Lift
A lift, sometimes called an elevator, was a device used to vertically transport people or goods between the levels of a building. Lifts consisted of a carriage which moved up and down inside a lift shaft. (PROSE: Sick Building)
On Earth
In Carthage in 1164 BC, Vicki Pallister lamented that lifts would not be invented for several thousand years. She once tried to describe the general concept to her husband Troilus but he did not understand it. (AUDIO: Frostfire)
In 1930, Martha Jones attached a long pole at the top of the Empire State Building to a lift. She used this to allow the gamma strike from a solar flare to fry the approaching pig slaves inside the lift. (TV: Evolution of the Daleks)
In 1958, the Tenth Doctor, Cassie and Jimmy tried and failed to escape the Dreamland base through a lift. (TV: Dreamland)
Mr Thompson was terrified of lifts, having read stories about people who had been killed or injured in lift accidents. He and Joanne were attacked by Saric Warder in a lift in their workplace. (PROSE: Trapped!)
In 1999, Simon Cooper waited for a lift down to the platform of Mornington Crescent underground station. (PROSE: Have You Seen This Man?)
In the early 2000s, the Ninth Doctor was near a lift in a Debenhams in Sheffield when he asked Lizzie for directions to the Winter Gardens. (PROSE: Have You Seen This Man?)
In March 2005, the Ninth Doctor and Rose used a lift to escape from the attacking Autons in Henrik's. (TV: Rose)
In March 2006, the Ninth Doctor used a lift in 10 Downing Street to escape from the Metropolitan Police Service members that had him at gunpoint. Elsewhere, "Joseph Green" and "R. Asquith" took a lift. Farting, "Green" complained that he was "poisoned by the gas exchange" and was convinced by his brother to remove his human skin suit as the two Slitheen proceeded to hunt. (TV: World War Three)
Lifts were used in Henry van Statten's Vault. (TV: Dalek)
By the second half of the 20th century, lifts allowed tourists to get to the upper floors of the Eiffel Tower without using the stairs. Though they briefly considered flying instead, Romana II and the Fourth Doctor employed such a lift during their holiday in Paris. (TV: City of Death)
In the 2000s,[nb 1] the Torchwood Three hub had an invisible lift to travel from the hub to the surface at Roald Dahl Plass. (TV: Everything Changes)
Basement unit 4b, located beneath the old library on Maccateer Street, was accessible via a lift which LINDA used to meet up in 2007. (TV: Love & Monsters)
In 2007, when the Tenth Doctor ordered everyone to run up to the top floor of Torchwood Tower to see what the Daleks were doing, Jake Simmonds suggested they could take the lift instead. (TV: Doomsday)
In 2007, the Tenth Doctor, Donna and Lance discovered the lift in H.C. Clements led to an abandoned Torchwood base not on the building's schematics. (TV: The Runaway Bride)
In the 2000s,[nb 2] Sarah Jane Smith escaped from being killed by Mrs Wormwood's people from inside a lift. (TV: Invasion of the Bane)
By 2011, George — who was actually a Tenza — was frightened by the sound of the lift in the estate where he lived. He accidentally sent Amy and Rory to the dolls house in his cupboard that had become a psychic repository for his fears. (TV: Night Terrors) George had been afraid of the noise of the lift for a least a year prior, albeit not the lift itself as he knew it was merely a box that smelled of wee, as he thought the noise was a creature, perhaps a dragon or a monster, living in the walls like the snake from Harry Potter. (PROSE: My Special Book)
A broken lift in Colchester was used as a teleport site to the crashed Cyber-ship. (TV: Closing Time)
At some point in the 21st century, a wormhole portal was hidden in a lift in a London hospital. It led to the Shakri ship. Rory and his father, Brian Williams, were both captured by orderlies and taken through the portal. The Eleventh Doctor and Amy later discovered in portal in the lift and travelled through it as well. (TV: The Power of Three)
Bill Potts initially thought the TARDIS was a lift. (TV: The Pilot)
Sometime in the 21st century, Mel and Pex used a lift in Paradise Towers to try to get to floor 304. However, the cleaners overrode the controls and had the lift alternate between floors 173 and 174. Pex kicked the controls and the lift plummeted to the basement. There, they managed to get it working again and made it to floor 304. (TV: Paradise Towers)
On other worlds
The lifts at New New York Hospital on New Earth were voice-activated and disinfected their occupants, as the Tenth Doctor and Rose Tyler discovered, much to the latter's dismay. Lady Cassandra and Chip overrode the lift for Cassandra to take over Rose's body down in the basement. Later, the Doctor and Cassandra used the lift's disinfectant spray to cure the new humans. (TV: New Earth)
In the Dalek City on Skaro, the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Susan escaped from their imprisonment by the Daleks in a lift. They threw a sculpture down the shaft to destroy the lift and the pursuing Daleks. (TV: "The Ambush")
The lifts inside Kaalann on Skaro were broken down before the Daleks returned to the planet with the Eye of Time and rebuilt their race. This was undone when the Eleventh Doctor and Amy travelled through the Eye and stopped the Daleks before they could harness the Eye. (GAME: City of the Daleks)
Around the 42nd century, Sanctuary Base 6 had a lift, dubbed "the capsule", built to retrieve a power source from the centre of Krop Tor. (TV: The Impossible Planet)
Lifts connected the five floors of the Alpha Sphere in the Eutermes zone. (AUDIO: The Creed of the Kromon)
The lift inside the Dreamhome on Tiermann's World travelled from the roof of the building down to Level -40. The lift, like all other technology, was controlled by the Dreamhome's central, sentient computer, the Domovoi. (PROSE: Sick Building)
Spaceships and space stations
Around the 27th century, when the stairwells on the Empress collapsed following a bombing, Benny Summerfield and Grand Marshall Sstac took a malfunctioning lift to the ninth floor. Inside, Benny and Sstac experienced memories of the Kolgarian delegates, Musjarna and Asnarbi. When they came to, they climbed the maintenance ladder in the shaft to the tenth floor. (AUDIO: The Dance of the Dead)
The Demeter, an Earth Alliance cruiser during the Cyberon War, was equipped with turbo lifts between ducks. However, it still had emergency ladders that could be used in case the power supply was too depleted for the lifts to work. (AUDIO: Curse of the Cyberons)
In 200,000, the Editor of Satellite Five granted the Ninth Doctor and Rose access to the five hundredth floor to trap them. (TV: The Long Game)
The Eleventh Doctor's TARDIS had a lift leading to at least three floors. (GAME: TARDIS)
Footnotes
Notes
- ↑ Episodes 1-10 of the first series of Torchwood are set anywhere from 2006-2009 as a result of conflicting evidence shown in the episodes Ghost Machine, Greeks Bearing Gifts, Random Shoes, To the Last Man, Reset, Adrift, Fragments, Exit Wounds, and The New World. As episode 10, Out of Time, is set at the end of December, this means that episodes 11-13 are almost certainly set the year after episodes 1-10.
- ↑ No on screen date is given for the first two series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, outside of The Day of the Clown from the second series being set shortly after 9 October in an undisclosed year. While Donna Noble's present from the fourth series of Doctor Who is set around the same time as the first series of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith from the second series of The Sarah Jane Adventures is explicitly described as being set a year after Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? from the first series, Doctor Who's fourth series is not consistently dated, with TV: The Fires of Pompeii, TV: The Waters of Mars, and AUDIO: SOS setting the present of the 13 regular episodes in 2008 (heavily implied by TV: The Star Beast and TV: The Giggle as well), and PROSE: Beautiful Chaos setting them in about April to June 2009.
