The Advocate was transported across time and space from the Shadow Proclamation to the Medusa Cascade and into the Time War. She arrived seconds before the Doctor used the Moment and time-locked the War, and so was killed and reborn over a thousand years as time lost meaning. She became little more than stardust, and eventually drifted out of the War through the same tear in time as Davros. Once reformed, she decided that the Doctor was a great threat to the universe. [581]
“I saw Gallifrey sacrificed when the Cruciform fell. I turned the Key in the lock and I doomed them all.” [582]
Time Lords outside the Capitol Dome, including a young girl, looked up and were bathed in a blue light. Gallifrey was destroyed in one second. [583] Gallifrey was “lost in fire”. [584]
The Doctor wiped out the entire Dalek race, and their ten million-strong war fleet, in one second. The Time Lords - save for the Doctor - also perished as a result of this. The Doctor instigated this destruction, referred to as an “inferno”. He “watched it happen... made it happen”. [585] The Doctor killed all the Time Lords. [586] Many other planets, star systems and galaxies were destroyed at this point. [587]
The Last Great Time War was timelocked.
Aftermath of the Last Great Time War
The Time Lords’ secrets died with them, as well as artifacts such as the Seal of Rassilon. Susan was taken from the Doctor, everyone was taken from him. [588]
“Time Lords are the stuff of legends. Belong in the myths and legends of the higher species.” [589]
Some people regard the Time War as a legend. [590] The Saturnynians knew the Doctor as the “man that let an entire race turn to cinders and ash”. [591]
The Doctor himself survived the Last Great Time War. The eighth Doctor “started and ended this regeneration alone”. [592] It was possible that the eighth Doctor regenerated during the Time War - the tenth Doctor suggested that his previous self had been “born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge”. [593]
“Remember what happened immediately after the War. Remember Rose.” [594]
The Doctor’s home planet was reduced to rocks and dust, and he was the only survivor. [595] He stated, “I lived... everyone else died.” [596]
A single Dalek fell through time to the early twenty-first century. [597] The Emperor Dalek’s flagship also survived, and limped to the solar system “centuries” before the year 200,000. [598] A single Dalek Progenitor survived, and was later recovered by the last surviving Daleks. [599]
Time was more fragile without the Time Lords to protect it, and some of the rules governing time were suspended. [600] Travel between parallel realities had been “easy” when the Time Lords “kept their eye on everything”, but following their downfall, the walls of reality closed and travel between parallel worlds became nearly impossible. [601]
The Shadow Proclamation [602]
“What is the Shadow Proclamation, anyway?”... “Posh name for police. Outer-space police.” [603]
The Time Lords gave the Shadow Proclamation strict rulings on the subject of manipulations in Time and Space before they left. [604] The Shadow Proclamation followed the Holy Writ of the Shadow Proclamation, and considered Time Lords “the stuff of legend’” [605]
There were at least twenty-three conventions to the Shadow Proclamation. [606] The extraction machines used to create Golems were forbidden under Article 29.8 of the Shadow Proclamation. [607] Article 57 of the Proclamation forbid the destruction of Level Five planets. [608] Article 1768C of the Shadow Proclamation allowed for a trial operating under “innocent until proven guilty”, a legal standard found on eighty-seven member planets and 12,932 affiliated worlds. [609] Clause 374 of the Shadow Proclamation authorised lethal force to retrieve a culturally valuable artifact. [610] The Shadow Proclamation underestimated the success and reach of the Time Market. [611]
Rumours and anecdotal evidence suggested that the Shadow Proclamation had enforced the boundaries of a far galaxy by seeding a virus that would activate if any of that galaxy’s populations ventured into space. One civilisation ventured toward the stars anyway, casing the virus to kill off a third of the beings in that galaxy. If this story was nothing more than propaganda, it was nonetheless effective at keeping some of the lesser races in line. [612]
The Doctor’s Wife [613]
The sentient planet called House existed in a bubble universe. It fed on rift energy, and over the course of half a million years had killed hundreds of Time Lords to feast upon the refined Artron energy in their TARDISes. Before doing so, House had to transplant the sentience of each TARDIS into a living being. House’s junkyard included the remains of one hundred TARDIS models.
