#heartshaven wrote an essay

[daughterofheartshaven]

Using the Doctor Who EU to recontextualize the whole Timeless Child thing

Or, why the Doctor is a dhampir.

Salutations!

Maybe you saw my essay here about how Gallifrey wasn't actually destroyed by the Master using the Expanded universe as my evidence. Now, I want to tackle The Timeless Children's other controversial plot point - the titular Timeless Child's relationship with the Doctor. Also, perhaps you have heard of the Doctor Who book Lungbarrow, and how it connected the Doctor to a mysterious figure called the Other in Gallifrey's ancient history. So how are those connected? Was the Doctor really the Other? And just what is the story of the Timeless Child?

So let's talk about the Timeless Child. Let's talk about the Other. Let's talk about Patience. Let's talk about Division. And let's talk about vampires and where regeneration really comes from.

Shall we get started? Buckle up for another ride into the endless pit that is the Doctor Who expanded universe.

Okay, ground rules first. Anything seen on tv, happened. I can recontextualize as much as I want (and I'm gonna do that, believe me) but it still has to fit with everything we see onscreen. I also have to use all of an EU source if I use it. No picking and choosing bits. However, that same loophole applies to EU material - I can recontextualize those as much as I want, too.

With that out of the way, let's meet the stories that are our players. I'm going to be sorting them into medium by category this time.

Tv stories:

Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children: The controversial Thirteenth Doctor episodes. I'm assuming you're familiar with if you're reading this.

Fugitive of the Judoon: The Thirteenth Doctor story that introduced the Fugitive Doctor. I'm assuming you're familiar with this.

Flux: The Thirteenth Doctor story that followed up to the Timeless Child plot points in a way that is very relevant to this discussion. I'm assuming you're familiar with this.

A Good Man Goes to War: An Eleventh Doctor episode that established some of the history of the Time Lords

The Brain of Morbius: A Fourth Doctor story. Notable for this discussion because it featured brief images of ten faces that were implied to be incarnations of the Doctor from before the First Doctor. These are collectively known as the "Morbius Doctors".

State of Decay: The Fourth Doctor tv story that established the series lore on vampires

Books:

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible: the Seventh Doctor book that laid the groundwork for Lungbarrow and its Gallifrey Lore

The Pit: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Goth Opera: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Damaged Goods: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

Cold Fusion: A book starring the Fifth and Seventh Doctors that is notable for introducing the character of Patience

Lungbarrow: the big Gallifrey Lore book. I will be going over this one in depth

Interference: Shock Tactic: A 90s Who book with some vampire lore

The Infinity Doctors: A very confusing Doctor Who book (this will get explained later)

The Book of the War: The first book in the Faction Paradox series

Audios:

Zagreus: A Big Finish story starring the Eighth Doctor and Rassilon

Patience: A Big Finish story starring the Eighth Doctor

Comics:

The Tides of Time: A 70s comic starring the Fifth Doctor

The Bidding War: A 2010s comic with some vampire lore

Monstrous Beauty: A 2020s comic with some vampire lore

Origins: A recent comic that features the Fugitive Doctor

Okay, so there are kinda four threads running together that tell a more complete story, but were all written independently of each other. The story of the Timeless Child and Division, the story of the Other, the story of Patience, and the story of the Yssgaroth War. Let's go through them in order.

Also while the Other, the Timeless Child, Patience's husband, the Fugitive Doctor, the Infinity Doctor, the Morbius Doctors, and the Doctor are all presented as more or less the same character who all call themselves "the Doctor", I will be referring to them all separately. I have a few reasons for doing this which will become clear later, but it's also helpful for reasons of clarity.

Prologue: Where all this mess came from

So in the 70s, there was a tv story called The Brain of Morbius. Morbius was a Time Lord president who decided it was Morbin Time, tried to conquer the universe, and caused a civil war on Gallifrey in just about the only interesting thing to happen on Gallifrey between Rassilon's presidency and the Doctor being loomed. He was killed, but one of his followers managed to save his brain and is trying to make Morbius a new body so it can be Morbin Time again. The Time Lords decide to throw the Doctor at this problem, and he ends up getting into a mind-bending contest with Morbius (who was by that point in an artificial body). During this, both Morbius and the Doctor's past incarnations are shown on a screen, and then we see ten new faces while Morbius says, "How far, Doctor? How long have you lived?". A lot of people assumed those faces were Morbius's, but the intention from the producers was that they were prior faces of the Doctors (I will be referring to these incarnations as the Morbius Doctors moving forward, as that is how they are generally reffered to in the fandom). Trouble is, the rest of classic who completely ignored that.

Oh and if you're worried, while Morbius won the mindbending contest, it left him disoriented enough that he was able to get mobbed by the Sisterhood of Karn and pitched off a cliff, averting the renewal of Morbin Time.

And with that out of the way, let's get on to the real attractions.

Part 1: The Timeless Child and Division

So this story is the most straightforward of the three. In Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children, it is revealed that in Gallifrey's prehistory, a Gallifreyan scientist named Tecteun travelled off-world (in her world's first exploration of another planet) and found the Timeless Child by a portal to another universe. She took the Timeless Child back to Gallifrey and discovered that the Timeless Child had the ability to regenerate. Tecteun was able to synthesize this regenerative power and give it to her own people, becoming one of the founders of modern Time Lord society in the process. Later on, the Timeless Child and Tecteun were both recruited into something called Division, a time-active-interventionist group that skirted around or outright ignored Gallifrey's laws. It is also stated that the Timeless Child's memory was wiped - at least once, possibly more than once - in order to control them. It's also suggested that Tecteun seems to have regrets about all of this, given how she left a message for the Timeless Child in the matrix about it.

This is where the story gets fuzzy. The next time we see anything, the Timeless Child has evolved into the Fugitive Doctor. She is seen working for Division in the flashbacks in Flux and Origins, but following Origins, she goes on the run from them. The events of the Fugitive Doctor's flight from Division play out in Fugitive of the Judoon. She is able to assassinate Gat, the Time Lord seeking her capture, and while it comes at significant personal loss, there is nothing to indicate that the Fugitive Doctor is unable to make a clean getaway.

By the story presented in Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children, however, the Fugitive Doctor is assumed to have been captured with her memory wiped to eventually become the Doctor. Let's put a pin in that assumption, though. That same story also shows the Fugitive Doctor and the Morbius Doctors being a part of the Doctor's past.

Tecteun, meanwhile, had become head of Division (if she wasn't head of it to begin with). Origins briefly shows her leading Division at the time of the Fugitive Doctor, and she is finally shown meeting the Doctor proper in Flux. There, it is revealed that she had started considering the entire universe a scientific experiment, but due to the Doctor being considered too much of a rouge element, she decided to use antimatter called flux from outside the universe to destroy the universe, with Division being safe outside the Universe. She also released a pair of Great Old Ones, Swarm and Azure, with the intention that they would kill the Doctor. Tecteun's plan was that the old universe would be destroyed, and that Division would conquer the universe that the Timeless Child originated from.

This plan did not work.

Swarm and Azure instead killed Tecteun and destroyed Division, before being destroyed by an entity only known as Time (and I could go on a whole tangent on what her deal is, but I'm gonna save that for another post). It's not shown explicitly in the show, but I also believe Time removed the destruction of the flux from the universe as well (mostly because planets explicitly destroyed in Flux are shown still existing in the future of the series).

In any case, during the Flux event, the Doctor was able to recover the archive where the Timeless Child's wiped memories were stored, but she ultimately decided not to access them.

