Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson
“The Stockbridge Horror”
The fifth Doctor arrived on Gallifrey seconds after Tubal Cain’s missiles froze time in the Capitol. Within the time warp, the Doctor repaired the TARDIS. When the effect wore off, the Doctor was arrested and brought before a secret court for his interference with the timeline. Shayde disposed of evidence pertaining to the case, resulting in the Doctor’s release.
Tubal Cain was demoted to run the Quantum of Solace.
[467]
It was possible for Time Lords to “transform” into - or otherwise hybridise with - other species during regeneration.
[468]
Circular Time: “Spring”
Cardinal Zero was a Prydonian, and a member of the Council of the Great Mother - a group focused upon the politics of regeneration. He was in the running for a High Council seat when he abandoned life on Gallifrey, instead living in a rainforest on an alien world. The Time Lords dispatched the fifth Doctor and Nyssa to talk Zero into returning home, lest his actions damage the time-stream.
The Doctor and Nyssa found Zero living among a race of avian-people; Temporal Projectionists on Gallifrey had foretold that this species would progress from steam to orbital space flight in less than three generations. The avians themselves foretold of a prophet who would “lead them back to the sky”, and Zero arranged his death using a local poison. He theatrically fell into a lake - which was actually his TARDIS - and regenerated inside it into a half-Time Lord, half-avian being. Events compelled the Doctor and Nyssa to leave, and Zero - hailed as the prophet of the avians - set about boosting their development and refining their judicial system along more civilised lines.
Arc of Infinity
Omega had survived, and convinced a member of the High Council, Hedin, that he had been wronged by Gallifrey. With access to a biodata extract, Omega would be able to bond with a Time Lord, re-entering our universe. Hedin chose the fifth Doctor as Omega’s target - when the High Council discovered this, they recalled the Doctor’s TARDIS to Gallifrey (only the third time this had been done in the planet’s history) and lifted the ban on the death penalty. Killing the Doctor, they believed, would break the renegade’s link with our universe. The Doctor survived vaporisation by entering the Matrix, where he discovered Omega’s plan. He tracked Omega to Amsterdam, where the renegade’s new body proved unstable and disintegrated.
Time Lords could potentially live for millennia.
[469]
“Blood Invocation”
The fifth Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa responded to an emergency signal from Cardinal Hemal. A Time Lord had been found, drained of blood, and the Doctor realised there were vampires abroad. The Doctor discovered acolytes of the Cult of Rassilon the Vampire and had them rounded up. Meanwhile, Tegan was bitten by a vampire Time Lord who had gained access to the TARDIS. The vampire took the Ship to Earth... but disintegrated because he landed in the daytime.
The Five Doctors
[470]
/ The Five Companions
Borusa regenerated once more. He had become dissatisfied with ruling Gallifrey. Now he wanted “perpetual regeneration”: a secret discovered by Rassilon that allowed true immortality, not simply the vast lifespans granted to other Time Lords. Borusa discovered the ancient Timescoop machinery and restarted the Game of Rassilon, pitting the first, second, third and fifth Doctors and their friends - Susan, the Brigadier, Sarah Jane, Tegan and Turlough - against a selection of old enemies in the Death Zone on Gallifrey.
The fifth Doctor escaped a group of Cybermen by transmatting to the Capitol,
but en route was diverted into a pocket dimension containing an alternate Death Zone environment: a collection of fused spacecraft and space stations. More of the Doctor’s friends - Ian Chesterton, Steven Taylor, the incarnated “house” version of Sara Kingdom, Polly Wright and Nyssa - had been transported into the holding dimension, and aided him against foes that included Daleks, dinosaurs and members of the Sontaran Sixth Column. Time Lord technicians sent the Doctor’s friends home, and the Doctor continued on to the Capitol...
Rassilon gave Borusa the immortality he sought, transforming him into a living statue. He also sent the first, second and third Doctors - and their associates - back to their native times. Chancellor Flavia declared the fifth Doctor as President, but he left Gallifrey with Tegan and Turlough before he could take up office, and appointed Flavia to rule in his stead.
The Doctor was the 409th President.
[471]
Type 57 TARDISes were in operation at this time.
[472]
Flavia didn’t chase the Doctor because she wanted the Presidency for herself. Her reign was one of prosperity.
[473]
The Time Lords tasked the fifth Doctor with investigating time warps on Earth.
[474]
The fifth Doctor knew about the Shadow Proclamation, and that the Judoon had a contract with them.
[475]
Resurrection of the Daleks
The Daleks planned to assassinate the High Council of the Time Lords using duplicates of the fifth Doctor and his companions, but the Doctor prevented this.
Type 70 TARDISes were better suited than Type 40s to apply brute force and penetrate distortion grids that prevented space-time travel.
[476]
The Axis of Insanity
The Axis was an interdimensional nexus akin to a giant tree, whose branches linked to alternate realities that were usually the result of time experiments gone wrong - especially those conducted by the Time Lords. The Axis prevented such errant realities from interfering with the primary timeline.
The scientist Jarra To conducted experiments with a Timescoop that brought dragons - the Firebreed - from the past of her homeworld of Pangorum to the present. Jarra To killed the Time Lord Protok when he attempted to intervene, and although the Time Lords closed off Jarra To’s timeline, she escaped from it into the Axis - where she gained fantastical abilities and adopted multiple guises. As the nihilistic Jester, she killed the Overseer - a multi-faceted being from the dimension of Guardas, whose consciousness stabilised the Axis. This threatened to bring down the barriers separating timelines within the Axis, an act that would have spread madness through the whole of creation. Tog, a native of Pangorum, sacrificed himself to kill Jarra To. The fifth Doctor, Peri and Erimem, relegated Protok’s TARDIS to a pocket dimension that held hundreds of inert TARDISes whose operators were deceased. The Doctor also went to the Grand Prosideum on Guardas to request installation of a new Overseer.
