History of the Last Great Time War
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The history of the Last Great Time War between the Time Lords and the Daleks was complex and non-linear, with many battles rewritten, and planets retroactively destroyed before becoming useful assets to either side.
Origins
- Main article: Origins of the Last Great Time War
Beginning of the Time War
Fighting breaks out
Declaration of the War
- Main article: Declaration of the Last Great Time War
The rivalry between the Time Lords and the Daleks, regarded as the two most powerful species in N-Space, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) eventually hit a boiling point, (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"]) with the Daleks, believing themselves to be the rightful supreme power of the universe, having grown eager to overthrow Gallifrey (WC: Gallifrey War Room [+]Loading...["Gallifrey War Room (webcast)"]) to become the new Lords of Time and finally have revenge on the Gallifreyans for their attack on their origins. According to some historians, before properly beginning the conflict, the Dalek Emperor led the Dalek Empire out of space and time, going into the Time Vortex to prepare for the War, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) but another account held that the Daleks only deployed their "awesome fleet" into the Time Vortex when the War finally began. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) No matter the true circumstances, from the perspective of humanity, the Daleks suddenly disappeared "thousands of years" prior to the Battle of the Game Station in 200,100.
As recalled by Jack Harkness, a former Time Agent from the 51st century, the Daleks vanished from time and space, even though they were the "greatest threat in the universe", (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) thus ending the Tenth Dalek Occupation. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) The Doctor would later state that the Daleks had "gone off to fight a bigger war", that being the Time War. (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) When the Daleks emerged to begin the fighting, their forces were at a scale never before seen, making it clear that they were on a war footing. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) According to the War Doctor, combatants of the War came to forget how it had actually started. In effect, the start of the conflict became "ancient history," even as the fighting continued to rage throughout space and eternity. (AUDIO: The Innocent [+]Loading...["The Innocent (audio story)"])
While Dalek historians would claim that "no one is certain" if it was the Time Lords or Daleks who committed the act of aggression that made their tensions reach a boiling point, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) one account held that the breaking point was hit after the extermination or near-extermination of such allied Temporal Powers as the Monans, the Sunari and the Nekkistani. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"]) When a temporal crisis allowed him to get knowledge from his future incarnations, the Fourth Doctor told Leela that "in the early days of the Time War, the Daleks sought to isolate Gallifrey — they wiped out whole planets, just so they wouldn't be allies of the Time Lords".
One of their targets during this phase were the Minyans who, after reaching Minyos II and rebuilding their civilisation using the race bank, were predicted to align themselves with the Time Lords in recognition of the Fourth Doctor's role in saving them. A small party of Daleks went back in time to board the Minyan ship on its way to Minyos II, claiming they only wanted to borrow the race bank for "study". They actually intended to alter the genetic codes with a Mutation Device so that the new Minyans would become a slave-race instinctively loyal to the Daleks. However, the Doctor and Leela foiled this attempt at interference. (GAME: Lost in Time [+]Loading...["Lost in Time (video game)"])
After the Daleks committed these massacres, the Time Lords prepared to formalise hostilities against the Dalek Empire. Following the fall of Phaidon, President Livia decided the time had come. On the eve of war, a dispute broke out the between the Celestial Intervention Agency and the War Council on whether to allow the surviving Warpsmiths to be granted asylum on Gallifrey, as the Council demanded their full secrecy in return for the asylum policy. Frustrated, Coordinator Romana, who was still in her second incarnation (AUDIO: Celestial Intervention [+]Loading...["Celestial Intervention (audio story)"]) thanks to Irving Braxiatel's alterations to the timeline, (AUDIO: Enemy Lines [+]Loading...["Enemy Lines (audio story)"]) sent agent Leela to investigate the Death Zone facility and discovered Project Revenant.
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Housed within a pocket universe, the project was designed to restore the greatest minds of Gallifreyan history from the Matrix to help defeat the Dalek Empire, with Rassilon secretly amongst those to be restored. Livia shutdown the dispute between the CIA and War Council. That evening, she issued the formal declaration of war on the Daleks. (AUDIO: Celestial Intervention [+]Loading...["Celestial Intervention (audio story)"]) The Daleks then made their own formal declaration of hostilities. Upon the official outbreak of the War, the Daleks contacted Davros on Alacracis IV, asking for his help in the conflict. Filled with pride at his children, he accepted. (PROSE: Father of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Father of the Daleks (short story)"]) The War between the Daleks and Time Lords first exploded into active battle within the Time Vortex and Ultimate Void. (PROSE: Daleks - A History of Terror)
When the War suddenly began, a bright light began to shine in the Kasterborous system and towards Gallifrey, catching the attention of the Gallifreyans on the planet, though their reactions were not universal; some were shocked and showed signs of fear at the start of the conflict, while at least one Time Lord outside the Capitol looked up in anger. (COMIC: Agent Provocateur [+]Loading...["Agent Provocateur (comic story)"]) Shortly after the official start of hostilities a massive Dalek fleet took out the Unvoss and Sunari in one hit, (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"]) and fleets of Dalek flying saucers were dispatched to invade the Gallifreyan homeworld, forcing Gallifrey and the fleet it came to gather to start the War on the defensive. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) While all of Gallifrey was shielded by its transduction barriers, (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) sky trenches were established around vital Gallifreyan cities like Arcadia and the Capitol in case the Daleks broke through. (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"], The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
