Howling:Time Lords evolved?

The Howling → Time Lords evolved?

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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)

It wasn't the Doctor who said "Human plus Time Lord," it was Madame Vashtra(sp?). In another thread we've argued about the general interchangeability of the word "Gallifreyan" and "Time Lord". Just because #10 is punctillious about the distinction doesn't mean #11 is. While #10 was vague about one thing ('timey-wimey'), #11 seems to lack the patience to explain much. In any cause, it seems clear that Time Lords are a society or class of the population of Gallifreyans. As for the evolution part, even assuming that that hasn't been dropped, notice that human beings evolved after billions of years of exposure to the Earth, but it is quite likely that within a hundred years we will have techniques to gene splice humans and create deliberately and specifically genetically modified people.Boblipton 11:23, August 19, 2011 (UTC)

Good luck trying to get Icecreamdif to accept the fact that people sometimes speak imprecisely on Doctor Who just as they do in reality; I'm giving up on that one.

But your other point is an important one. We probably won't be able to give ourselves the ability to regenerate like the Doctor in 100 years—but we will be able to improve abilities that we naturally evolved. So, 213.121.200.42's theory (that Rassilon improved a fitful and unreliable regeneration capability that evolved through exposure to time travel) actually makes more sense than the classic theory (Rassilon invented regeneration), not less. I think I'm convinced now. Except, of course, for the pretty good possibility that this really is a "Time Lord history has changed" thing in Moffat's head. --173.228.85.35 05:43, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

Info to Boblipton: The name is spelled "Vastra" (no "h"). --89.240.247.37 13:26, August 20, 2011 (UTC)

I undertand that Gallifreyan and Time Lord are sometimes used interchangably, but I think that in this case they actually did mean Time Lord. Vastra talked about how billions of years of exposure to the time vortex made the Time Lords what they were. Now, it didn't take billions of years of being exposed to the time vortex to make the Gallifreyans into Gallifreyans. Just being from Gallifrey made them that. The billions of years of exposure to the time vortex and the untempered schism made the Time Lords time sensitive, giving the Time Lords the ability to sense fixed points in space time, to see different possible time lines, and to ignore disturbances in time that effect humans around them. According to Mawdryn Undead, regeneration is also a trait of Time Lords, not Gallifreyans. I think that we have to assume that the Doctor actually did mean Time Lord in that case as well, because although he can apparently stop being a Time Lord, he can never stop being a Gallifreyan (unlesss he uses a chameleon arch, but that is irrelevant). His father was from Gallifrey, he was born and raised on Gallifrey, he is Gallifreyan. Losing his regenerations would not make him non-Gallifreayan, but it would apparantly make him non-Timelord. Melody has the ability to regenerate which is a Time Lord trait. A mere Gallifreyan would not be a very useful weapon to Madame Kovarian. She would want a Time Lord. Somebody who can regenerate, operate a TARDIS, and see everything-all that is, all that was, all that ever could be. The traits that would make Melody an effective weapon are Time Lord traits, not Gallifreyan traits. Melody Pond is a Human who is at least part Time Lord, but she is not a Gallifreyan.Icecreamdif 05:52, August 21, 2011 (UTC)

The fact that Vastra talks about billions of years of exposure is proof that she's _not_ talking about Time Lords (unless Time Lord history has radically changed). There were no Time Lords before Rassilon, and that's only 6241 years before The Deadly Assassin, not billions. (If you ignore the novels, we don't know for sure that Gallifreyan years are the same length as ours, but they're not a million times longer. And there's plenty of other evidence to corroborate the fact that Rassilon wasn't billions of years ago—for example, he was the first Lord President, and the Doctor was the 407th.)

