Last Great Time War
- You may be looking for the general concept of a time war.
The Last Great Time War was the war between the Time Lords and the Daleks "for the sake of all creation". (TV: Gridlock) In a linear sense, it lasted for at least 400 years. Fought throughout countless time periods, however, it more accurately lasted an eternity. (PROSE: Engines of War)
At the heart of the war, millions were killed and brought back to life every second. (TV: The End of Time) The Dalek forces numbered in the billions (TV: The Day of the Doctor) and fielded a fleet of ten million flying saucers. (TV: Dalek) The Time Lords used over a million Battle TARDISes. (PROSE: Peacemaker)
It resulted in the apparent destruction of Gallifrey, (TV: The Day of the Doctor) leaving only two Time Lords (TV: Utopia) and a small number of Daleks as survivors. (TV: Dalek, Doomsday, et al)
History
Prophecies
- Main article: War prediction
The Time Lords became aware of their future involvement in the Time War a long time before it began, and many prophecies, stories and legends were generated around the idea. One concerned the Hybrid, which some took to believe would be a creature, half-Time-Lord and half-Dalek, capable either of Gallifrey's salvation or destruction. Many years later, after the war, the Twelfth Doctor would claim that the Hybrid was destined to conquer Gallifrey and stand in its ruins. (TV: Heaven Sent)
Shortly before the war began, the Matrix prophesied that Gallifrey would be destroyed in a war. (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls)
The Time Lords foresaw the War during the life of the Eighth Doctor, as Straxus told the Doctor they saw "something terrible in the time tracks." (AUDIO: Fugitives)
The Accord foresaw a "great war spreading through time". They feared that the 1970s and 1980s, which had been temporally weakened due to the Doctor's frequent visits, would be damaged and set out to reinforce the two decades before they were hit by the war. They altered the DNA of every single person that lived through those decades on a temporal level so that they subconsciously realised that there were inconsistencies with history. (PROSE: The Enfolded Time)
Origins
During the early days of Romana's presidency she made a ceremonial visit to the planet Etra Prime when it was taken out of time and space all together. 20 years later during the Archetryx Convention the Sixth Doctor and Coordinator Vansell discovered that this was down to the Daleks. When Etra Prime returned to the universe, the Daleks attacked the convention in order to gain access to Monan Host time vessel to complete their synthesis of the Apocalypse Element. Romana escaped and informed the Doctor and Vansell of this and stole a crystal vital to the Daleks plan. Vansell and the interim Lord President escaped Gallifrey and let a Monan Host deposition land on the planet. This was in fact a Dalek trick to allow them to invade Gallifrey. The Daleks wanted to gain access to the Eye of Harmony to control the explosion they had set off in the Seriphia Galaxy. The Dalek squad died in the process of containing it and the invasion was defeated. Romana said that the Time Lords wouldn't tolerate a Dalek Empire on their doorstep in the new Seriphia Galaxy. (AUDIO: The Apocalypse Element)
The Daleks created the Dogma Virus, which could corrupt Time Lord DNA and eventually wipe out the Time Lords. They sent the virus to Gallifrey through an organisation known as Free Time, who were working for them. (AUDIO: Panacea, Ascension)
The Daleks then hacked into the Matrix, giving them a backdoor to invading Gallifrey. The Dalek Supreme led an invasion force into the Matrix with the intention of leading them out into Gallifrey itself. The plan was stopped by Romana II and her third incarnations, who created enough defences inside the Matrix to allow it to be shut down. Romana II trapped them in a time loop to ensure that a temporal war with the Daleks would be avoided.