Nonetheless, Gallifrey was largely able (AUDIO: Homecoming [+]Loading...["Homecoming (audio story)"]) to remain on the "furthest edge" of the fighting throughout the conflict. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) The Gallifreyans started out the War overconfident, believing that shows of their power could deter the Dalek advance, (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) but they eventually came to fear that they were merely holding back the inevitable, believing that the Daleks would, eventually, break through even Gallifrey's awesome military might and destroy the planet's civilisation in its entirety. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) Furthermore, the ensuing conflict between the Daleks and Time Lords was so devastating it was contained within a time lock by the post-War universe; (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) while the Great Time War was known to have spread into every time zone in existence, (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) the time lock around it meant that those trapped in the War found themselves unable to escape the fighting, (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) with the new time zones they travelled into almost always simply becoming new fronts that the other side would respond to. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"], AUDIO: The Sontaran Ordeal [+]Loading...["The Sontaran Ordeal (audio story)"], et. al)
As the battles of the War spread throughout eternity, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"], et al) there would be many accounts of the conflict that appeared to contradict each other; the identity of the Dalek Emperor of the War, (PROSE: Exit Strategy [+]Loading...["Exit Strategy (short story)"], AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"]) the precise events of and temporal placement for the "death" of Davros, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"], The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"], AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"]) whether or not the Eighth Doctor regenerated into the War Doctor, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"], TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"]) the War Doctor's mindset after that regeneration, (COMIC: The Clockwise War [+]Loading...["The Clockwise War (comic story)"], AUDIO: Light the Flame [+]Loading...["Light the Flame (audio story)"]) and even the precise way the War ended were all examples of details that had varying, disagreeing accounts. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"], PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"])
However, such incongruity in accounts of the Time War was natural for the conflict; (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) even though it was thought events trapped within a time lock were impossible to rewrite, (AUDIO: One Life [+]Loading...["One Life (audio story)"]) both the Time Lords and Daleks had access to space-time vessels (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"], et al) and took advantage of history, changing it to their will whenever possible. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence [+]Loading...["Sphere of Influence (audio story)"]) It was possible for Dalek and Time Lord forces to travel from a later point in the War back to an earlier moment, attempting to alter the course of the conflict. (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]; AUDIO: Havoc [+]Loading...["Havoc (audio story)"]) As noted by one post-War Time Lord author, it was impossible to know what had exactly happened in the War, writing that every action in the conflict "has happened, then not happened at all, then happened again but at a different time entirely": In the end, having been fought "through every time and no time", the struggle between the Time Lords and Dalek Empire would leave the universe in a constant state of temporal flux. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"])
The conflict begins
Dubbed the "Great Time War" despite those living through it simply calling it "Hell", (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) the savage and endless conflict fought between the Time Lords and Daleks (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) was fought for "the sake of all creation", (TV: Gridlock [+]Loading...["Gridlock (TV story)"]) becoming the most all-consuming and brutal conflict ever inflicted upon the universe. Due to its nature as a temporal war, it was nearly impossible for post-Time War individuals to deduce its proper and logical chronology, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) leaving those who survive to only know it to be a cataclysmic period of universal history. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) As much of the War's history was overwritten and rewritten during the fighting, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"], The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) with the opposing factions each undoing the actions of the other again and again, it was hard to figure out what had even happened, at least within the terms of the post-War timeline. Additionally, much of the Time War's history would become shrouded in mystery, inaccessible, and time locked. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"])
One account stated that the physical war was fought in the Time Vortex and Ultimate Void, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) with the Nestene Consciousness perceiving the Time War as being able to breach into the "normal universe", only to disappear as soon as it came. (PROSE: Revenge of the Nestene [+]Loading...["Revenge of the Nestene (short story)"]) However, many other accounts did indeed show that the conflict could be fought on terrain or in normal space (COMIC: The Clockwise War [+]Loading...["The Clockwise War (comic story)"], PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"], et. al) in addition to being fought through "time battles" that lesser species could not comprehend. In effect, the Daleks and Time Lords faced each other on both physical and temporal fronts. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage [+]Loading...["The Eternity Cage (audio story)"]) With battles opening up in the known universe, unknown universe, partly known universe, and the countless epochs that made up history, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"], Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) the universe was filled with conflict; large and small-scale engagements were fought everywhere and anywhere, (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) with "all of time and space" becoming available for use as a battleground, while less comprehensible engagements like "time battles" were waged beyond the understanding of lesser beings. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage [+]Loading...["The Eternity Cage (audio story)"])
The War even spread into alternate realities, which only made uncovering its proper chronology harder, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) and the Twelfth Doctor later reflected that the War shattered entire dimensions. (COMIC: The Clockwise War [+]Loading...["The Clockwise War (comic story)"])