It's never stated which universe the Timeless Child comes from in the show, but we're gonna circle back to that. It's also not stated how long Tecteun ran Division between its founding in early Gallifreyan history and its destruction during the Flux event. We're coming back to this, too.

Part 2: The Other

Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible establishes two very important things about Gallifreyan history. One, all Time Lords became sterile early in their history - shortly after the conclusion of their war with the vampires (more on that war in a bit). Since then, instead of having sex, they have big cloning machines called Looms that make new Time Lords. And two, Rassilon (the founder of Time Lord society) had two major co-founders - Omega, and one other whose name was lost to time. He gets called just "the Other."

Rassilon and Omega were both established as characters in the classic series, but the Other is an invention of the books in the 90s (from the reader's perspective at least - he was a behind the scenes idea from the last few seasons of classic who, but he was never explicitly mentioned onscreen). He gets cryptic references all over the Virgin New Adventures book line, but this only gets concrete in their final Seventh Doctor book, Lungbarrow.

Where we get to know them in the book, Omega is presumed dead, and the Other and Rassilon are having a falling out. Omega's death is weighing heavily on the Other, and he thinks Rassilon is going power-mad and is trying to have the Other killed. Omega's last and most impressive creation, the stellar manipulator called the Hand of Omega, is quite possibly the Other's only friend by this point. The Other wants to leave the planet and so he tells his family to escape, and then confronts Rassilon with his intentions. Rassilon Does Not Like This and tries to have the Other stopped, and blocks all spaceports to make this happen. The Other then calmly walks into the primary generator for the looms and is never seen again.

And then, ten million years later, out from a loom, comes the Doctor. The Doctor's looming process was unusual, with the Doctor later claiming he could remember just before it happened, waiting to be born. (Although given the Doctor was five years old at the time he said this, that may be a little suspect). In any case, the Doctor lives a fairly normal life for a while, until he is found by the Hand of Omega which sees in him its old master. Shortly thereafter, the Doctor is confronted by the Time Lord Glospin (explaining his deal is a little complicated but he's a part of the same Family House as the Doctor is, the titular House Lungbarrow), about some irregularities in the Doctor's biology before being driven off by the Hand. It's ambiguous if either of these were the deciding factor, but the Doctor takes the Hand and leaves Gallifrey shortly thereafter.

Of course there's one last little piece left to take care of. If you're familiar with Classic Who, you may know that when we first met the Doctor, he was travelling with his granddaughter, Susan.

Lungbarrow claims that the Doctor's first trip in the Tardis was to travel back to Gallifrey's prehistory and meet the Other's granddaughter, the last child born before the Time Lords became sterile. She recognizes the Other in the Doctor, and considers him her grandfather. The Doctor doesn't quite recognize her, but takes her on as his first companion in the Tardis. And thus, Susan joined the Tardis crew.

The other thing that's important is uh that Lungbarrow has an actual plot. And said plot is only tangentially related to the above. Everything I just said is presented as three flashbacks in Lungbarrow - one straight narrative sequence (the argument between Rassilon and the Other), one where the Doctor shares his memories of leaving Gallifrey (basically everything that happens with Glospin, the Hand of Omega, and the Doctor first leaving Gallifrey), and one where several characters enter the Doctor's subconscious and have a dream sequence (including the Other walking into the Looms and the Doctor meeting Susan). The subconscious trip has some moments to it that are super trippy and metaphorical, and I'm gonna use that fact later. But for now, on to part 3!

Part 3: Patience

Like I said earlier, Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible is the story that establishes that all Time Lords are sterile. At the end of a civil war in Gallifrey's ancient history, the leader of the losing side, Pythia, cursed the people who would become Time Lords with sterility before killing herself. (Her followers, by the way, left Gallifrey and eventually became the Sisterhood of Karn). The Time Lords, desiring to avoid extinction, created breeding engines known as Looms, which would create new Time Lords through what was effetely cloning. That's the story presented in Cat's Crade: Time's Crucible, anyway. But if you look at other places in the EU, this story starts to crack. An Earthly Child introduces Susan Forman's explicitly biological son, for example. And in Lungbarrow, the Time Lord Andred is able to get a human, Leela, pregnant, although the character's future appearances in Big Finish are notably child-less, suggesting the pregnancy failed somehow (either that or the child removed themselves from history as part of joining faction paradox and became the character known as Intrepid, but this is a tangent).

So are Time Lords sterile? Yeah, I think so. For the most part. But we know that not all of them are. A rare few can still reproduce sexually. There is another Time Lord who had a biological child that I've yet to bring up, as well. Her true name was lost to time, so we know her only as Patience.

This is her story.

The character of Patience has some truly strange origins, even for the Doctor Who EU. In the 1982 comic The Tides of Time, the fifth Doctor briefly sees an illusion of someone who looks familiar to him, created by the demon Melanicus using something called the Event Sythesizer (no, I'm not going to explain that). The art shown is close enough to Second Doctor companion Zoe Herriot to assume that's who the author and artist intended the illusion to be of, but that's not the direction later stories went in.

The character of Patience was introduced proper in 1996's book Cold Fusion. It also features the Fifth Doctor, in an earlier point in his life then The Tides of Time. In it, a prototype Tardis crashes into a planet that is later colonized by humans. The humans discover one pilot, comatose, who by all rights should be dead. She isn't. They take her back to their big fancy lab and attempt to find out more about her with basically no success.

Enter the Doctor. (And also Tegan Jovanka.)

When the Fifth Doctor stumbles into this, he is able to help the pilot complete her first regeneration. She is unable to remember much of anything from prior to her regeneration and is from Gallifrey's distant past. She is, biologically, something of a proto-Time Lord: she speaks a different language then the Doctor naturally, she only has one heart, and a few other things. She's explicitly more-or-less a contemporary of Rassilon.

Not having a name for herself, she adopts the moniker "Patience" on Tegan's unintentional suggestion. Despite all this, Patience and the Doctor recognize each other on some level, and neither really have any ideas as to why - the Doctor shouldn't even be able to recognize the dialect of Gallifreyan she speaks, as it is dead by his time. Patience has some garbled memory of fleeing from arrest as ordered by Rassilon (with the implication being that any fertile Time Lords were having their births stopped so that the loom-born were to inherit Gallifrey). Patience's escape came with the help of her husband, whom authorial intent confirms as one of the Morbius Doctors. In any case, in the present day, Patience is starting to properly recover when she is shot in the back of the head, apparently killing her. Her body then disappears. The Fifth Doctor's memory of Patience is lost shortly thereafter when the Seventh Doctor orchestrates the Fifth Doctor losing his memory of the whole adventure in order to preserve the timelines. The Seventh Doctor only met his prior self after Patience's body had vanished, meaning that the Doctor's entire memory of Patience was erased - except, perhaps, for some vague recollection which we see in The Tides of Time.

While Patience's fate is followed up in the book The Infinity Doctors, The Infinity Doctors is a very strange book that doesn't really contribute much to this ongoing discussion. The Infinity Doctors is deliberately evasive about which Doctor it stars, with its protagonist being sometimes implied to be the First Doctor and sometimes the Eighth. It's very possible that Patience and Omega (yes he's here but I'm not going to explain that) are the only characters in the story from the Whoniverse as we understand it, with everyone else being from a different universe. I might do a breakdown of The Infinity Doctors someday, but now is not that day.