Acting through his own authority and unaware that Romana had succeeded in defeating the Daleks, Narvin sent Valyes to Skaro to give the Fourth Doctor a mission to avert the creation of the Daleks, (AUDIO: Ascension) accidentally causing the Time War. (PROSE: Engines of War, COMIC: Hunters of the Burning Stone, et al)
Sent by either a Time Lord from his own era (PROSE: Lungbarrow) or one from a future point when Gallifrey was threatened by Daleks, (AUDIO: Ascension) the Fourth Doctor was given a mission on Skaro during the Thousand Year War with certain objectives:
- If possible, to avert the creation of the Daleks
- Otherwise to alter their development and make them less aggressive
- To find some intrinsic flaw or weakness to exploit in the Daleks
The Doctor didn't avert their creation, but he believed he might have set back Dalek history for a thousand years. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) This attempt created hostilities in the Daleks towards Time Lords and would eventually lead to war. (WC: Monster File: Daleks, AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) The Eternity Circle even considered this act the very beginning of the Time War, (PROSE: Engines of War) while Rojan considered it to be an early event before the War escalated. (PROSE: The Stranger) The Eleventh Doctor himself referred to it as the "first shot." (COMIC: Hunters of the Burning Stone)
As revenge for the Time Lords' plot to destroy them, the Daleks attempted to create a duplicate of the Fifth Doctor to send to Gallifrey and assassinate the High Council of the Time Lords. (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks, AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)
The next Dalek attempt to attack the Time Lords involved the Hand of Omega, which Davros attempted to use to make the Daleks have mastery over time like the Time Lords. The Seventh Doctor tricked Davros into using the Hand of Omega to destroy Skaro. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests) Rojan considered this attack to be an early event in the Time War. (PROSE: The Stranger) By one account, the Daleks' next step after this was to start a war with the Time Lords. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)
Rojan believed the Etra Prime incident to be one of the events that started the Time War. (PROSE: The Stranger)
After the Etra Prime incident but while the Doctor was still in the early years of his eighth incarnation, (PROSE: The Ancestor Cell) the Time Lords fought a generations-long time war against the Enemy which resulted in the Time Lords being nearly wiped from history save for a few survivors. (PROSE: Alien Bodies, The Adventuress of Henrietta Street, et al) During this War, the Daleks were seen as "mindless biomechanoids with speech impediments" who were far less dangerous than the Enemy, (PROSE: Alien Bodies) but in the post-War universe, with the Time Lords no longer present to quell time travel development in the lesser species, the Daleks began greatly growing in prominence. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) The Time Lords were eventually restored to power. (PROSE: The Tomorrow Windows)
The extermination or near-extermination of such allied Temporal Powers as the Monans, the Sunari, the Nekkistani and the Phaidonians led to Gallifrey formally declaring war against the Daleks. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures) From the perspective of humanity, the Daleks suddenly disappeared "thousands of years" prior to the battle of the Game Station in 200,100, vanishing from time and space at a point when they were the "greatest threat in the universe." (TV: The Parting of the Ways)
Early months of the Time War
Missing information from The War Master.
One of the first acts in the war that the Daleks took to weaken Gallifrey was to destroy Phaidon. This led to the first conflict between the Celestial Intervention Agency and the War Council on whether to allow the remaining Warpsmiths to be granted asylum on the planet. By this time the war council had set up six different facilities around Gallifrey to help their war effort, which were known to the CIA. A seventh facility was set up in the Death Zone, which was part of Project Revenant. (AUDIO: Celestial Intervention) The War Council also built munitions factories beneath the surface of Gallifrey where Gallifreyan children worked. (PROSE: The Stranger)
The Time Lords turned away from governing established history and protecting the Web of Time, and instead threw all their resources into battling the Daleks and their allies. (PROSE: Ghost of Christmas Past) The Time Lords sent an activation signal to any N-Forms laying dormant throughout history. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures)
In the first days, the home planet of the Zygons was destroyed. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) During the Time War, the surviving Zygons became adept at making structures which couldn't be breached by TARDISes. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)
While "exploring possibilities", the War Master became stranded in a parallel dimension. When the dimension was invaded by Cybermen seeking to conquer the multiverse, the Master saw an opportunity to obtain technology to repair his TARDIS and return to his universe. The Cybermen proceeded to invade the universe of the Time War via virtual reality technology spread by the Auctioneers on 2010s Earth. The Master followed the Cybermen back to his home universe, where the Cybermen — influenced by Petronella Osgood — took his TARDIS and attempted to cyber-convert him. The Master collaborated with Kate Stewart and Sam Bishop to destroy the Cybermen by overloading them with power from infinite dimensions, syphoning some of it off to give his TARDIS enough energy to return to "the fray" of the war. (AUDIO: Master of Worlds)
Keetol was the site of a major battle. The Daleks wanted to mine the planet for its weapons-grade rocks. The Master helped the Time Lords achieve a victory, one of their first in the War. This victory was later negated when the War Master used the Heavenly Paradigm. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm)
Irving Braxiatel along with Ace went to the Obscura to find information about a weapon there. This was a ruse from Braxiatel to use the power held in the Obscura and old soldier Danna to destroy a Dalek Fleet. When this didn't succeed, Braxiatel killed Danna and wiped Ace's mind of all knowledge of the war. After Romana II was informed of Ace's "death", she decided to get the help of the Master. (AUDIO: Soldier Obscura)
The Master was on Gardezza when he was summoned to Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Beneath the Viscoid)
Romana sent the Master and Leela to find information about a power source that Finnian Valentine knew about that she thought could win her the war. The Master betrayed her and went after the source on Arcking. (AUDIO: The Devil You Know)
The Master met Cole Jarnish on Arcking. (AUDIO: The Good Master)
Right after the failure of his Heavenly Paradigm scheme, the Master escaped the Time War (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm) by using a Chameleon Arch to hide himself as a human infant at the Silver Devastation. (TV: Utopia)
The Daleks found out about Project Revenant and thought it was a way to convert Time Lords into Daleks. Romana tried to negotiate with the Dalek Emperor to try and get him to stop the conflict as she knew that both sides would be utterly destroyed in the conflict. This act caused her to lose the presidential election when Livia resigned. The CIA managed to stop the Daleks from using Project Revenant against them. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures)
In the early days of the Time War, (PROSE: Engines of War) about two months after its start, Rassilon was resurrected to lead the Time Lords in battle. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures)
Several months into the Time War, in 0.71 of the First Segment, Daleks from the future tunnelled through Gallifrey to find the War Council's underground munitions factories, intending to kill the children working in the factories and prevent future generations of Time Lords from ever fighting. The Daleks destroyed one such factory beneath the Mountain of Serenity, but the War Doctor, who had travelled back in time from the Fifth Segment, helped the children escape to the skimmer port with the assistance of Rojan. Senior Tahl sacrificed his life by creating an explosion which entombed this group of Daleks, saving the children's lives. (PROSE: The Stranger)
In the first year, Davros was killed at the Gates of Elysium when his command ship flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child. The Doctor tried to save him but failed. At the cost of his own sanity, Caan, the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro, was able to time shift back into the war and save Davros from the time-locked event, bringing him into the post-war universe. (TV: The Stolen Earth) The Advocate followed Caan and Davros out of the Time War. (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass)
Involvement of the Eighth Doctor
Missing info from The Sontaran Ordeal, Day of the Vashta Nerada, and A Heart on Both Sides.
