Doctor Who: The 11 Best Ever TARDIS Designs

9. The Fifth Doctor€™s TARDIS

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In Tom Baker€™s final year his atrocious TARDIS interior was given an overhaul. What we got was a middle panel hiding that hideous join and some work done on the doors. It€™s overall a much more polished look, a bit more spacious but it is still exceedingly dull, and grey. It was also beginning to look very dated and rather than a spaceship, just looked like a studio set. However a lick of paint was less than enough to save the console, as week by week, bits would come off or go missing. In €˜The Visitation€™ a handle actually comes off in the Doctor€™s hand. There is even a glaring great hole visible in the underside of the console for several stories due to a missing panel in the base. For Season 20 a revamp was done to the console, which did it no favours as it seemed to be covered with liquorice allsorts and glitter and functionally the console had seen better days. It broke down repeatedly and kept falling apart due to the battering it received from the special effects team who had turned blowing up the console into a beloved past time. However during this era, we got to see more of the TARDIS than ever before. Another past time that seemed to come with the John Nathan-Turner years was running up and down lots of TARDIS corridors. €˜Logopolis€™ and €˜Castrovalva€™ two consecutive stories featured exactly that. That might sound great by current standards, but it made the TARDIS seem so repetitive and boring. Admittedly we got to see bedrooms of the companions every now and then, that showed that the TARDIS could appear somewhat homely and both €˜Logopolis€™ and €˜Castrovalva€™ tried to inject a little bit of variety with the cloister room and the zero room, two rooms that weren€™t seen in the original series since. The cloister room was resurrected in the TV Movie but the Zero room was ejected part way through Castrovalva, disappointing considering it was quite an extensive set. A bit plain but nonetheless impressive. For the most part though, the TARDIS interior was quite, well, boring. Apart from the previous example, each room was the same, and the fact they were seen so regularly, took a lot of the mystery out of the ship.
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My name is Jon, recently graduated media production student. Always on the look out for chances to do what I enjoy and make it count. Writing, filming, animating, editing, radio. My speciality seems to be Doctor Who, years of accumulated knowledge and passion appear to be paying off creatively this being one outlet channel. So thanks for sharing in that with me and offering your support by reading my articles.