#tardises

[gotyouanyway]

tardis/time lord symbiosis as a mathematical operation along the lines of a complex multidimensional trigonometric proof. transforming each side until they’re not only equivalent but actually identical. ?

[pl9090]

[gallifreywhere]

[non-normal-nate]

Interesting TARDIS facts

The ‘TT’ in ‘TT Capsule’ stands for “Timespace Traversal”

Type 20 TARDISes only had 4 control panels on the Console

i’ll add more facts once I either remember them or find more.

[st4rshiptr00per]

powerful image in my mind of the tardis getting completely nuked and being all burnt and crispy on the outside and everybodys like "oh NO it killed her!" and the doctors like "no no no dont worry about that. see look" and starts peeling off the charred exterior in big chunks to reveal a slightly too pale, slightly too smooth, mucusy but intact police box underneath

[sparrowlucero]

What doctor who monster do you think has the most wasted potential?

i like hide and think it's cute that its janky looking monster is just lost and wants to get home, but a while back i found out that the original pitch was about time lord who had been rotting away in the dimensional woods and wanted to cannibalize the doctor in order to give himself new life and escape

like, oh my god, can you imagine

[the-worms-in-your-bones]

One of my favorite parts of the wilderness years has got to be the fact that the writers looked at the time lords and went ‘they could be weirder and worse’ and then proceeded to come up with some insane concepts, most of which sadly did not make their way into new who

[claraoswalds]

#mrs flood who are you: time lord edition

[thebraxiatelcollection]

"Some TARDISes tend not to hang around if the operator departs. It's this symbiotic link. Very attached to their owners. Most TARDISes spend millennia grieving, some just jettison themselves into the Vortex never to be seen again. Somewhere, at the end of time, is an elephant graveyard of broken TARDISes. I always meant to go and have a look one day."

Fifth Doctor in Big Finish: Omega

[corallapis]

also the like. implications of being in telepathic symbiosis with your tardis but only being able to access it when given authorization by the castellan? which presumably doesn't happen very often? maybe non-renegade (/pre-war) time lords usually aren't even aware of the extent of their connection. maybe renegades are WAY more intertwined w their tardises than is considered normal.

[gotyouanyway]

i’m not sure if this is something i’d do to the cia main characters (maybe side characters, or way later in the main guys’ timeline) but i want to write a dynamic where two time lords are symbiotically linked to the same tardis and are both equally emotionally invested in it. it would be fun for partnered cia agents because it adds flavour to the partnership if they share a relationship with their tardis. thinking of a story where the two of them without hesitation or discussion abandon/sabotage a mission in order to save their tardis, then they have to deal with the fallout together and it’s them against the agency. or the tardis helps one of them betray the other and the drama is insane. i just think having an extra guy in there opens up so many new kinds of tardis stories we could be doing it all

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

Are the Backrooms a broken TARDIS?

Are the Backrooms a broken TARDIS?

🪞 What Are the Backrooms?

For those unfamiliar with the mythos, the Backrooms are a human urban myth/legend that describes an endless, liminal labyrinth of fluorescent-lit, yellow-carpeted rooms that one "noclips" into by accident—that is, by falling through reality itself. Once inside, escape is rare, sanity is optional, and time seems to move… wrong.

Key features include:

Shifting architecture: rooms repeat, distort, and change dimensions.

Non-Euclidean layouts: corridors loop or stretch in an impossible manner.

Chronological instability: time appears to pass inconsistently, if at all.

Paratextual paranoia: Vaguely-described 'entities' may stalk the corridors.

🌀 So, Are They a Broken TARDIS?

Let's examine the possibilities.

📦 TARDISes and Interior Collapse

When a TARDIS is damaged, especially from temporal stress, its dimensional interior can collapse into paradox loops or misfire into recursive spatial traps. We've seen:

Corridors twisting endlessly, and rooms vanishing from memory.

A corrupted TARDIS creating an infinite prison of alternate timelines.

So yes—TARDISes are capable of housing rooms that shouldn't exist and sometimes do so maliciously.

🔧 Diagnostic Parallels

Backroom-like phenomena could be explained by:

A rogue or feral TARDIS losing control of its architectural configuration.

An Interior Perception Filter gone haywire, trapping occupants in looping cognitive constructs.

A crashed prototype (pre-Type 40) abandoned in the vortex and left to rot until reanchored to N-Space.

🚫 Counterpoints

But let's not jump to conclusions:

The Backrooms have no known control room or Eye of Harmony.

The "noclip" mechanic is anomalous even by Gallifreyan standards. TARDISes don't usually kidnap people without a psychic link or a darn good reason (though you may counterpoint this one with sheer madness).

No known signs of a symbiotic interface.

🏫So ...

Could the Backrooms be the decaying husk of a broken TARDIS? Possibly. But they could just as easily be:

A collapsed pocket dimension.

A trapped reality fragment from the Dark Times.

A thought-based prison from the 10th Dimension.

