Tom Fordy
In thedramatic Doctor Who finale, the show’s history changed forever. The Doctor, so we learnt, is not a native of the planet Gallifrey, but the “Timeless Child” – found under a dimensional portral and bringing with her the power to regenerate. The Time Lords, it turns out, took the power for themselves and have been lying about the history of their people and planet ever since. There are in fact many more previous incarnations of The Doctor out there, wiped from The Doctor's memory by the Time Lords.
But who are the Time Lords? And should we be surprised that they’re not entirely trustworthy? In a word, no. “It’s an idea suggested fairly early on in the series,” says Toby Hadoke, actor, comedian, and performer on one-man show Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf. “These god-like like beings are actually a rather murky cabal.” God-like or not, the Time Lords have a backstory arguably more knotty than anything in the latest series. Here's a recap.
Who gave birth to the Time Lords?
During the adventures of the First (William Hartnell) and Second (Patrick Troughton) Doctor – the 1963-1969 black-and-white era – all that was known about The Doctor’s past was that he was an “exile” from his own planet and people. Who those people were, audiences still didn’t know. Other than The Doctor’s granddaughter Susan (Carole Ann Ford – the show’s original companion), the first member of The Doctor’s own people we met was “The Monk” (played by Carry On star Peter Butterworth) in the 1965 serial The Time Meddler.
Equipped with his own Tardis, The Monk was also a renegade from their home world and enjoyed interfering with history. The Doctor vowed to stop him for breaking the “golden rule” of time-tinkering –in hindsight, a bit rich considering how much The Doctor has stuck his/her oar into other beings’ business over the past 2,000-odd years.
The Doctor’s true origin story – or the origin story we believed to be true for the past 50 years, at least – was revealed in Patrick Troughton’s last adventure, the epic 10-parter The War Games. The Doctor, it was explained, is a Time Lord who fled their still-unnamed planet in a stolen Tardis for what amounted to an intergalactic joyride.
The creative decision behind The Doctor’s backstory waspurely functional. With the future of the show up in the air, producer Derrick Sherwin needed to save money. So the Time Lords were created as a means of banishing him to Earth. Script editor Terrance Dicks has often been credited with the idea, but he credited Sherwin. Amusingly, Sherwin had no recollection of it.
“It’s a bit strange really,” said Dicks, being interviewed for Doctor Who Magazine. “People say, ‘You created the Time Lords’, and certainly I can’t claim to have done that. Derrick Sherwin and I were discussing the story one day and he said, ‘He belongs to this mysterious race called the Time Lords, doesn’t he? And that was it! Everything came from that.”
“Terrance is absolutely certain that I invented the Time Lords […] but I can’t remember doing that,” laughed Sherwin on The War Games DVD commentary.
In The War Games, The Doctor comes face to face with The War Chief (Edward Brayshaw), yet another renegade from his planet, who has been kidnapping and brainwashing soldiers from human history. When The Doctor realises he can’t return all the soldiers home himself, he resigns himself to summoning the Time Lords for their help – even though it means surrendering himself to them.
“The Time Lords are the only beings capable of retuning all these soldiers,” says Toby Hadoke. “It’s a powerful moment where The Doctor admits, ‘I’ve beaten the baddies but the task of getting these soldiers back is too big for me.’ He sacrifices himself.”
What are their powers?
The original Time Lords appear as a trio of all-powerful observers in black and white robes –space-age chin-strokers, looking down at everyone. But their credentials are impressive: they live forever (“barring accidents”), have the power to torture people telepathically, and can stick a force field around an entire planet.
Interestingly, “Time Lord” seems originally to be a rank – like an opposite number to main villain The War Lord (Phillip Madoc) – rather than an entire race of people. “This nomenclature that we think is universal to the show is very much in the idiomatic language of that particular story,” says Hadoke. “Now, Time Lord is an all-encompassing name across the show.”
The Time Lords put The Doctor on trial for breaking the law of “non-interference with other planets”. In turn, The Doctor accuses them of merely observing when they could use their power to fight evil. Then sentence him to exile on Earth – and force him to change his appearance again. The Doctor is shown a series of sketches of potential new faces, all of which he rejects. Troughton’s performance is absolutely priceless. (“Well that one’s too fat, isn’t he!”)
Particularly interesting in light of last night’s revelations – that regeneration was taken from the Timeless Child – the concept of regeneration isn’t established until later. As noted in Tat Wood’s About Time book series, Troughton was seen as an alter-ego of Hartnell, a “renewal” of the same person; and when the Doctor wakes as Jon Pertwee in 1970, he reacts to his new face as if he’s been forced to undergo cosmetic surgery – he’s also acquired a second heart.
