Doctor Who: 10 Things Everyone Always Gets Wrong About The TARDIS

One of the rarely discussed aspects of the TARDIS is its weight, and that's probably because the answer seems wildly inconsistent.

In The Day of the Doctor, a UNIT helicopter easily picks up the TARDIS with a crane and flies it to the National Gallery in London. Yet, in Flatline, something has caused the exterior of the TARDIS to shrink with the Doctor inside, and he eliminates enough of the weight for Clara Oswald to carry it in her bag.

The Twelfth Doctor also states that if the TARDIS landed with its full weight on the Earth, it would fracture the surface of the planet. In the classic series, the TARDIS was said to weigh fifty thousand tons in Alzarius' gravity (the home planet of Adric), and in Castrovalva, seventeen thousand tons of thrust were jettisoned for the TARDIS to escape Event One, also known as The Big Bang.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the TARDIS simply weighs as much as a standard Earth police box. Perhaps that's true on the outside, and, like the ship's size, its mass is a case of "heavier on the inside".