h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I suppose you could use that - it does make a lot of sense.

Can't remember where I read it, but there was a persuasive bit of retcon suggested for what exactly Time Lords *are* put forth in a book a few years back.

It suggested that Time Lord abilities (telepathy, regeneration, symbiosis with TARDISes, etc.) are the result of the presence in their bloodstream of nanotechnological devices developed by Rassilon, Omega etc.

This rather neatly explains how Time Lord society could arise basically overnight from a pre-existing highly advanced but non-TL Gallifreyan society, and how there could remain Gallifreyans who are not TLs thousands of years later.

It also sort of explains how a race that is basically humanoid in appearance can have such radical abilities - immense lifespan, regeneration etc. - as these abilities become not innate and biological, but rather a feature of the technology that defines Time Lords.

If you take this explanation as true, then the Time Lords can be usefully compared to Iain M. Banks's Culture, whose denizens enjoy the fruits of similar technology. Taken further, one might view the Celestial Intervention Agency as the equivalent of the Contact section, and the Doctor as a representative of Special Circumstances.

Even better, if "Time Lord" can be shown to be not a biological race or species, but rather a title that can be conferred by the application of the appropriate technology, then there exists the possibility that the Doctor, last of the Time Lords though he may be now, could create from his own essence a new race, a race perhaps less determinedly uninvolved.

Consider: previously he has abandoned his companions because he could not grow old with them, and the edicts of his people prevented him from gifting them with his particular form of near-immortality. But now he is the last of his kind, passing on his abilities is no longer a potentially disastrous interference and is instead a shot at recreating his people in his own image. Now that he has had his epiphany with Sarah Jane, he could realise that one way he *could* be with Rose is to make HER a Time Lord, something he could never have done for Sarah or any of his previous companions.

This idea is rife with possibilities. Doctor makes Rose a Time Lord, she struggles with some aspect of it and they fight, she runs back to Mickey and passes on the gift to him. Mickey's suspicion and suppressed dislike of the Doctor come to the fore, especially after an encounter on Earth with the Sontarans in which the Doctor sacrifices Mickey to save Rose. Mickey, however, does not die, but regenerates into a better actor. The Doctor is horrified that Rose has passed on what he gave to her, but that is as nothing compared to what is to come.

Using his already demonstrated technical savvy combined with nanotech-accelerated intelligence, the regenerated Mickey makes himself known to UNIT, and demonstrates that he is a Time Lord (his regenerated body having two hearts...). Using their resources, he builds his own TARDIS and pursues the Doctor through space and time, stopping off wherever he can to create new Time Lords and "educating" them that their ancestors were destroyed in the Time War and the Doctor is to blame.

This leaves us with the following continuity elements:

1. The Doctor is no longer the last Time Lord - but now every other Time Lord is out to get him.
2. The Time Lords exist again, but they are distributed throughout the universe.
3. Mickey effectively becomes a replacement for the Master, only less two-dimensional and more dangerous.
4. Rose can regenerate and get her own spin off series, perhaps moving to LA to become a private investigator...

It's a crazy idea, but it just might work...

SoRB

Superb stuff!!



And does she turn into a homocidial murdering machine after shes had a shag? Or is that just the women I know?

The more I think about this, the more I want to actually see it.

Picture the scene: Mickey has regenerated into Don Warrington (http://www.bbcamerica.com/genre/comedy_games/manchild/manchild_actor_don_warrington.jsp)

... and he has a face off with the Doctor, with the Doctor at some dramatic disadvantage - hanging off a cliff or something similar. The Doctor doesn't know who he is, yet (the ability of Time Lords to instantly recognise each other in spite of regeneration presumably not working because Mickey is an appointed TL, rather than a hereditary one...), and the two of them square up in a similar fashion to the scene with Tony Head in "School Reunion". Over the course of the conversation the Doctor slowly comes to the realisation that this is someone who knows him, someone he's met before - someone who has a grudge against him. Slowly the realisation dawns, and he says "Mickey?".

'Mickey' replies snarlingly "I prefer 'Michael'." And drops the Doctor off the cliff. Cue cliffhanger music.