(Other quirks of the Time Lord body and mind include orange-tinged blood, the power of hypnosis, the ability to hold a telepathic conference calls with each other, and a respiratory bypass system to stop them being strangled by monsters. They also eat food pills.)
For the Third Doctor’s exile on Earth – in which Jon Pertwee would swoosh around in a cape and velvet suit, karate-chopping rubber monsters – the Time Lords are more of an absent nuisance, having stranded The Doctor by removing his knowledge of the “secret of the Tardis” and changing its dematerialisation code.
When did they turn evil?
Over the next five decades, the canonical history of their Time Lords, their technology, and their planet – eventually named as Gallifrey – all gets a bit timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly. And it’s further complicated by last night’s revelations about how Tecteun discovered the Timeless Child and used her ability to regenerate to create the Time Lords.
But until now, Time Lords were known as a peace-keeping race that its their time-travelling capabilities and immense power to two legendary figures: Omega, who detonated a star to create the Time Lords’ power source; and Rasillion, who harnessed the power into the Eye of Harmony and founded Time Lord civilisation. But writers were subverting these omnipresent beings before much of that history was written.
The next appearance of a Time Lord – in the 1971 serial Terror of the Autons, written by Robert Holmes – would look like something from the Bradford & Bingley, complete with a bowler hat and umbrella. The Time Lord appears out of literal thin air to warn Pertwee’s Doctor that The Master has arrived on Earth and rigged up a bomb.
“It’s interesting because the Time Lords were set up as these powerful beings,” says Hadoke. “But Robert Holmes is the greatest iconoclast of all Doctor Who writers, so he has this Time Lord disguise himself as a city gent to undercut all that. He comes and he patronises The Doctor and then buggers off when there’s a bomb to diffuse. Holmes would totally reinvent the Time Lords later, but here he’s saying, ‘I find god-like beings a bit boring… I’m going to mess about with them.’”
New producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrence Dicks disliked the concept of The Doctor’s exile. They used the Time Lords as a narrative device for manipulating The Doctor into various adventures.
“[Peter] Bryant and Sherwin had taken the decision to exile the Doctor to Earth, which I thought was totally wrong,” Dicks told Doctor Who Magazine. “Because exiled to Earth, the Doctor is not the Doctor. It becomes Quatermass or something. He’s got to be roaming time and space in the Tardis. Barry and I decided to get him away gradually by having the Time Lords use him on missions. So they snatch him away to somewhere and put him down in the middle of a difficult situation knowing he won’t be able to resist getting involved. That’s how we used them.”
In Colony in Space, they send the Doctor to track down files on the ominously-named Doomsday Weapon, which has been (predictably) stolen by the Master. In 10thanniversary story The Three Doctors,the Time Lords pull the First and Second Doctors from their respective time streams to help the The Third Doctor defeat the legendary Omega, who’s been stuck on the other side of a black hole from most of eternity and has understandably gone mad.
The Time Lords would send The Doctor on his most important covert mission in 1975’s Genesis of the Daleks, during Tom Baker’s first series in the role. A mysterious Grim Reaper-like Time Lord summons The Doctor and instructs him that he must stop the creation of The Daleks. Flying in the face of the Time Lords’ “non-intervention” policy, it’s pure black-ops – the kind of thing the Time Lords don’t want to be seen dirtying their hands with. (The Doctor, of course, doesn’t stop the creation of the Daleks. He has an attack of conscience and only succeeds in delaying their progress by a thousand or so years).
What are their politics?
Robert Holmes would completely reinvent the Time Lords in the 1976 serial The Deadly Assassin, a divisive, game-changing story and the first to be set entirely on Gallifrey.
The Fourth Doctor is tricked into the returning home by The Master – now a decaying Skeletor-like monster (played by Peter Pratt) – and framed for the assassination of the Time Lord President. (The incident was referenced by Sacha Dhawan’s Master last night.)
The Doctor is tried and sentenced to death, but he enters a computer simulation called The Matrix– over 20 years before, erm, The Matrix – and discovers that Chancellor Goth (Bernard Horsfall) killed the President in league with The Master, who’s after the ancient powerful artefacts.
The assassination and conspiracy is an obvious twist on the JFK assassination – even with mention of Gallifrey’s own CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency). “They get their fingers into everything,” says The Doctor when the learns the CIA has been tampering with files.
“It’s not subtle,” says Toby Hadoke. “But for 1976 children’s teatime it’s quite cheeky.”