When they saw the Daleks emerge from the shadows on a war footing, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) the Time Lords had sent an activation signal to any N-Forms laying dormant throughout history. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"]) The Seventh Doctor, Chris Cwej, and Roz Forrester encountered one reactivated N-Form in 1987 Britain and stopped it from destroying the Earth. During a confrontation, the N-Form told the Doctor that its reactivation signal came from the future, taunting him by asking if Gallifrey had forgot to warn him that "the War's started all over again." (PROSE: Damaged Goods [+]Loading...["Damaged Goods (novel)"], AUDIO: Damaged Goods [+]Loading...["Damaged Goods (audio story)"]) The Doctor later confirmed that a deliberate reactivation impulse had been sent from the future to dormant N-Forms throughout time, with another N-Form being responsible for the destruction of the Quoth homeworld. He faintly traced parts of the signal to the 30th century, (PROSE: Damaged Goods [+]Loading...["Damaged Goods (novel)"]) where he discovered that the Brotherhood of the Immanent Flesh had some responsibility for the N-Forms. (PROSE: So Vile a Sin [+]Loading...["So Vile a Sin (novel)"])
Having taken them from their own history, the Time Lords were now equipped with a fleet of N-Forms, bowships, and Black Hole Carriers. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) As all these ships were swiftly assembled in response to the Dalek war footing, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) it was this fleet of craft that met the Dalek Emperor and his forces at the start of the War, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) defending Gallifrey from the vast Dalek fleets sent against the planet during the first days of the War. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) To counter the Time Lords' forces, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) the Daleks fielded an army of extremely powerful bronze Dalek drones, (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"], Doomsday [+]Loading...["Doomsday (TV story)"], et al.) deployed a fleet of over ten million flying saucers, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) and unleashed the "full might" of the Deathsmiths of Goth, who were released by the Emperor Dalek himself. ((PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"], A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"])
Soon after the Time Lords assembled their fleet, the devastating conflict officially erupted into the universe, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) yet, according to the General's reflections, his people did not consider the conflict a war at first; the Time Lords thought the Daleks were simply acting out of line and, even as the Daleks continued their attacks, hoped the fighting would end as a series of mere skirmishes. Whenever Daleks gathered in millions for battle during this early period, the Lords of Time, arrogantly believing they did not need to meet the Daleks as an equal force, would force the star nearest to the assembled Dalek armada to explode in an attempt to wipe out the assembled force, only for the Dalek Empire to assemble another attack group and reattack. Whilst the Time Lords once thought themselves superior to the Daleks, (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) the General came to realise his people were not prepared to do battle with the exterminators. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"])
Furthermore, the ancient vessels the Time Lords had plundered from their past were little compared to the Dalek Fleet; massive Dalek mega-saucers and void-tanks could easily outperform the ancient craft, even when they were fielded as massive fleets, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) and Time Lord soldiers came to realise that one Dalek drone was a big enough threat to wipe out an entire Gallifreyan city. (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"]) Having also pulled Battle TARDISes from their past (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) to join the number already at Gallifrey's disposal in the present, thanks to the Doom Coalition having restarted the Battle TARDIS program, (AUDIO: The Crucible of Souls [+]Loading...["The Crucible of Souls (audio story)"]) entire fleets of Battle TARDISes of various models were deployed into the fighting, with the Time Lords even developing new generations of Battle TARDISes designed specifically to better fight Daleks. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) However, though they were once thought impossible to breach, the Daleks improved in their ability to break through TARDIS force fields, even the shields of Battle TARDISes, as the fighting carried on. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence [+]Loading...["Sphere of Influence (audio story)"])
One of the first Time Lord victories was at Keetol, where the Daleks wanted to mine the planet for its weapons-grade rocks, which was achieved with the aid of the War Master. This victory was later negated when the Master later used the Heavenly Paradigm. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) The Time Lords quickly assembled great battleships in the Quantum Yards for an assault on Seriphia, including Dreadnought Septima. (AUDIO: Hostiles [+]Loading...["Hostiles (audio story)"]) The fateful battle of Seramiphius V was fought between a Time Lord force, made up at least in part by ancient vessels, and Dalek fleet of void-tanks and mega-saucers. Additionally, Grey Daleks were deployed into space during the battle, helping the fleet attack the Gallifreyan force. When the engagement at Seramiphius V was mentioned in a text written by Dalek historians, it was mentioned towards the start of the book's section on the War, imply it to be an early battle. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"])
The Time Lords called on the Eighth Doctor for aid, but he refused to join their conflict. (AUDIO: All Hands on Deck [+]Loading...["All Hands on Deck (audio story)"], Soldier Obscura [+]Loading...["Soldier Obscura (audio story)"]) He was initially nowhere to be found in the Time War. (AUDIO: Master of Worlds [+]Loading...["Master of Worlds (audio story)"]) Nonetheless, stories of the Doctor's stands against the Daleks brought hope to the Time Lords, even during the early days of the War when he refused to battle. Furthermore, there were moments when the War Doctor could be found in the wartime before his regeneration during the Fifth Segment, as he could travel back into the days of the Eighth Doctor if the fighting called for it. (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]) For example, Cass Fermazzi, who would die during the life of the Eighth Doctor, had bore witness to the massacre at Skull Moon that the War Doctor led. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