The Doctor was initially nowhere to be found in the Time War (AUDIO: Master of Worlds, Soldier Obscura) because he was willfully avoiding the conflict. (AUDIO: The Starship of Theseus)
Following being augmented by the Celestial Intervention Agency to have reality-changing abilities, Quarren Maguire saw too much potential for his power to be abused by the Time Lords, wiped all evidence of his existence, and used a biodata module to hide as a human unaware of his true nature. (AUDIO: One Life) Quarren and his wife Rupa went on the same luxury spaceliner that the Eighth Doctor and his companion Sheena were investigating disappearances on, bringing the Time War to the Doctor. As the spaceliner was approached by Daleks following Aymor, local history was rewritten so that the Doctor's companion ceased to exist and the cruise ship became a refugee ship from the Time War. The Doctor escaped the Daleks with Quarren, Rupa, Bliss, and Jefferson. (AUDIO: The Starship of Theseus)
The Eighth Doctor decided to become part of the Time War after watching a child die at the hands of a Dalek. (PROSE: Museum Peace) The Doctor refused to fight in the war, claiming he was "a good man", and instead "helped out" when he could. (TV: The Night of the Doctor) The Doctor quickly found that because of the nature of the Time War, timelines shifted about frequently, sometimes causing the people he rescued to never have been born, leaving him no one to save. (PROSE: Ghost of Christmas Past) The Eighth Doctor considered the Time War to be cruel and senseless. (AUDIO: The Sontaran Ordeal)
The Doctor's TARDIS was caught by some temporal turbulence caused by a small skirmish between the Temporal Powers, sending him away from the War to Earth at Christmas. After receiving a hypercube from Susan Foreman, the Doctor was able to fix the TARDIS and return to the War. (PROSE: Ghost of Christmas Past)
Seeking to enlist Susan, the Time Lords sent Hypercube messages to her home in Shoreditch, where she lived following the second 22nd century Dalek invasion. Though the Doctor attempted to distract her and intercept the messages, Susan ultimately discovered a Hypercube and, believing she could be of help due to her experience fighting the Daleks, decided to accept the Time Lords' request and join the war despite the Doctor's protest, with a TARDIS arriving to collect her. (AUDIO: All Hands on Deck)
During the period of helping, the Eighth Doctor attempted to save a group of sentient suns from falling into another universe. (PROSE: Osskah) During the War, while trying to help people, the strain of the fighting started to show on the Eighth Doctor, as his TARDIS was shown to have scorch marks from laser fire, due to escaping the warzones. His outfit was becoming increasingly battered, degrading from tidy to scruffy. (TV: The Night of the Doctor)
The Daleks employed the Time Destructor, wiping out Polymos, its shockwave affecting systems from Grantaginus to Mellandrova, and from the Farflung Rift to the Wolf's Heart Nebula. The Eighth Doctor was also caught in the temporal wave, causing him to land on Rontan 9 to find mercury that would repair his TARDIS' fluid links. Whilst on Rontan 9 he found a group of scientists, and relocated them to a new home, away from the War. (PROSE: Natural Regression)
While cleaning up the "mess" of the war, the Eighth Doctor was lured to the party ship of the Rulers of the Universe using knowledge from River Song's diary in order to get him to help them take control of a Sanukuma spore ship. Their plan backfired when the Sanukuma themselves also arrived, wishing to join the Time War. Using a chronon mine he recovered from the war, the Doctor managed to defeat them by banishing them to the early years of the universe while he escaped using a "souvenir" pendant of the type carried by Gallifreyan shock troops, and with the help of River, also defeated the Rulers. River contacted him only remotely, so as not to reveal her true identity to him. (AUDIO: The Rulers of the Universe)
The Eighth Doctor tried to regain the Great Key of Rassilon, (COMIC: The Forgotten) which had been missing since before Rassilon's presidency. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures) He found the forces keeping the Key and was imprisoned by them for a month. He overpowered the guards with the help of Chantir and escaped with the Key. The Doctor planned to use the Key to replicate the De-mat Gun and then modify the gun so that instead of removing only one individual from time and space, it would remove millions. (COMIC: The Forgotten) By one account, this modified De-mat gun was the Moment, (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass) the weapon in the Doctor's possession on the last day of the Time War which could "destroy Daleks and Time Lords alike". (TV: The End of Time) The Eighth Doctor experienced a memory wipe shortly after obtaining the Key, which the Tenth Doctor attributed to using the modified De-mat Gun. (COMIC: The Forgotten) The Tenth Doctor and the Advocate believed that the Doctor used the Great Key to activate the Moment, time locking the war (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass) and "doom[ing] them all". (COMIC: The Forgotten)
