Authors: Lance Parkin,Lars Pearson

B00DPX9ST8 EBOK (352 page)

BOOK: B00DPX9ST8 EBOK

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Clearly, this is a perennial and active debate among the Time Lords, with three factions. In descending order of size and influence: most are opposed to any form of intervention; a significant number think the Time Lords should be a benign influence; a very few feel Gallifrey should impose its rule on the rest of the universe. The majority of Time Lords clearly worry that “benign” intervention will quickly become tyranny, and this is not an unfounded fear.

From the time of Rassilon through to the Doctor’s time, however, there seems to be a status quo - the Time Lords fight wars against immense threats, and perhaps monitor time-travel experiments and send occasional delegations out for specific reasons, but broadly confine themselves to Gallifrey. The existence of the Celestial Intervention Agency suggests that covert operations were also conducted.

If Gallifrey’s “zero tolerance” attitude to intervention is a recent crackdown, rather than dogma since the time of Rassilon, this would help explain a few of the apparent contradictions in its policies towards other races. We can see that when the Doctor was young, he travelled and was involved in interventionist efforts, like banning the MiniScopes. Clearly, Gallifrey in this period was relatively willing to interact with the wider universe.

The Minyan Incident seems to have been a shock to the system that resulted in a clampdown in all interventionism. As the Doctor left soon after this, and given what we know of the Doctor’s attitude to intervention, it’s extremely tempting to imagine that this clampdown was a factor in his departure. As the varying accounts of why the Doctor left Gallifrey show, what motivates him leaving could be anything from a principled rejection of Time Lord society to punishment for his being caught redhanded in a newly-illegal act.

[
346
]
The Brain of Morbius
. See the Past Lives sidebar.

[
347
]
Cold Fusion, The Infinity Doctors.

[
348
]
The Infinity Doctors

[
349
]
Cold Fusion

[
350
]
Cold Fusion, The Infinity Doctors
. The Doctor’s new incarnation matches the description of the “Camfield Doctor” seen in
The Brain of Morbius.

[
351
]
The Infinity Doctors

[
352
]
Cold Fusion

[
353
]
Unnatural History.
There’s also no account of what happened to the Doctor’s son and daughter-in-law, or any of the Doctor’s other children.

[
354
]
Fear Her
. Although some have seen this as a reference to the Doctor raising Miranda in
Father Time
, if he was indeed Susan’s biological grandfather, then he clearly must also have been a father.

[
355
]
The Doctor’s Daughter

[
356
] “A Fairytale Life”

[
357
] Dating
The Infinity Doctors
(PDA #17) - The story takes place an unspecified amount of time after Patience disappears, to an unspecified incarnation of the Doctor, at an unspecified point before Gallifrey’s destruction (possibly between
The Gallifrey Chronicles
and
Rose
). It’s a thousand years since Savar lost his eyes.

Is The Infinity Doctors Canon?

The Infinity Doctors
is a story set on Gallifrey that takes all the information from every previous story (in all media) set on Gallifrey - and other references to it - at face value and incorporates them into the narrative. The paradox being that we’ve seen a vast number of contradictory accounts of the Doctor’s home planet, so that
The Infinity Doctors’
super-adherence to established continuity actually makes it impossible to place at a particular point in continuity without contradicting something established elsewhere.

References in
Seeing I
,
Unnatural History
,
The Taking of Planet 5
,
Father Time
and
The Gallifrey Chronicles
all make it clear that
The Infinity Doctors
(or, at the very least, events identical to it) took place in the “real”
Doctor Who
universe.

Latterly a fan consensus has built up that
The Infinity Doctors
is set on the “reconstructed” Gallifrey promised by
The Gallifrey Chronicles
, that the Infinity Doctor is the eighth Doctor, and his Gallifrey is the one destined to be destroyed in the Time War. This wasn’t the author’s intention, but isn’t ruled out by the book.

