#and how the time war is an oxbow reality and so is doctor who as we know it

[seveneyesoup]

can’t remember who said it, but i saw a theory somewhere saying that The Enemy was an abstract thing that the time lords chose to make manifest with the daleks? turning something abstract and powerful into something concrete and therefore less dangerous. what are your thoughts on that theory?

I dare you to make one whole post about Time War without mentioning your unconditional love for EAD and without using the word "Doctor" (or referring directly towards him)

Hehehe I woke up and chose mean behavior towards my favorite page *hit the button* hehe

i'll use this opportunity to talk about "the enemy."

"the enemy" is one of the unsolved mysteries of the time war that will always linger in the back of my mind. first mentioned in Alien Bodies, they go on to be mentioned elsewhere, mostly in the Faction Paradox books and The Ancestor Cell. their form and nature is very unpredictable, usually in flux. a lot of the accounts of them come from visions and premonitions, rather than first-hand experience. they were supposed to cause Ths Event, aka the destruction of Gallifrey, but the war began on Dro(r)nid instead.

they were basically the first draft of what many nuwho fans think of as the Time War! most people think that the TW was just between the Time Lords and the Daleks, with maybe a few other groups having a major impact, but it started with "the enemy." not many people seem to know about this.

[natequarter]

to elaborate on the post-war universe ideas: the oxbow reality idea makes a lot of sense if they contain two different powers who escaped the war, because the doctor is dead in the faction's universe and the faction don't exist in nuwho. it also makes the end of the war that bit more horrifying because there is no end of the war; the only people who have escaped exist in oxbow realities or pocket universes, and the real universe is stuck in a permanent state of war. (how naïve do you have to be to think a war like that could ever end?) and i actually quite like the earth being moved to the centre of the spiral politic idea - it explains how the time lords were totally destroyed in a way that a big explosion just wouldn't (they never existed in the first place! the doctor only survives by virtue of having an existence so complicated (cste) it can exist without gallifrey's grounding presence) and explains why everyone keeps forgetting aliens - it's a stagnancy of their culture that comes with being at the centre of the spiral politic

[rassilon-imprimatur]

Good EDAs, Faction Paradox, and various Post-War Who thoughts for today: 

- I really love how Fitz’s implied-but-never-stated bisexuality wasn’t just limited to the Doctor. The Taint’s whole bit where he thinks about same-sex marriage happily reeks of him thinking of a current friend he’s crushing on (to me anyway). His relationship with Sasha in Mags Halliday’s superb History 101, or with George Williamson in Justin Richards’ Time Zero, are so homoerotic (and totally in a “Fitz has no idea what to do with these feelings” way). 

- I don’t think The Gallifrey Chronicles was setting Fitz and Trix up for a permanent goodbye, not at all. Their conversations throughout the novel, at best, implies a break. Sure, Fitz admits he’s unclear and confused about what he wants and expects from traveling with the Doctor, but he and Trix essentially just discuss taking a brief vacation. TGC also shows Anji is literally a phone call and a visit away, keeping in close contact with the TARDIS. Granted, TGC probably wouldn’t have set up a “departure” for Fitz and Trix had it not been the last EDA before the New Series took the BBC Books’ priority, but I far more easily see more of a post-Happy Endings Benny/series 7A Ponds/Series 8-9 Clara arrangement with the pair’s traveling with the Doctor, not a full-blown Classic Who “goodbye.” 

- Mags Halliday’s The Silk Road has got me thinking that the post-War, amnesic Eighth Doctor might have accidently involved himself in several “prequels” or 

- The Doctor and Miranda totally had dozens of smaller scale adventures, akin to The School of Doom and the interlude in The Gallifrey Chronicles. Father Time as a bit of narrative inflexibility, but I totally think Parkin regretted letting Richards kill Miranda off in Sometime Never..., and was totally trying to suggest many further adventures, regardless of how it “doesn’t technically fit.” 

- The Doctor, Fitz, and Anji totally bumped into Emily and Honoré from Time Hunter. 

- I hardcore headcanon Honoré as pansexual. 

- The “Headmaster” Master from Parkin’s The School of Doom is totally The Adventuress of Henrietta Street’s Man with the Rosette, and that short story is how the Doctor was able to recognize him in the novel through his amnesia.

- Many of the oxbow realities mentioned in Weapons Grade Snake Oil (one of which is implied to be NuWho) were created by the Pageant and overseen by their Masksmasters as a means of experimenting and just observing different “victories” in the War.  

[doctornolonger]

For ages now, I’ve been working on something about how oxbow realities are inevitable by-products of the destructions of the Nine Gallifreys, and how that explains how post-War futures work, with Eight’s post-Ancestor Cell oxbow splitting him away while the War continued. But the longer I think about the idea, the more holes I poke in the interpretation.