During the Fifth Segment of the War, (PROSE: The Stranger) the Doctor tried to save a gun-ship pilot, Cass, as her spaceship was on a collision course with the planet Karn. Cass rejected his help after finding out he was a Time Lord, claiming he was no different than the Daleks. Both Cass and the Doctor died in the crash. The Sisterhood of Karn temporarily revived the Doctor and offered to control his regeneration so that he could become the person he needed to be to end the Time War. Having kept out of the war till this point, he eventually succumbed to their persuasive arguments. He told them he needed to become a warrior, and regenerated. This newly-regenerated incarnation rejected the title of "Doctor" immediately, his first words being, "Doctor, no more." (TV: The Night of the Doctor)
Fighting intensifies
Missing info from Ambush, The Clockwise War and The Bidding War, as well as The War Doctor, but that probably deserves its own section(s).
The Doctor called himself "the Warrior" at the start of his new incarnation. (PROSE: The Stranger) Sontarans told legends of the Doctor leading Time Lords into battle. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem) In his centuries of fighting, the War Doctor fought to prevent the rise of the Nightmare Child; witnessed the seven deaths of Davros; took command at Skull Moon (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor) with Gastron at his side; (TV: Hell Bent) and led a final charge up the slopes of the Never Vault, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor) where the Master fought with the Supreme Dalek. (TV: The Witch's Familiar)
The Voord sided with the Time Lords during the War and mounted a resistance against the Daleks. During the year A10%?, the Daleks attacked Marinus. The War Doctor defended the planet with a chronic tripwire and promised the Voord that he would speak to the Time Lords on their behalf. (COMIC: Four Doctors)
Schemes of the Volatix Cabal and involvement of the Cyclors
The War Doctor teamed up with the Master for a time. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder) They travelled to Veestrax, a planet on the front line of the Dalek advance through the star cluster banks of the Gallifreyan Planetbirth Nursery. The War Doctor transported part of Veestrax to another part of the universe in order to wipe out three Dalek assault battalions. (COMIC: Outrun)
The Daleks recruited the Cyclors to fight alongside them after witnessing them destroy the spiral arm of a galaxy. The War Doctor was sent by the Time Lords to deal with them. (COMIC: The Then and the Now) Alice Obiefune, a companion of the Eleventh Doctor, found her way into the Time War by using the Master's TARDIS and met up with the War Doctor. The Master proposed a plan to cut off the Cyclor's psychic bond with the Overcaste, but the Doctor had other ideas, intending to use the Psilent songbox to sacrifice himself to defeat the Cyclors. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder) The Master left before the Doctor carried his plans out, believing them to be too evil even for him. (COMIC: The One, Kill God) The Masters next incarnation would be present in the early stages of the War. (AUDIO: The Devil You Know) To stop the Doctor using the Psilent songbox, Alice herself activated it, creating a paradox that interacted with the Cyclors. A member of the Volatix Cabal interacted with the effect of the songbox, deforming it to transform the Cyclors into the Malignant. (COMIC: Fast Asleep) The Malignant went on to wipe out over fifty generations of the Overcast. (COMIC: The Then and the Now) To return Alice home, the Doctor removed the tracker dart from her left there by the Then and the Now, leaving it to interact with the songbox to create the Then and the Now originally. He then placed Alice inside it and sent her back to her Doctor. He told her that because of the paradoxes, they would all forget the events that happened there. (COMIC: Fast Asleep)
The Doctor was later surrounded by members of the Volatix Cabal when Abslom Daak descended from the skies. The Doctor expressed his concern as Daak fired upon the Volatix. (COMIC: Physician, Heal Thyself)
Final days of the Time War
Horrors and terrors were seen in the final days of the war, including the Nightmare Child, the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, and the Could've Been King with his Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres. The Tenth Doctor described the war's final days as "hell." (TV: The End of Time)
Around this time that the Doctor was sent to look for the Master, but could not find him. (PROSE: Engines of War)
Activity in the Tantalus Eye
When the Time War had been raging for four hundred years of linear time (though temporal war zones had left no era of history unscathed), the War Doctor, who had been fighting in the Time War for a hundred years or more, led the Fifth Time Lord Battle Fleet against the Daleks in the Tantalus Eye. They defeated the Daleks there but were soon wiped out by nearby Dalek stealth ships. The Doctor then crash-landed on a nearby planet, Moldox. Here, he met a Dalek hunter going by the name "Cinder", an orphaned victim of the Time War at a very young age who survived the extermination of her family by hiding. She helped the Doctor infiltrate a Dalek base and uncover their plans to create a De-mat weapon that could erase its victims from history, and the Daleks planned to do the same to Gallifrey. The Doctor brought Cinder aboard his TARDIS en route to Gallifrey to warn the Time Lords of the Daleks' plan.
