One overlooked bit in The Doctor’s Wife that I love and think has a lot of Lore Potential™ is the passcode the TARDIS gives Amy to get into the archived console room (Crimson, Eleven, Delight, Petrichor). At first, it just seems to be a random collection of poetic words, except for two things:
- The passcode isn’t actually the words themselves; those are just a quick way to express the psychic concepts that make up the actual passcode (Amy gets it to open by vividly imagining the color crimson, the delight she felt on her wedding day, etc.)
- The TARDIS has a bit of trouble with words (presumably, she normally thinks more in the conceptual way Amy used to unlock the door) and doesn’t know the names of the companions. She refers to Amy and Rory as “the orangey one” and “the pretty one” respectively.
My thought here is that the passcode the TARDIS intended was actually “Amy, The Doctor, Rory, & River”, using the “names” she’d attached to the current task (at least, when she’s not stuck in a human body and suddenly having to verbalize it). better translated as abstract concepts than just words:
- (A bright color, close to red)/The orangey one - Amy
- (The number 11) - The Doctor (probably 1/5,000,000 ways she could name the Doctor, honestly, but “eleven” is obviously specific to this specific Doctor)
- (A feeling of delightfulness)/The pretty one - Rory (I assume “pretty” here refers to the fact that he’s a kindhearted person - a nurse who cares for people, and who stayed with Idris when she died)
- (The smell of dust after rain) - River (who goes by a few water-related names, something the TARDIS specifically mentions at the end of this episode)
So conjecture/Lore Potential: it’s very likely the TARDIS “names” the companions in feelings and concepts, ala “like the bite of the time-winds” or “a lingering sense of anxiety”, rather than just words.