The Zygons, who once had formed part of Rassilon's Alliance of Races in the distant past, (COMIC: Terrorformer [+]Loading...["Terrorformer (comic story)"]) were involved in the Time War. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"], et. al) While one account credited the Xaranti war with its destruction, (PROSE: The Bodysnatchers [+]Loading...["The Bodysnatchers (novel)"]) most accounts agreed that the Zygon homeworld of Zygor was destroyed during the War. Specifically, most accounts held that Zygor was destroyed in the "first days" (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]; PROSE: The Monster Vault [+]Loading...["The Monster Vault (novel)"]) of the first year of the Time War. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Even so, one historical account of the universe claimed Zygor was destroyed during a time when the conflict had "intensified even further". (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) No matter the case, Zygor was destroyed in a stellar explosion, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (novelisation)"]) described as a "stellar catastrophe" by one group of researchers, (PROSE: The Monster Vault [+]Loading...["The Monster Vault (novel)"]) that "burnt" the planet. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
The post-War Dalek Caan claimed the world's destruction was one of the sights he saw after breaking back into the conflict. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"]) Many Zygons survived the destruction of their home planet and began to hunt for a new home. (PROSE: The Bodysnatchers [+]Loading...["The Bodysnatchers (novel)"]) According to researchers, the Zygons lost their peaceful ways after the destruction of their world. They based themselves into a mobile refugee fleet, within which millions of Zygons slumbered as embryos, as the hunt for a new homeworld carried on. There was disagreement amongst the Zygons, however, on whether to conquer worlds or to live amongst the local population, although most colonisation attempts ended up being attempted conquests. (PROSE: The Monster Vault [+]Loading...["The Monster Vault (novel)"]) During the War, they became adept at making structures which couldn't be breached by TARDISes. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) During his attempted invasion of Earth in the 20th century, Broton claimed that Zygor was lost in a "recent catastrophe", (TV: Terror of the Zygons [+]Loading...["Terror of the Zygons (TV story)"]) but he was not following human time-scale. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (novelisation)"])
The Time Lords had hoped to scare the Daleks away, failing to understand the enemy they were facing and that they would be met with the Daleks' special brand of hate. Time and time again, this was showcased, yet the Time Lords failed to understand; Harlan Castellos made Daleks fall like they were hail during the Spiral Furl when he turned the death of his TARDIS into an electromagnetic extinction event, yet the Daleks did not stop; the Anything Gun was used and crumpled space-time, yet the Daleks did not stop; the fighting overturned the universe as if it was mere dirt, yet the Daleks did not stop. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) At some point, the vicious sky battle of Thusk was fought in the upper atmosphere of the colony, with Time Lord pilots crashing to the surface of Thusk, forcing refugees to rush to their rescue. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"])
Irving Braxiatel initiated a plan to lure a Dalek fleet into a trap at the Obscura, taking Ace along with him. He told Ace there was a weapon there, which was actually a lie he was using to bring the Daleks. On arrival they discovered Daleks had already made multiple efforts to reach the Time Lord station at the heart of the Obscura and the old soldier assigned to guard the station, Danna, had lost her accuracy due to old age, jeopardising Braxiatel's plan which depended on her making a vital shot at the right moment. Braxiatel killed Danna and worked with Ace to improvise a new plan when the Dalek fleet he'd lured arrived, exposing the station to the forces of the Obscura as they boarded and making the shot himself. As he returned to his TARDIS, Ace revealed she knew what he'd done to Danna and accused him of being a coward.
Infuriated, Braxiatel wiped Ace's mind of all knowledge of the War and left her on 20th century Earth. (AUDIO: Soldier Obscura [+]Loading...["Soldier Obscura (audio story)"]) Safe behind the time lock around Earth, (AUDIO: Assassins [+]Loading...["Assassins (audio story)"]) Ace eventually founded A Charitable Earth, (AUDIO: In Remembrance [+]Loading...["In Remembrance (audio story)"], TV: Death of the Doctor [+]Loading...["Death of the Doctor (TV story)"]) and later had contact with Time Lords from long before (AUDIO: Dark Universe [+]Loading...["Dark Universe (audio story)"], et. al) and beyond the Time War. (TV: The Power of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Power of the Doctor (TV story)"]) Braxiatel abandoned the Time War, sending a message to Romana warning that invasion was imminent, (AUDIO: Soldier Obscura [+]Loading...["Soldier Obscura (audio story)"]) and altered Ace's timeline as far back as her travels with the Seventh Doctor to prevent him being traced. (AUDIO: Assassins [+]Loading...["Assassins (audio story)"])
Early escalation
The Time War escalated; the first battles saw the Time Lords flotillas combating large fleets of the invading Dalek flying saucers, only for the Lords of Time to turn towards fighting these brief incursions with increasingly inventive strategies (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) due to the ruthless relentlessness of the Daleks. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["Ghost of Christmas Past (short story)"]) As the Fisher King later recalled, the Time Lords, who once appeared to be nothing more than "cowardly, vain curators" to the rest of the universe, "suddenly remembered they had teeth". (TV: Before the Flood [+]Loading...["Before the Flood (TV story)"]) The Time Lords achieved victories in the Nevarra Cluster and the Prylus system. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"])
In the early stages of the War, the War Council built munitions factories beneath the surface of Gallifrey, where Gallifreyan children worked, (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]) and began the development of deception fields, designed to entrap enemy time vessels. The CIA looked into the project, concerned that non-combatants could also fall prey to them. (AUDIO: Deception [+]Loading...["Deception (audio story)"]) The CIA sponsored Lord Vibax to research new weapons. (AUDIO: Assets of War [+]Loading...["Assets of War (audio story)"]) When the Lords of Time turned towards increasingly inventive strategies, the Daleks adapted their tactics as well. As such, the War spread to encompass many new temporal fronts, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) and the Daleks even came to overlook their ideals of racial purity to form new cabals that could formulate new plans. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"])