The only other information we have about Patience comes from the 2021 audio story fittingly entitled "Patience". In it, the Doctor tells uses an ancient artifact that takes the form of a deck of cards called the Paradoxica to analyze time and hide his companions - Liv Chenka, Helen Sinclair, Tania Bell, and Andy Davidson (yes, the Torchwood character. no, I'm not explaining that either) - from the Judoon. The narrative is interspersed with the Doctor telling a fairy tale about a woman completing an impossible task (emptying an ocean with a bag that had a hole in it) and receiving the child she desired once she had spent an eternity completing this task. The story ends with the confirmation that this woman was Patience, and that she gave the Doctor the Paradoxica. How this happened is left unsaid - either she gave it to her husband who became the Doctor, or this happened during the events of Cold Fusion.

Part 4: The Yssgaroth War

Unlike the other narratives I've just rambled off, the Yssgaroth War is much more of a patchwork from various places around the EU, so this is gonna be even more scattered than I have been thusfar.

State of Decay, for being a story set in the pocket universe called E-Space, ended up being one of those foundational Gallifrey lore episodes of the classic series. That's the serial that established that at the dawn of time, the Time Lords fought and won a massive war against the vampires.

Yes, you read that right. This is one of my favorite pieces of Doctor Who lore.

State of Decay establishes that the Great Vampires were massive bat-like creatures who could drain the life from entire planets and who created more traditional vampires as their servants. Rassilon lead Gallifrey against them, and ordered the construction of "bowships," which were giant spaceship crossbows that could be used to stake the Great Vampires. The Great Vampires were ultimately defeated by the Time Lords. EU sources generally agree that this was the biggest war the Time Lords ever participated in until the Time War ten million years later.

The book The Pit would add a couple of new details about the conflict. It would rename the Great Vampires "Yssgaroth" and claim that the Yssgaroth originated from outside the universe - the early time travel experiments overseen by Rassilon ripped a hole in reality and the Yssgaroth were what came through with intent to consume the universe. These details are supported by Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and Interference: Shock Tactic.

A couple more recent comics have fleshed out the Yssgaroth War a bit. The Bidding War further reinforces that the Yssgaroth are from outside our universe, with it showing that during the Time War, the Time Lords opened a rift to the Yssgaroth dimension in an attempt to use them as a weapon against the Daleks. Monstrous Beauty was the first story to show us the War proper, depicting Rassilon personally leading forces against the vampiric army.

And this would all be interesting but irrelevant to our discussion if not for two stories published in the early 2000s that both seek to recontextualize the Yssgaroth War and the Time Lord's rise to power.

Let's start with Zagreus. The story as a whole is dedicated to deconstructing Rassilon's façade as a benevolent and reasonable ruler and instead reveals him to be a xenophobic tyrant who wished to remake the universe in his image - something that lines up with pretty much all of Rassilon's appearances post-Zagreus. As part of this, the vampire Lord Tepesh states that before the war, the vampires were peaceful and Rassilon provoked them because he feared their power. Tepesh is presented by the narrative as an unreliable narrator, but the point he makes is still worth noting.

The other story I need to talk about is The Book of the War. While the book's primary focus is The War in Heaven (for the uninitiated, that's basically spin-off series Faction Paradox's version of the Time War), it does give a lot of relevant information about the Yssgaroth War. First of all, it gives the timing of the War being right after Gallifrey established History as a concept - by "anchoring the thread" and making a linear history, the Time Lords accidentally let the Yssgaroth into the universe. While this contradicts some of the timings given by some of the sources mentioned above (other sources agree that it was the early experiments that caused the Yssgaroth to enter the universe not the final establishing of History and mastery over time), this can be excused since The Book of the War is an in-universe document and so may not be completely accurate. What makes this book relevant is that it also theorizes that the Time Lord's regenerative capabilities were stolen from the vampires. Even for an unreliably narrated book, this is treated as speculation, but as a concept, that is fascinating.

Interlude: when regeneration happened

There is some inconsistency in all of these sources as when regeneration first became a property of the Time Lords. The Timeless Children has it come shortly after they discover interstellar space travel, and far before time travel, but several of the VNA-era books (including Cold Fusion and I think Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible) depict early time-travelling Gallifreyans as being without regeneration. The tv episode A Good Man Goes to War states that regeneration came about as a result of exposure to the Time Vortex. My personal take is that The Timeless Children showed Tecteun discovering regeneration, and initially only shared it amongst herself and her elite (Rassilon, etc.). After the Looms went into effect, they started Looming more and more Time Lords with regenerative capabilities, until eventually it's a shared trait among all Time Lords. After ten million years, the artificial origins of regeneration have been lost to time, but the symbiotic nature of the Time Lords to Tardises and the Time Vortex has meant that a being conceived in a Tardis could be engineered to have limited regenerative capabilities.

Part 5: Bringing it all together

So back to the Doctor and Gallifreyan history. Uh, how does this all make one cohesive story?

Okay so our story starts with Tecteun and finding the Timeless Child by a portal to another universe. She takes said child home, discovers from it the secrets of regeneration, and so on and so forth. Tecteun, Rassilon, and Omega become the three founders of Time Lord society.

So that's the first thing there. The Other, as revered in Time Lord history, isn't the Doctor or some version thereof. The founder whose name was lost to time was Tecteun. And Tecteun discovered regeneration from the Timeless Child. This child, for whatever reason, starts calling themselves the Doctor.

But wait? Wasn't there some theories running around that the the Time Lords stole regeneration from vampires? And that vampires initially weren't as hostile to the universe before Rassilon saw them as competition?

Yes, yes, there were. It's simple, really. The Timeless Child was from Spiral Yssgaroth. They're a vampire.

(I really wish I had been clever enough to come up with that on my own, but I'm not. Pretty much everything else here is out of my own brain, but that is a fan theory I saw on the internet.)

In any case, the Yssgaroth War was motivated, at least in part, by the Vampires' outrage that their secrets and child had been stolen. But, as history records, they were defeated.

And for a time afterwards, Tecteun and Rassilon continue to rule Gallifrey together. But Omega's apparent death shortly after the end of the Yssgaroth War weighs heavily on them both - and they're both ambitious enough to not quite appreciate the other being their equal. Trouble is, they kinda need each other. Rassilon, despite his posing, isn't a scientist - he's a politician. He needs his scientists to continue to work miracles, and Omega is already gone, so that just leaves Tecteun. Tecteun, for her part, is no leader. She wants power but doesn't have the people skills. And she still cares deeply about her people and about the vampire she has come to see as her child. The two drift apart - Tecteun becoming the leader of Division which she took increasingly off-world while Rassilon becomes more and more the sole face of leadership on Gallifrey.

Eventually this reaches a boiling point. Tecteun and Rassilon have lost all trust in each other. Tecteun makes preparations - including leaving the message in the Matrix we saw in Ascension of the Cybermen / the Timeless Children. She and Rassilon then have the confrontation that we saw in Lungbarrow. But Tecteun doesn't throw herself into the looms - she takes herself off Gallifrey through technology Rassilon doesn't know about and begins to cut Division's ties with Gallifrey altogether. Division has already begun recruiting across the universe, so she figures she can leave Rassilon to his one planet. Notably, she also leaves the Hand of Omega behind on Gallifrey, where it is eventually put in a vault and forgotten about. She maintains contact with Gallifrey only through her agents, one of which is the Timeless Child.

For their part, the Timeless Child has gone through several incarnations. They've had their mind wiped to hide that they're not Gallifreyan, and they have then been the Morbius Doctors, including Patience's husband. The Timeless Child has had a personal life (as seen by their marriage to Patience), but they're increasingly being a full-time agent of Division.