The Doctor spoke to Rassilon and the High Council of Time Lords in a meeting, where Rassilon planned to detonate the Tear of Isha in the Tantalus Eye. Rassilon consulted Borusa on his plan, who told him it would succeed. However, it would have caused the destruction of many innocent lives. The Doctor opposed the plan, which made Rassilon throw both him and Cinder in a prison cell.
Cinder was also kidnapped by the Time Lords Karlax and the Castellan and received a mind probe to back up the Doctor's claims that the Daleks were going to eliminate their world. After finding out about the mind probe, with Cinder's help, the Doctor broke free of the prison. The Doctor took Cinder from the Capitol and took her to the Death Zone, where the two of them retaliated by kidnapping the immortalised Borusa from his imprisonment in the Dark Tower. Under Rassilon's orders, Karlax pursued them with some help from the Celestial Intervention Agency to assassinate them. During the chase, the CIA and their Battle TARDISes were attacked by Dalek stealth ships, leaving Karlax the only survivor. When Karlax then tried to take over the TARDIS following his regeneration, the Doctor dematerialised his ship, setting the controls so that Karlax would be left behind in the middle of the Dalek Eternity Circle. There, he faced extermination as retribution for what he had done. The Doctor used Borusa to wipe out the Dalek presence from the Eye, thus ending the Dalek plan.
Once the Doctor had foiled Rassilon's plan to detonate the Tear of Isha and spared the lives Rassilon would have let die, Rassilon condemned the Doctor's actions and declared him an enemy of the Time Lords because of it. In honour of Cinder's death, the Doctor promised he would put an end to the War, declaring, "no more". (PROSE: Engines of War)
Nearing the end
The day before the end of the Time War, the Doctor went to Skaro and destroyed most of the Dalek Emperor's fleet. Using a stolen gunship, he burned the message "no more" into the Dalek City. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)
By the last day of the war, the Daleks had begun to invade Gallifrey itself. (COMIC: Sky Jacks, TV: The Last Day, The Day of the Doctor) A crucial battlefield was Arcadia, where the Doctor fought on the front lines (TV: Doomsday, The Day of the Doctor) and used a Soldier's fusion blaster to write "no more" on the side of a building. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) The Daleks broke through all 400 of Arcadia's sky trenches. (TV: The Last Day) Finally, they then proceeded to bombard Gallifrey from space with their remaining fleets, all the while moving towards the Capitol. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
The Player tried to escape the war by hiding in his art, but, when the Daleks began to attack the First Doctor's timeline, the Time Lords made him go and convince the Doctor to go to his regeneration at the South Pole to keep the timeline on track. At the time, a new front of the war was opening at the Last Hour, and rumours were beginning about the fall of Arcadia. (AUDIO: Volume Two trailer, The Plague of Dreams)
In the final hours of the war, as Daleks approached the Capitol after the fall of Arcadia, (COMIC: The Memory Feast) hundreds of Time Lords recorded their cherished memories into memory lanterns and set them adrift in the Time Vortex (PROSE: Engines of War, AUDIO: The Memory of Winter, COMIC: The Memory Feast) in an effort to seed remnants of Gallifrey in the distant corners of the universe. (PROSE: Engines of War)
Unknown to anyone, the Daleks created a time capsule launched during the final battle with a single Dalek with the plan to spread the Dalek Factor on Earth to use humanity's life force and raw materials to build more Daleks for back-up in the war. The capsule's engines failed in the journey and the Dalek within ejected, falling to Earth in 70 AD. The Dalek died but released a small amount of Dalek Factor that remained dormant in the genetic structure of humanity. (PROSE: I Am a Dalek)
The Doctor stole the Moment from the Omega Arsenal, took it to a barn in Gallifrey's drylands, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor) and was ready to destroy Gallifrey. (TV: The End of Time, The Day of the Doctor)
Priyan believed that the Doctor now stood against the Time Lords, and would use the Moment to his own ends. Time Lords were dying at such an exponentially increasing rate that Engin worried the APC net would overload. Instead of overloading, the influx of new Time Lord minds granted the Matrix sentience and it abandoned the seemingly doomed Gallifrey by uploading a copy of itself in the Doctor's TARDIS. (COMIC: Sky Jacks)
Rassilon's Ultimate Sanction
President Rassilon was so desperate he proposed the Ultimate Sanction. The Time Lords would become creatures of pure consciousness and all of creation would be destroyed. Learning the Doctor possessed the Moment, the Time Lord High Council tried to escape the time lock by implanting a signal in the mind of the Master when he was a boy. They then sent a Gallifreyan diamond called a White-Point Star to Earth in 2009, where the Saxon Master had escaped to. With the signal inside the older Master and six billion humans converted by the Immortality Gate into the Master Race to triangulate it, the Master made a connection with the Time Lords' signal.