SoRB

"This rather neatly explains how Time Lord society could arise basically overnight from a pre-existing highly advanced but non-TL Gallifreyan society, and how there could remain Gallifreyans who are not TLs thousands of years later."

It's a nice idea.

But...

terms like "overnight" change their meaning when you're dealing with a Transtemporal society. If you have a Tardis you can do all the pre-arranging you want and then at the right moment...pow! Cultural revolution created from seeds that were there all along that weren't there all along yesterday. It would be impossible to know how much sociopolitical manipulation someone like Rassilon would have engaged in if he and only he had a Tardis.

I don't like the idea of Rose becoming a time lord through spurious technology. It takes away a lot from the Doctor.

Doc 9 had a backlog of grief and a deathwish. He hurt so badly that he was willing to kill to makes his race's death meaningful. He hurt so badly, he was willing to be an absolute cad to Mickey in order to get Rose to himself. If he had a way to not be alone, don't you think he would have taken it?

Doc 10 is more aware of his responsibility than before. It's not arrogance when he says things like "I'm the Doctor and it stops with me!", it's the truth. We saw what the universe without the Time Lords is like in Father's Day. There's stuff that he can't allow to happen, things he can't ask anyone else to take care of. That's whjy Mickey is travelling with them - he's giving Mickey and Rose some common ground so that when they part company for good, she'll have someone who's seen the things she's seen and done the things she's done.

But...

...I do love the 'Michael' idea.

"I don't like the idea of Rose becoming a time lord through spurious technology. It takes away a lot from the Doctor."

Does it?

First of all, the technology isn't spurious, it's what makes TLs what they are and always has done (say). Secondly, making new TLs doesn't take anything away from the Doctor any more than the existence of the Master, the Rani, the meddling monk, or (Bod save us from Cockney TLs) Drax did. In fact, I would say his ability to create the TLs anew adds to him.

One could reasonably explain the fact that he hasn't already done it in a number of ways.

1. Perhaps he simply can't because he lacks the technology, but could develop it.
2. Perhaps he could, but won't due to some ethical objection - he views being a Time Lord as a burden and a responsibility that he may not wish to lay upon someone else.
3. Alternatively, he may not *trust* anyone he's ever met enough to make them TLs, even though he could - he has pretty high standards after all. And eventually Rose may prove herself worthy. She's already looked into the Vortex, remember.

In fact, consider the following: Rose looked into the Vortex. She destroyed the Daleks. She brought Jack back to life. And then the Doctor took the Vortex energy from her into himself.

What did it do to him? It killed him. He had that Vortex energy within him for a matter of seconds, and his body fell to pieces within a matter of minutes, saved from death only by his ability to regenerate.

Rose stood exposed directly to it, held it within her for a considerable period of time, and to date has shown precisely NO ill effects whatsoever. What is she *already*, that she can do that? Time Lord sounds like a step down from where she already is...

SoRB

A rather holey plot device?

Nope, both wrong. She's a woman!

love this discussion. Some great theories here.

I'm surprised by the belief that Rassilon wans't the first Time Lord simply because he gave them the ability to master time and regenerate. They couldn't time travel before this event, how could they have been Lords of Time?

That doesn't mean that they weren't. Just doesn't strike me as logical. But then, for a race with such a strong sense of regality and pomposity, the term 'Time Lord' seems a bit basic.

Have you guys read 'The Time Traveller's Wife'? It's about a relationship between a woman and her husband who she first meets when she's a child and he's middle-aged. They get together when she's in her 20s and he's in early 30s. All the while he keeps disappearing and relocating in some other part of his own time-stream.

So maybe the Time Lords were like that - they could travel along their own time streams but nothing more. The problem with this is that it made their lives very stressful and complicated, so maybe Rassilon and his contemporaries worked on a solution that would keep them relatively consistent to each other's time (ie, a Gallifreyan Meantime that all Time Lords run to), but allowed them to travel across the whole of the Universe's history.

Thoughts?

"So maybe the Time Lords were like that - they could travel along their own time streams but nothing more"
- Sam Beckett stepped into the quantum leap generator and disappeared, sort of thing?

