Doctor Who Series 10: 7 Big Questions We're Asking After 'Smile

5. Why Is The TARDIS Disguised As A Police Box?

Fans of Doctor Who will have already known the answer – a broken chameleon circuit. The TARDIS is meant to blend in with its surroundings but is stuck in the form of a 1963 Police Box, a fact that puzzled the First Doctor and Susan the first time they left Totters Lane junkyard.

It does nonetheless go through the occasional external reboot, sometimes with quite dramatic adjustments to the specifications, but as the Doctor explained to Amy (in the minisode, Meanwhile in the TARDIS): “Every time the TARDIS materialises in a new location within the first nanosecond of landing it analyses its surroundings, calculates a 12-dimensional data map of everything within a thousand mile radius, and determines which outer shell would blend in best with the environment…and then it disguises itself as a police telephone box from 1963.”

So that should be the end of it, shouldn’t it? Not after the lovely moment in Smile when Bill thinks that the Doctor’s answer is a fudge. She offers an interesting alternative as to why he doesn’t seem too bothered about fixing the fault, one that is met with something of a throwback to the Twelfth Doctor’s more acerbic personality in series eight.

The Doctor’s angry reaction to Bill presuming to know him, suggests she’s hit a nerve. So is Bill onto something by suggesting that the TARDIS’s design is a symbol of his need to be a saviour figure – an expression of his mission statement to provide ‘help and assistance’?