Rassilon escaped to 2009 Earth, flanked by four Time Lords including the Woman (TV: The End of Time) and the Patriarch of Stillhaven. (PROSE: Lords and Masters) Gallifrey itself started to return and everything from the war could escape. The Tenth Doctor, who had already ended the war sometime before, broke the connection by shooting the White-Point Star; the Time Lords, Gallifrey, and the Master, who had seen how monstrous his people had become and decided to take revenge on Rassilon for making him a monster, vanished in a burst of white light and were sent, according to the Doctor, "back into [the] hell" of the Time War.
As a consequence of this incident, Wilfred Mott became trapped in a radiation booth nearing a meltdown. The Tenth Doctor sacrificed himself to rescue his companion and exposed himself to a lethal 500,000 rads of radiation which began his regeneration into the Eleventh Doctor. (TV: The End of Time)
Relocation of Gallifrey
Back in the barn, the Moment put the War Doctor in contact with the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors to help him evaluate destroying Gallifrey. After an adventure involving Zygon survivors of the Time War, the Doctors came up with a plan to save Gallifrey.
Gallifrey had not been destroyed, but merely transported to an alternate dimension by the first thirteen incarnations of the Doctor; it was spared, but stored in stasis, waiting to be recovered. At the same time, all of the Daleks, having surrounded Gallifrey and bombarding it from space, suddenly became a spherical firing squad and destroyed themselves in a massive explosion that was believed by the rest of the universe to be Gallifrey's destruction as well. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
Gallifrey’s relocation took almost a day to complete, longer than the Doctor had predicted, causing the planet to burn and rage. A town on the shore of Lake Calasper was ripped apart by an earthquake. The Doctor, in all their incarnations up to the Ninth (Minus the War Doctor), helped to get civilians trapped in dangerous situations to safety. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor)
According to another account, a different weapon was used to end the Time War (PROSE: The Eyeless) by ultimately annihilating the Time Lords and most Daleks. The weapon notably matched some descriptions of the Moment. (COMIC: The Forgotten, Don't Step on the Grass, PROSE: The Eyeless) The blast was so powerful the universe convulsed as planets, systems and galaxies were obliterated. (COMIC: Agent Provocateur) The Skrawn homeworld, Kolox, was reduced to the Kolox Nebula by the time winds at the end of the Time War. (COMIC: The Skrawn Inheritance)
The Cruciform fell when Gallifrey vanished. (COMIC: The Forgotten) The Eye of Time, long possessed by the Time Lords, vanished from the universe as well, later being possessed by the Daleks of the New Dalek Paradigm. (GAME: City of the Daleks)
The Time War was time locked. (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass, Running to Stay Still, TV: The Stolen Earth, The End of Time) With the exception of a very few survivors, the Time Lords and the Daleks disappeared from time and space. (TV: Dalek, The Parting of the Ways, Army of Ghosts / Doomsday)
Aftermath
Although the first thirteen incarnations of the Doctor saved Gallifrey, due to the timelines being out of sync, the first eleven would forget this act. This caused the Ninth Doctor to reject his war incarnation until the memories of saving Gallifrey caught up with the Eleventh Doctor. The Tenth Doctor, obviously, believed Gallifrey had been destroyed when he was returned to his timeline. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) He remembered Gallifrey's fall as a legitimate destruction, (PROSE: The Eyeless) though his memory was similar to the Eighth Doctor's attempted aversion of the War in Heaven. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles, The Eyeless)
The disappearance of the Time Lords created a vacuum that may have left history more vulnerable to change. The Ninth Doctor explained to Rose Tyler, (TV: The Unquiet Dead) the Tenth to Donna Noble (TV: The Unicorn and the Wasp) and the Eleventh to Clara Oswald (TV: Cold War) that time was in flux and history could change instantly.
