Time war

The Time War is an event referred to on several occasions new series of Doctor Who. Although the programme has yet to show any of the events of the Time War on screen, some fans have speculated that the war was responsible for the Eighth Doctor's regeneration into the Ninth. The Doctor also referred to this conflict as "the last great Time War," implying that there had been others.

The term Time War can be applied to at least two types of time-spanning conflicts in the Doctor Who universe. The first type of time war is where the two sides are fighting the war across different points in history, separated by centuries or millennia. The second type of time war is where Time itself is used as a weapon, with pre-emptive strikes, time loops, temporal paradoxes and the reversal of historical events. The last great Time War appears to be of the latter variety.

The last great Time War should not be confused with the War against the Enemy that features in several of the spin-off novels in the Eighth Doctor Adventures series. It is implied in the various spin-off media that there have been several previous Time Wars, but that all traces of them have been removed from history.

One such war is mentioned in the 1995 Virgin New Adventures novel Sky Pirates! by Dave Stone. Lasting thirty thousand years, it was fought between the the Doctor's people, the Time Lords, and other races that were developing time travel. The Time Lords destroyed one such race, the Charon, before they even existed. This war took place a generation after the time of Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society.

The last great Time War

The last great Time War was first alluded to in the first episode of the 2005 series, Rose. There, the Ninth Doctor explained to his latest companion, Rose Tyler, that the reason behind the Nestene Consciousness' invasion of Earth was because its food planets were destroyed in a war. Later in the episode, the Doctor stated that he fought in the war, but he was unable to save the Nestenes' planet.

In the following episode, The End of the World, set five billion years in the future, Jabe of the Forest of Cheem expressed amazement that the Doctor, a Time Lord, still existed, implying that the war had consequences up and down history. At the end of that episode, the Doctor confessed to Rose that the war had destroyed his home planet (presumably Gallifrey, though never named as such) and left him the only surviving Time Lord.

In the third episode, The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor encountered the ghostly Gelth, aliens whose bodies had been destroyed by the war. The Gelth said that the war was unseen by "lower species" but devastating to the "higher" ones.

In Dalek, the sixth episode, it was revealed that the Time Lords' adversaries in the war were the Daleks. What actually started the war was not stated, but executive producer Russell T. Davies commented in an episode of the documentary series Doctor Who Confidential that the origins of the war dated back to the 1975 serial Genesis of the Daleks, where the Time Lords sent the Fourth Doctor into the past in an attempt to avert the Daleks' creation or affect their development to make them less aggressive.

Further details of the War are sketchy; in Doomsday, the Tenth Doctor mentions that he fought on the front lines and was present at the Fall of Arcadia. In any case, at the war's end, the Doctor was responsible for the destruction of the Dalek fleet, an action that also destroyed the Time Lords and Gallifrey. Although at least the single Dalek in Dalek had survived, the Doctor dismissed the possibility that other Time Lords may have survived as well, saying that he would have sensed it if they had.

The destruction of the Time Lords created a vacuum that may have left history itself more vulnerable to change. In The Unquiet Dead, the Doctor told Rose that time was in flux and history could change instantly- a more fluid definition to that which had been seen in earlier stories, which had implied that history was either immutable (The Aztecs) or capable of being changed only by very powerful beings (Remembrance of the Daleks).

The most dramatic demonstration of this was in Father's Day, when Rose created a paradox by crossing her own timestream to save her father's life just before his intended death in a traffic accident. This summoned the terrifying Reapers, who descended to sterilise the "wound" in time by devouring everything in sight. The Doctor stated that if the Time Lords had been still around, they could have prevented or repaired the paradox. The consequences of creating a paradox were also why the Doctor could not go back in time and save the Time Lords. Indeed, such actions may have directly contributed to their near-extinction: "They’re all gone," the Ninth Doctor laments, "And now I’m going the same way."

Although the Doctor believed himself to be the last survivor of the Time War, in The Parting of the Ways he discovered that, in addition to the lone Dalek in Dalek, the Dalek Emperor itself had also survived, and had built a new Dalek race. Whether this means that other Time Lords may have survived as well is unclear. The apparent destruction of the Emperor and his fleet at the conclusion of the 2005 series by a time vortex-augmented Rose Tyler was accompanied by her declaration that "the Time War ends."

In the 2006 series episode School Reunion, while being tempted by the power of the Skasis Paradigm which would give him the ability to reorder the universe, the Doctor mused that he could "stop the war". In Rise of the Cybermen, the Doctor noted that when the Time Lords were around, travel between parallel universes was less difficult, but with their demise, the paths between worlds were closed. In The Satan Pit, the Beast says that he recognises the Doctor as "the killer of his own kind".

In Doomsday, it was revealed that a group of Daleks from the elite Cult of Skaro fled into the void between dimensions and survived the original end of the Time War, taking with them the Genesis Ark, a Time Lord prison ship containing millions of Daleks. The new Dalek army released from the Ark was eventually sucked back into the Void due to the actions of the Doctor, but the black Dalek named Sec managed an "emergency temporal shift" and escaped.

