Willard remembers that in a 4th Doctor episode, there was a problem with the consol room and they had to relocate to another consol room in the TARDIS.
He remembers the Doctor had to jettison rooms. This means it was done before the 5th Doctor did it. Is this true?

Short answer is: first change of control rooms, 4th Doctor, first jettisoning, 5th Doctor.

Long answer: The first indication we had that there might be a "secondary control room" in the TARDIS was in (from memory) The Masque of Mandragora, wherein the fourth Doctor and Sarah were exploring the TARDIS and simply rediscovered it.



The Doctor dusted it off, pushed a few buttons, and made it the active control room for a couple of seasons.

Baker's Doctor went back to a revised version of his original control room for his final season. The real life reason was that the wooden wall panels had warped in storage between seasons and would no longer assemble.

The "jettisoning" method of power-boosting the TARDIS was only used twice (again, from memory). The first occasion was in Peter Davison (5th Doctor's) debut story Castrovalva to avoid plunging into the big bang (he was sent there by the Master). Amongst the rooms lost then were the gravity-free healing chamber called the Zero Room which the Dcotr needed to recover from regeneration, the absence of which forced the Doctor to seek help from the city of Castrovalva - the next part of the Master's plan.

I think the other time was also a 5th Doctor story, Terminus. That time the TARDIS "crashed" into a spaceship (a bit like it later did with the Titanic) and the crew exited through an "emergency door" which doesn't usually exist that dropped them right into the dangerous part of the leper ship (the occupants all had "Lazar's Syndrome"; companion Nyssa remains behind to tend to them when the TARDIS departs). Rooms were deleted then to facilitate disentangling the TARDIS from the space craft.

I think Tom Baker jettisons a room or two in Logopolis (his last story), but I've never actually seen it.

Davison was all about chucking rooms out the back door.

I've seen it, both at the time of original transmission and since, and there's a copy of it (along with every other extant Dr Who episode) in an old cabinet in the lounge downstairs. While I haven't watched it for years now I'm fairly confident that nothing got jettisoned.

What that story does introduce to TARDIS mythology is the cloisters and their cloister bell which rings when the TARDIS in in peril of imminent destruction. That sound effect has appeared intermittently since. It reappeared in the new series in the Children in Need "mini-episode" linking Ecclestone's regenration into Tennant (look it up if you haven't seen it, it explains why the TARDIS crashes into bins on the Powell estate at the start of The Christmas Invasion) and has been used quite a lot since; most recently in The Doctor's Wife.

Logopolis is the first time we've seen the TARDIS land around another object so it appears in the console room. I don't think we saw it do that again until the Doctor rescued Rose with that trick in The Parting of the Ways.

It's also the first time we've seen a TARDIS land inside a TARDIS. Previously we'd seen the Doctor trying to "time ram" the Master's TARDIS with his own, to their mutual destruction, but this time the Doctor's TARDIS materialises around the Master's TARDIS, so the Master's TARDIS (also currently disguised as a police call box) appears in the console room. But conversely, the Doctor's TARDIS appears at the same time in the Master's console room. Leaving one ship automatically leads people into the other.

And for only the second time in the series we see that a Time Lord coming to the end of his regeneration can create a psychic manifestation "halfway to the next incarnation". Kampo Rampoche did this with Cho-Ji in Planet of the Spiders. Here Baker does it, creating the mysterious "Watcher".




In Baker's final series, for the first time since 1965, the BBC actually built additional corridors and room sets for the TARDIS. Suddenly we got a lot more "backroom" stuff and started to see other rooms - first Romana's bedroom (specifically ejected in Castrovalva - interesting, eh?), then the closters, then Adric's room, then the wardrobe and the zero room, then Nyssa's room/lab and Tegan's room.

The redressable sets got used extensively until they fell apart sometime around the start of the McCoy season (they'd been improperly stored during the year hiatus after the sacking of Colin Baker). The TARDIS interior was in such poor condition that it doesn't appear at all in McCoy's third season; there are no TARDIS scenes.

But the biggest display of TARDIS rooms came in the middle of the Baker years, in The Invasion of Time, wherein the Sontarans chase the Doctor and his friends through the interior of his ship for a whole episode. We are shown the TARDIS swimming pool, the infirmary, the greenhouse (complete with carniverous Sontaran-eating plants), and the "power plant" - which looks like a classical sculpture museum.

Unfortuately for such an important episode, the BBC flubbed the production values big time. I don't know what they'd intended to do for the interior, but a national strike of TV stagehands and set designers meant that no sets could be used for much of the story except the existing TARDIS control room. The whole production was moved to location at an abandoned hospital; hence when we see the TARDIS chase the Doctor has clearly set his screensaver to "old brick-walled cellar". I was still impressed as a teenager though. The six part serial doesn't stand up as well after the fact.

And to complete the trivia stuff: the original TARDIS blue box was finally replaced in Tom Baker's first season when it actually collapsed onto Liz Sladen's head during shooting.

thanks! Sush a long and varied history.
Thank you for explaining this.