Holmes’ reinvention of the Time Lords would influence their portrayal for the future of the series. It created Time Lord society, with elite chapters, academies, a security force, and even a TV reporter calling the action at the President’s resignation ceremony.
The Time Lords are no longer god-like but pompous and classist – self-serving bureaucrats who scramble over each other for power. When The Doctor thwarts The Master’s plan, the Time Lords spin the facts for good PR to make the villainous Goth look like the hero.
“It was controversial at the time,” says Hadoke. “Very vocal and high profile fan organisations hated The Deadly Assassin, which is now seen as one of the greats of Doctor Who. They were seen as lofty and all-powerful – benign and benevolent people who protect space and time. But Robert Holmes was such a good writer that he’s more interested in shades of colours and nuance. They have a society but Holmes treats them as as an object of satire. They are shown to be shady and duplicitous and Machiavellian, and they’re all the more interesting for it. It’s a glorious tale.”
The story would introduce the Time Lords’ classic look, the ceremonial robes, skull caps, and high pointed collars. The look of the Time Lords and Gallifrey was conceived by costume designed James Acheson and production designed Roger Murray-Leach. As recalled in About Time, Acheson left halfway through the serial because of frustrations over the budget and creative demands.
Why are they always putting the Doctor on trial?
The Deadly Assassin also introduced other elements that would become Time Lord lore: the grand Panopticon hall, referenced in last night’s finale; The Matrix, a databank containing the containing every Time Lord consciousness, which The Doctor took a trip into once again last night; Time Lords being limited to 12 regenerations (something the Time Lords had to fix by granting The Doctor a whole new cycle of regenerations when the show’s popularity lasted longer than 13 lives); TimeLords being prone to leaving around troublesome, hugely powerful gadgets – The Great Key of Rassilon, The Sash of Rasillon, the Hand of Omega, the Time Ring – which The Doctor inevitably has to rescue from the clutches of evil; and – as continued in this season’s bit finale – highly ranking Time Lords as corruptible, or at best, a bit dodgy.
In The Arc of Infinity, they sentence The Doctor to execution as a means of stopping the return of Omega; in The Five Doctors President Borusa manipulates The Doctor to find the secret of eternal life. Even Rasillon, the most revered of all Time Lords, turned out to be a baddie once he regenerated as Timothy Dalton. “They’re not very good at choosing their leaders on Gallifrey,” says Hadoke.
(Not all Time Lords are duplicitous power mongers, howeverThe Fourth Doctor travelled with posh-but-likeable Romana – played by Mary Tamm/Lalla Ward – for three years.)
The Doctor was offered the presidency himself but was deposed for abandoning his post and made the the subject of an inquiry in the series-long Trial of a Time Lord saga. One thing we do know about The Time Lords is that they’re very,verykeen on putting The Doctor on trial – and where possible, sentencing him to death.
Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor would later refer to himself as “President-elect of the High Council of Time Lords” and insinuated he was one of the Time Lord founding fathers.
Why did they have to die?
When Doctor Who was re-launched in 2005, new show runner Russell T Davies made a bold move: he destroyed Gallifrey and killed all the Time Lords. The Doctor (the Ninth Doctor – Christopher Eccleston) was alone – emotionally crippled by the guilt of killing both the Daleks and his own people to end the Time War.
“I think it was a masterstroke,” says Toby Hadoke. “We could have expected there to be no continuity from the previous series and we’d have had few complaints. The fact that Russell T Davies made this accessible show that was a big hit and gradually seeded in the show’s history was frankly great. If you’d never seen the show before you’d think it was about a guy whose planet has been destroyed. If youhadseen the show before you’d think, ‘Oh Christ, they destroyed Gallifrey!’”
Steven Moffat’s tenure brought the Time Lords and Gallifrey back, they’d all been hiding in a “pocket universe”, in turned out, while Chris Chibnall killed them off again – an act of diminishing returns perhaps, but a set up for all new mysteries.
What’s the truth about the Time Lords? Why have they wiped the Doctor’s memory? And what’s the the secret Time Lord organisation The Doctor seemed to be working for in flashbacks? The Time Lords, it seems, are murkier than ever – ultimately the Time Lords at their best.
“On the surface the Time Lords are lofty, benign do-gooders,” says Toby Hadoke. “What’s interesting is that’s what they see themselves – as boring science fiction tropes – but because Doctor Who’s more interesting than that, what they actually are is much more down-to-earth shady operators. That’s why Doctor Who handles its gods rather brilliantly – because actually its gods are as grubby as the rest of us.”
For more on Toby Hadoke visittobyhadoke.com