[
358
] Is Susan the Doctor’s Granddaughter?

Cold Fusion
recounts Susan being rescued by the Doctor as an infant, which followed the description in the original “Cartmel Masterplan” document. When the events of that document were dramatised in
Lungbarrow
, Susan was an older child.

This complicates an already rather convoluted story. If both the accounts of
Cold Fusion
and
Lungbarrow
are taken at face value (and both contain degrees of ambiguity), it seems that Susan was born to the Camfield Doctor’s daughter-in-law in the recent past (ie: when the Doctor was a younger man and living on Gallifrey, not millions of years ago at the time of Rassilon). The Hartnell Doctor came back to this time zone (in
Cold Fusion,
it’s possible he simply regenerated, but this would seem to seriously contradict
Lungbarrow
) with the Hand of Omega and then rescued the infant Susan and Patience. The Doctor then travelled deep into the past of Gallifrey, where Susan was left in “safety” with the Other (where she was considered the last womb-born child). Patience fled Gallifrey in an early TARDIS (possibly she was taken into the distant past, too, and stole the TARDIS there). The Hartnell Doctor would revisit ancient Gallifrey and discover that following the death of the Other, Susan had been living on the streets there.

[
359
]
An Unearthly Child
, the quote comes from
The Dalek Invasion of Earth
. The Doctor and Susan frequently refer to each other as grandfather and grandchild.

[
360
]
Marco Polo

[
361
]
The Five Doctors

[
362
] Barbara says Susan is 15 in
An Unearthly Child
. In
Marco Polo,
Ping Cho says she is “in my sixteenth year”, and Susan says “Well, so am I”. So Susan is not far older than she looks, unlike Romana.

[
363
] On screen, Susan is never mentioned by any Time Lord, either those on Gallifrey or the various renegades.

[
364
]
An Unearthly Child.
Later stories showed the manual for the Doctor’s TARDIS which has the word on the cover, suggesting it was coined long before the Doctor’s time. One possible conclusion is that Susan is from an earlier period of Gallifreyan history, and which is indeed what
Lungbarrow
established.

[
365
]
Cold Fusion

[
366
]
Lungbarrow

[
367
]
Here There Be Monsters
. Having “a perfect memory” certainly isn’t something one could convict the Doctor of, though.

[
368
]
An Earthly Child

[
369
] As
The First Doctor Handbook
(p181) spells out, while the series was being devised and before the first scripts were in, the production team had a relatively clear idea of what the Doctor’s secret was: “He has flashes of garbled memory which indicates he was involved in a galactic war and still fears pursuit by some undefined enemy... he escaped from his own galaxy in the year 5733”. There’s no supporting evidence for this on screen.

[
370
]
The War Games

[
371
] Dating
Lungbarrow
(NA #60) - This was “eight hundred and seventy-three years ago”. Given that this is set just before
Doctor Who - The Movie
, and
Vampire Science
states that the Doctor was 1009 when he regenerated, it would make him 136. However, given the contradictions over his age, it is probably best not to rely on this figure. Owis was Loomed 675 years ago.

The Doctor’s Family

Sixteen of the Doctor’s forty-four Cousins are named in Lungbarrow: Quences, Owis, Glospin, Satthralope, Jobiska, Rynde, Arkhew, Maljamin, Farg, Celesia, Almund, Tugel, Chovor the Various, DeRoosifa, Salpash and Luton. Braxiatel is presumably another.

[
372
]
Here There Be Monsters

[
373
]
Gallifrey: Annihilation
. The inauguration of Pandak III is mentioned in
The Deadly Assassin
.

[
374
]
The War Games, Resurrection of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars, The Deadly Assassin
.

[
375
]
The Invisible Enemy
,
The Five Doctors.

[
376
]
The Sound of Drums
,
The Beast Below.

[
377
]
An Unearthly Child
,
The Edge of Destruction
,
The Massacre
,
The Two Doctors.