A secret society of Daleks that possessed creativity, (COMIC: The Organ Grinder [+]Loading...["The Organ Grinder (comic story)"]) the Volatix Cabal was active since the beginning of the Time War. (COMIC: Downtime [+]Loading...["Downtime (comic story)"]) The Cult of Skaro was also active in the War, thinking in non-Dalek ways to find new ways to kill and survive. (TV: Doomsday [+]Loading...["Doomsday (TV story)"], Daleks in Manhattan [+]Loading...["Daleks in Manhattan (TV story)"]) Another Dalek council that served in the conflict was the Eternity Circle, which was tasked with making new, unpredictable strategies and weapons. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) The Overseer was designed, using various other species, to be a genius in the field of genetic manipulation and given a black casing with multiple arms. (AUDIO: Planet of the Ogrons [+]Loading...["Planet of the Ogrons (audio story)"])
Threatening every moment of the time continuum, the War did not only spread across space, but forwards and backwards through time. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Itself a battlefront, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) the damage to the Time Vortex by the fighting caused chrono storms, (AUDIO: The Scaramancer [+]Loading...["The Scaramancer (audio story)"]) and the rupturing of the Vortex rewrote the history of whole worlds. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) As the universe began to crumble under the weight of the conflict, the War quickly boiled out of control, raging throughout the universe, destroying entire epochs of time, and causing collateral damage to whole species. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) As recorded by a post-War group, the Daleks committed "untold Time War crimes" over the course of the conflict. (PROSE: Wanted! Daleks [+]Loading...["Wanted! Daleks (feature)"]) The Daleks laid waste to a Brancheerian colony on Donnahee's Moon, taking prisoners from whom they recruited at least one agent. (AUDIO: The Uncertain Shore [+]Loading...["The Uncertain Shore (audio story)"]) Eve's peace loving species was caught up in the middle of the war (WC: Alien File: Eve [+]Loading...["Alien File: Eve (webcast)"]) and was exterminated due to their ability to read timelines. (TV: The Mad Woman in the Attic [+]Loading...["The Mad Woman in the Attic (TV story)"])
As both sides threw an ever-increasing number of resources into crushing the other, new fronts would open in new epochs as the Daleks seeded themselves into different time zones, as the progenitor devices that cloned new Dalek mutants could be dropped into current fronts and uncontested time zones alike. While the Time Lords showed contempt for the Daleks seeding themselves through time with "their infernal progenitors," (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) a history of the universe noted that the Time Lords seeded new "colonies", which increased their numbers and opened up new temporal fronts, throughout time as well. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Indeed, the "Gallifreyan Planetbirth Nursery" existed during the conflict. (COMIC: Outrun [+]Loading...["Outrun (comic story)"])
With the terrible conflict raging throughout all of time and space, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Secret Lives of Monsters (short story)"]) the new Dalek and Gallifreyan colonies were created to grow new armies into upcoming epochs (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) or the epoch they were dropped into. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) Both factions also tried to impede the development of the other race, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) yet the Daleks established a time lock around Skaro to prevent another mission into their past. The Time Lords did the same for Gallifrey in an attempt to protect their history, (AUDIO: Legion of the Lost [+]Loading...["Legion of the Lost (audio story)"]) yet the Daleks nonetheless found a way to attack the Time Lords throughout their timeline; (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) by the final phases of the War, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) every part of Gallifreyan history was under attack by the Daleks.
One of these assaults into the Time Lords' past included at least one attempt by the Daleks to prevent the Time Lords from ever evolving by trying to exterminate the primitive beings of prehistoric Gallifrey. While that attempt failed, the siege of Gallifreyan history continued, leaving Lord Cardinal Karlax to feel as though every epoch of Time Lord history was blurring together. The Dalek forces grown from progenitors, which could grow entire Dalek legions to lie in wait, played a role in this siege of Gallifreyan history; if not sent as reinforcements to seemingly-depleted Dalek attack groups active at another front in the War, the new legions would suddenly begin to attack unsuspecting Gallifreyan strongholds located in any of the chaotic eras of Gallifrey's history, if not being deployed to open new fronts elsewhere in time and space. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
As the War spread across the history of the cosmos, the universe started to fall apart, being pulled apart at its seams as its very origins were being rewritten. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Battles between the Daleks and Time Lords raged in countless epochs, (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) with the conflict further muddled whenever Daleks or Time Lords from later periods of the Time War went back into earlier Wartime events to try and change them to their benefit. (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]; AUDIO: Havoc [+]Loading...["Havoc (audio story)"]) Days became battlelines as fronts opened up throughout time and the universe. Additionally, centuries turned against each other and divergent streams of time fought each other to survive. After the War, Ohila, who referred to it as the deadliest conflict time would ever know, reflected on the Time Lord attempt to use their time travel to avert the existence of the Daleks. Because they failed and the Daleks, using their own time machines, tried to do the same to the Time Lords, she stated time had become "a weapon in a war that could never end." (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Despite their war resulting in the entire whole history of the cosmos being to be remade and torn apart, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) battles between the Daleks and Time Lords, whether they be engagements fought through armies, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) massive fleets, or agents infiltrating and rewriting major parts of the opposing side's history, continued to rage. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) It was said that, if one was a soldier fighting in the Time War, they could die a thousand times in a single day, only, during the next day, to learn they had never been born at all. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) The Time Lord Carvil lost his family to the Daleks. (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror [+]Loading...["The Lords of Terror (audio story)"]) The Time Lord Tandeeka was injured in battle by temporal distortion, which aged her hundreds of years. She was taken away from the front and placed as the guardian of the Research and Development Repository. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"])
