How did Doctor Ruth have a Police Box

[Csalem]

How did she have even have a TARDIS when it was Susan who came up with the name?

I was a bit confused at the time that Ruth called herself the Doctor, and had a police box as a TARDIS, and was on the run from the Timelords just like Hartnell was, but it is just part of the loose continuity of the show.

 

[DS9Continuing]

I've said before, and I still think it would have been better, that Ruth's Tardis should have been the lighthouse itself. Instead of 13 walking to the top of the lighthouse, looking out and seeing the grave, then leaving the lighthouse and digging up Ruth's Tardis from beneath the grave... the lighthouse should have been Ruth's Tardis all along.

Ruth did call the lighthouse "home". It is where her Time Lord consciousness was stored. It has lots of room inside it, lots of stairs and layers. It has a flashing light on the top, used for keeping travellers safe.

13 should have gone to the top of the lighthouse and looked out over the landscape. Meanwhile down below, Ruth smashes the glass... and 13 should have seen the lighthouse vworp vworp around her, reformatting itself into the familiar Tardis set, and Ruth is standing there saying "I'm the Doctor".

I think that would have been just as much a shock as finding a police box buried in the ground, and without causing all these "plot hole" complaints. When it rematerialises in the Judoon ship, it could have been anything they like. A crate, a pillar, whatever. Like in the finale when 13 stood next to a random tree and said "that's a Tardis."

Plus, it would have been another case of the Doctor walking into somebody's house in the middle of nowhere that she doesn't realise is really a Tardis in disguise, after the Master's outback hut, thus making it a motif of the season.

Necrothread because I just rewatched "Fugitive of the Judoon" tonight, and I have slightly reconsidered the above theory / suggestion / complaint.

I paid attention to the bit where our Doctor is interrogating Ruth about her parents, and the lighthouse they lived in. Here's the transcript:

RUTH: I wish I could tell you I adored them. But they chose to live in a disused lighthouse. That tells you how good they were with people.
DOCTOR: Not like you, in the heart of the city, talking to people all day long.
RUTH: I guess we all rebel against our parents. It's part of growing up, innit?
DOCTOR: Never been a fan of growing up.
RUTH: They loved it out here. Suited them.
DOCTOR: Loved it so much they wanted to be buried here?
RUTH: Yep.
DOCTOR: You'd moved away by then.
RUTH: Yeah.
DOCTOR: But you still own the lighthouse?
RUTH: Yeah, they left it to me. But I never wanted to come back here to live, though.

Those parents that Ruth describes – they are the Time Lords. They choose to isolate themselves, avoid contact with the rest of the world (universe), they have their big light to keep an eye on everyone else but they don't get involved (Time Lord non-intervention policy).

Whereas Ruth (the Doctor) couldn't stand not being involved, she wanted to be with people, helping them, guiding them through history. So she ran away to the city and never came back, doesn't even like to think about them.

Note also that those parents are dead and buried in the grounds of the lighthouse (Time Lords destroyed, Gallifrey in ruins). Ruth (the Doctor) is the only one who can go back there, who has any reason to, and it's where she rediscovers her sense of self, but she also gets right in her Tardis and runs away again.

RUTH: That smell. Home. Forgotten what it feels like to come back here. Like nothing can touch me.

So that is why the lighthouse isn't the Tardis – it's because the lighthouse is Gallifrey itself.

So this of course reflects forwards to "The Timeless Children", where our current Doctor does in fact return to actual Gallifrey, rediscovers her own history, and flies away again, only to get caught by the Judoon. The false history that Ruth creates for herself – with its metaphor for her real life – is also not a million miles from the Irish police metaphor shown to us in "Ascension"/"Timeless".

Just some thoughts. Still doesn't explain why it was an Earth police box, though.

.

 

[dupersuper]

I keep forgetting the mystery Doctors name is Ruth, and this threads title always catches me off guard.

 

[Butters]

It was a police box when Jodie unearthed it because the TARDIS remembers all of its forms, even future ones. It recognised Jodie's Doctor digging and took the familiar form for her, they are linked across time and space. It was not a police box when Ruth buried it.

 

[DS9Continuing]

You know what? I'll buy that.

.

 

[Butters]

You know what? I'll buy that.

.

 

[dupersuper]

It was a police box when Jodie unearthed it because the TARDIS remembers all of its forms, even future ones. It recognised Jodie's Doctor digging and took the familiar form for her, they are linked across time and space. It was not a police box when Ruth buried it.

Then why wasn't Ruth surprised to see it was a police box?

