House (The Doctor's Wife)


 * For the short story see: here.

House was a malevolent entity that fed on TARDISes in a bubble universe.

Biology
House was a malevolent, mysterious entity that lived in a small bubble universe outside the main universe. House existed as an intelligence that resided in a time rift. Its body was that of an asteroid-sized celestial body. At the time of his encounter with the Doctor, he implied that he was at least half a million years old.

The creature gorged itself on artron energy and at some point discovered the existence of the Time Lords, whose TARDISes were filled with just such a power source. It began using Gallifreyan distress signals to lure Time Lords to its surface, where they were trapped. Once there, House removed the TARDIS' Matrix and devoured the TARDIS to feed itself. The trapped Time Lords were left behind and they eventually would perish. House's encounters with the Time Lords led it to calling them a kind race.

The Doctor describes House as "a sort of sea urchin", with a tough outer shell protecting a soft interior. This idea was raised when Uncle introduced the Doctor to House though a mesh-covered hole, most likely a pore through the surface of the creature to the body at the centre. House was never shown to have any physical features apart from his outer shell, such as eyes or a mouth. He demonstrated the ability to possess other lifeforms. He used Auntie and Uncle to speak when he first encounters the Doctor, Rory and Amy. The green glow in the eyes of Ood Nephew was presumably also an indicator of Houses' direct telepathic influence. (DW: The Doctor's Wife)

History
During its existence, Uncle, Auntie, the Ood Nephew and Idris came upon House. They lived on its surface. As Time Lords died on the surface of House, he used his powers to renew the bodies of his servants and replaced parts of their dying bodies with those taken from the dead Gallifreyans. They became an extension of his will and did his tasks. After the near-annihilation of the Time Lords in the Last Great Time War, House again grew hungry and attracted the attention of the Eleventh Doctor, who was accompanied by Amy Pond and Rory Williams, by sending a psychic distress signal box, originally broadcast by a Time Lord the Doctor refers to as the Corsair, into their universe through the rift.

Upon their arrival, House used his powers to remove the Doctor's TARDIS's Matrix and inserted it into the body of Idris, leaving it blank in order for it to be consumed. However, during a conversation with the Doctor, House learnt that the Time Lords had perished in a terrible conflict. Realising that its food source had been eliminated, House decided to change its pattern of behaviour by possessing the now empty TARDIS and using it to reach the mainstream universe in order to find new sources of energy. At the same time, the Doctor discovers the large cache of psychic distress signal boxes which had been sent by the now dead Time Lords House had managed to trap in ages past. At this discovery, the Doctor becomes very angry and aggressive towards Auntie and Uncle, before leaving to find Idris, who them reveals that she is the TARDIS Matrix, trapped in a human body. The Doctor realises the danger Rory and Amy are in, but is too late to stop House stealing the TARDIS, with Amy and Rory trapped inside and the Eleventh Doctor and the TARDIS Matrix trapped on the now lifeless shell of Houses' body.

To amuse itself, it used the TARDIS to play with the lives of Amy and Rory, using the TARDIS's telepathic constructs to place illusions into their minds to panic and terrify them, and at one point sending Ood Nephew after them. However, the Doctor, with the aid of Idris, managed to construct a makeshift TARDIS from the remains of the time ships left on House's shell, and allowed them to catch up with and enter the TARDIS, once Rory had found access to an old control room and Amy figured out how to open the door. The Doctor's TARDIS Matrix was eventually released from her dying Human body, allowing her to repossess the time ship, whereupon House's essence was expunged from the ship. (DW: The Doctor's Wife)