“Urban Myths”
The fifth Doctor cured an outbreak of the Tule-Oz virus on the planet Poiti, but three CIA agents (Commander Edge, Commander Harom and Kettoo) became infected with a benign strain of the germ. The Tule-Oz virus made the agents believe that the Doctor and Peri had devastated Poiti, but the Doctor provided an antidote for the agents and their superior, Inquisitor Auron. At this time, top-secret correspondence was automatically routed via the nearest Type 40 TARDIS to incidents away from Gallifrey.
Attack of the Cybermen
The Cybermen invaded the sixth Doctor’s TARDIS and cut short a signal he sent to the Time Lords asking for help.
[477]
Mission to Magnus
The Seven Sisterhoods of Magnus petitioned the Time Lords for permission to incorporate time travel into their conflict with the neighbouring planet of Salvak. Anzor, as an envoy of the High Council, was sent to Magnus in a Type 60 TARDIS. He denied the Sisterhoods’ request on the grounds that, “It is forbidden to alter history. My job is to prevent time tampering, except in the most exceptional circumstances.” The Doctor revenged himself on his school tormentor by sending Anzor and his TARDIS back to the Mesozoic Era.
The Phylesians made immortal temporal phoenix birds fly in time loops, creating quills capable of rewriting time. The Time Lords were thought to have destroyed all such devices, but at least one survived.
[478]
New surveillance methods were developed, increasing the range of information that the Matrix could harvest. The Matrix could now record events that occurred within a certain vicinity of a TARDIS.
[479]
“The World Shapers”
The Time Lords sent an agent in a new TARDIS to investigate time disturbances on Marinus. That Time Lord died, but the sixth Doctor, Frobisher and Peri arrived and took on the assignment. At its conclusion, a delegation of senior Time Lords met up with the sixth Doctor and offered false assurances that they would nip the creation of the Cybermen in the bud.
The Celestial Intervention Agency worried that the Ravolox Affair would be exposed. They spread rumours that Flavia wasn’t legitimately President, and she ordered an election to settle the matter. The Agency fixed the election, installing their supporter, Niroc.
[480]
The Doctor’s Second Trial
The Trial of a Time Lord / The Ultimate Foe
The sixth Doctor discovered that the planet Ravolox was in fact the Earth in the far future, but he didn’t know what had moved the planet two light years or, more importantly, why. Despite this, the High Council became worried that the Doctor knew too much, and they brought him to a vast space station. The Doctor at first learned that he was to undergo an impartial enquiry into his activities. He also learnt that as he had neglected his duties, he had been deposed from the Presidency.
The prosecuting council, named the Valeyard, successfully argued that the Doctor was guilty of interference on a grand scale, and the enquiry became a trial. It was revealled that the Doctor’s actions on Thoros Beta had threatened the course of universal evolution. The Time Lords intervened directly, killing the scientist Crozier, the Mentor Kiv and possibly the Doctor’s companion Peri. When the Doctor’s own evidence proved that on another occasion he had committed genocide - wiping out the Vervoids to save the Earth - he faced a death sentence.
The Doctor claimed that the Matrix was being tampered with. The Keeper of the Matrix was brought in as an expert witness, but the Master suddenly appeared on the Matrix screen, demonstrating that it was indeed possible to breach the security of the Time Lords’ master computer. The Master explained that Andromedans had previously entered the Matrix from their base on Earth and stolen valuable scientific secrets. To protect their position, the High Council had covertly ordered Earth’s destruction.
The Master’s greatest bombshell was the identity of the prosecuting council: the Valeyard was an amalgamation of all that was evil in the Doctor, somewhere between his twelfth and final incarnation.
[481]
The Master had encountered the Valeyard before, and knew that the High Council had brought him in to frame the Doctor, in return for which the Valeyard would gain the Doctor’s remaining regenerations.
When the truth about Ravolox was revealled, popular unrest deposed the High Council. Both the Master and Valeyard moved to take advantage of the situation: the Master planned to take control of Gallifrey, even as the Valeyard attempted to assassinate senior members of the Time Lord hierarchy. Both failed. The Master was trapped by the Limbo Atrophier, a booby trap placed on the Matrix files. The Valeyard was believed destroyed by his own particle disseminator, but he somehow survived. When last seen, he had assumed the guise of the Keeper of the Matrix.
The Doctor suggested that once order was restored, the Inquisitor should run for President.
A secret faction of Time Lords had authorised Peri’s assassination, fearing the damaging testimony she might deliver at the sixth Doctor’s trial. A splinter group of that faction, fearing reprisals from the Doctor, revised history so Peri instead became Yrcanos’ queen. The incoming Gallifreyan president, upon reviewing the Trial, authorised use of standard CIA protocol - that Peri be returned home after her memories of the Doctor were wiped, save for their first adventure together. Each intervention created a new timeline for Peri; before long, at least five of her were active in the universe.
[482]
The Eight Doctors
The eighth Doctor travelled to the time of his trial. He called on Rassilon to briefly free Borusa’s noblest incarnation. Borusa deposed the corrupt High Council and arranged honest elections. Flavia was re-elected and restored Earth to its rightful place. Rassilon might have intervened to make the Doctor meet his companion Sam Jones in 1997.
Unregenerate!
[483]
The High Council foresaw a time when lesser species would develop time travel, and pack the space-time continuum to the bursting point. The Gallifreyan CIA therefore instigated a project to install the sentiences of newly birthed TARDISes into living beings. They hoped the sentiences would operate as CIA agents on their hosts’ homeworlds, thwarting the lesser species’ endeavours to create time-travel technology. The CIA believed this would work better than the usual array of spies and brainwashing.