In any case, right now the Timeless Child is the Fugitive Doctor. And she plays along with Tecteun for a while. However, following the events we see in Origins, she goes on the run. Tecteun has Division track her to Earth, where the events of Fugitive of the Judoon play out. The Fugitive Doctor manages to get away as we see, but she doesn't know of any way to get away from Division long-term (as Big Finish is currently exploring) - and, away from Tecteun's influence and protection, she's starting to work out that she's not the Gallifreyan she thinks she is.

In an act of desperation, she pilots her Tardis back to Gallifrey - on the very same day Tecteun left. She takes Tecteun's place in Lungbarrow's story, and throws herself into the Looms, where she dies, dissolving into the giant vat of Gallifreyan genetic material.

This leaves Tecteun searching time and space desperately for the Timeless Child. At first, the Timeless Child seems nowhere to be found. But eventually Tecteun discovers that there is a time traveler called the Doctor out and around the universe. An investigation into the Doctor reveals that they've been all over the universe. Trying to just grab them and do a memory wipe isn't an option because they've done too much. Tecteun doesn't realize this Doctor is a different person to the Timeless Child, to the Doctor they left a message in the Matrix for.

Tecteun had probably never been that good of a person, but she used to care. She used to care about Omega, but he's gone. She used to care about Rassilon, but they burned too many bridges. She used to care about her vampiric child, but she takes this as a betrayal. And whatever good left in Tecteun dies.

Tecteun decides to destroy the universe and start over in a new one where she can control everything, so she picks a point far in the future where Gallifrey will have been destroyed naturally so her home planet will be unaffected. By convivence, one of the Doctor's most common destinations - Earth - happens to be at that point. Tecteun initiates the Flux event in Earth's time and releases Swarm and Azure to finish the Doctor off.

The Doctor stumbles into this, but she's operating off incomplete information from the Matrix. She doesn't realize that she's not the Timeless Child, since the Master seemingly destroyed any records that she could check his claims against. So when Tecteun and the Doctor confront each other, they both assume that the Doctor is the Timeless Child.

And this becomes a moot point because the Doctor finding Tecteun and Division HQ allows Swarm and Azure to find it as well. They kill Tecteun and destroy Division. If you're reading this, you probably watched Flux, you know how this goes.

It's not clear if Rassilon is aware that Tecteun died shortly after their argument. He certainly comes to the conclusion that she won't be an ongoing concern anymore, and, as the last survivor of Gallifrey's founding trio, uses his remaining lives to rule Gallifrey unopposed. With no one to oppose him, he removes Tecteun's name from record - as far as he's concerned, she betrayed him and does not deserve to be remembered.

Ten million years pass.

The House of Lungbarrow looms a new Time Lord, but, for whatever reason, this particular Time Lord has a significant amount of the Timeless Child's genetic material mixed into their genetic soup. This new Time Lord chooses to call themselves the Doctor - in unconscious echo of their genetic predecessor. Their amount of vampiric genetics makes them genetically distinguishable from other Gallifreyans if close examination is done, but for a while no one has any reason to do this.

This is also why I get to call the Doctor a dhampir - they're not a true vampire, but have a nontrivial amount of vampiric genetics - or, to use the terms of The Book of the War, they carry the Yssgaroth Taint.

These genetics are still enough to get the attention of the Hand of Omega, which has been mothballed for those Ten Million years. Maybe the Hand sees the Timeless Child in the Doctor, or maybe it's just intrigued by someone who isn't just another Time Lord. In any case, Glospin confronts the Doctor, the Hand drives Glospin off, and the Doctor leaves Gallifrey with it.

He also leaves with Susan. She isn't from the dawn of Gallifrey. Instead, she is a Loomed Time Lord of the Doctor's era who found herself ostracized and disliked. That being said, she found community with three other Time Lords: the Doctor, the Master, and another Time Lord named Braxiatel. The four of them are all outsiders from their own Houses, and so consider themselves a house unto themselves, and Susan, as the youngest, began referring to the Doctor as "Grandfather", as that term is reserved for the head of a House (something that is established in The Book of the War), as she views him as the head of their little house of four.

In any case, the Doctor and Susan leave Gallifrey. The Master loses his mind when he realize he got left behind, steals a Tardis himself and heads out after the family he thinks abandoned him. Braxiatel stays behind and becomes a successful politician and art collector.

A couple hundred more years pass.

We're now in the events of Lungbarrow. The Doctor shares his memory of leaving Gallifrey with some of the fellow members of his House. However, he edits Susan out of the memories he shows - technically, he went through the criminal justice system for this, but Susan never did and he doesn't want her to. Gallifrey has seemingly forgotten about her, and he wants to keep it that way.

And then he has his vision trip dream sequence where he sees the past and sees the Timeless Child walk into the Looms. He then sees a memory of himself meeting Susan. This isn't literal - it's symbolic of Susan and the Doctor's relationship changing and evolving as they left Gallifrey. The Doctor knows this isn't literal, but it's in his best interests to act like it is - he's not in control of this dream sequence and several other people are there (including one of the Doctor's enemies), and he still wants to protect Susan, so he goes along with that story.

The Doctor continues their life and eventually gets to the Thirteenth Doctor where she meets the Fugitive Doctor in Fugitive of the Judoon. When she scans herself and the Fugitive Doctor, the two register as the same entity. However, Time Lords are not biologically identical across regenerations - the Doctor has to have something specific to herself that she is looking for.

And she actually has one. At some point in the Doctor's life, they found a genetic quirk that has persisted across their regenerations. They don't know it, but it's the Yssgaroth Taint. Since the Doctor has never encountered another Time Lord with the Taint, she is by this point assuming it's a quirk of her own biology, so takes her sonic detecting the Taint in the Fugitive Doctor as confirmation that the two are the same.

And then shortly after the Doctor meets her genetic predecessor, the aforementioned stuff with Tecteun happens. It's possible that the Doctor themselves has noted the ambiguities in their backstory and heritage but given that there were several thousand years of life between the Seventh and Thirteenth Doctors, it seems likely that they don't think to try to analyze it that closely.

And that's a wrap! If you have any thoughts on all of this, I'd love it if you would share them! Thank you!

[daughterofheartshaven]

So yes everything from Worms applies to me too but also Doctor Who had a massive effect on my personality because as an ace/aro autistic teenager who hated herself but also really wanted to be a good person...

well, it was a big deal to see someone who felt different in the same way I do who got confused by the same things I do who struggled with doing the right thing but still was a hero. Someone who sometimes hated themself but was undoubtedly a good person, in ways they can't wrap their head around.

So I unconsciously decided that was what I was gonna be.

Like, I can't emphasize enough how much I look back and realize that I as a teenager had the Doctor as my biggest role model and how much that has shaped everything about who I am as an adult. That moment in Flux where Yaz looks at her palm and goes "What would the Doctor do?" That's my life.

And frankly, I think I'm both a better and happier person for it. I like who I am, the people around me like who I am, and if a significant chunk of who I am is based on a tv character, then so what?

So, yeah. Without Doctor Who, I would be a very different person. Possibly less kind, and definitely less happy. And I will always be grateful for that.

[daughterofheartshaven]

Doctor Who - how Mary Shelly became a companion of the 8th Doctor but then later didn't recognize the 13th Doctor

This is in a series of Doctor Who expanded universe reconciliations. If you see a contradiction in the Doctor Who expanded universe, you can drop me an ask and I will come up with an explanation for it.

