Howling:Time Lords evolved?

The Howling → Time Lords evolved?

There be spoilers about un-released stories here.
Run back to the forums if you're scared.

It's stated in A Good Man Goes to War that the ancient Gallifreyans evolved time-sensitivity and the ability to regenerate over billions of years. Well if all Gallifreyans could regenerate and were time-sensitive, I suppose that would make all Gallifreyans Time Lords. But there are hints in the classic series that some Gallifreyans were not Time Lords, such as the Castellan and the Chancellory Guards. Furthermore, when the Castellan is shot dead in The Five Doctors, he does not regenerate, which would suggest that regeneration is by no means a natural ability of all Gallifreyans. I realise that it's of dubious reliability, as it was ultimately never produced, but Andrew Cartmel intended the character of Ace to eventually be enrolled in the Time Lord Academy by the Doctor, opening up the possibility that not all Time Lords were even from Gallifrey!! If candidates have to be naturally time-sensitive and able to regenerate, that would immedietely disqualify Ace, as she was neither of those things! I'm currently unsure how all of this can be made to fit together coherently. 213.121.200.42 09:58, August 17, 2011 (UTC)

They weren't very clear about it in A Good Man Goes to War, but it seemed like the Time Lords didn't just evolve, but billions of years exposed to the untempered schism made them what they are. River, who is not a Gallifreyan, may still be considered a Time Lady due to the fact that she can regenerate. Instead of being exposed to the untempered schism for billions of years, River was concieved in the TARDIS in the vortex and then experimented on by Madame Kovarian. In The Five Doctors, the Castellan was shot dead by a Time Lord staser. Time Lord weapons would almost certainly be designed to prevent regeneration, or they would be rather useless on Gallifrey. Maybe all Gallifreyans are capable of becoming Time Lords due to their billions of years exposed to the time vortex, but they don't become one until they reach the age of eight and look into the untempered schism. This would explain the outsiders seen in The Invasion of Time. Ace can certainly never become a true Time Lord, and she can't really be used as evidence of anything since that was never produced. Maybe she would have just learned from the Time Lords, but wouldn't actually become one.Icecreamdif 19:42, August 17, 2011 (UTC)

First, please put your content after the little icon thingies (it's more obvious in Source view), and sign your posts.

Oops, I see now that you did sign your post, it just got split up by the forum header. I reattached your signature. --173.228.85.35 03:52, August 18, 2011 (UTC)

Anyway, I think the best answer to the Gallifreyan/Time Lord distinction is that the former is a biological thing, and the latter a social thing. Jenny, who's biologically Gallifreyan but not a Time Lady, has a second heart and presumably all the other stuff that goes with it. (And post-TV Leela, who's a Time Lady but not Gallifreyan has one heart, and ages and dies like a human. Presumably the same would be true for Ace if the 7th Doctor and Andrew Cartmel got their way.) River is part-Gallifreyan, but not really part-Time Lady.

My guess is that being a Time Lord is a lot like being a Norman Lord in medieval England. You can inherit it, and that's how most Time Lords become Time Lords, but on rare occasions it can also be granted in some kind of ritual (looking into the Schism, graduating the Academy, having the Rod of Rassilon waved at you by the President, whatever). It may require the ritual even if you're born to it. Sometimes people use the term "Time Lord" sloppily, just as people sometimes used the term "Norman" to mean basically anyone in England who knew French (especially knights who weren't peers).

That fits pretty much everything that's ever been said on TV, and almost everything that's been said in any other media. The only problem is that every earlier source, TV and otherwise, agrees that Gallifreyans got their special abilities because Rassilon tinkered with their genetics/biodata/morphic fields, while A Good Man Goes to War says it's from eons of exposure to the untempered schism. in fact, that's a problem for _any_ explanation, not just mine.

One possibility is that history has radically changed with the erasure of Gallifrey (as it definitely did the last time Gallifrey was erased, in the EDAs); the Rassilon story was true before the LGTW, but it's not true anymore (just as it wasn't true between the SWiH and the restoration of Gallifrey).

But there's another possibility, for the people who hate any "history changed, deal with it" explanation: The schism changed the Gallifreyan people over the eons, but then Rassilon edited those changes to clean them up and improve them. River got the Rassilon-edited changes (in particular, including regeneration), not just the raw-schism changes, because she was conceived in flight in the vortex _in a TARDIS_. --173.228.85.35 03:51, August 18, 2011 (UTC)

My understanding of A Good Man Goes to War is that River was part Time Lady, but not part Gallifreyan. She has two Human parents and has never been to Gallifrey, but she has at least some of a Time Lords abilities, like regeneration. It was also said in Mawdryn Undead that if the Doctor's remaining regenenerations were stolen, he would cease to be a Time Lord. Icecreamdif 04:51, August 18, 2011 (UTC)

OK, obviously "Gallifreyan" can also mean "resident of Gallifrey" as well as "member of the biological species", just like "German" can denote residency as well as ancestry, but that's not relevant here. Regeneration, etc., are obviously a part of being biologically Gallifreyan, not part of having legal Gallifreyan citizenship.

Anyway, despite having two human parents, River's biology (genetics, biodata, morphic fields, whatever) is clearly not just human. The "human+" scan explicitly tells us that, as does the fact that she can apparently regenerate. She's partway between human and Gallifreyan biologically; if you don't want to call that "half-Gallifreyan", that's fine; it's just a matter of definition. (Oddly, I like calling that "half-Gallifreyan", but when one of the EDAs hinted that the Doctor's "half-human" meant the same thing, I hated it…) But she's definitely not half-Time Lady in any sense; she doesn't have any of the shared ethics, suffering, blah blah any more than Jenny does.

As for Mawdryn Undead, the best explanation for that is that it's a case of people using the word "Time Lord" sloppily to mean "Gallifreyan", just as I already explained. (Yes, the _real_ best explanation is that some of the writers didn't know or care about any such distinction, and they kept contradicting the other writers who were trying to establish one—that story in particular was chock full of contradictions, like the idea of physical "regeneration packets" that can be stolen from Time Lords, a completely different thing than usual called the "Blinovich Limitation Effect", etc. But in-universe, you can blame it on the characters being sloppy instead of the writers.) --173.228.85.35 02:29, August 19, 2011 (UTC)

Maybe prior to Rassilon's genetic tinkering, Gallifreyans did already have the ability to regenerate, but it was extremely rare and unreliable; those could only regenerated once, and most of those could not survive the regenerative process. Rassilon made artificial modifications to the ability, leading to a total of 12 regenerations. So it could be a bit of both - a natural ability AND technologically enhanced. 213.121.200.42 12:37, August 18, 2011 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't want to get into specifics because we have almost no specifics to go by, but that's the kind of thing I meant by "clean them up and improve them".

But Melody wasn't described as being human plus Gallifreyan, she was human plus Time Lord. Everything that the Doctor said to Jenny really had more to do with the fact that he hadn't fully accepted her as his daughter yet, and wasn't willing to accept an artificially created being as one of the great Time Lords. I think that by the time she "died," and certainly if she had continued to travel with the Doctor, the Doctor had come to accept her as a Time Lord. Either way, the episode stated that Melody's DNA is human plus Time Lord, so that is what we must assume that she is unless a future episode contradicts this. Hopefully we will get more details into River's Time Lord/Gallifreyan DNA by the end of the season.Icecreamdif 04:43, August 19, 2011 (UTC)