The most major problem is that so many other Wartime characters end up in the Doctor’s post-War oxbow, despite not being at the destruction of Romana III’s Gallifrey. The Timeless folks are explainable, maybe, but Scarlette and Mother Francesca? Why are they tied to Romana’s Gallifrey as opposed to any other? I did all kinds of thinking about this until the answer popped up in the Discord:

The Doctor didn’t get launched into a post-War universe at all. After the destruction of Romana III’s Gallifrey, there was no oxbow involved. The War kept raging on the other Gallifreys, but the Doctor was out of the loop. He was stranded on Earth for a hundred years, while Compassion was running around the universe mothering a generation of 103-forms. And during that 100 years, while he wasn’t clued into the greater scheme of things at all, the War came to an end. He just assumed it was because of what he did in The Ancestor Cell, because that’s the kind of person the Doctor is.

(As @fwhiffahder pointed out, this is an exact parallel to The Blue Angel: Iris / Compassion dumps the Doctor on Earth without his memory because he can’t be involved in the War. The Blue Angel even asks which Doctor it is who inevitably does get involved, lending comparison to the Relic.)

This explains a lot of other things: in The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, the Time Lords elementals had never existed. Blowing up a planet wouldn’t do that to a species! The Book of the War actually directly addresses the idea, saying that if all the Homeworlds were destroyed, there would be a colossal diaspora and the Great Houses would enter a new age of thinking, like the posthumans did after the destruction of Earth. Nothing to do with being wiped from existence!

No, in order for the world of Adventuress to come about, something much trickier would have had to happen. History itself would have had to been edited. And it’s no coincidence that the caldera was capable of doing exactly that. The Houses portrayed it on their tapestries as a black circle not unlike the “black eye-sun” that hangs above the post-War Kingdom of the Mal’akh in Adventuress. (It’s no coincidence that the caldera is also called the Eye of Harmony.)

And who placed the Eye of Harmony in the Mal’akh dimension? Who is hinted in The Ghost Kingdom to be the mother of the monsters? Who was last seen in a presidential inauguration, promising to drill to the caldera at the Earth’s center?

Lady Wakai. Queen Charlotte. Lola Denison. Lolita. The face of what is to come.

[rassilon-imprimatur]

The Book of the Ceasefires: The Eighth Man Bound, Introduction

This is not a straightforward chronology.

I don’t think it ever could be, really. I think historians as a whole need to forgo the idea of ever tying a Houseworlder to the concept of a “straight line.” It’s easy to make a simple timeline when they remain in their dark Cloisters on Gallifrey, certainly, where they gather dust by the inch and putter around like cardinals and clerics in a jade Vatican. But Gallifrey is a stagnant world of tradition and memory for a reason, and I think it’s more for the universe’s protection than anything else. Remember, the Houseworlders are not people. Sure, your typical Earthperson would only see the clumsy collars, the wrinkles, wizened hands clasping at ancient relics as they spout ancient protocols like Gospel, but that’s because human beings can only see three dimensions. When you look at a Time Lord, you’re only seeing as much as your brain can process.

I’m not implying that Gallifreyans are some sort of eldritch abominations, all tentacles and pinchers, drifting in the upper dimensions of reality. They’re subtler than that. They are, however, forces of nature, albeit sewn into the bodies of dusty mathematicians, philosophers, and librarians. They are beacons in Time. More than that, they are its architects. They anchored their laws and their will into the very fabric of creation. What we process as Time, the ever changing face on a clock, the ticking of seconds, minutes, hours, years, is the handiwork of Gallifrey. [1]

On their own planet, they may be inactive, all tedium and tradition, but they should not be viewed as the decaying relics of an old order. Instead, think of them as dormant. They are dammed up rivers, or thick clouds, fat and grey with the promise of thunder and lightning. They are brewing storms that could rewrite a textbook merely by disagreeing with it. The universe is perhaps at its safest when the Lords are in their glass castle, Time and Space free to shift, flow, alternate. It’s when they stand in the midst of the quantum foam that it has the potential to solidify, become ice of probability, and then the cold stone of certainty, an island of definition that forces possibles and maybes to part, to ripple, flow in numerous directions.