More importantly, you're confusing different senses of the word "Gallifreyan". Obviously the ancestors of the modern species of Gallifreyans were also "Gallifreyan" in the same sense that Australopithecines are Earthlings, and hominids. But they weren't the same species. It's being "Gallifreyan" in the sense of "the species of modern near-humans who've been affected by time travel" that determines whether you have time sensitivity, not being a member of any species that evolved on Gallifrey, or being a citizen or resident or native of Gallifrey or anything else. Just because we only have one word "Gallifreyan" for all those things (unlike "human" vs. "Earthling" vs. "Earthborn" etc.) doesn't mean they're all the same thing. --173.228.85.35 20:15, August 21, 2011 (UTC)

Of course Time Lords haven't been around for billions of years, but it took billions of years of exposure to make it possible for the Gallifreyans to become Time Lords. The billions of years of exposure left the door open for Rassilon and Omega to create the Time Lords. Jenny is a good example of this. She is half Gallifreyan just like the Doctor is, as evidenced by the fact that she has two hearts. However, she was never exposed to the time vortex or the untempered schism, and so is not a Time Lady, as evidenced by the fact that she can not regenerate. Melody, on the other hand, was concieve in the time vortex, which opened the way for Kovarian to turn her into a time lady just like Rassilon turned the Gallifreyans into Time Lords. Icecreamdif 01:00, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

We don't know Jenny can't regenerate. She survived, so she didn't have to. Out-of-universe, when asked whether she could, RTD said something like, "I never decided, so it's up to Moffat." And the only evidence that she's not a Time Lady is the Doctor's shared-ethics/etc. speech, which contradicts what you're saying. --173.228.85.35 06:46, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

We certainly don't know Jenny can't regenerate. The glowing breath she exhaled as she revived closely resembled the breaths exhaled by the Doctor in The Christmas Invasion (and, later, in The Eleventh Hour) while he was still in the process of regenerating. Also, it's worth remembering the compressed timescale of events in The Doctor's Daughter: an entire multi-generational war took only a week. When Jenny was shot, it was significantly less than 15 hours after she had been generated by the machine. She may (repeat, may) have been the same state as the Doctor was when his hand was cut off -- still full of (re)generation energy and able to repair herself without going through the full regeneration process. She took longer to recover but that could have been because she was unconscious or because she had no training or because the injury was more serious or a combination of those reasons. Until/unless we learn more about her, the question of her ability to regenerate has to stay an open question. --89.242.65.86 07:30, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

Well I doubt that being clonedish really counts as a regeneration. It was the same process that was used to create the humans their, and I always assumed that the glowing breath she exhaled was supposed to be the source. I guess you're right that Jenny can't really be used as an argument for either side until we learn more about hr, but the rest of my point still stands.Icecreamdif 20:05, August 22, 2011 (UTC)

I didn't say it counted as a regeneration. I only speculated that her initial generation might have left her in a similar state to the Doctor, immediately after a regeneration (ie, that's a line future scriptwrites could take, if it suited them). The fact that the same machine was used to generate humans is rather beside the point; neither the Doctor nor Jenny is human. The Source being responsible for her revival is an alternative line future scriptwrites could take, of course. Until/unless someone actually does take one or other of those lines (or dreams up another one I've not thought of), we won't know just what happened. --89.242.68.217 17:27, August 23, 2011 (UTC)

In fact, RTD explicitly told us that he deliberately made the scene look similar but not identical to a regeneration, so a future writer could decide whether it had anything to do with regeneration or not. And as far as I know, that's the last word so far.

Plus, I dreamed up another one: We've seen cases where a Time Lord in a healing trance fooled even other Time Lords into thinking he was dead, so it could certainly fool Martha. Since I don't think we know whether healing trances are a natural part of their biology, or a special technique they learn at the Academy (although in the novels, the Doctor goes into trances involuntarily a few times), some future writer could decide Jenny was in a healing trance, and that would tell us nothing about the whole Gallifrey/Time Lord distinction… --173.228.85.35 03:18, August 24, 2011 (UTC)

Isn't there a line somewhere in the classic series to the effect that a "plebian" class exists on Gallifrey that are lower in status than the Time Lords? In light of what's been revealed recently in the new series, what do people think is the difference between Time Lords and ordinary Gallifreyans in the Doctor's time? 82.2.136.93 09:51, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

