The Time War — or the Last Great Time War — was the war between the mightiest races in the universe, the Time Lords and the Daleks, "for the sake of all creation". It resulted in the apparent destruction of Gallifrey, leaving only two (known) Time Lords and a small number of Daleks as survivors.
- You may be looking for the general concept of a time war.
The war
The beginning
The Daleks created the Dogma Virus, which would 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 managed to hack 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 one of her future 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 meet the Fourth Doctor, and give him a mission to avert the creation of the Daleks. (AUDIO: Ascension) The Doctor's mission on Skaro during the Thousand Year War had 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 believed he might have set back the history of the Daleks for a thousand years. (TV: Genesis of the Daleks) This attempt to avert their creation created hostilities by the Daleks towards Time Lords and would eventually lead to war. (WC: Captain Jack's Monster Files: Dalek, COMIC: Hunters of the Burning Stone, AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests, Ascension)
In revenge of the Time Lords plot to destroy them, the Daleks attempted to create a duplicate of the Doctor to send to Gallifrey and assassinate the High Council of the Time Lords. (TV: Resurrection of the Daleks, AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)
The final 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's sun. (TV: Remembrance of the Daleks, AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)
After this, the Daleks' next step was to start a war with the Time Lords. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests)
The conflict
The Dalek forces numbered a "billion billion" (TV: The Day of the Doctor) and fielded a fleet of ten million flying saucers. (TV: Dalek) They also unleashed the full might of the Deathsmiths of Goth. The Time Lords used over a million Battle TARDISes. (PROSE: Peacemaker) Over the course of the war the Time Lords deployed every forbidden weapon of the Omega Arsenal against the Daleks save for the Moment, which they dared not use because it had a conscience and would sit in judgment of their actions. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
The Eighth Doctor decided to become a part of the Time War after watching a child die at the hands of a Dalek. (PROSE: Museum Peace) He stated that he 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)
During the period of helping, the Eighth Doctor tried to regain the Great Key, which had been stolen by unknown forces. After being imprisoned for a month, with the help of Chantir, he overpowered the guards and escaped with the key. With the key, he believed that the De-mat Gun could be replicated and the Medusa Cascade closed. The Doctor planned to modify the gun so that instead of it removing an individual from time and space, it would remove millions. (COMIC: The Forgotten)
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)
Some time during the war, the Eighth 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. (TV: The Night of the Doctor) The Sontarans told legends of the Doctor leading Time Lords into battle. (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem)
During the war, the entire chain of Hotel Historia was destroyed, (COMIC: Hotel Historia) Polymos was destroyed, (PROSE: The Dust of Ages), Kolox was destroyed, leaving behind the Kolox Nebula, (COMIC: The Skrawn Inheritance) and in the first days the home planet of the Zygons was destroyed. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) It was also implied that the Nestene lost their homeworld during the war. (TV: Rose) The Gelth were reduced to gaseous form. (TV: The Unquiet Dead)
The Time Lords resurrected the Master, believing him an excellent soldier for a Time War. The Master was at the Cruciform, but when the Dalek Emperor took control of it, he ran in fear, remaining unaware of the Time War's conclusion until told by the Doctor many years later. (TV: The Sound of Drums)
Towards the end of the war, the Daleks sent a capsule to Earth in the year 70 to spread the Dalek Factor amongst humans. The capsule's engine exploded and the Dalek was killed soon after impact. It released only a small amount of the Dalek Factor, leading to only one in five hundred million humans having it. (PROSE: I am a Dalek)
At the heart of the war, millions were killed and brought back to life every second. (TV: The End of Time)
Conclusion
Near the end of the War, the Doctor rejected his name, and the Time Lords called him simply, "the Renegade". Priyan believed that the Doctor now stood against the Time Lords, and would use the Moment to his own ends. By the last day of the war, the Daleks had destroyed every Battle TARDIS and War TARDIS, and began to invade Gallifrey itself. (COMIC: Sky Jacks) A crucial battlefield was Arcadia, where the Doctor fought on the front lines. (TV: Doomsday, The Day of the Doctor) Arcadia was a city on Gallifrey, and the most secure Time Lord stronghold. It had defences called sky trenches, and although it was thought to have been impossible to break through two of them, in the last day of the conflict, the Daleks broke through all 400 of them and gained access to the whole planet. (TV: The Last Day) Finally, they then proceeded to bombard Gallifrey from space with their remaining fleets. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
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. Other horrors and terrors seen in the final days of the war (including the Daleks) were 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)
The Doctor came into possession of the Moment and was ready to destroy Gallifrey. (TV: The End of Time, The Day of the Doctor) One account claimed that the Doctor created the Moment from a De-Mat Gun modified by the Great Key. (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass) Another revealed that the War Doctor, showing no familiarity with its workings or sentient operating system, stole the Moment from the Omega Arsenal on the final day of the Time War. The General said the Moment was the final creation of the Ancients of Gallifrey. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
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 and sending 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. Five Time Lords, including Rassilon and the Woman, escaped to Earth in 2009, where Gallifrey itself started to return and everything from the war could escape. The Tenth Doctor, who had already ended the war some time before, broke the connection by shooting the White-Point Star; the Time Lords, Gallifrey, and the Master vanished in a burst of white light and were sent, according to the Tenth Doctor, "back into [the] hell" of the Time War. (TV: The End of Time)
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. (TV: The End of Time) This ultimately forced him to use up the final regeneration of his original cycle and become the Eleventh Doctor. (TV: The End of Time, The Time of the Doctor)
According to one account, when the Doctor used the Moment, the war was time locked. (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass) The time lock made it (in theory, or at least according to the Tenth Doctor) impossible to revisit the events; Dalek Caan, however, somehow entered, albeit at the cost of his sanity, (TV: The Stolen Earth) while the Moment itself was able to bring the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors through the time lock. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
Gallifrey disappeared in a silent flash as bright as a sun, with many people believing that it had been destroyed. Its disappearance was so profound it stretched deep into the past and far into the future. (PROSE: The Eyeless) The blast was so powerful the universe convulsed as planets, systems and galaxies were obliterated. (COMIC: Agent Provocateur) In reality, Gallifrey had not been destroyed, but merely transported to an alternate dimension by all 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)
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 reposeseded by the Doctor. (GAME: City of the Daleks).