A known Houseworlder Renegade, self titled Marnal, said it best in his reiteration of the first Law of Time (written in his 1976 novel The Hand of Time):

There was structure, the universe was a web made not of spider’s silk but of space and time. But in such a cosmos, one of fluxing quad-dimensionality, who was to say what was cause and what was effect? Even the newly woven children of his world understood the solution to that solemn inquiry: there was no history, don’t you see, only established history. Time was an ocean of broth, rich in elements and possibilities. Observations could be made to spot trends and to predict, for the oceans of time were subject to the laws of temporal mechanics. But these were projections of reality, not the re- ality itself as long as the Lords of Time remained in their Citadel, merely watching. Yet, if a single one among them were to cease observation and to step out into the universe, they would freeze time wheresoever their feet touched the ground, wheresoever they drew breath from the atmosphere. At that moment, their mere presence would change time, from a fluid to a solid thing. If one of the Lords of Time but glanced into the night’s sky, the stars would become true in the instant they were seen, and thence back for every picosecond of the ten thousand years of the stars’ photons’ jour- ney. When a time-traveller swam in this ocean, it solidified around them, crystallised, became transmuted into that which could never change. And so was written the most sacred law of all – for even the softest touch of a Lord of Time could condemn a man to existence or nonexistence, bring empires into being and destine them to ruin, and blot out the sky or fill it with heavenly radiance. Observe. Never interfere.

A Time Lord cut off from the Homeworld, either by choice or exile, can be a very dangerous thing. They can also be a very confusing thing to document.

The Doctor, known Time Lord renegade (and perhaps the most infamous renegade, next to the Master) is no stranger to the notable temporal tangles caused by his reckless travels through history. His exile to late 20th century Earth is a prominent example, his presence and activities seemingly having combed the 1970s and 1980s into a conflicting mass of a single decade (a dating controversy many Earth experts are still bickering over). However, the Doctor’s life is incredibly hard to document once he enters the shadow of the War.

Many theorists and historians (this author included) have tried fitting the life (lives?) of the eighth incarnation of the Doctor into a single timeline. However, recent discoveries and analyses have led me to, instead, embrace the impossible contradictions, and see that the branches and alternate paths of this incarnation can still be connected. The life and times of the Eighth Doctor can be nothing but contradictions. This was an incarnation of temporal orbits, paradoxes, rewrites, and biodata shifting, who not only crossed the War, but two iterations of it. [2]

A note regarding this chronology... 

It is understood that Time Lords are immune to the memory lapses expected with having one’s history rewritten. While there are (several) clear, documented cases of the Eighth Doctor experiencing amnesia, it can be assumed that many of the diverging paths, some of which led to completely separate Ninth incarnations, are not guaranteed divergences in memory.

This author would also like to make clear that the universe is a sprawling, ridiculous, messy place. Oxbow realities, parallel timelines, alternate dimensions, and bottle universe are just as real and genuine as ours to the people living in them. At no point does this author attempt to make an assertion that any of these realities, all linked by the same Doctor, are more “real” than the others.

[1] It has long been speculated that there would be some sort of chronological dimension without the “Time” decreed by the Time Lords. The little information gleaned regarding other dimensions such as the Divergent Universe certainly show that, without the presence of what certain Time Lords call the “universe of Time,” lesser species can still force the quantum muck into an adequate, if hazy, definition of cause and effect (however, as the only lesser species known to have experienced this sort of environment are known companions of the Doctor, it is unclear how much of this was due to the holding influence of a timeship).

[2] Technically speaking, the eighth Doctor is not the first incarnation to have encountered a time war. Ignoring the implications that the Doctor’s link to the Other creates (regarding the Time Wars at the beginning of Gallifrey’s history), the Doctor has either brushed against or been caught in several temporal conflicts. The Fourth and Fifth incarnations became tangled in Melanicus’ Millennium Wars, while the Sixth experienced the aftermath of the Millennium War of Bophemeral (which are more than likely linked to the former event anyway… it is possible that Melanicus’ symphony of war continued to race down the strands of history after he was killed and the Event Synthesizer’s function restored).

The Seventh Doctor was destined to, in some form or manner, take part in a conflict that eventually destroyed Gallifrey and left only a select few Time Lords in the universe. However, this was the timeline that followed the Sixth Doctor’s original regeneration into Time’s Champion and a true “God of the Fourth.” The Seventh Doctor, in this timeline, had powers and abilities beyond the normal capabilities of a Time Lord, as did the few survivors. This timeline, and the mysterious conflict, was unwritten when the Sixth Doctor replaced his regeneration with another, similar but different, version.

To come... 

The Eighth Man Bound, Part One: Now Unto War 

The Eighth Man Bound, Part Two: The Last Contact 

The Eighth Man Bound, Part Three: Journey to the Needle 

The Eighth Man Bound, Part Four: The Gallifrey of Charlotte Pollard 

The Eighth Man Bound, Part Five: The Ninth Doctors