The eleventh Doctor received an emergency message from a Time Lord slain by House: the Corsair. He took Amy and Rory into House’s bubble, where House transferred the “living soul” of the TARDIS into a young woman named Idris. When House learned that the TARDIS was the last of its kind, he took control of the Ship and attempted to fly back to the universe, marooning the Doctor in a collapsing universe with a dying Idris. They scratch-built a TARDIS from House’s junkyard, and caught up with the House-TARDIS. As Idris’ body died, the TARDIS Matrix was released and reclaimed control of the Ship, annihilating House.
The Doctor’s TARDIS had about thirty console rooms in its archives, including ones the Doctor would use in future - until now, he had only changed the “desktop pattern” about a dozen times.
Gallifrey Section Sidebars
The Doctor’s Age
The Doctor’s age has been specified a number of times, but he is often vague and contradictory on the subject.
The second Doctor tells Victoria that he is “450” in The Tomb of the Cybermen. The Master of the Land of Fiction says he is “ageless” in The Mind Robber. (In the draft scripts of The Power of the Daleks and The Underwater Menace, he was “750”.)
The third Doctor claims to have been a scientist for “thousands of years” in both Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Mind of Evil.
The fourth Doctor says he is “749” in Planet of Evil, The Brain of Morbius and The Seeds of Doom, and “nearly 750” in Pyramids of Mars. He is “750” by The Robots of Death, 756 (according to him) or 759 (according to Romana) in The Ribos Operation, nearly 760 in Nightmare of Eden, 750 again in The Creature from the Pit and The Leisure Hive. (A scripted scene in The Stones of Blood showed him celebrating his 751st birthday.) Complicating matters further, fifteen years elapse for the fourth Doctor and Romana in Heart of TARDIS (set between The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara) as they travel through a nexus fighting such foes as the Solstice Squid; it’s thirty years if they do, in fact, have to make the same journey back again.
The sixth Doctor is 900 in Revelation of the Daleks and The Mysterious Planet, but “over 900” by Terror of the Vervoids. An elderly Jacob Williams claims in 100: “Bedtime Story” that the sixth Doctor spent a hundred years showing four completely paralysed people - including him and Evelyn - the wonders of the universe, but this is a highly suspect claim given the Doctor’s age in Time and the Rani, and could just owe to Jacob relating events to his son in a fable-like fashion.
In Time and the Rani, both the seventh Doctor and the Rani are “953”, and the Doctor has “nine hundred years experience” by Remembrance of the Daleks. In the New Adventures, he was around a thousand years old. According to SLEEPY, he celebrated his 1000th birthday during Set Piece.
The eighth Doctor is 1012 in Vampire Science, in which it’s also said that his current body is “three” years old, meaning that the seventh Doctor regenerated at age 1009. In The Dying Days, the eighth Doctor is 1200. We also know that this incarnation resided on Earth for one hundred and thirteen years, from 1888-2001 (beginning with The Ancestor Cell and ending with Escape Velocity) and that he spent six hundred years on the planet Orbis (Orbis). Cumulatively, and however one structures the eighth Doctor’s adventures, he must be at least 1725 (probably more).
The new series reset the Doct
or’s age, but has been consistent in its progression since then. The ninth Doctor says he’s 900 in Aliens of London and The Doctor Dances. In response to Rose’s question about the problems introducing himself without a real name in The Empty Child, he says, “Nine centuries in, I’m coping”.
The tenth Doctor says he’s 903 in Voyage of the Damned, “The Whispering Gallery” and The Nemonite Invasion. He’s 906 in The End of Time (TV). Taken at face value, this means that the Doctor’s tenth body only survived for six years.
