Doctor Who: The 11 Best Ever TARDIS Designs

6. The Eighth Doctor€™s TARDIS

I feel guilty ranking this one so low down but like the Eleventh Doctor€™s TARDIS it does suffer from being too big and shapeless, the console room is also a dozen other rooms in one. It doesn€™t help that we never got to see that much of it, I mean we got to see some corridors and the cloister room but we never really got to feel at home there. There was a library, a greenhouse, a study, a huge mantelpiece with a variety of clocks and heaven knows what else. But at least this TARDIS has atmosphere and some comforts like the gramophone, the wingback chair, the rugs and even the fine china. It looks so tasteful, distilling some of the great elements of previous TARDISes and putting them together in a credible and successfully modern interpretation. By modern I mean old fashioned but the modern production value shows. This TARDIS has depth, and the two tier console is a good example of that. It takes what has gone before and builds upon it. The extended central column is a solid effect and the spider like framework is an excellent addition with the roundels being incorporated into that framework. That whole unit alone sums up the previous console rooms, the rest is free for interpretation. The Jules Verne effect has worked before in Doctor Who, most notably in the Secondary Console room, but that has been really developed into a functional hybrid of the secondary and primary control rooms. The only thing that spoils it is the going overboard with the Seal of Rassillon on everything! We get it! He's a Time Lord! When we step beyond the console room, it gets a bit too gothic, gone is the homeliness and comfort, we have stone chic, cold, hard, stone. And bats, the TARDIS has bats! They might as well have called the cloister room the really really gothic room. You half expect Alice Cooper to pop out of the Eye of Harmony. Personally, the cloister room from €˜Logopolis€™ works better for me, the green really lifts it. The dead leaves and all that beige and brown really do make it look like the Doctor has hit middle age and given up. If the rest of the TARDIS continued the same sophistication of the control room, and maybe adding some more traditional elements and hints to past TARDISes within the console room and other rooms would make it the ultimate TARDIS set. Imagine the console and support unit in Secondary console room style walls. There you have it.