Doctor Who Annual 2006

The Doctor Who Annual 2006, published by Panini Comics in August 2005, contained an article entitled Meet the Doctor by Russell T. Davies, which provides some additional background information on the Time War as seen in the television series. Although the canonicity of such material is debatable, the fact that Davies is the chief writer and executive producer of the television series may add some weight to the information given. Whether or not any of the material will be used as part of the television series is also unclear.

The article describes the Time Lord policy of non-intervention, but states that on a "higher level", they protected the time vortex and kept the peace. It further claims that two previous "Time Wars" had been fought: the first a skirmish between the Halldons (a race mentioned in the Terry Nation story We are the Daleks from the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special, 1973) and the Eternals (Enlightenment). The second was the brutal slaughter of the Omnicraven Uprising, with the Time Lords intervening on both occasions to settle matters.

The conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords is described as "the Great (and final) Time War". Initial clashes included the Dalek attempt to infiltrate the High Council of the Time Lords with duplicates (Resurrection of the Daleks), and the open declaration of hostilities by one of the Dalek Puppet Emperors; although the Daleks claimed that these were merely in retaliation for the Time Lords' sending of the Doctor back in time to change Dalek history in Genesis of the Daleks.

The article says that historical records are uncertain, but mentions two specific events in the lead-up to the war. The first was an attempted Dalek-Time Lord peace treaty initiated by President Romana under the Act of Master Restitution (a possible reference to the otherwise unexplained trial of the Master on Skaro at the beginning of the Doctor Who: The TV Movie, 1996). The second was the Etra Prime Incident (The Apocalypse Element), which some say "began the escalation of events." Weapons used by the Time Lords included Bowships, Black Hole Carriers and N-Forms (the last from Davies' 1996 New Adventures novel Damaged Goods) while the Daleks wielded "the full might of the Deathsmiths of Goth" (from the comic strip story Black Legacy by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, in Doctor Who Weekly #35-#38) and launched a massive fleet into the vortex.

The timelines of lesser races and planets shifted without the inhabitants of the worlds affected being aware of the changes in history, as they were a part of them (presumably including humans). "Higher Species" who were able to notice the changes included the Forest of Cheem, who were distraught at the bloodshed; the Nestene Consciousness, which lost all its planets and further mutated; the Animus, which died; and the Eternals, who apparently fled this reality in despair, never to be seen again. The war lasted for years, and exactly how it ended was also not precisely known.

The article ends with a description of a monument to the Time War on a distant planet, upon which, under an image of a lone survivor walking away, the message "You are not alone" has been scratched, perhaps indicating that the Doctor was not the sole survivor of the conflict.

Other Time Wars in Doctor Who

Eighth Doctor Adventures

In a story arc stretching through several of the Eighth Doctor Adventures, sometime in the Doctor's future a war was fought between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. Although in this story arc Gallifrey was also destroyed as a result of the Eighth Doctor attempting to prevent the war from beginning (The Ancestor Cell), series executive producer Russell T. Davies wrote in Doctor Who Magazine #356 that there is no connection between the War of the books and the Time War of the television series. (At one stage it was also rumoured that the novels' Enemy would be revealed to be the Daleks, however issues with the estate of Dalek creator Terry Nation, which co-owns the rights with the BBC, prevented them from being used.) Presumably, if the novels and the television series events are to be reconciled, at some point Gallifrey was restored, only to be destroyed again in the Time War.

In the same Doctor Who Magazine column, Davies compared Gallifrey being destroyed twice with Earth's two World Wars. He also said that he was "usually happy for old and new fans to invent the Complete History of the Doctor in their heads, completely free of the production team's hot and heavy hands."

Despite Davies' unequivocal statement that the two wars are distinct, Lance Parkin, in his Doctor Who chronology AHistory, suggests in a speculative essay that the two destructions of Gallifrey could be the same event seen from two different perspectives, with the Eighth Doctor present twice (and both of them culpable for the planet's destruction).

Another version of the Eighth Doctor Adventures' War, referred to as the "War in Heaven", also appears in the Faction Paradox novels conceived by Lawrence Miles.

Doctor Who comic strip

In three comic strip stories written by Alan Moore and published in Doctor Who Monthly, the Time Lords fought a time war early in their history against the Order of the Black Sun, based some thirty thousand years in their future.

The first strike of the war, from the Time Lords' point of view, was when a Black Sun agent travelled back in time and attacked the Time Lords just as they were about to turn the star Qqaba into a power source for their time experiments. This also caused the apparent demise of the stellar engineer Omega. The Time Lords did not know why the Black Sun (whom they had never encountered before the attack) should have wanted to strike at them, and surmised that it was for something they had yet to do (Star Death, DWM #47; The 4-D War, DWM #51).

Years later, at a diplomatic conference, a representative of the Order was murdered by the Sontarans and this was blamed on the Time Lords. This provided the motivation for the war's beginnings, as from the Order's point of view, the Time Lords were the ones who struck first (Black Sun Rising, DWM #57).

Like all spin-off media, the canonicity of these stories is debatable.