Shortly after the Time War ended, the War Doctor realised he would not retain his memory of saving Gallifrey with his timestream out of sync from that of his future selves. However, he had reached a very advanced physical age and regenerated before these memories vanished, fully at peace. (TV: The Day of the Doctor) His next incarnation, the Ninth Doctor, not knowing about Gallifrey's survival due to his time stream being out of sync, explained to Rose that even saving one man who "wasn't supposed to be alive" affected the whole of time. The Doctor rhetorically asked Rose whether she believed that the thought hadn't occurred to him to go back and save his people and planet. While the Ninth Doctor did not reference the Time Lock, he certainly knew attempting to save his people would have grave consequences. (TV: Father's Day)
According to the Tenth Doctor, the time lock prevented him going back and saving his people. (TV: The Fires of Pompeii)
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
The Nestene Consciousness's food stock planet was destroyed, (TV: Rose) forcing them to invade other planets for resources.
The Gelth lost their physical bodies because of the war. They were reduced to gaseous forms. (TV: The Unquiet Dead)
Though the Sontarans were aware of the war, they weren't allowed to take part (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem) , much to their disgust, as opposed to the Graxnix who were one of the lowest races to take part. (COMIC: Hotel Historia)
Eve's species was wiped out in the Last Great Time War due to their abilities to see timelines. (TV: SJAF 2)
The Forest of Cheem witnessed the the war and wept at the bloodshed. (TV: The End of the World)
The Skrawn homeworld, Kolox, was obliterated by the time winds at the end of the Time War which left the Kolox Nebula (also known as the Skrawn inheritance). (COMIC: The Skrawn Inheritance)
The Kin, locked away eons ago by the Time Lords, escaped their temporal prison due to the Time War's mutalation of Time, Space and Matter. (PROSE: "Nothing O'Clock")
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 Fires of Pompeii, The Unicorn and the Wasp) and the Eleventh to Clara Oswald (TV: Cold War) that time was in flux and history could change instantly — a big change from the way it had been.
The most dramatic demonstration of this was when Rose created a temporal paradox by crossing her own time stream to save 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) making the universe a less kinder and a more dangerous place to be.
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 they were trapped in. 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)
Known survivors
Time Lords and other residents of Gallifrey
Most of the inhabitants of Gallifrey at the end of the War survived, though apart from the War Doctor (TV: The End of the World, Dalek, The Day of the Doctor) and the War Master, disguised as a human using the Chameleon Arch, (TV: Utopia) the majority of the Time Lords and Gallifrey itself were put into stasis in another universe. (TV: The Day of the Doctor)
K9 Mark I travelled through time to the year 2050 some point before the disappearance of Gallifrey. (TV: Regeneration)
Daleks
A single Dalek survived and crashed on the Ascension Islands on Earth in 1962. (TV: Dalek)
The Dalek Emperor also survived. He had fallen through time to approximately the 2,000th century. (TV: The Parting of the Ways)
The Daleks sent a time capsule to 70 AD Earth in order to spread the Dalek Factor amongst the humans. (PROSE: I am a Dalek)
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)
A group of Daleks that appeared to be Time War era appeared in the 22nd century. (COMIC: The Living Ghosts, Extermination of the Daleks)
Several Daleks who had survived several 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)
Others
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, Journey's End)
The Advocate escaped the Time War when Davros was rescued by Dalek Caan, using his path. (COMIC: Fugitive, Don't Step on the Grass)
Eve was sent to Earth as a child to survive extermination in the Time War. (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)
Behind the scenes
- Every season 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 300 years of defending Trenzalore, preventing the Time Lords from returning and the Time War from starting anew. (TV: The Time of the Doctor)
- 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 Second War in Heaven between the Time Lords and the Enemy. Russell T Davies, the producer of the revived TV series, has, however, been on record as stating that the Second War in Heaven is a different conflict, which is one reason why the war referenced on TV is called "the Last Great Time War."
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 were weakened and fell through time to 70 million years before the 21st century and were 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 phenomenons 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.