Ask by @silvermaple6

If you are not familar, in the Big Finish audios, Mary Shelly (yes the Frankenstein author) was briefly a companion of the Eighth Doctor, but later met the Thirteenth Doctor on tv in a way that made it clear that Shelly had never met the Doctor before and clearly assumed the Doctor had not met Shelly before either.

So shall we explain how that worked?

A quick list of stories I will be refrencing:

Tv:

The Haunting of Vilia Diodati: The tv episode where the Thirteenth Doctor meets Mary Shelly

The Unquiet Dead: The Ninth Doctor tv episode that first established the effects of the Last Great Time War

Human Nature / The Family of Blood: A Tenth Doctor two-part story that was an adaption of a Seventh Doctor novel

Not Tv:

Mary's Story: The first story where Mary Shelly becomes a companion of the Eighth Doctor. While it is not the only audio story to feature Shelly as a companion, it is the only one that is actually relevant to this discussion

Terror Firma: an Eighth Doctor story set after he travelled with Shelly

Lies in Ruins: An audio story featuring the Eighth Doctor towards the very end of his life during the Last Great Time War.

Human Nature: A Seventh Doctor novel that was adapted into a Tenth Doctor tv episode

Shadow of a Doubt: A two-minute video published during the Doctor Who Lockdown events, starring Bernice Summerfield. You can watch it on youtube right here, and I recommend you do so - it's pretty good and also the crux of my argument.

The Book of the War: the first book of the Faction Paradox series and one of my favorite things to cite in an argument like this.

Okay I don't know if this would be fun for anyone else, but if this were me, I would totally look over the stories and try to guess what the arguments would be. Now is your chance to do that if you want. Also I should disclaimer in here that I continue to assume the Last Great Time War and Faction Paradox's War in Heaven are the same conflict, although that's not really that important to my overall argument. A full justification for that assumption is still in the works.

Okay actual essay time.

So The Unquiet Dead established that the Last Great Time War rewrote a lot of history. And if you're thinking "well hang on is this just rewritten by the Time War" then yes that is my reason, but I also have a lot more evidence to back this up.

Time to talk about Human Nature.

So Human Nature was a book that was loosely adapted into a Tenth Doctor story. The two stories share only a central concept (the Doctor turns into human and the villains are family who want to steal his being-a-time-lord), a setting (England right before WWI), and a couple of crucial characters (Joan Redfern, Tim, and Hutchinson). Besides that, the two versions of the story are quite different.

One notable difference is the villains. In the book, we have the Aubertides - a family of six shapeshifting aliens with distinct personalities and motivations, but strong loyalty to each other. Over the course of the book most of them die, but some escape. The very first one to die is Aphasia - who at the time was disguised as little girl with a murderous balloon.

In the tv show, we have the Family of Blood - a family of four gaseous aliens who are much more united. At the end of the story, the Doctor captures all of them and imprisons them in various places. The youngest of the Family, the daughter, was imprisoned in a mirror along with the corpse she was possessing - a little girl with a balloon.

When the tv adaptation was first made, the Daughter having the same appearance of Aphasia was a simple nod to the fact that the Family of Blood was this version's version of the Aubertides. But Shadow of a Doubt made this whole situation much more interesting.

Shadow of a Doubt was written by Paul Cornell, author of both the original Human Nature and its adaptation, as well as the creator of Benny Summerfield, who was the companion of Human Nature. In it, Benny meets the Daughter trapped in the mirror and recognizes her as Aphasia. The Daughter denies being Aphasia, claiming that was a different her

This confirms three points:

both versions of Human Nature happened in the Whoniverse

both versions of Human Nature are telling the same story - there weren't just two extremely similar situations.

Aphasia and the Daughter are variations on each other

It's not clear exactly why two versions of the same events happened, but my best guess is the giant history-altering war that happened between the Seventh and Tenth Doctors, since it is the only event shown to do large amounts of rewriting of history.

The situation with Human Nature sets a precedent for analyzing this sort of situation, so I feel like that makes a decent case for Shelly's life to have been rewritten by the War.

But come on. I haven't even gotten to talk about any stories with Shelly in them yet.

So Mary's story is the first story with Shelly as a companion. It is also notable for featuring two different versions of the Eighth Doctor. We have Young Eight - this is the Doctor who Shelly begins travelling with - and Old Eight, who has fallen out of a great battle and is deeply injured. It is implied, but not confirmed, that Old Eight is from the era of the Time War. There is some further evidence for this - Old Eight namechecks companions by the name of Gemma, Charley, Ssard, Compassion, Trix, Destrii, Lucie, Alex, Todd, and Rita. All but the last two were established Eighth Doctor companions at the time of Mary's Story's release, but Todd and Rita were unknowns.

Roughly a decade later, Lies in Ruins comes out. It features the Eighth Doctor embroiled in the Time War, and introduces a companion named Ria. Ria is close enough to "Rita" that I believe Old Eight is referring to Ria in Mary's Story, which means for Old Eight, Mary's Story takes place after Lies in Ruins and so definitely in the Time War.

All of this is to prove that Shelly was at least tangentially involved in the Last Great Time War. Furthermore, she only one step removed from a minor wartime power - the Book of the War shows that Lord Byron would later become a recruit of Faction Paradox, a cult that (somewhat successfully) desired to set itself up as a third faction in the War.

So yeah, the changes of history in the War could totally have rewritten Mary Shelly's life specifically without specifically effecting much around her. So when she does not recognize the Doctor or any sci-fi concepts in The Haunting of Vilia Diodati, it is because he history in which Shelly travelled with the Doctor no longer existed.

As for why the Doctor did not recognize her, we have two options.

Firstly, it is possible that the Doctor's memories of this were lost when his memories were altered by Davros. Terror Firma reveals that Davros captured the Doctor and altered his memories of a specific point in his life - specifically Davros removed all memories of the Doctor's companions Samson and Gemma. Mary's Story, and the Doctor's travels with Mary Shelly, are explicitly set during a time in which the Doctor is on break from Samson and Gemma, so it is very possible that when Davros removed the Doctor's memories of Samson and Gemma, his memories of travelling with Shelly were also lost.

The other option is that the Doctor lost his memories of Shelly during the Time War. The Starship of Theseus (among many other stories) shows that while the Doctor can sometimes remember altered timelines, this is in no way a constant, with him remembering the new reality instead of the old one as the War creates it. So it is possible that the Doctor lost their memories of travelling with Shelly because the history those memories were created in was removed.

In any case, when Shelly and the Thirteenth Doctor come face to face, neither knows that in another life they were friends.

[daughterofheartshaven]

Doctor Who - an explanation and resolution of the UNIT Dating Controversy

This is in a series of Doctor Who expanded universe reconciliations. If you see a contradiction in the Doctor Who expanded universe, you can drop me an ask and I will come up with an explanation for it.

Ask by @silvermaple6

First, some context. The 1968 story The Web of Fear introduced the character of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and he would be a prominent recurring character in the show from that point on until 1975's Terror of the Zygons. The Brigadier was the leader of the British Division of UNIT, a military & scientific organization that was designed to protect Earth from unconventional threats. The UNIT Dating Controversy is Doctor Who's most notorious continuity error: there are two conflicting accounts as to when the stories that featured Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart leading UNIT UK took place. Either they took place roughly at the same time as the episodes came out (so the late 60s and early 70s) or during the 80s.

So with that explained, I have two separate explanations as to how to resolve this problem. One of these explanations is designed to work only within the confines of the tv show and does not necessarily line up with the expanded universe, if you're inclined for a tv-purist answer, and the second one is more aligned with my usual "everything is canon at once" stance towards Doctor Who.