The eleventh Doctor is 907 in Flesh and Stone and Amy’s Choice. He mentions spending “nine hundred years in time and space” in A Christmas Carol. In The Impossible Planet, we see him at two different points in his life - at age 909 and 1,103. He ends Series 6 as the latter. It’s unclear if the intervening hundred and ninety-five years occur (for him) during the mid-season hiatus between A Good Man Goes to War and Let’s Kill Hitler or between The God Complex and Closing Time (after he drops Amy and Rory on Earth). The Doctor telling young George in Night Terrors, “I was your age oh, about a thousand years ago”, might suggest that about a century elapses between each break.
The tenth Doctor evidently doesn’t add the ten years of life he yields to restart a TARDIS energy cell in The Rise of the Cybermen to the overall tally of his age, perhaps suggesting that the eleventh Doctor doesn’t count the twenty-five years he donates to settle Amy’s temporal credit card bill (Borrowed Time) either.
From this, we can infer some other dates:
• The Doctor has been operating his TARDIS for five hundred and twenty-three years by The Pirate Planet, and was 759 in the previous story, The Ribos Operation. This would mean that the Doctor left Gallifrey when he was 236. However, The Doctor’s Wife claims that the Doctor has been travelling in the TARDIS for “seven hundred years”; as he was cited as being 909 in The Impossible Astronaut, this would alternatively suggest that he left Gallifrey when he was 209-ish.
• The Doctor attended his Tech Course with Drax “four hundred fifty years” before The Armageddon Factor. This would mean he was 309 at the time (implying it was after he left Gallifrey, or that he left and then returned before leaving for the last time).
• Romana is equally inconsistent with her age, and the age difference between her and the Doctor can variously be calculated as 617 or 620 (The Ribos Operation), 625 (City of Death, Creature from the Pit) or 600 (The Leisure Hive).
Past Lives
The orthodox view accepted wholesale by most fans is that the Doctor is a Time Lord who can regenerate his body twelve times when it is seriously injured. It’s also held that William Hartnell played “the first Doctor” and that by the end of The End of Time (TV), the Doctor has regenerated ten times, so that Matt Smith is the eleventh incarnation of the Time Lord. This version of events is actually established very late in the show’s history (the term “regeneration”, for example, is not even used until Planet of the Spiders at the end of Season 11, the word “incarnation” is only used on rare occasions - such as in The Twin Dilemma and The Trial of a Time Lord - and so on).
Only a half a dozen stories in the classic series refer to the orthodox view: In The Three Doctors, the Time Lords claim that the Hartnell Doctor is the “earliest”. We learn that the Time Lords are limited to twelve regenerations in The Deadly Assassin, a view that is reinforced by The Keeper of Traken, The Five Doctors and The Twin Dilemma. (Although in The Deadly Assassin, The Keeper of Traken and The Five Doctors, we learn that it is possible for a Time Lord to regenerate more than twelve times, and in The Twin Dilemma, Azmael initiates a thirteenth regeneration, the strain of which kills him.)
It is Mawdryn Undead (Season 20) before the Doctor explicitly states that he has regenerated four times and has eight regenerations remaining. In The Five Doctors, the first Doctor sees the Davison Doctor and concludes “so there are five of me now” and refers to himself as “the original, you might say”. In Time and the Rani, the Doctor talks of his “seventh persona”. The voiceover at the start of Doctor Who - The Movie says that the Doctor is “nearing the end of my seventh life”.
The new series displays the established eleven Doctors in order (starting with William Hartnell and finishing with David Tennant, then Matt Smith) in The Next Doctor and The Eleventh Hour. In The Lodger, the earliest Doctors appear in a mental flash, and the Matt Smith version points at himself and says, “eleventh”. SJA: Death of the Doctor upsets some orthodoxy when the Doctor says he can regenerate “five hundred and seven times” (see the “Regeneration... A Complete New Life Cycle” sidebar).
Despite all this, the commonly used terms such as “first Doctor”, “second Doctor” and so on are never used on screen (and should never be capitalised).
