre threatens glorious collapse, pushing my potential into the infinite.
'Stop… Stop. Concentrate on one thing. One thing…'

I remember the Doctor's voice, echoing from so long ago, yet still fresh as successive seconds. Those are words I helped him to speak through new lips, that very first time I helped him change. They help my systems shift safely to stationary as I recall that when the Doctor's body wore thin, I helped him to renew himself. A part of me exchanging life and light and power with a part of him.

We have changed and stayed the same across all of time and space.

But there was a time before.

The start of things.

It's not easy to access the data around my origins. It is hazy.

Contradictory.

Gallifrey. Old gods. New lords. Black holes and dark matters and shush, don't tell.
But more generally, I know that space-time units are grown rather than built. Like crystals forming not from a solution, but from all solutions. And, since we are born with every answer, we burn with the need for every question.
Structures and circuits, both mechanical and virtual, are grafted onto us and soldered with artron energy. At our core is a trans-dimensional link to a collapsed star, a vast power we must harness if we are to explore these questions correctly.
In the fullness of time – and in the vastness of space – explore I did.
Except, here's the funny thing. There was one question I heard louder and brighter, over and over again, wherever I was taken.

HELP?

Each time I heard the question, I knew the right answer…"

The TARDIS is Everywhere and "Everywhen"

The extract from Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memories of an Impossible Blue Box reiterates several ideas about the TARDIS that began as fan theory and speculation that have since become cannon. One is that in the classic series' long history of the TARDIS landing where people needed saving. Another, which is weirder and cosmic, is that the TARDIS exists in all of Space and Time and sees it all at once, including future Doctors. That brings us to an interesting wrinkle.

In the recent season finale, "Empire of Death," the TARDIS is controlled by Sutekh as if it were under demonic possession. We are introduced to the Memory TARDIS, which is a TARDIS created by the TARDIS and Ruby's memories, and therefore, a clone of the TARDIS… or the same TARDIS. This means the TARDIS is a Quantum entity. It doesn't have clones. It is always the same TARDIS. And the Memory TARDIS shows Ruby moments from "73 Yards" the episode whose mystery has confounded virtually everyone who watched it. It doesn't explain the mysteries but introduces a new one: how does the TARDIS remember an alternate timeline? That means the TARDIS exists in and remembers alternate timelines and universes where it exists as well. That makes any story and every story possible and canon in all of Doctor Who past, present and future, but the love story between the Doctor and the TARDIS remains.

Doctor Who: I, TARDIS: Memories of an Impossible Blue Box is available in ebook and Audiobook now, with the print edition out now in the UK but not available in the US until September.

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