With that all out of the way, let's dive into it!

The usual ground rules apply here. Anything seen on tv, happened. I can recontextualize as much as I want but it still has to fit with everything we see onscreen. I also have to use all of an EU source if I use it. No picking and choosing bits.

A quick list of stories I will be referencing:

Tv:

The Abominable Snowmen: A second Doctor tv story that sets up The Web of Fear

The Web of Fear: A second Doctor tv story that introduces the Brigadier (but before he gained that rank)

The Invasion: A second Doctor tv story that features the Brigadier

The Time Warrior: The Third Doctor tv story that introduced Sarah Jane Smith and also features the Brigadier

The Pyramids of Mars: A Fourth Doctor tv story with Sarah Jane Smith as the companion

Mawdryn Undead: A Fifth Doctor tv story that features the Brigadier

The Day of the Doctor: An Eleventh Doctor tv story that makes an in-universe reference to the dating controversy

Flux: A Thirteenth Doctor tv story that briefly features the Brigadier (again, before he gained that rank)

Expanded Universe:

Interference: A BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures book featuring the Eighth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith (and a few others, but those tow are the only important ones for the narrative today

The Enfolded Time: A short story in the Lethbridge-Stewart series (a prose series published by Candy Jar Books that stars Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and other creations and IPs from the writing pair of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln)

The Split Infinitive: A Seventh Doctor audio drama published by Big Finish as a part of The Legacy of Time - an audio box set celebrating 20 years of Big Finish making Doctor Who audio stories.

An in-depth explanation of the discrepancy

The Brigadier and UNIT were primarily onscreen in the Third Doctor era, which ran from 1970-1974. The behind-the-scenes intentions from that era were that these stories took place "like ten years in the future" (which includes some really hilarious 70s guesses as to what the 80s would be like) but there also were never any direct references to this - with script editor Terrace Dicks deliberately avoiding giving dates in an attempt to avoid this exact sort of continuity error. Because of this, the only stories to make this intention of being set in the 80s explicit were in a couple Second Doctor stories and a Fourth Doctor story.

To elaborate, the 1968 story The Web of Fear features a character named Edward Travers. Travers had previously appeared in the story The Abominable Snowmen, which was definitively stated as taking place in 1935. In The Web of Fear, Travers references the events of The Abominable Snowmen being "over 40 years ago", putting The Web of Fear in 1975 or later. As mentioned above, this was the first appearance of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, then a Colonel in the regular army. The character would next appear, having been promoted to the rank of Brigadier, in The Invasion. In The Invasion, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart tells the Second Doctor it has been four years since he has seen the Doctor last, putting The Invasion at 1979 at the earliest. The Invasion is also notable for being the first story to feature UNIT, with it is implied that UNIT was founded in response to the events of The Web of Fear. Lethbridge-Stewart's involvement in UNIT explicitly as a result of his actions during The Web of Fear, which will become vaguely important in a bit

The Fourth Doctor story I mentioned above is the 1975 story The Pyramids of Mars. While it does not feature the Brigadier or other UNIT staff, it does feature Sarah Jane Smith, who had been established in her introductory story, The Time Warrior, as being from the same time as the Brigadier and UNIT. In The Pyramids of Mars, Sarah Jane references being from 1980, a claim which is corroborated by the Doctor briefly taking her to the version of 1980 where the villain of the episode, Sutekh was not stopped by them, leading to a desolate wasteland.

So by current evidence, all five years of Unit stories released between The Invasion and The Pyramids of Mars took place between 1979 and 1980. This strains credulity a little bit but is still vaguely plausible. It's the next story that breaks this completely.

After his departure from the show in 1975, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart returns in the Fifth Doctor 1983 story Mawydrn Undead. Here it is a major plot point that the Brigadier retired from UNIT and the military in 1976, and we see him adopting a new career of a maths teacher by 1977.

So this is where it all breaks. Going by the established dates, the Brigadier retired from UNIT before he ever joined it.

The only other tv story to add to this at all is, weirdly, 2021's Flux. This story's fifth episode has a scene that shows UNIT UK being operational by 1967, with its current leader, General Farquhar, mentioning a Corporal Lethbridge-Stewart being a on staff. In theory, this should take place between The Web of Fear and The Invasion, since Lethbridge Stewart is not a Brigadier yet but has joined UNIT. This would place both The Web of Fear and The Invasion as taking place in the 60s.

This does leave out the problem that Lethbridge-Stewart was a Colonel in The Web of Fear and not a Corporal (if you don't know military ranks, a Colonel is much higher up the chain of command then a Corporal), but given that General Farquhar is repeatedly shown to be somewhat unintelligent (his main role in Flux is to get manipulated then killed by one of Flux's minor villains), I'm comfortable saying that General Farquhar misspoke when he called his new Colonel a Corporal.

NuWho stories such as The Day of the Doctor have begun playing with this concept a little bit. For example, in The Day of the Doctor, Kate Stewart, the current leader of UNIT UK mentions the events of Terror of the Zygons happening in the 70s or 80s, "depending on the dating protocol."

The Tv-only explanation

So if you just want to make the tv show to be self-consistent without bringing the EU into it...

Then I can say that Travers made the very reasonable mistake of saying "forty years" when he actually meant "thirty years." I dunno about you, but I do stuff like that all the time when I'm talking and the plot moved on fast enough that the characters didn't come back to it.

As for Sarah Jane and 1980, that's a bit weirder. But you could say that Sarah Jane was at that point from 1985 or 1986 and rounded up because she liked having a nice round number to say where she was from. This does not feel like a normal thing to do, but Sarah Jane Smith is not a normal person. And the Doctor took her to an alternate 1980 because why not it was as good a date as any for him to make his point.

So there! Now all the UNIT stories can take place in the late 60s and 70s making the dates given in Mawydrn Undead and Flux work. But if you want to have a little more fun and see the explanation that is what I consider "canon," then I invite you to keep reading.

The Expanded Universe explanation

If you thought the tv version of this was a mess, the EU is so much worse. I really do not want to go through each and every book, comic, and audio that gives a date for the time the Brigadier was in charge of UNIT - if you want to explore the full list of contradictory dates, Tardis wiki has an excellent overview here. For the record, most of the EU tends to agree with Mawdryn Undead over anything else, but even those stories that put the Brigadier leading UNIT UK era in the early 70s often disagree with each other.

Luckily for me, I can just bypass all of that altogether.

So I mentioned above that the UNIT Dating Controversy is the most notorious continuity error in all of Doctor Who, and so uh my job here is actually a lot easier because of that. My Whoniverse essays are usually trying to reconcile the EU, but the Unit Dating Controversy is a problem that exists completely in the tv show. The different parts of the EU are somewhat disinclined to pay attention to each other, and the tv show doesn't care about contradicting the EU (which, for the record, is 100% a good thing. I think trying to stay in-line with established lore would be super limiting to the series and also deprive me of getting to write these essays!), a lot more people care about the tv show being consistent with itself.

Which is why the EU has not one but two ready-made solutions handed to me on a platter.

So the first one gets seeded in the book Interference. In it, Sarah Jane Smith says she can't remember if she worked with UNIT in the 70s or 80s, and the Doctor responds by saying that, "Temporal slippage… My fault, I'm afraid. I think it's currently the 1970s, but —", at which point he is interrupted.

This is followed up with the short story The Enfolded Time, which claims that the 70s and 80s were basically scrunched into a single decade by the Doctor visiting them so much. The story states that the disturbances were settled by 1990, and has the Brigadier working with UNIT to establish a new dating protocols - the same ones Kate would later be using.