At the age of fourteen, Cass Fermazzi stowed away on a star freighter to see the wonders of the universe to find that there were no wonders left. One day, whilst helping an old man to die in a crater of mud snakes under a burning moon, she realised there was nowhere left to hide. The following morning, the medtech who closed the man's eyes gave Cass his bandolier. Cass took the bandolier, tightened it around herself, and decided to start running in the opposite direction. The medtech involved was actually the Thirteenth Doctor. Within three months, Cass had found and joined the crew of a gunship, setting the stage for her to experience much over the course of, in her personal timeline, four years. At one point, she fought in the remains of a location known as the Ulterium. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
The Daleks and Time Lords fought over Saracassar, a gateway to fifteen hidden galaxies. This resulted in the Siege of Saracassar, a battle so horrible mere words could not describe in. In the end, the Daleks prevailed and the entire population was wiped out or fled, contaminated with pulse energy from pulse waves used in the battle. The Master visited the battle to see the sights, meeting Lyric who he rescued, though he forced her to leave her sister behind if she chose to come with him. (AUDIO: The Scaramancer [+]Loading...["The Scaramancer (audio story)"]) The Master cruelly forced Lyric to relive the siege multiple times until she became numb to the grief, at which point he became bored with her and left her on an ice planet. Lyric subsequently sought fellow survivors of Saracassar, (AUDIO: The Cognition Shift [+]Loading...["The Cognition Shift (audio story)"]) and eventually turned to space piracy, becoming known as the Scaramancer. (AUDIO: The Scaramancer [+]Loading...["The Scaramancer (audio story)"])
According to one source, the planet Saturnyne was a forgotten casualty of the Time War. The planet had been a water world until it was hit by a shockwave of the War's temporal disruption; the world went from a planet filled with sealife to one where its inhabitants, the Saturnyne, evolved without natural laws of evolution. They became strange looking beings that could move from the darkest depths of the seas to dry land. Upon looking at their new forms, the unnatural creatures cursed those who were responsible for their new, semi-humanoid forms. (PROSE: The Monster Vault [+]Loading...["The Monster Vault (novel)"]) Indeed, the Saturnyne matriarch Rosanna Calvierri knew of Gallifrey and the Time War. (TV: The Vampires of Venice [+]Loading...["The Vampires of Venice (TV story)"])
The Master's exploits
Info from Rogue Encounters needs to be added
To the War Master, the conflict was proof that the universe was built on destruction and chaos, fulfillinvg his belief that "life is only made possible by death". (AUDIO: Darkness and Light [+]Loading...["Darkness and Light (audio story)"]) Throughout the War, the War Master saw horrible things (AUDIO: Masterful [+]Loading...["Masterful (audio story)"]) and killed many. While he worked with the Time Lords, (AUDIO: Darkness and Light [+]Loading...["Darkness and Light (audio story)"], et. al) he truthfully served no greater power than himself. (AUDIO: Beneath the Viscoid [+]Loading...["Beneath the Viscoid (audio story)"], The Wrath of Medusa [+]Loading...["The Wrath of Medusa (audio story)"]) Eager to see if he could use War-time inventions to conquer the universe, (AUDIO: Darkness and Light [+]Loading...["Darkness and Light (audio story)"]) he only wanted to end the War to give himself another chance to take over the cosmos. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) To act as diversions from himself during the war, the Master duplicated himself multiple times and gave the duplicates his real memories. (AUDIO: The Kicker [+]Loading...["The Kicker (audio story)"])
The Master was present at the Siege of the Chronotide. There he found himself screaming for the General's mercy when the Multiform closed in. (PROSE: Lords and Masters [+]Loading...["Lords and Masters (short story)"])
While "exploring possibilities", the War Master became stranded in a parallel dimension. When the dimension was invaded by weapons-grade Cybermen of the Cyber-Mainframe 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 Master's universe 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. He reluctantly collaborated with Kate Stewart and Sam Bishop and managed 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 [+]Loading...["Master of Worlds (audio story)"]) He left behind several Wirrn eggs as a "parting gift", leading to a Wirrn invasion UNIT then needed to battle. (AUDIO: Hosts of the Wirrn [+]Loading...["Hosts of the Wirrn (audio story)"])
The Master was part of the Time Lords' Project Blackstar, which involved the destruction of the planet Hydrosa in a weapons test. During the destruction, one native, Illya, saw him up close. (AUDIO: The Edge of Redemption [+]Loading...["The Edge of Redemption (audio story)"]) The Time Lords also destroyed the homeworld of Severine's people, leaving Severine and her mother the only survivors, on the order of the Master. He would later confess he had not understood the extent of their telepathic powers then, revealing he would have tried to exploit them instead if he had. (AUDIO: The Last Line [+]Loading...["The Last Line (audio story)"])
During the War, a Confederation was fighting against the Daleks as well. Wanting to learn about the brainwashing techniques being pioneered on the planet Thabus, the Master moved to infiltrate the world by posing as a Confederation emissary, only for his lie to be revealed. As such, he was tortured by Cato, the inventor of the very techniques he want to study. However, his meddling had allowed Cato's political rival Gallia to begin gaining power. Gallia then freed the Master. The Confederation ultimately collapsed. (AUDIO: The Players [+]Loading...["The Players (audio story)"])
Whilst scavenging battlefield wreckage, the Master fell into a Dalek trap. To escape a Dalek assault squad, he took his TARDIS outside time and space into the Land of Fiction. There he sought the impossible weapons unique to fiction, first by obtaining the Greek Gods' gifts to Perseus and helping Medusa overthrow them, in return directing her to the Land's exit where she destroyed the Daleks following him. (AUDIO: The Wrath of Medusa [+]Loading...["The Wrath of Medusa (audio story)"]) Using Mount Olympus as a base, the Master subsequently pillaged the works of Hans Christian Andersen, encountering his own sentient shadow in the process, (AUDIO: The Shadow Master [+]Loading...["The Shadow Master (audio story)"]) and then sought the fragments of the Encyclopaedia Omnia, which were split across multiple variations of Professor James Moriarty. (AUDIO: The Adventure of the Deceased Doctor [+]Loading...["The Adventure of the Deceased Doctor (audio story)"]) Finally the Master targeted Dorian Gray, planning to transfer his immortal lifeforce into himself, however his plan failed due to Sibyl Vane betraying him. Wounded, the Master decided he'd lingered long enough in fiction and returned to face reality. (AUDIO: The Master of Dorian Gray [+]Loading...["The Master of Dorian Gray (audio story)"])
