TARDISes may be grown, but there are lots of things inside them that are not.

This is all mind-boggling! This 'eye of harmony' thing is a bit weird to me - I'd prefer it to be stuck on Gallifrey to be honest!

In the third story of 1963 - 'Edge of Destruction' - the Doctor mentions that the whole power of the Tardis is beneath the rising column of the console. Barbara asks what would happen if the column came out....The Doctor simply says something like the entire energy would be released and booomph!! (Not those words, obviously...cannot remember at the moment!)

Was that the Eye of Harmony? I don't think so - it hadn't even been thought of yet!

So. The eye of harmony is in the TARDIS but linked to the eyes of harmony on Gallifrey. They're called the same thing.

Refuelling in Cardiff (primarily) because the eye in the TARDIS was struggling without the eye on Gallifrey.

Now the Doctor has fixed the eye somehow in the TARDIS so refuelling isn't needed?

Is what folk are BASICALLY saying?

The idea that the other energy "absorbed through the rift" or whatever, is a sort of primer for accessing the dimension in which the eye is held, I can buy--provided that we're not dealing with a single Eye on Gallifrey.

I agree with Tom Tit that the Time Lords should be stellar engineers of unimaginable prowess. They're one of the oldest civilizations in the universe, and can control time and space. Hell, ignore what I think they should be, and ignore what Tom Tit says they should be. That's how both the Classic series and New Who have presented them.

And I know I keep saying this, but I think it's the most important point to bear in mind in this thread:

The Time Lords grew, and retired, and redesigned the TARDISes. They harnessed at least the power of one black hole, and could put an entire planet in a "time loop," removing it as a threat from space and time. If you believe in a single Eye on Gallifrey, and believe it beams/beamed power to all the TARDISes, then you have to be comfortable with the idea that this ancient and powerful species who are engineers of the primordial forces of the universe would have, up until the time of the Fourth Doctor, waived dismissively and said, "what powers a TARDIS, you ask? Why, these things just seem to power themselves." Unacceptable.

AmazingJim put it right. This was lazy writing. The classic writers had plenty of fault of their own, but the New Who writers could have easily figured a way out of this problem without blundering into grievous continuity error.

That sounds more like whatever Rose absorbed in the Bad Wolf finale, which was the Heart of the Tardis, or the Time Vortex, or some such timey wimey thing. I think that's Power with a capitol P, like Power of the Timelords, rather than the energy type power. But at this point who knows? (Pun mildly intended)

The problem is that it's a show that's been going for such a long time without a single overseer, so things are bound to trip over themselves, there's no Gene Roddenberry for the Whoniverse, and even then that's not fool proof.

The Daleks had two completely different origins in the classic years, so it's not entirely the new eras fault, but the 'new' are a lot worse at not paying attention to previous events. The RTD years pretty much make sense in their own context, but revised quite a bit of history. Moff's might eventually all make sense within themselves too, though I have my doubts, someone really needs to properly explain to him what a paradox is for a start. The explanations of his explanations still need further explanation for me.

Damn, went off topic.

Really, there's no one answer to a very interesting discussion like this, because there are too many options due to dimensional engineering. It could conceivably be in the Tardis because it's bigger on the inside, but that doesn't explain everything, and likewise neither does my favoured theory of a remote power. The Timelords have a billion years of history according to Timothy Dalton and we've followed a person who's about a thousand years old, and 95% of his activity isn't on screen. It could have been one thing, then another, then another, and we're all correct at a certain point in time.

Did you know some Romulan Warbirds use an artificial singularity for a power source? Basically that's a tiny controlled black hole. Sounds familiar, and doesn't give me a headache.