Meanwhile, the audio story The Split Infinitive (set in both the 60s and 70s) features, at the end of the story, a "temporal shockwave" that the Seventh Doctor notes would affect nearby time travelers. The Brigadier's situation of retiring in the 70s after working in the 80s is explicitly mentioned as one side effect of the temporal shockwave.

I think both explanations are true. The temporal shockwave damaged the timezone around the 70s enough to weaken spacetime, so the Doctor entering and exiting the time vortex from UNIT UK's headquarters as frequently as he did caused the temporal slippage around the Brigadier and UNIT UK.

That's it for this one! If you have any comments or replies, I would love to hear them! And if you have any questions about discontinuity in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe that you would like me to tackle, send me a note or an ask!

[daughterofheartshaven]

You asked for an essay in your tags.

...

Oh all, right. Just a small one. Also bear in mind I haven't read Lungbarrow in a bit and am also tired so this is gonna be a ramble.

So.

To call Lungbarrow is a good book is accurate, but it is more specific to say that it is a good Doctor Who book specifically - I wouldn't hand it to someone unfamiliar with the show. If you ARE familiar with the EU, then it's a must read if you can track down a pdf or somehow get a physical version for a sane price.

The book gets mocked a lot for being the crucial reimagining of how Time Lord society works, but I think it does so brilliantly. The concept of Time Lord houses being... well, literal Houses is such a fun concept, especially since it plays off the very human idea of childhood in such an alien way. Having the outsiders of Ace, Leela, and Chris give such a human perspective on it, and it helps portray the society of Gallifrey as truly alien while still giving us a nonhuman society. The concept of Looms themselves is also brilliant - they're basically just cloning vats, but the Lords of Time wouldn't come from something so banal as a cloning vat, so let's call it a Loom. Relatedly, the Time Lords having a quota per House makes sense as to how a species that can practically "live forever, barring accidents" is a really neat bit of worldbuilding. And we get to see the logistics of how all this works.

Lungbarrow is also the end of Chris Cwej's arc - an arc that had been built up over many books, and is of surprising relevance today. Basically a young space cop who is also a furry discovers that ACAB, and runs away with his mentor/best friend and the Doctor. He gets put through hell and back fighting a psychic reality-bending enemy. Said friend dies a pointless death. He's seen the Doctor a hair away from death himself. He still doesn't know what he's doing with his life. And this book is where he works out that's okay. He sets out from the Doctor, ready to work out a new life. (Wonderful plans dashed by a War in Heaven, but that's another story)

We also get to see Romana, Ace, and Leela come together. They're a brilliant trio, and Ace gets the best of it here - this is her victory lap from all the character development she went through in the New Adventures. She's older, wiser, and smarter. There's an amazing scene towards the start of the book where she faces off against a pre-character-development her, and wins soundly. It's a victory in the moment, but also a victory for her growth as a person. Not that Romana or Leela are slacking - the book shows a friendship that Big Finish happily followed up on to a much greater depth.

The actual main plot set in the House of Lungbarrow is brilliantly executed. The Doctor's Cousins are a well-characterized bunch; all effected deeply and irreparably by his leaving of Gallifrey and the events that happened shortly thereafter. Glospin, Innocet, Jobiska, Owis, Quences. These characters stuck with me. The Doctor's first rival, the closest thing he had to a mother, a senile old lady, an adult child, a father who wanted to plan his son's future. They're so very Gallifreyan, but they're so very human. I don't want to spoil the twists that haven't already been plastered all over the internet, so I will let it rest: even if you know about the Other and all that, Lungbarrow has some amazing twists left for you still.

And to take a moment to discuss the Big Thing about Lungbarrow: the concept of the Other. Andrew Cartmel said his masterplan was never to explain a new past for the Doctor - it was simply to add a new level of mystery to the character. This might be controversial, but Lungbarrow succeeds. Who is the Other? Is he the Doctor? Is he Leela and Andred's child, the firstborn of Gallifrey in ten million years? Is he, say, an explorer and tyrant named Tecteun? Lungbarrow could support it all? (Seriously, I have a great theory tying Lungbarrow and Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children together, but that's another essay for another day.)

For me, the emotional core of the book is where Leela, Ace, and Chris discover that by his calendar and culture, it's the Doctor's birthday (well, Name Day). And so they sing happy birthday to him. They celebrate him. They love him. He chose his friends, and they chose him. As little as I've talked about him, this is a book about the Doctor. It's a book about the family who rejected him and the better family he found on a blue forgotten planet throughout time and space. As a book, it is certainly not perfect - it has many of the usual flaws of the NAs, and a few things that haven't aged well. But I will still call it a perfect end to the Seventh Doctor of the books and the start to a new, greater era.

I have more I could say, but I'll leave it here for now. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

what you have to understand is that lungbarrow is a good book

[daughterofheartshaven]

Why the Gallifreyan Presidency is such a mess.

This is in a series of Doctor Who expanded universe reconciliations. If you see a contradiction in the Doctor Who expanded universe, you can drop me an ask and I will come up with an explanation for it.

A response to an ask from @presidentdisastraofgallifrey - they asked me to explain why how the Gallifreyan Presidency works and to clean up the mess that is how it exists in the EU. I will probably still do that, but in the meantime, I figured I'd give my in-universe explanation as to why it's a mess. Happy reading!

This is a bit less formal then some of my other essays, so I'm not gonna do a play-by-play of where I'm drawing on this stuff. That being said, most of this comes from the classic series Gallifrey tv stories, the audios Time in Office, and Peri and the Piscon Paradox, and the books The Ancestor Cell.

The role of the Lord President was set up by Rassilon, and, following some teething troubles (read: Morbius and Pandora), set up into a pretty consistent pattern: A president would have the role for one of their lives, then at the end of their life, they would name a successor. The successor would then become Lord President for the remainder of whatever regeneration they were on before naming a successor and so on and so forth. In theory, the Lord President had vast power, but in practice, Gallifrey was so stable that this never came into play. Similarly, a nomination could be contested and brought to a public vote, but since the Presidency was just a ceremonial role, this almost never happened. While there were occasionally incidents where a president would die in office, they tended to have a successor prepared in the case of such an eventuality.

However, one case of this not happening broke the entire system.

When the current President was assassinated in The Deadly Assassin, he had yet to announce a successor. Subsequently, the first Presidential election in quite possibly thousands of years was held on Gallifrey. Had that election produced a clear winner, it is possible the Presidency would have stabilized.

However, of the three people running in the race, one (Goth) died and another (the Doctor) disappeared. This left Greyjan the Sane as the de facto victor of the election, but Greyjan killed himself less then three years into his term as president.

Since Greyjan left no successor, the presidency relapsed to the only contestant in the election still alive - the Doctor. (Or, possibly, Greyjan named the Doctor as their successor). Since the Doctor had roughly zero interest in being president, after The Invasion of Time he officially nominated Borusa his successor as Lord President and stepped down.

While president, Borusa regenerated. By the laws, he should have stepped down. But he didn't. Under other circumstances, this would have been somewhat controversial, but after the brief and chaotic presidencies of Greyjan and the Doctor, the populace of Gallifrey wanted a consistent Presidency. So no one challenged Borusa keeping the office after he regenerated.

Borusa, however, has realized that he does, in theory, have a lot more power than presidents have traditionally wielded, and he gets very interested in maintain his position. He attempts to undermine the High Council and solidify his powerbase to become President eternally. This backfires and he disappears.