The "Gallifreyan Mean Time" idea is one that's cropped up in other discussions elsewhere and makes a whole heck of a lot of sense. Time, as we know, is relative. In the case of the Time Lords, it's relative to Gallifrey and I think there's a Law of Time that prevents the Time Lords messing with their own past. In order to travel in time successfully, you've got to have a present to use as a baseline.

Rose the Bad Wolf: she gets kissed by the Doc and passes out. We don't know how long she's unconscious; it could have been seconds or hours or just as easily the Doctor could have been filled with vortex energy (wasn't that Artron energy back in the old days?) for only a minute longer than Rose was...

Building Better Time Lords? Not something I see the Doctor attempting, for dramatic reasons as much as anything else. If you've seen School Reunion, you'll know how he reacts to that idea. I also think that, in the end, it would saddle him with too much of the wrong kind of responsibility.

"Not something I see the Doctor attempting"

It could be something he was forced to do. It could be something that someone else does by using him or some part of him.

What I'm not clear on, within the context of the Who-niverse is how the Time Lords could be destroyed and how he could be the last. Have the Time Lords been entirely erased from existence throughout time?

The problem with a war as we know it is that it is a discrete event in an ongoing history. Presumably the Time War is a more complex thing, not an event in itself such as we are used to thinking about. How would one prosecute a war against an enemy with the ability to travel in time? And what counts as a victory in such a conflict?

It appears that in the Who-niverse, the answer to the last question is the complete annihilation of the enemy at EVERY point in history. Which then begs the question, how is it that the Trees of Cheem, the Crillitanes and others still *remember* the existence of Time Lords? If they've been erased from the universe, why does anyone know who they are/were?



Ooooooh. Here's another thought... passing on Time Lord abilities might not require any technology at all. If TL ability really is carried in bodily fluids... it would at least explain why the Doctor has at no stage in over forty years expressed or acted on any sexual interest in any of his companions. He was afraid of passing on what might be a very desirable sexually transmitted condition.

The Doctor may well resist the urge to build "better" TLs in his own image, but the events of "Father's Day" and other things may persuade him that the universe needs TLs, and that he on his own is not enough. Let's face it, he was not enough in Father's Day, and if it hadn't been for Rose's dad's sacrifice, that would have been it.

That would actually be, dramatically, a good dilemma to put the Doctor in - place in the position of having to do something he considers to be abhorrent or unwise (i.e. create a new race of TLs), or face a universe without their moderating influence. He's always railed against their interventions, but we've seen the kind of thing that can result and heard from his own mouth the fact that the TLs would, in earlier times, have prevented it.

Ooh, the possibilities are endless...

SoRb

One theme the new show has repeatedly returned to is that nothing lasts forever, everything eventually has its time and dies - planets (Earth, Gallifrey), races (the Time Lords, the Daleks), individuals (Pete, Cassandra, Boe (eventually, one presumes)). The only exceptions being Jack and the Doctor (and the consequences of saving Jack's life seem to still be playing out, while the Doctor occasionally seems ambivalent at best about his own survival).

Given the Doctor seems to subscribe to this idea, it would be rather out of character for him to want to resurrect his own people, who - let's not forget - were a stagnant, indolent, reactionary, corrupt bunch, who were wiped out in a war that they themselves started. The original Gallifreyan Time Lords seem lost beyond hope of restitution, so any replacements would be pale simulacra, at best a pinful reminder of what the Doctor has lost.

Though it would be an interesting story if the Doctor were to encounter a group of surviving Time Lords who epitomised all the worst aspects of his people, the stuff he seems to have conveniently forgotten about recently...

Rose would become a Time LADY.

And, if you take the BBC Books or even BF Audios as canon, then many other Time Lords and Gallifreyans survived both of Gallifrey's ends.

But he would have access to such technology. Once again, considering the BBC Books canon, he reconstructed Gallifrey and all dead Time Lords with a supercomputer long after its first destruction.

The whole Rose/Vortex thing just seems like a cheap way out on RTD's part because he couldn't think of anything decent to end the season with, too. I mean, come on, the energy of the Vortex is nearly infinite. The Doctor would never have even made it to the TARDIS doors.

Don't forget, though, that the Time Lords, Ladies and Tots who survived may be able to reproduce, too. The curse on Gallifrey that no children were to be born there (brought upon by Pythia due to something Rassilon did, if my memory serves me correctly), was just that - no child would be born on Gallifrey. This was until Lungbarrow, though; Leela became pregnant at the end of the novel.