One demonstration of this was when Rose created a temporal paradox by saving her father, Pete, just before his death in a traffic accident. This summoned the Reapers, who descended to sterilise the "wound" in time by devouring everything in sight. The Ninth Doctor said that if the Time Lords had been still around, they could have held back the Reapers and prevented or repaired the paradox. (TV: Father's Day)
As well, the Tenth Doctor noted that when the Time Lords were around, travel between parallel worlds was less difficult. With their demise, the paths between worlds were closed. (TV: Rise of the Cybermen)
The Time Lords' position as keepers of the Web of Time was fought over by many time-active races, including the Sontarans, the Cybermen, and the Unon. It was the Time Agency that asserted itself as the replacement Lords of Time. (COMIC: Weapons of Past Destruction)
The Kin, locked away aeons ago by the Time Lords, escaped their temporal prison due to the Time War's mutilation of Time, Space and Matter. (PROSE: Nothing O'Clock)
Due to the actions of Daleks near the end of the Time War, the Dalek Factor was left within the genetics of 1 in a half a million humans, though dormant. When a Dalek casing was uncovered in England, the Dalek Factor became active in Kate Yates who's Dalek personality grew a new Dalek within the casing. The Dalek intended to travel to the future and use humanity's resources to rebuild its race but failed when Kate's human personality resurfaced and set the Dalek's Time Ring to self-destruct. The self-destruct caused a warp implosion that atomized the Dalek and made the Dalek Factor go dormant again in humanity. (PROSE: I Am a Dalek)
The entire chain of Hotel Historia was left destroyed. (COMIC: Hotel Historia)
The Testimony later recorded the War Doctor's actions during the conflict in its data banks, specifically noting how it earned him the title "the Doctor of War". (TV: Twice Upon a Time)
Survivors
Most of the inhabitants of Gallifrey at the end of the War survived in stasis in another universe. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) The Doctor believed himself to be the only remaining Time Lord in the universe, (TV: The End of the World, Dalek, The Day of the Doctor) but in his tenth incarnation he encountered the Rani (COMIC: Untitled) and the War Master, who survived disguised as a human using the Chameleon Arch. (TV: Utopia)
K9 Mark I travelled through time to the year 2050 some point before the disappearance of Gallifrey. (TV: Regeneration)
A single Dalek survived and crashed on the Ascension Islands on Earth in 1962. (TV: Dalek) The Dalek Emperor also survived by falling through time to approximately the 2,000th century. (TV: The Parting of the Ways) The Cult of Skaro and the Daleks imprisoned in the Genesis Ark left the universe for the Void before the end of the war. (TV: Doomsday)
Several races which were erased from existence during the war persisted as echoes displaced from time on a plane of non-reality, banding together to become the Bygone Horde. (AUDIO: The Other Side)
Though Davros was believed by the Doctor to have been killed in the war (consumed by the Nightmare Child), Dalek Caan temporal shifted into the war and rescued him. (TV: The Stolen Earth) The Advocate escaped following Caan's path. (COMIC: Fugitive, Don't Step on the Grass)
A Time Lord veteran of the Eternal War survived through the Time War trapped in a time loop with the Qwerm. (PROSE: River of Time) Several Daleks who had survived various pre-Time War encounters with the Doctor on the planets Kembel, Spiridon, Exxilon, Aridius and Vulcan resided in the Dalek Asylum. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks)
Eve was the only one of her species to escape being wiped out in the Last Great Time War due to their abilities to see timelines. (TV: SJAF 2)
The Gelth survived but lost their physical bodies, reduced to a gaseous state. (TV: The Unquiet Dead) The Zygon homeworld apparently burned in the first days of the war. Several Zygons survived this attack. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) The Skrawn which were lucky to have survived their planet's destruction were left drifting aimlessly, bitter and vengeful. (COMIC: The Skrawn Inheritance)
A temporal mine survived due to waiting in a pocket dimension throughout the War's duration, unable to find a big enough target. (PROSE: Keeping up with the Joneses)
Return of the Time Lords
When the Time Lords made contact with the universe through a crack in time on the planet Trenzalore, they broadcast the first question to the universe to draw the Doctor in to free them from the pocket universe in which they were trapped. This also drew in "half the universe" who would descend upon Trenzalore if the Time Lords were released, and restart the Time War. The Doctor fought for centuries in the Siege of Trenzalore to prevent this, unwilling to leave the planet to its destruction but equally unwilling to release the Time Lords and restart the Time War which would bring Hell upon the whole universe once more. Ultimately, the Time Lords themselves closed the crack in time, closing the only known way for them to return, but not before granting the Doctor a new regeneration cycle, allowing him to defeat the Daleks besieging the planet (everyone else having been destroyed or retreated) and changing his future. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
The Time Lords eventually unfroze Gallifrey and moved it to "the end of the universe, give or take a star system" for protection. The Doctor was unsure how they did this as he didn't ask. While confronting the Time Lords at the end of the universe, Clara Oswald told them that "everybody" hated them as a result of the war. (TV: Hell Bent)
After the failure of the Final Sanction, the Time Lords cured the Master's condition and he left Gallifrey in what he later referred to as "a mutual kicking me out." (TV: The Doctor Falls)
Other realities
In an alternate timeline created when Rassilon allied with the Cybermen to rewrite history, (COMIC: Supremacy of the Cybermen) the Time War was fought against the Cybermen. The War Doctor actually used the Moment to destroy Gallifrey and the Cybermen. (COMIC: The War Doctor)
Participants
Please help by adding some more information.
