Tags: Doctor Who »»»» Doctor Who Season 12
The Doctor Who show runners launched us into a serious rewrite of Doctor Who Canon with Season 12. First we had a new Master who told us everything we knew about Gallifrey was a lie, so he destroyed Gallifrey. Then we met a whole new incarnation of The Doctor that flatly doesn't fit the known timeline of THe Doctor. At the end of Fugitive of the Judoon, The Doctor said time is swirling around her, indicating there is some serious flux going on. And we have to remind ourselves that what's kept Doctor Who alive all these decades is its ability to reinvent itself from time to time.
To start with a bit of review. It may be Chibnall's master plan for Doctor Who to rewrite Time Lord History,
going by a news article from Season 11 -- based on a line, "I used to have sisters", which was a throw-away line in Arachnids but rewrites The Doctor's history. In any case, it is in Skyfall 2 where we hear The Master tell us:
The Master: They lied to us. The Founding Fathers of Gallifrey. Everything we were told is a lie. We are not who we - you or I - the whole existence of our species was built on the lie of The Timeless Child.
That's the essence of the message - for the full thing see [master-destroys-gallifrey.html]
So... on the one hand we have an incarnation of The Doctor that doesn't fit The Doctor's timeline. That is, in every other multi-Doctor story the newest incarnation remembered the older incarnations, but the older incarnation said words to the effect "so, you're my replacement". In this case neither Ruth-Doctor nor Jodi-Doctor recognized the other. Either there's some seriously deep mind-wiping going on and one of these Doctor's really does precede the other, but forgot, or else there is some completely different seriously deep thing going on.
So... on the other hand, The Master revealed a completely different seriously deep thing about the history of Gallifrey. So seriously deep that he felt motivated to completely destroy Gallifrey. He musta been pretty pissed.
After thinking about this a fair amount
- Remembering The Doctor's past lives in Fugitive of the Judoon
- The Ruth-Doctor fits the 'Time Lords are a lie' story line of the latest Master incarnation
- The Master destroys Gallifrey because of a lie about The Timeless Child
The only conclusion I see is that The Ruth-Doctor is somehow related to this lie that The Master discovered. We have no idea who this Timeless Child might be, since this is the first time it has been mentioned ever in televised Doctor Who. But, the history that's been shown was written by Rassilon. He isn't exactly a trustworthy source. On reflection it's very likely that he concocted a story and hid some details.
If we demangle what The Master said ...
- The Founding Fathers of Gallifrey told Gallifreyan Society a story about their founding
- But it was all a lie
- They are not who they think they are
- Gallifreyan society was built on a lie of The Timeless Child
The Founding Fathers of Gallifrey were: Omega, Rassilon and "The Other".
We have seen Omega and Rassilon in televised Doctor Who. We were told that through a feat of stellar engineering, Omega, Rassilon and The Other created an immense energy source which gave The Time Lords the energy with which to manipulate the entire universe.
Omega got stuck in an anti-matter universe and would have been destroyed but he was too stubborn to be destroyed. He remade that universe to his own liking, but was bored and going stir-crazy. He tried to escape a few times, but was thwarted by The Doctor on every attempt. There were several gadget made by Omega, such as The Hand of Omega, that could be used to destroy whole stars. The 7th Doctor used it to destroy Skaro, for example. When Omega lured The Doctor to Omega's universe, in the episode called The Three Doctors, The Doctor was able to outwit Omega and avoid a fate of taking Omega's place in that anti-matter universe.
We first saw Rassilon in The Five Doctors where he had been confined to a vastly intricate tomb full of tricks and traps. Rassilon had ensnared several Time Lords in this tomb after they failed his tests. We've seen Rassilon a few times in New Who - the most recent being when The 12th Doctor finally made it to Gallifrey, after getting stuck in a trap, and he basically evicted Rassilon from Gallifrey.
That The Doctor was able to outwit both Rassilon and Omega says something about The Doctor. There is a fan theory that The Other was thrown into some kind of Time Lord mix-master, only to be reformed as The Doctor. I don't know -- the video attached below was made by someone who's made a much deeper study of this than I have.
Where this story line appears to be heading is to reveal more about the origin of Gallifreyan society and The Time Lords. If it's all a lie, as The Master put it, then the revelation will surely cause a collective head-explosion of Doctor Who fandom.
But - I'm reminded in my mind - hey, folks, it's just a TV show. In fact, what's happening is that the BBC is creating a fiction. This so-called history of the Time Lords is nothing more than fans spending a lot of time grasping at fragments of clues, and the BBC is purposely keeping it this way so that we are eager to pounce on any crumb of a clue that falls our way. At the end of the day, it's about the BBC making a few bucks on us.