Or (most likely) a low-level spatial trauma node clinging to a forgotten corner of the Web of Time.

Either way, we don't recommend it.

Related:

💬|🛸🌌Can a TARDIS be altered for travel in the multiverse?: How you might go about getting to the multiverse in your TARDIS.

💬|📱🕸️What does the Web of Time look like?: Overview on the Web of Time and its relevance.

💬|📱👁️What’s Eye of Harmony?: What this is and how it works, and how crucial it is to Time Lords.

Hope that helped! 😃

Any orange text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →📢Announcements |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts → Features: ⭐Guest Posts | 🍜Chomp Chomp with Myishu →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired 😴

[intuitive-revelations]

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been thinking a lot about the exact chronology of ancient Gallifrey, and specifically I've put a lot of attention on the Caldera and the Citadel, plus related things like the Eye of Harmony, the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, the Untempered Schism etc.

All these things seem to be located in the same place on Gallifrey, albeit some at different times, and often overlap in nature. After some thinking, I think I've worked how everything goes together, as well as the order of events. At some point I want to create a fully history, but for the sake of this we'll focus primarily on the subjects above, with some other major events sprinkled in for context.

A Very Brief History of the Capitol

[ID: Surviving parts of the old Capitol, in an illustration from Lungbarrow. Crystal-like towers and walkways stand over a waterfall. The TARDIS, in pyramid form, dematerialises.]

Pythian Era - The capital city is built near the Mountains of Solace and Solitude (likely, in antiquity, a stronghold against the Gin-Seng cats to the south). Beneath the Pythia's temple, in the centre of the city, is the Cavern of Prophecy. Within the cave is a deep, deep opening known as the Crevasse of Memories That Will Be, which holds, in the astral plane, something known as the Gate of the Future, a tear into the time vortex far greater than the similar natural rifts that occur elsewhere on Gallifrey. Time flows out from it, from the future, to the past Gallifrey. In times of meditation, the Pythia sits in a hanging cage above the Crevasse, breathing in the rising vapours, which aid her in her clairvoyance.

[ID: Gif edit made by me, featuring the last Pythia sat in a small cage slowly swinging in a chasm as a mist slowly rises around her.]

The Intuitive Revelation - The Neotechnologists, led by Rassilon, bring a revolution. The Pythia curses Gallifrey with sterility and cuts the ropes holding her cage, falling into the abyss. The Gate of the Future inverts, forming the Gate of the Past. Visibly, the Doppler-effect like colouring of the vortex changes - no longer red, flowing towards the viewer, but blue and flowing away (ironically directionally the reverse of the real Doppler effect). Time from the new future flowing into the chaotic past.

The new government take control of the Capitol. A new age of space exploration arises, with the Shobogans taking on the name, for now, of "Space Lords". One of these first individual explorers, semi-authorised predecessors to future Time Lord renegades, is a woman named Tecteun.

The First Attempt - The stellar engineers, including Rassilon and Omega, make their first attempt at capturing the energy of a collapsing star, recieving the energy on Gallifrey using an obelisk, like that later used to channel energy from the Eye of Harmony, in the middle of the city, using the nature of the Crevasse.

The experiment is a catastrophic failure. A hole is punctured into the Spiral Yssgaroth, unleashing Vampires through openings throughout the universe, fracturing out from the experiment.

[ID: From The Book of the War, an illustration of the "Eyes of the Yssgaroth", human-like eyeballs looking through holes punctured into spacetime.]

Part of the Old Capitol is destroyed in a great blast, destroying the Cavern of Prophecy and opening up the Crevasse, leaving a giant crater: the Caldera. It is likely that many are killed. Left behind in the middle of the crater, is the Gate of the Past, now manifest in the physical world: an open gap in reality. In this form, it becomes known as the Untempered Schism.

(I also suspect this is when Rassilon is forced to regenerate for the first time, to the shock of on-lookers, having secretly previously recieved Tecteun's genetic modifications - I plan to expand on this theory in a future post.)

The Vampire War / Rebuilding of the Capitol - The exact circumstances of the experiment are covered up. Rassilon, leaving to fight the Vampire hoard, swears Omega to secrecy regarding the project during the Arcalian High Council's investigation.

[ID: A gif, rotating around the Citadel is constructed over the Caldera, from part of the (likely partially-symbolic) time-lapse in The Timeless Children.]

Though some of the city survives, including parts of the Pythian temple, a new colossal city-complex begins construction in the place of the old one, suspended over the Caldera, the centrepiece of the new Capitol: the Citadel. It is built as a defensive structure, both for the war, and to protect the new, growing elite, surrounded by a great circular wall named "Rassilon's Rampart". The "core" of the structure, on which the towers rest, reaches down deep into Caldera and the deeper Crevasse.

Meanwhile the Untempered Schism is taken out of the city by those fearing further destruction, to a place in the nearby hills that will one day be known as the Weeping Field, where prospective Time Academy students are initiated.