 

[The Nth Doctor]

It was a police box when Jodie unearthed it because the TARDIS remembers all of its forms, even future ones. It recognised Jodie's Doctor digging and took the familiar form for her, they are linked across time and space. It was not a police box when Ruth buried it.

Honestly, I've heard a lot of different explanations of varying degrees sensibility...and this one works the best for me in its simplicity.

Then why wasn't Ruth surprised to see it was a police box?

Because she knew the TARDIS could do that.

 

[Chaos Descending]

I thought it wasn't established whether Ruth was a pre-Hartnell or post-Whittaker Doctor?

Did I miss something?

 

[Butters]

I thought it wasn't established whether Ruth was a pre-Hartnell or post-Whittaker Doctor?

Did I miss something?

It's been a while since I watched it, but Ruth spoke to Jodie across the ages in the Matrix bit and was included in the faces montage.

 

[Butters]

Then why wasn't Ruth surprised to see it was a police box?

It's the equivalent, I suppose, of parking your car with the top down, and returning to it to find the top had closed, knowing that it closes automatically when it rains. Something like that. It's still the TARDIS, whatever it looks like.

 

[DS9Continuing]

I thought it wasn't established whether Ruth was a pre-Hartnell or post-Whittaker Doctor?

Did I miss something?

There were times in the ep that they weren't sure who came first, because one of them should have remembered the other, and neither did. But then 13 reasoned that since Ruth and Gat were working on behalf of Gallifrey itself, they must be from her past, since she knew Gallifrey had no future for them to come from (it having been destroyed by the Master in her own timeframe).

Plus what Butters says.

.

 

[Csalem]

We also saw the desktop theme changing in Day of the Doctor when the three Doctors boarded 10's Tardis before settling on 11's. It might have chosen the phone-box cos 13 found it and Ruth just went with it since she just got her memories back.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Well it's that or it's the same thing as two girls showing up to the prom wearing the same dress...

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From a certain perspective the TARDIS being a police box is the show’s first plot hole. If the chameleon circuit was working when the TARDIS landed in the junk yard, why did it turn into something that, as Ian points out in the very first episode, is conspicuously out of place in a junk yard? (“What on earth's it doing here? These things are usually on the street.”)

I'm wondering if there had been a succession of escalating malfunctions with the chameleon circuit during the 1st Doctor's previous travels. Perhaps it was still changing shape every planet but was becoming increasingly erratic in terms of choosing shapes that were appropriate for the time period but didn't totally make sense in the context of where exactly they landed. It wasn't until they left Earth in "An Unearthly Child" that it finally just got totally stuck.

How did she have even have a TARDIS when it was Susan who came up with the name?

My theory is that the Time Lord equivalent of Blue Peter had a contest for what to call their time travel ships, with Susan submitting the winning entry. The Doctor thought this was kind of silly, which is why he mostly just called it "the ship" during the early days. But as the years went on and he started to miss Susan more, he started calling it "the TARDIS" more frequently because it gave him fond memories.

I thought it wasn't established whether Ruth was a pre-Hartnell or post-Whittaker Doctor?

Did I miss something?

"The Timeless Children" certainly seems to imply that she's a pre-Hartnell Doctor and that the Time Lords, for some reason, erased her memory and forced her to become a child again, which is why it was still a young Hartnell Doctor in that barn in "Listen" and why she remembers playing with the Master during their childhood.

But it's still very confusing. And given that none of this has anything to do with a plot about the Master creating an army of immortal Cyber-Time Lords, I don't know why the writers bothered with any of this. Presumably some of this will be explained in future stories dealing with the Division. (Unless it becomes an abandoned plot point like the accelerated evolution of Ood civilization in "The End of Time" or the Doctor failing to stop the Sandmen in "Sleep No More." And I'm still hoping that Toby Whithouse comes back to show us the Minister of War, as referenced in "Before the Flood.")

 

[Csalem]

My theory is that the Time Lord equivalent of Blue Peter had a contest for what to call their time travel ships, with Susan submitting the winning entry. The Doctor thought this was kind of silly, which is why he mostly just called it "the ship" during the early days. But as the years went on and he started to miss Susan more, he started calling it "the TARDIS" more frequently because it gave him fond memories.

I suppose it could also be an example of the paradoxes of time travel. Susan calls it a Tardis and a someone from the past hears her say it and then it becomes what it has always been known as.
The timeline makes sense to us as we experience it mostly as the Doctor experiences it, but from at a fixed point in time it must get confusing after a while. Doctor's 9 and 11 were both in London during WW2. 10 and 11 met Queen Elizabeth but 10 first met her when she was much older, but she met him when she was younger and he older.