There's at least one such line: "Well, Castellan, in your line of duty you probably have more experience with the more plebian classes." It's not at all clear whether those plebians are urban Gallifreyans who aren't Time Lords, or just the lower classes of Time Lords. Then there's the Outsiders. In The Invasion of Time, they're primitives living in the wilderness of Gallifrey, wearing leather and skins and carrying bows and arrows. And finally, the Shobogans. The only mention of them on TV is that Shobogans were responsible for vandalism and graffiti in the Capitol. In the NAs by the Cartmel/Platt/Aaronovich contingent, they're are a tribe of primitive Outsiders going back to the time of Rassilon; in another NA, All-Consuming Fire, they're the Time Lord equivalent of "New Age dropouts"; in John Peel's NAs and EDAs, they're the peasant farmers of Time Lord society.

So, there's not much firm detail, and what there is, is somewhat contradictory. Which leaves lots of room for fan speculation. There are long threads on r.a.dw and the old OG forums full of such speculation over the decades, and I think I summarized the popular theories on another thread on this forum, so I won't go over all of them again. But I'll repeat my favorite theory because it's my favorite:

Time Lords are a sort of cross between modern British aristocracy and ancient Roman citizenship. Being born (or loomed, if you prefer) to one of the Great Houses means you're an automatic candidate for the title, but you still have to go through the right training and initiations (probably starting with looking into the Untempered Schism, and ending with graduating from the Academy). Someone from outside the Houses (even from outside Gallifrey) can be sponsored on the path as a child, similar to adoption into Roman families, but it's not that common. And meanwhile, the Lord President can grant titles (even to non-Gallifreyans) the way the British Monarch can, but that's even less common. Many Time Lords, including the Doctor at times, have the same kind of romantic notion of nobility that 19th-century British aristocrats did, which explains why the Doctor sees the real meaning of being a Time Lord as a shared history, code of ethics, suffering, responsibility, etc.

Historically, "Shobogans" were a rival tribe or nation (explaining Lungbarrow, etc.), but in modern (meaning classic-series through EDA) times, the word is used more generally, kind of like the word "vandal". Some Outsiders live in shantytowns around the Capitol, like the medieval lower classes in Europe; others deliberately avoid technology to live "naturally" in the wilderness; others live on relatively modern farms, and there may be even more variety than that. Some of the shantytown Outsiders use the name "Shobogan" with pride. The New Age dropouts mentioned in ACF are a group of Time Lords who chose to leave the Capitol, live among the primitive Outsiders, and call themselves Shobogans.

Biologically, they're all Gallifreyan. However, at least some of the Outsiders didn't benefit from Rassilon's improvements (remember, he originally wanted to share them with only a select few even)—although there's probably been more interbreeding than many Time Lords could care to admit.

The new series doesn't really change any of it, except for adding the Schism as part of the training/initiation. (As much as I'd like to believe that Time Lord history is actually unraveling the way it did in the later EDAs, there's absolutely no evidence of that, and some evidence against it.)

But keep in mind: All of that is speculation, and there are many alternative possibilities that are equally popular in fandom. Also, most of that theory originates with John Peel, whose attitude toward canonicity is 'whatever the people currently paying me to write say I should reference is true, everything else is false or irrelevant', and most of it comes from his posts during the early EDA era, so take that into consideration.

Within that framework, I was suggesting that River has all of the abilities of a Time Lord (even the ones that Outsiders don't have, if any) because of the TARDIS, and possibly because of Kovarian and the Silence. But that doesn't make her a Time Lord in the social sense, of course. I think the last episode, where she explicitly calls herself a "child of the TARDIS", adds some weight to that, but doesn't actually confirm it. --173.228.85.35 16:24, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

I actually agree with most of what you just said, but I still think that River is a Time Lady. I think the Academy is where Time Lords go to learn the laws of time and everything else they need to know, but they officialy become a Time Lord just by looking through the untempered schism. If they did not go to the academy, they would still be a timelod, just an untrained Time Lord.Through years of exposure to the votex, any Gallifreyan can become a Time Lord by looking into the schism, but many do not and becomd shobogans, or plebians, oroutsiders. I wouldn't be surprised if most of the guards with the funny helmets that we always saw in the classic Gallifrey episodes were not Time Lords. River however is a weird exception. Being concievved in the vortex replaced looking into the untempered schism, and being experimented on by Kovarian replaced being Gallifreyan. She is now a timelord, b ut not a Gallifreyan.Icecreamdif 22:32, August 29, 2011 (UTC)

I think River is something unique, the one and only "child of the TARDIS".