More often, the evidence about the Doctor’s past is ambiguous or inconclusive: he seems vague about his age throughout his life, the details varying wildly from story to story, likewise his name, his doctorate and the reasons why he left Gallifrey. In The Deadly Assassin, Runcible remarks that the Doctor has had a facelift and the Doctor replies that he has had “several so far” (the original script more specifically said he had done so “three times”). In The Ultimate Foe, the Valeyard comes from somewhere between the Doctor’s “twelfth and final incarnation” (not the “twelfth and thirteenth”). No unfamiliar Doctors come to light in The Three Doctors or The Five Doctors, but on two occasions (Day of the Daleks and Resurrection of the Daleks), an attempt to probe the Doctor’s mind is abruptly halted just as the William Hartnell incarnation appears on the monitor. In The Creature from the Pit, he claims Time Lords have ninety lives, and he’s had a hundred and twenty.
There have been a number of hints that incarnation of the Doctor played by William Hartnell was not the first. In the script for The Destiny of Doctor Who, the new Doctor confides to his astonished companions that he has “renewed himself” before. In the transmitted version of the story, The Power of the Daleks, the line does not appear, but neither is it contradicted. In The Brain of Morbius, Morbius mentally regresses the Doctor back from his Tom Baker incarnation, through Jon Pertwee, Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell, but this time no-one interrupts and we go on to see a further eight incarnations of the Doctor prior to Hartnell. Morbius shouts - as the sequence of mysterious faces appears on the scanner - “How far Doctor? How long have you lived? Your puny mind is powerless against the strength of Morbius! Back! Back to your beginning!” These are certainly not Morbius’ faces (as has occasionally been suggested) or the Doctor’s ancestors or his family. Morbius is not deluding himself. The Doctor fails to win the fight and almost dies, only surviving because of the Elixir... it just happens that Morbius’ brain casing can’t withstand the pressures either.
The production team at the time (who bear a remarkable resemblance to the earlier Doctors, probably because eight of them - Christopher Barry, George Gallacio, Robert Banks Stewart, Phillip Hinchcliffe, Douglas Camfield, Graeme Harper, Robert Holmes and Chris Baker - posed for the photographs used in the sequence), definitely intended the faces to be those of earlier Doctors. Producer Philip Hinchcliffe said: “We tried to get famous actors for the faces of the Doctor. But because no-one would volunteer, we had to use backroom boys. And it is true to say that I attempted to imply that William Hartnell was not the first Doctor”.
However we might want to fit this scene into the series’ other continuity, or to rationalise it away, taking The Brain of Morbius on its own, there’s no serious room for doubt that these are pre-Hartnell incarnations of the Doctor. This hasn’t stopped fans doubting, of course. Two stories later, in The Masque of Mandragora, the Doctor and Sarah Jane discover “the old control room” that the Doctor claims to have used, although it had never been seen in the TV series before.
Cold Fusion features a sequence where the Doctor remembers his past on Gallifrey (p172-173), where he has recently regenerated to resemble the “Camfield Doctor” seen in The Brain of Morbius. However, there is a degree of ambiguity as to whether these are the
Doctor’s own memories. Lungbarrow states that the Hartnell Doctor was the first and hints, but never explicitly states, that the faces seen in The Brain of Morbius are incarnations of the Other, not the Doctor.
“Regeneration... a Complete New Life Cycle”
In The Five Doctors, the High Council offers the Master the carrot that - should he enter the Death Zone and help the Doctor as they wish - he will be rewarded with both a full pardon and “regeneration, a complete new life cycle”. This has become a perennial source of confusion, as it would seem to be a change from the twelve-regeneration limit as first established in The Deadly Assassin. And yet, both on screen and in the tie-in media, nearly every classic Doctor Who story has ignored the development and continued to regard the twelve-regeneration rule as sacrosanct.
Even within The Five Doctors itself, the deal looks a bit suspect. The story entails Borusa wanting to be President of Gallifrey for eternity by obtaining the immortality promised by Rassilon, but we know that Borusa can remain President even if he regenerates (he’s done so at least once while in office; compare with Arc of Infinity), so the issue isn’t that he’s desperate to hold onto his current body. He wants to be truly immortal, which The Five Doctors cites as being beyond any Time Lord save Rassilon and anyone he bestows it upon.
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