There aren't many Gallifreyans during the TV series, either - there are those who live on the lower levels of the Capitol (Shabogans, I think) who are not Time Lords yet clearly Gallifreyans. There are those living in the wastelands surrounding the Capitol, of course. Susan was born naturally as a 'true' Gallifreyan.


> Rose stood exposed directly to it, held it within her for a considerable period of time, and to date has shown precisely NO ill effects whatsoever. What is she *already*, that she can do that? Time Lord sounds like a step down from where she already is...

The Time Vortex's energy was being channelled through Rose by the TARDIS - the TARDIS was absorbing all of the energy, apparently.

"ooh the possibilities are endless"
- and doesn't it drive you mad?

"What I'm not clear on, within the context of the Who-niverse is how the Time Lords could be destroyed and how he could be the last. Have the Time Lords been entirely erased from existence throughout time?"

They weren't. As you pointed out, different people remember them.
What appears to have happened is the Daleks and the Time Lords got together for a 'last stand' at some point in recorded history. There might have been a last ditch defence of Gallifrey, or a last desperate assault on Gallifrey (depending on who was winning at the time) and someone used a weapon that should never have been unleashed. It might, given the level of destruction, have been the Hand of Omega. Either way, both sides put all their eggs in one basket and then promptly dropped the basket.

Rusty Davies wrote a piece, published not long after End of the World was broadcast, where he made it clear that even if the makers of the new show wanted to make use of continuity from the books, audios, etc (i.e. treat them as canon) they couldn't as it would be in breach of the BBC's charter.

Anyway, wasn't all the stuff about the Pythia, Gallifreyan society, and so on, from the early 90s pretty much rendered irrelevant by *the very next piece of broadcast Dr Who*, the TV movie (where the Doctor goes on about his father, not his Loom or anything like that).

I mean, it's fun to speculate about this stuff and all, but the new show nuked the Time Lords for a reason (freeing the show's continuity of a lot of its baggage), and if the Doctor really could resurrect them and actually wanted to (and I argue why I doubt he would up the page), why didn't he start trying to straight away?

The discussion as to why absorbing the Bad Wolf energy killed the Doctor but not Rose is interesting - but given that Rose had the power to resurrect the dead while under the influence, maybe the Doctor was able to use it to repair the damage it did to her before releasing it back into the time vortex. At which point, sadly, there was no-one around to heal him. A bit like the old legend about summoning the angel of death - just calling up the power means a life must be sacrificed, it's just not very particular about whose.

Thinking back to The Deadly Assassin and, lawks o'lordy, the Trial season, I miss Gallifrey. There was some lovely atmospheric stuff set on Gallifrey and the history was attractive. It'd be a shame to lose all that permanently.

Well, there's something to be said for that, but you've got to set the arcane and gloomy and wonderful Gallifrey of Deadly Assassin against the flat and dull and overlit 'leisure centre reception area' Gallifrey of virtually every story set there after that.

There's no reason the history couldn't be alluded to again, the same way that the farty satire story and the Xmas show referred to the UNIT stories of the 70s. But a full-scale return to using UNIT in a big way every other week would be a mistake, right? I think the same would be true of stories about Gallifrey.

True. UNIT were a bit before my time but, from what I've seen, were a pretty dull lot. They only seemed to exist to give the Earthbound Dr something to do.

I'm hoping that the war, and therefore Gallifrey, will be addressed in a big way at some point (possibly a feature film?) There's a lot of potential for Gallifreyan atmosphere meeting Babylon 5ish menace. And some LoTR stylee massive battle scenes, of course.

Yeah, but isn't there a sense in which that an apocalyptic Dalek-Time Lord battle on screen, no matter how much cash was spent on it, would inevitably not live up to the one we all currently have in our imaginations?

Wouldn't stand chance and, on reflection, would be out of character for the programme. I do think that there's too much potential there for the war to be left as a couple of comments from The Doc.

As an aside: the 'Trial' Gallifrey might have been a tad Homebase but it did have Linda Bellingham! She almost made up for the Langford.