Though the Sontarans were aware of the war, they weren't allowed to take part, much to their dismay. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem) However, they did try to get involved. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage)
The Graxnix who were one of the lowest races to take part. (COMIC: Hotel Historia)
The Eighth Doctor was once imprisoned along with a Sea Devil and a Malmooth. (COMIC: The Forgotten)
The Forest of Cheem witnessed the war and wept at the bloodshed. (TV: The End of the World)
Technology
The Daleks created temporal mines to use against the Time Lords, which would sit and wait in another dimension before destroying what they deemed a large enough fleet. The Time Lords captured many of the mines and repurposed them to attack Dalek fleets instead. (PROSE: Keeping up with the Joneses)
Douglas Henderson was created as a living weapon during the War. (COMIC: The Big, Blue Box)
Behind the scenes
- Every series finale by Russell T Davies featured a villain who'd escaped from the Time War. Series 1's Bad Wolf / The Parting of the Ways had the Dalek Emperor and a whole fleet of Daleks; series 2's Army of Ghosts / Doomsday had the Cult of Skaro; series 3's Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords had the Master; series 4 had Davros; and the 2009 Specials' The End of Time had Rassilon and the High Council.
- Though a frequent theme in the entirety of the RTD era, the Time War itself was not depicted until 2013's The Last Day and The Day of the Doctor. Until then, the audience was only treated to brief, scattered mentions. The End of Time did depict Gallifrey and the actions of the High Council during the last days of the Time War but nothing of the fighting against the Daleks.
- Every one of the Doctor's regenerations within the revived series has occurred following an event that is in some way related to the Time War:
- The Eighth Doctor regenerated during the Time War with the help of the Sisterhood of Karn who turned him into the man he needed to be to end the war. (TV: The Night of the Doctor)
- The War Doctor regenerated after growing too old following years of fighting in the Time War. He regenerated shortly after he and all of the other Doctors saved Gallifrey from destruction and obliterated the Dalek fleet. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
- The Ninth Doctor regenerated after a battle with the Dalek Emperor who had survived the Time War. (TV: The Parting of the Ways)
- The Tenth Doctor regenerated after defeating Rassilon who was attempting to free Gallifrey from the time lock, bringing the rest of the war with him. (TV: The End of Time) Earlier, the Tenth Doctor also aborted a regeneration which was caused when he was shot by a Dalek of a new empire created by Davros who had escaped the Time War with the help of Dalek Caan. (TV: The Stolen Earth / Journey's End) The Eleventh Doctor later confirmed that this did indeed count as a regeneration. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
- The Eleventh Doctor also died of old age after centuries of defending Trenzalore, preventing the Time Lords from returning and the Time War from starting anew. The Time Lords intervened to save the Doctor and change the future so this could happen. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
- The events that led to the Twelfth Doctor's regeneration are more tenuous, but still by proxy related to the Last Great Time War, as the Doctor was shot by a Cyberman, created by the Master following the aforementioned encounter with Rassilon. (TV: The Doctor Falls)
- A 2005 faux-documentary produced by BBC Radio, The Dalek Conquests, attempts to put the Time War into context with the Doctor's recurring conflicts with the Daleks over the years.
- A long-running story arc featured in the BBC Eighth Doctor Adventures book series concurrent with the return of Doctor Who to television in 2005 featured another Time War, the War in Heaven, which also ended in the Doctor's destruction of Gallifrey. However, Russell T Davies clarified in DWM 356 that, though fans were free to invent their own interpretations, the BBC's merchandise regulations meant that there could be no official connection between the Time War of the novels and the Time War of the television show.
Doctor Who: Battles in Time
Non-narrative material in Doctor Who: Battles in Time magazine revealed further survivors of the Time War.
- According to DWBIT 51, an army of Daleks was weakened and fell through time to 70 million years before the 21st century and was destroyed by dinosaurs.
- According to DWBIT 11, a Dalek ship crashed in an island in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, causing a disturbance in human vehicles and the mysterious disappearances of aircraft and surface vessels, which alludes to the eerie phenomenon of the Bermuda Triangle. Their ultimate fate is unknown.
- Also, DWBIT 19 stated a group of Daleks massacred the pirate fleet of Captain Jack Lawrence in late September 1697.