The Master embroiled the neutral Code Purgers of Chift in the Time War, by deliberately infecting his own brain with self-duplicating code. In an attempt to cure him to save his mind, purger Mendrix wiped the code out across the universe, in doing so slightly shifting the outcome of numerous battles between ships using the code. With their neutrality broken, the Master departed, anticipating Chift would soon be targeted for an attack. (AUDIO: The Walls of Absence [+]Loading...["The Walls of Absence (audio story)"])
The Master's TARDIS was drawn off course by a temporal beacon upon landing on Mehr Kee, which had previously been caught in a battle in the Time War as both sides had been drawn there by the beacon. The Master sailed to the beacon to recover his ship with the aid of a captain, travelling back through time as they approached it. They arrived before it was activated, and so the Master lit it so it would draw his TARDIS to him, in doing so instigating the battle which would devastate Mehr Kee. (AUDIO: The Long Despair [+]Loading...["The Long Despair (audio story)"])
The Master exploited an AI tool, Maisu, to build his influence over a planet's population. When one developer, Alexander Bennett remained resistant to it, the Master personally manipulated events in his life to break him and make him controllable. (AUDIO: The Life and Loves of Mr Alexander Bennett [+]Loading...["The Life and Loves of Mr Alexander Bennett (audio story)"])
The Master discovered one of his duplicates had infiltrated the Crane Institute in a sector he was now interested in. He tipped off a Dalek ally, the Temporal Inquisition, and when they failed to dispose of the duplicate, he arrived personally to kill him. (AUDIO: The Kicker [+]Loading...["The Kicker (audio story)"])
New forms of biological warfare
Time Lord genetic experiments
As noted by the War Master, both sides investigated gene splicing and manipulation to create new creatures for use in the Time War, (AUDIO: Concealed Weapon [+]Loading...["Concealed Weapon (audio story)"]) with the Time Lord military also coming to look for ways to revive their soldiers from death (AUDIO: Legion of the Lost [+]Loading...["Legion of the Lost (audio story)"]) and applied bio-technology to them. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"])
The Celestial Intervention Agency augmented a highly psychic Time Lord, Quarren Maguire, to have reality-changing abilities. Quarren saw too much potential for his power to be abused by the Time Lords so used his abilities to erase all evidence of his existence from the timelines and then used a Chameleon Arch to hide as a human, unaware of his true nature. (AUDIO: One Life [+]Loading...["One Life (audio story)"])
Eager to get involved in the War's new forms of biological warfare and experimentation, (AUDIO: Concealed Weapon [+]Loading...["Concealed Weapon (audio story)"]) the Master was commissioned by the Time Lords to create the ultimate biological weapon, so he established a facility on Xenotopia and personally recruited all the scientists to work there. (AUDIO: Darkness and Light [+]Loading...["Darkness and Light (audio story)"]) He spent years collecting samples from across the universe, (AUDIO: The Missing Link [+]Loading...["The Missing Link (audio story)"]) beginning with Alice Pritchard, a Chronopsycho who had fallen to Earth in the 20th century and been adopted in England, (AUDIO: The Survivor [+]Loading...["The Survivor (audio story)"]) before acquiring Giuseppe Sabatini from 1890s America (AUDIO: The Coney Island Chameleon [+]Loading...["The Coney Island Chameleon (audio story)"]) and secretly incubated an extinct ancient species in two members of River Song's expedition on the Utorpy, only her for to stop him from gaining control over the creature, forcing him to flee with her in an escape pod. (AUDIO: Concealed Weapon [+]Loading...["Concealed Weapon (audio story)"])
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For the final component of his creature, the Master tricked Alice into using her psychic abilities to lure the Eighth Doctor to his facility. Unknowingly Alice psychically drained the Doctor as he sought to rescue her, resulting in him collapsing whilst confronting the Master. The Master then extracted cells from the Doctor, which were useful as they had been exposed to the Time Vortex more than any other. (AUDIO: The Missing Link [+]Loading...["The Missing Link (audio story)"]) The result of the Master's experiment was the Rage, but it was let loose prematurely when a Time Lord agent, who was embedded among the Master's employees, attempted to extract it. The Master arranged the Doctor's escape, intending that the Rage would absorb him and thus make itself controllable, only for the Rage to absorb him as well. Together the Doctor and Master broke free, destroying the Rage, and the Master fled, activating a device he'd implanted in the Doctor to wipe his memory of the incident as he did so. (AUDIO: Darkness and Light [+]Loading...["Darkness and Light (audio story)"])
The Time Lords also developed a virus for use against Daleks, of which the Master was aware. (AUDIO: Unfinished Business [+]Loading...["Unfinished Business (audio story)"]) At the same time as the Master's work, the Daleks and Time Lords alike had begun to splice different alien species together within the Time Vortex itself, all in the name of winning the War despite their efforts creating impossible and mindless creatures. (AUDIO: Concealed Weapon [+]Loading...["Concealed Weapon (audio story)"]) On behalf of the Time Lords, the Master also created war seeds, humanoid weapons based on himself, and sent them to worlds with a proven aptitude for war to convert the people there into the perfect warriors loyal to the Time Lords. One was sent to Earth in 1985 but failed to blossom after nuclear war didn't break out, becoming weak and amnesiac. (AUDIO: War Seed [+]Loading...["War Seed (audio story)"])
Dalek genetic experiments
Looking for new weapons with which to win the War, (AUDIO: Concealed Weapon [+]Loading...["Concealed Weapon (audio story)"]) the Dalek Emperor asked Davros to build a new Dalek mutant to use against the Time Lords. Inspired by how the Doctor disliked his own kind but helped them nonetheless, Davros created the Nightmare Child and dubbed it "the perfect Dalek". This resulted in a creature that completely hated the Daleks and as a result its own form, prompting it to massacre Daleks. The Daleks committed resources to hunting it down, resulting in the Time Lords experiencing weeks of silence on the front, until Davros successfully lured it to the Gate of Elysium where there was antimatter that could destroy it, at the apparent cost of his own life. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"])
The Dalek Overseer, itself a product of genetic slicing, was designed to be a genius in the field of genetic manipulation, additionally being assigned command over operations on the Ogron homeworld because the simple biology of the Ogrons made them effective test subjects for its efforts. Although most captured Time Lords were sent for interrogation, there were rare times when the Overseer had a chance to experiment and work on captured Gallifreyans.