[ID: The Untempered Schism in the Doctor's time, as seen in The Sound of Drums. It sits in a stone frame on red grass, with the Seal of Rassilon in front of it, and flames on either side. Within it, the blue "past" variant of the RTD1-era time vortex flows away from the viewer. The Citadel's lights are visible in the background.]

(Side note: it's possible the Untempered Schism's 'ring' is deliberately designed to evoke the Caldera. Note how it's lined with pieces sticking out. Look a bit like the battlements on Rassilon's Rampart, don't they? Surrounding the hole into the vortex just as they surround the crater.)

The Anchoring of the Thread - Several centuries later, once the Vampires are more or less defeated, Rassilon returns home. He coups Pandak I, forcing him to resign, and takes the Presidency.

By now the Citadel is more or less completed, though for the next few centuries it still lacks its characteristic dome, likely added during a later founding conflict.

[ID: Gallifrey, around the time the first TARDISes are grown, from The Lost Dimension. In the background past a small outsider village is the Citadel, new and gleaming, but undomed.]

The Triumvirate retry their experiment at Qqaba / Polyphilos, attempting to capture the collapsed star. When the experiment goes wrong once more, Omega's ship falls inside, as spacetime threatens to crack open again. With temporal energy flowing though him (a la the Bad Wolf), Rassilon reshapes the laws of physics, forming an event horizon, and black holes as we know them.

The black hole is dimensionally captured and suspended in the moment it collapses and the event horizon is formed, creating the Eye of Harmony, controlled using the Obelisk of Rassilon storied in the Panopticon Vaults. Meanwhile, the black hole itself is suspended within the temporal singularity of the Caldera, deep below the Citadel.

Harnessing the power of the Eye and the Caldera rift, Rassilon "anchors" chronology around Gallifrey, creating the Web of Time and placing it under the control of the Gallifreyans, now Time Lords.

Future Developments - Over the years, many changes come to Rassilon's Gallifrey.

Over the years, the more and more of the old city is replaced with new towers, forming the new Capitol around a now domed Citadel. Interweaved with these buildings over 28 square miles is much of the new Time Academy, such that the Academy is sometimes considered a whole city itself annexed to the Citadel.

While the remnants of the Pythian Temple are eventually torched by Rassilon, hunting down dissenters, many old buildings remain intact. These continue to be inhabited far into the future, in a community known as "Low Town" or the "Lower Len", as opposed to the "upper" city above. Shanties surround the surviving buildings, some climbing up Rassilon's Rampart.

Another such community is based around the "Old Harbour", whcih once sat on the coast of the now recessed Sea of Time. Nowadays, it likely sits on the shore of the small (possibly designed) lakes near the Capitol, where streams from the mountains presumably once drained directly into the sea.

[ID: From Hell Bent: a screencap as Rassilon turns from looking out the window from an Inner Council chamber high above the Capitol. In the background can be seen some lakes between the mountains, with some signs of what might be buildings on their shores.]

(Side note: I reckon this shot above might actually give us a glimpse of Old Harbour. I might just be imagining things, but there's some small features around and on the lakes I reckon could be docks or buildings? Interestingly, this also comes as Rassilon asks about the Cloister Bells ringing, and Old Habour is well known for the bells in its clocktower, which might explain why Rassilon was looking out at it from the window.)

In the space around the Eye in the Caldera, the Cloisters, the core of the APC net and later the Matrix, are constructed. The structure itself is, externally at least, relatively small, but it generates an entire 'micro-universe' on the Astral plane once accessed by the Pythia. Indeed, just as the Crevasse once allowed the meditating Pythia to see the future, so does the Matrix create its own prophecies.

[ID: From Hell Bent, the Doctor and Ohila converse in the entranceway to the Cloisters, a dark space with glowing optic fibres running across cobwebbed columns.]

In the Matrix is a "womb-like" null-space is where most TARDISes are grown, taking advantages of the Caldera's spatio-temporal properties. Budding within the Citadel Cloisters, a TARDIS's "Cloister Room" is one of the first parts to grow.

By the time of the Time War, though possibly earlier, the sealed Caldera also forms the resting site for many dying Battle TARDISes, the Under Croft, where they presumably decay and fertilise the growth of new time ships.

[stillthesunkenstars]

i love womem ♀

[strange-destinations]

It’s Bandcamp Friday!! Which means 100% of purchases go to the artists on Bandcamp today. So why not toss a coin or two to me, the person who wrote smash hit concept EP ‘AISLING GREEN KISSED THE FAERIE QUEEN’ or a multitude of instrumental nerdy soundtracks? I’ve gotta justify the fact that I bought an autoharp somehow.

[halfbakedideas]

ranking the doctors’ tardis interiors based on how accessible (wheelchair & white cane) they are, imo

(best -> worst)

5th

4th

3rd

fugitive

8th

9th/10th

12th

11th’s first interior

14th/15th (yes it has ramps but they’re steep enough you’d get a full workout just going up them)

war

13th

note: i’m not a wheelchair user but i do use a white cane sometimes

@k0sch-31