However, in his disappearance, Borusa did two things:

Borusa did not name a successor because he planned on never needing one.

Borusa showed just how much power a High President could have.

Gallifrey had a new succession crisis, and it had become much more clear how an ambitious Time Lord could wield great power as a President. There had been an underlying cultural assumption that the President was a figurehead, but Borusa had broken that.

After a few interim leaders (Flavia, then Tivoli), the High Council brought the Doctor back and installed him as President.

I quite honestly believe that this was the worst possible choice they could have made.

The Doctor's second brief presidency was a flurry of him attempting to wield his power in order to break Gallifrey out of its stagnancy and better the lives of his people. This was very well-intentioned, and in the short term probably did result in the betterment of the lives of his citizens. However, a Lord President actually publicly using that level of power was functionally unprecedented and finished the cultural shift that Borusa started. The Presidential position was now one that was desired for its power.

The Doctor nominated a successor, Lowri, who kept things in check for a time. But then following the Ravalox Scandal, Lowri was revealed to functionally be in the pocket of the Celestial Intervention Agency, and she lost all public respect. And several ambitious Time Lords who had cottoned on to the fact that Gallifrey was finally in a position to change for the first time in millions of years sensed an opportunity.

What followed were the first actual, honest-to-Rassilon presidential battles in almost ten million years. The problem that immediately followed was that all of the relevant laws were almost ten million years old - with no reason to have accountability for what was seen to be a powerless figurehead, the laws regarding the presidency by and large had not been updated since the Rassilon had founded Time Lord society. And while Gallifrey had stagnated, it had changed enough over the past ten million years for this to be a big problem.

So, the reason the laws regarding the Presidency seem really inconsistent and contradictory in everything that follows the Fifth Doctor era (especially in the Gallifrey series)? They quite literally are that inconsistent and contradictory. The laws of how the presidency works by this point had very little to do with the actual office of the Presidency, and the sudden influx of ambitious would-be presidents left no time for the updating of the law. Following the fall of Lowri, the presidency became a game of "figure out a new legal loophole that allows me to illegitimize the last guy and legitimize myself."

[daughterofheartshaven]

Thank you so much! I seriously appreciate you typing all this out and this makes a lot of sense. I'd like to share my own thoughts and reasonings on the matter, if that's all right. Since I like to be explicit about my intentions, I would like to be clear that I have no intention or desire to get you to change your mind - I enjoy this sort of analysis and trade of perspectives, and this exchange of ideas is my end unto itself. (Also btw no need to apologize for rambling or self-repetition - I do both on a regular).

Before I jump into it, I want to add a bit of nuance. While I do fairly firmly believe the War Chief is the Master, I don't really like how the recent War Games colorization intentionally implied that he was. I'm not as bothered by it as some people, but it does feel a little revisionist. I have a great many headcanons that make Doctor Who more satisfying to me personally but think the BBC confirming them would be to the detriment of the show. Doctor Who's lifeblood is being inconstant and able to evolve, and just because I like trying to build cohesive narratives out of that doesn't mean that having more of those would be better for the show. If the show ever explicitly de-confirms one of my headcanons then I can have fun making up a new one that accounts for the new information. So, what I'm saying here is not an attempt to defend what the colorized War Games did or explain why the BBC should do this or that thing - it's just why I personally like to believe the War Chief is the Master.

My considering the War Chief as an incarnation of The Master is motivated by two distinct things. Firstly, this helps explain how the Master burnt through so many regenerations prior to The Deadly Assassin. The concept of him dying that many times doesn't really stretch credulity enough that there needs to be an explanation like this but surprises me given the Master's characterization up until that point (and also afterwords). In my opinion, the Master is consistently a character who takes large, arguably stupid risks, but they are also extremely good at getting out of a tight spot unscathed, so seeing places where they have died before The Deadly Assassin helps make their predicament in the Deadly Assassin more believable.

The second (and far more important to me) factor for me is in terms of characterization. The War Chief and the Master are extremely similar in how they are characterized - I would say the War Chief is closer to the characterization of the Classic Who Masters then the NuWho Masters are. Most other renegade Time Lords introduced have notably different motivations - the Monk genuinely wants to do good most of the time, they're just short-sighted, immature, and genuinely thing the ends always justify the means. The Rani is amoral, but her goal is her own scientific advancement. The War Chief and the Master are both after power to rule over others pretty consistently, and the Master's MO seems to be to team up with some other alien species they think they can manipulate, which is exactly what the War Chief does. Again, this doesn't mean the two have to be the same, but having two characters with very similar backgrounds and characterizations feels a little redundant to me, so if merging the two feels plausible and helps set up The Deadly Assassin it feels worth it to me.

All that aside, I want to try to address your argument more directly and give my thoughts on it. I would argue that the War Chief being the Master does add to the thematic tragedy of the War Games on the virtue that (if this is true) this would be the first Master story. Since the Doctor has not seen this level of evil from the Master before, the Doctor can still be shocked by it. And even if this is a scheme of the Master's, he never planned for the Doctor to walk into the middle of it. The loss of Jamie and Zoe was never anything the War Chief (whatever his identity) planned - it was an unintended side-effect of the catastrophe. For me, having the Master doesn't lower the stakes or shock factor, it raises them. The Master is someone who can defeat the Doctor (I would consider Logopolis, Utopia, and World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls to all be examples of this. In all cases, the Doctor isn't resoundly defeated, and maybe the Master didn't get everything he wanted, but I would consider the Doctor losing in all three), but the Doctor doesn't even know this - but he discovers this over the course of the story. And at the end, both are brought to their knees (directly or otherwise) by the power of the Time Lords.

This also makes for an interesting progression: in future, the Master would start more actively accounting for the Doctor in his schemes. The Doctor went to terrible lengths to save the people trapped in the titular war games, and having the Master remember that and start taking the Doctor more actively into account is a nice bit of character development.

(I will fully admit this argument breaks down completely if you look at the EU, which has the Doctor and Master battle before this, but EU also has the First Doctor face off against the War Chief, so I've been using my "themes through just tv" hat here)

And having typed that all out, I notice that we are starting from very different points for our analysis. If I am understanding you correctly, you are placing high value on thematic cohesion and satisfaction, whereas I am valuing inter-narrative cohesion and worldbuilding. To put it another way, I think you are analyzing what makes for a more emotionally powerful story, whereas I am analyzing for what makes for a more cohesive world. (If I'm misrepresenting you here, please let me know! I don't want to be doing that!). Even when I'm trying to address your arguments more directly, I'm still coming from that inter-narrative lens.

And as a postscript, I will say when you said, "imagine if the Valeyard was actually the Master all along," my immediate reaction was "oh hang on that sounds like that could have been really interesting." A lot of this is because I don't find the Valeyard to be all that interesting (the concept in and of itself certainly isn't bad, but I don't think the Doctor is the sort of character where that really thematically works all that well. Someone like Romana feels like that could be much more interesting to work with). That being said, I am in full agreement with everything that you said about the Cybermen, so I think I was still able to get your point. (I feel like I should say that I don't want to turn every renegade Time Lord into the Master - if anyone claimed that the Rani, the Monk, or anyone like that was the Master, I would not respond positively).

Hopefully that made sense! And if you have any responses or counterarguments to anything I just typed out, I'd love to hear it. One thing I am curious about is if you think the Master's appearances in Doctor Who generally require the Master in the way you said the War Games does not. And thank you again for being willing to engage in a conversation like this - I really super appreciate it!

A Doctor Who question for you: