Time Lord

:This article is about the Time Lords from Doctor Who. For alternate meanings, see Time Lord (disambiguation).

History within the show

On screen

Details of the Time Lords' history within the show are sketchy and as is usual for Doctor Who continuity, fraught with supposition and contradiction. What little has actually been established on screen, arranged roughly in chronological order, is as follows.

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The Time Lords became the masters of time travel when one of their number, the scientist Omega created an energy source to power their experiments in time (The Three Doctors). To this end, Omega used a stellar manipulation device, the Hand of Omega, to rework a nearby star into a new form to serve that source (Remembrance of the Daleks). Unfortunately, the star flared, first into a supernova, and then collapsed into a black hole. Omega was thought killed in that explosion but unknown to everyone, had somehow survived in an antimatter universe beyond the black hole's singularity.

Related Topics:
Omega - The Three Doctors - Hand of Omega - Remembrance of the Daleks - Supernova - Black hole - Antimatter - Singularity

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The founder of Time Lord society, however, and its most revered name, was Rassilon. Rassilon's name reverberates through Time Lord legend and culture, lending his name to many artefacts of power. Rassilon was the one who took a singularity (assumed by fans and the spin-off media to be the same one as Omega's) and placed it beneath the Time Lords' citadel on Gallifrey. This perfectly balanced Eye of Harmony then served as the power source for their civilisation as well as their time machines (The Deadly Assassin).

Related Topics:
Rassilon - Eye of Harmony - The Deadly Assassin

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The early part of Time Lord history was known as the Dark Time, when the first Time Lords abused their powers over time by manipulating lesser species. Among these abuses was the use of the Time Scoop to abduct beings from throughout history to participate in gladiatorial games in an area of Gallifrey known as the Death Zone (The Five Doctors).

Related Topics:
Gladiatorial - The Five Doctors

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During Rassilon's era, he also led the Time Lords in a war against the Great Vampires, a war so horrific that the Time Lords foreswore violence from that point on. The weapons used by the Time Lords against the vampires in that war included Bowships that fired giant bolts through the Great Vampires' hearts. The Doctor encountered a surviving vampire in E-Space in the serial State of Decay.

Related Topics:
Vampires - State of Decay

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Eventually, Rassilon died, or was deposed; contradictory legends surround his demise. His body was placed in the Dark Tower in the Death Zone, which became known as the Tomb of Rassilon (The Five Doctors).

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At some point in their history the Time Lords actively interacted with the civilisation of the planet Minyos, giving them advanced technology. This met with disastrous results, the Minyans destroying themselves in a series of nuclear wars (Underworld).

Related Topics:
Nuclear war - Underworld

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As a result, the Time Lords apparently adopted an official policy of neutrality and non-interference, acting only as observers save in cases of great injustice. However, given the existence of the Celestial Intervention Agency and other renegade Time Lords such as the Doctor, the Master, the Meddling Monk, the Rani and the War Chief, the policy seems to be breached more often than not.

Related Topics:
Meddling Monk - The War Chief

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Spin-off media

Of the many accounts of Time Lord history in spin-off fiction, most of what is accepted by fans about Time Lord history derives from the licensed spin-offs, in particular the Virgin New Adventures and Virgin Missing Adventures novels and their successors, the BBC Books Doctor Who novels. It should be noted that the canonicity of these accounts, as with all spin-off media, is unclear.

Related Topics:
Virgin New Adventures - Virgin Missing Adventures - BBC Books - Canonicity

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The Virgin novels, and by extension the BBC novels, took heavily from the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan" devised by former Doctor Who script editor Andrew Cartmel, which was supposed to explain the Doctor's origins and his ties to Gallifrey's ancient history. Elements of the Masterplan were supposed to be revealed over the course of Cartmel's tenure on the series, but ultimately, as the programme ceased production in 1989, only hints of it surfaced in Seasons 25 and 26 and were never made explicit.

Related Topics:
Andrew Cartmel - 1989 - Seasons 25 - 26

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According to the novels, some millions of years ago the planet Gallifrey was home to a civilisation that could see all of the past and future. Gallifrey was also dominated by a cult of the Pythia, a great and powerful priestess. This cult was overthrown by a group of three younger Gallifreyan scientists, Rassilon, Omega and "the Other", whose name has been lost to time. When these three overthrew the Pythia, she cursed the people with sterility. Her cult fled to a nearby planet where they became the Sisterhood of Karn (seen in The Brain of Morbius). Forced to find a new way to reproduce, Rassilon built the Looms, cloning machines that could create new Gallifreyans to replace the dead. The Looms were eventually incorporated into great Houses of Cousins, to regulate the population levels and organise the new society.

Related Topics:
The Other - The Brain of Morbius

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Omega, in the meantime, concentrated completely on his time travel experiments. The Other's role was unclear but he seemed to have held the alliance between Rassilon and Omega together, and was a part of the project that produced the Hand of Omega. Omega used the hand on the star Qqaba (named in the comic strip Star Death by Alan Moore, DWM #47 and the novel The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin), and vanished in the resulting supernova which created the Eye of Harmony. Rassilon then took control of both the Eye and Gallifreyan society, and the Time Lords could now live up to their name.

Related Topics:
Alan Moore - DWM - Lance Parkin

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Eventually, Rassilon's rule became dictatorial and reached the point where he became obsessed with implementing his reforms and preserving Gallifreyan society as he saw it before the end of his life. Despite the protest of the Other, bloody purges began, and Rassilon began to dabble in immortality. In the Big Finish Productions audio play Zagreus, a historical simulation showed the existence of a vampiric race native to Gallifrey which Rassilon destroyed in his purges. The novels Goth Opera by Paul Cornell and Blood Harvest by Terrance Dicks suggest that Rassilon became a vampire himself to attain eternal life, a belief shared by a Gallifreyan cult also seen in Cornell's comic strip story Blood Invocation (Doctor Who Magazine Yearbook 1995).

Related Topics:
Immortality - Big Finish Productions - Zagreus - Paul Cornell - Terrance Dicks - Doctor Who Magazine

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Meanwhile, the Other, knowing that Rassilon would hold his family hostage to secure his cooperation, told his granddaughter Susan to go into hiding and literally threw himself into the Looms, disintegrating and spreading his genetic code into the machines.

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A year later, the Doctor arrived in his "borrowed" TARDIS from Gallifrey's future and discovered Susan on the streets of the city, where she had been living since failing to make it off-world. Somehow, Susan recognized him as her grandfather and he also knew her name. The Doctor then left Gallifrey's past, taking Susan with him into his exile. Many of the novels (especially Lungbarrow and The Infinity Doctors) have implied that the Doctor may be the Other, genetically reincarnated from the Looms, but the truth of the matter remains uncertain.

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(An alternative version, which contradicts the "Cartmel Masterplan", is in the short story Birth of a Renegade by Eric Saward published in the Radio Times 20th Anniversary Special (1983). This puts Susan in the Time Lord's recent history and identifies her as a descendant of Rassilon and the unwitting focus for a "student rebellion" against a dictatorial President. The rebellion is put down and the Doctor, his memory altered, is used to take Susan into exile.)

Related Topics:
Eric Saward - Radio Times - 1983

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Rassilon, now absolute ruler of Gallifrey, then led the Time Lords in the war against the Great Vampires. Aside from the Bowships, the Time Lords also used N-Forms, extradimensional war machines developed by the Patrexes chapter that attacked planets where they detected the presence of vampires. The Doctor encountered a reactivated N-form in the Virgin New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, by Russell T. Davies.

Related Topics:
Virgin New Adventures - Russell T. Davies

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The Time Lords then encountered the Minyans. The Big Finish Productions audio play Gallifrey: The Inquiry reveals that it was actually the secret test of a Time Lord timeonic fusion device that destroyed Minyos, an incident that was covered up by the High Council and led to their policy of non-interference.

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Eventually, the Pythia's curse was lifted with the arrival of the Fourth Doctor's companion Leela on Gallifrey. Leela fell in love and married a Gallifreyan, Andred (The Invasion of Time), and at the conclusion of the novel Lungbarrow was pregnant — the first naturally conceived child on Gallifrey for millennia.

Related Topics:
Fourth Doctor - Leela - The Invasion of Time

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Recent history

Eighth Doctor Adventures

In the BBC Books Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Ancestor Cell, the Eighth Doctor, to prevent the voodoo cult Faction Paradox from starting a time war between the Time Lords and an unspecified Enemy, apparently destroyed Gallifrey and retroactively wiped the Time Lords from history. In the last regular Eighth Doctor novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, it was revealed that while Gallifrey was destroyed, the Time Lords were not erased from history. However, the cataclysm set up an event horizon in time that prevented anyone from entering Gallifrey's relative past or travelling from it to the present or future. Some Time Lords, however, may have survived, including Iris Wildthyme, the Master and the Minister of Chance from Death Comes to Time.

Related Topics:
Eighth Doctor Adventures - Eighth Doctor - Faction Paradox - Lance Parkin - Event horizon - Iris Wildthyme - Master - Death Comes to Time

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The memories of the Time Lords also survived within the Matrix, which had been downloaded into the Eighth Doctor's mind, but their reconstruction would require a sufficiently advanced computer. At the novel's end, the question of whether or not the Time Lords would be restored remained unanswered. However, it can be assumed that both they and the planet were restored at some point before the start of the 2005 series if the novels are to remain consistent with the new series' continuity. Again, it should be emphasised that the canonicity of the novels is unclear.

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The Time War

In the 2005 series episode The End of the World, the Ninth Doctor said that Gallifrey had been destroyed in the last great "Time War" and that he is the last of the Time Lords. In Dalek, the Doctor further revealed that the war involved the Daleks and the Time Lords, and that both sides were obliterated in the final battle. Producer Russell T. Davies wrote in the April 28, 2005 issue of Doctor Who Magazine that the time war in the series and the one in the novels are unrelated. The survival of both a single Dalek in Dalek and the Dalek Emperor in The Parting of the Ways, however, suggests that the fate of the Time Lords may not be definitive.

Related Topics:
2005 - The End of the World - Ninth Doctor - Time War - Dalek - Dalek - Russell T. Davies - April 28 - Doctor Who Magazine - Dalek Emperor - The Parting of the Ways

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