On the Flesh and TARDIS Avatars

Yesterday, I found myself pondering “The Doctor’s Wife.”

Two weeks ago, “The Doctor’s Wife,” a Doctor Who story written by Neil Gaiman, aired on BBC 1, BBC America, and Space. In the episode, a villainous asteroid ripped the consciousness of the TARDIS from the Doctor’s ship and shoved the consciousness into a body belonging to a human woman, Idris.

At the end of the episode, with the TARDIS’ consciousness restored to the TARDIS, Amy asks the Doctor if there’s any way to bring Idris back as a person for the Doctor to interact with.

So, yesterday, I began to ponder how this might be possible.

The Star Trek solution, of course, would be a holographic projection, like Star Trek: Voyager‘s EMH. Or a holodeck. If the TARDIS has a library and a swimming pool, surely it can have a holodeck. Turn on the holographic projection, and suddenly the Doctor can talk to the spirit of the TARDIS.

But then I realized that last week, in “The Rebel Flesh,” Doctor Who gave us another possibility.

The Flesh is a way of creating an avatar of another consciousness. A couple of humans at an acid drilling station were using Flesh avatars to pump out the highly corrosive acid. And then at the end of the episode, we saw that a Flesh avatar of the Doctor was created as well.

So it occurred to me that the Doctor could use the Flesh, perhaps a more advanced version of it, to create a living, breathing, walking avatar of the TARDIS.

Would it work? I have no idea. But it would be quite an interesting development for Doctor Who, for the Doctor to have a permanent humanoid TARDIS avatar to interact with.

It’s interesting sometimes where the logical implications of a story can take you. 🙂