Then again, every surviving Time Lord (or Time Lord-esque character) in the new series is something unique. The Doctor is the half-human Champion of Time sole survivor of the Time War. River is whatever she is. The Master (assuming he'll come back some day, which seems a good assumption) was resurrected by the Time Lords, and then resurrected by humans in some quasi-magical ritual. Jenny is probably the only of one her kind ever. The Meta-Crisis Doctor and Doctor-Donna, we were explicitly told that had never happened before. The Ganger Doctor is probably the only one ever.

Lance Parkin once said that there's no point arguing over what makes a Time Lord in the post-War EDAs, because all that's left are four special cases, so there are no generalities. While this War didn't seem to affect the Doctor's history the same way as the last one, maybe the overall point is still valid. --173.228.85.35 03:57, August 30, 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that anyone is arguing that River isn't unique. The Doctor didn't really seem to believe that it was possible that Kovarian could create a Timelord in A Good Man Goes to War. That would suggest that what happenned to baby Melody was completely unheard of. My interpretation has always been tthat she is unique as the only human or non-Gallifreyan Time Lord, but I doubt that they will ever spell out exactly what she is.Icecreamdif 23:24, August 30, 2011 (UTC)

Well, Leela was a human Time Lady before her, but it's almost the exact opposite—she can't regenerate, or any of that, but she was given Time Lady status so she could officially work for Lady President Romana. (I may be remembering that wrong; it might have been the CIA doing it so they could hire her, or Andred doing it because he felt guilty, or just some Time Lady who was hoping it would mean she'd stop wearing the leather bikini around the Panopticon…)

Anyway, I think we can agree on this: If by "Time Lord" you mean "someone who can regenerate, absorb radiation, and commune naturally with TARDISes", she's half-Time Lord; if you mean "someone who's got the fancy robes in her closet and is allowed to wear them," she's not. If, like the Doctor, you sometimes mean one thing, sometimes the other, sometimes both, and sometimes neither, then the answer is different each time. --173.228.85.35 04:07, August 31, 2011 (UTC)

We know other species can regenerate, so I'd say is indeed more of a political term. Technically, The Doctor's the President of the Timelords, so if he wants to appoint someone that status, of course he could. Perhaps he will?

86.160.74.7 20:17, September 3, 2011 (UTC)

Good point; they actually did establish that a President Elect who never assumed the role could take over the position if his successor died, he's still assumed the role one less time than he was elected to it, and he's probably the last one ever to be in that position, so technically he could declare himself President. Or, hell, forget the technicalities; just call for a new vote among all living Time Lords, and he wins 1-0. (Unless the Master happens to be back alive at that point.)

And that could be a great plotline for a novel or IDW arc, the Doctor re-creating the Time Lords by appointing humans (or maybe different species from around time and space) to take over for his people. But it's hard to see it working on TV. (That could just be a failure of my imagination, and if Moffat or some future writer, or even a fan with clever ideas, wanted to prove me wrong, I'd definitely be open to it, of course.) --173.228.85.35 03:37, September 4, 2011 (UTC)

Wasn't there a line in Trial of a Timelord that said that he had forfeited his presidency by not showing up? Knowing the Time Lords, becoming Lord President is more complicated than just declaring a vote. I'm sure that its filled with all sorts of rituals, more than we saw in just Deadly Assasin. And the, of course, in Invasion of Time we saw that you need to hook yourself up to the matrix. Right now, the mosst likely way fo the Time Lords to come back would probably be the Doctor and River's descendants. Icecreamdif 15:18, September 4, 2011 (UTC)