"Aard·vark" /ˈärdˌvärk/
A nocturnal burrowing mammal with long ears, a tubular snout, and a long extensible tongue, feeding on ants and termites. Translates to "earth"+"pig" in Afrikaans.
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doctor who item #15: CHAMELEON CIRCUIT A component of a TARDIS which allows it to change shape to match its surroundings and remain inconspicuous. The circuit on the Doctor’s TARDIS has malfunctioned, leaving it stuck in the shape of a 1960s-style British police box. Attempts to repair the circuit have led to unpredictable results, including the TARDIS taking on the form of a pipe-organ (on which the Doctor plays a few notes of J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor). Since these episodes, the Doctor has said that he has become fond of the police box form, and so has stopped trying to repair it. The TARDISes owned by the Master, the Rani, and the Meddling Monk had fully functioning chameleon circuits. In series one episode “Boom Town”, the Ninth Doctorexplains to Captain Jack Harkness and Mickey Smith about the chameleon circuit and why the TARDIS has been “permanently” imaged as a police box. In the episode “Journey’s End”, when Donna Noble has the Doctor’s knowledge in her head due to an instantaneous biological metacrisis, she starts to tell the Tenth Doctor how he can fix the chameleon circuit, but does not finish before the knowledge in her head overwhelms her. The Eleventh Doctor explains to Amy Pond (set between “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below” in a deleted scene featured on the Series 5 Boxset special Meanwhile in the TARDIS) that the TARDIS takes a 12-dimensional scan of the surrounding area and determines what the best thing to turn itself into is, then it changes into a 1960s police box. Despite the fact that the circuit is broken, the TARDIS can still turn invisible as shown in “The Impossible Astronaut”. [image from the cover of ‘Chameleon circuit’ by Chameleon circuit]
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doctor who item #14: CHAMELEON ARCH The Chameleon Arch is a device that rewrites every cell of an individual to a specific species. The conversion, which causes extreme pain, also provides a set of false memories to match the new persona. The Tenth Doctor uses it in “Human Nature”, enabling him to hide from the Family of Blood in 1913 as the school teacher, John Smith. He retains a small amount of “residual awareness”, resulting in dreams about his life before the change. The Chameleon Arch stores the Doctor’s Time Lord identity in a fob watch that slots into the device as it is operated. In “Utopia”, Martha discovers that The Master used the same process, generating “Professor Yana” as his persona.
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doctor who item #13: CELERY The Fifth Doctor wears a sprig of celery in his lapel. He claims that he is allergic to certain gases in the praxis range. If those gases were present, the sprig would turn purple, whereupon he would eat it. Actor Peter Davison asked for this explanation to be included in The Caves of Androzani as it was his final story. It was referred to later in the same story by the Doctor as “a powerful restorative where I come from…” The Doctor first affixes the celery in Castrovalva, and replaces it in Enlightenment. The Tenth Doctor teases his earlier self about the celery (referring to it as a “decorative vegetable”) in the Children in Need special “Time Crash” (2007). A piece of plastic celery from the series fetched £5,500 for charity when it was sold at auction in November, 2007.
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doctor who item #12: BLUE CRYSTAL In The Green Death, the Third Doctor takes a perfect blue crystal from the planet Metebelis Three, which has the ability to focus and amplify thoughts. He gives it to Jo Grant as a wedding present, but she sends it back to him in Planet of the Spiders, setting in motion a series of events that end with the Doctor’s regeneration. In Destiny of the Doctors, the Doctor had a similar crystal hidden in a greenhouse within his TARDIS. Graak had to find it and give it to The Master in order to continue his quest to save the seven incarnations of the Doctor.
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doctor who item #11: BIODAMPER An item intended to screen the wearer from certain kinds of detection. A biodamper resembling a ring is placed on Donna Noble’s finger in “The Runaway Bride”, but the Doctor later realises it is ineffective, because Donna had been infused with Huon particles.
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doctor who item #10: BLACK SCROLLS OF RASSILON From The Five Doctors, these contain forbidden knowledge from the Dark Time of Gallifrey, the home of the Time Lords. Their discovery falsely implicates the Castellan in the abductions of the Doctor and others.
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doctor who item #9: BAZOOLIUM A metal that Rose Tyler gives to her mother in “Army of Ghosts”. It can be used to predict the weather, warming up when it will be hot and cooling down when it is about to rain.
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doctor who item #8: ASTRAL MAP A device which the First Doctor has on board the TARDIS. In The Web Planet, the Doctor was going to use his Astral Map to help the Zarbi ”queen” find the Menoptra ”invasion force”.
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doctor who item #7: ARCHANGEL NETWORK A worldwide mobile phone satellite network (composed of fifteen satellites) seen in “The Sound of Drums”, the Archangel network creates a global low-level telepathic field which allows the Master to subtly influence the behaviour of the world’s human population. It was first used to convince a substantial number of the British public to vote for his Mr. Saxon persona—individuals not affected included Clive Jones and Vivian Rook. It was later used to keep most of the human race afraid of the Master. The network also masks the Master’s Time Lord nature from the Doctor. In “Last of the Time Lords”, the Doctor uses the network to channel the combined psychic energy of the entire human race, after Martha had convinced them to think of the Doctor by name at the same moment.
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doctor who item #6: ANTI-REGENERATION GUN In “Last of the Time Lords”, Martha Jones claims that the Torchwood Institute and U.N.I.T. created a gun and four phials of coloured chemicals, which, when slotted into the gun and injected into a Time Lord, will kill the Time Lord and prevent regeneration. After the Master destroys the gun with his laser screwdriver, Martha reveals that the weapon is a fake, a ruse to conceal her actual mission and to engineer her return to the Valiant.