The Overseer found it was in need of foundational data to begin its experiments on the Ogrons, resulting in the Dalek inserting the primitive humanoids into past Dalek campaigns (AUDIO: Planet of the Ogrons [+]Loading...["Planet of the Ogrons (audio story)"]) like the Time Paradox Incident and Operation Divide and Conquer. (TV: Day of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Day of the Daleks (TV story)"], Frontier in Space [+]Loading...["Frontier in Space (TV story)"]) The Overseer found their presence had no impact on the events' outcomes.
Creating "crab gods" that fought past the "rock gods" guarding the Ogrons, the Overseer ordered the capture of Ogrons who lived near its base. The Overseer became particularly interested in developing soldiers who were immune to fallout from temporal energy, working past "the very laws of nature" because the experiment would deny entropy and, theoretically, allow the genetically-restructured cells to ignore the years that temporal fallout would normally inflict upon on someone. On one occasion, after forcing an Ogron through the pain of a complete genetic restructure, the Overseer subjected it to a bombardment of temporal energy and watched as the Ogron aged to dust, teaching the Overseer to adapt its experiments as it ordered a new Ogron to arrive with cleaning equipment. Another of the Overseer's experiment involved duplicating other lifeforms into some test subjects. (AUDIO: Planet of the Ogrons [+]Loading...["Planet of the Ogrons (audio story)"])
The Daleks tested a weapon which rendered the people of the Stagnant Protocol immortal, though still able to be wounded fatally, and sterile. The Master speculated this was an attempt to make them more like Daleks. (AUDIO: Unfinished Business [+]Loading...["Unfinished Business (audio story)"]) The Time Lords, who the people of the Protocol believed were responsible for the weapon, responded to the development by confining the entire Protocol in a time lock. (AUDIO: The Sincerest Form of Flattery [+]Loading...["The Sincerest Form of Flattery (audio story)"])
The Master's final plans
The Cognition Shift
The Master planned to use the Cognition Shift to transfer his mind into the Dalek pathweb to take control of the Daleks for himself. He obtained the Infinity Chip from Skaro, hiding it on Redemption, (AUDIO: The Cognition Shift [+]Loading...["The Cognition Shift (audio story)"]) and recovered the body of Cardinal Magos, deliberately leaving an artron energy trail for the Eighth Doctor to follow. In Magos' old laboratory on Kurnos 5, the Master spent decades seeking a descendant of Magos into who he could resurrect the Cardinal's mind. He finally succeeded, learning the Cognition Shift was hidden in the Lehar system, just as the Doctor arrived. Knowing the Lehar system was Dalek territory carefully monitored by the Time Lords, he used Magos' technology to swap his and the Doctor's minds and stole the Doctor's TARDIS to reach Lehar.
As he'd anticipated, the Celestial Intervention Agency detected the presence of two TARDISes on Kurnos 5, only to find the Doctor in the Master's body. (AUDIO: The Castle of Kurnos 5 [+]Loading...["The Castle of Kurnos 5 (audio story)"]) After multiple "diabolical" adventures in the Doctor's body, the Master eventually used his reputation to create a refugee camp on Nastrum, where the Cognition Shift was located, and manipulated the refugees to obtain technology he needed for him. He employed Dorada to fetch the Infinity Chip. (AUDIO: The Cognition Shift [+]Loading...["The Cognition Shift (audio story)"]) In the Master's body, the Doctor persuaded Narvin to release him from CIA custody and let him track down the Master in the Lehar system. (AUDIO: The Castle of Kurnos 5 [+]Loading...["The Castle of Kurnos 5 (audio story)"]) Narvin furnished him with a million credits which the Doctor used to hire a pilot, Morski, and assembled a crew to reclaim Morski's ship. (AUDIO: The Edge of Redemption [+]Loading...["The Edge of Redemption (audio story)"])
Headed for the Lehar system, the Doctor discovered Dorada had stowed away to return to Nastrum and encountered the Scaramancer, (AUDIO: The Scaramancer [+]Loading...["The Scaramancer (audio story)"]) who he convinced of his true identity. On Nastrum, the Master prepared the Cognition Shift, testing it on Dorada whose mind he transferred into a bird revealing his true identity to her. The Doctor and the Scaramancer reached him in time and sabotaged his scheme, with the Doctor manipulating the Shift to swap their minds back and using the Scaramancer's lingering pulse energy to neutralise the whole device. His scheme foiled, the Master hypnotised Morski to take him back to his TARDIS on Kurnos 5. (AUDIO: The Cognition Shift [+]Loading...["The Cognition Shift (audio story)"])
Subversion of Dalek history
The War Master planted his agent Crazlus in the Celestial Intervention Agency on Gallifrey as part of a long-term plan to obtain the Anti-Genesis Codes. (AUDIO: He Who Wins [+]Loading...["He Who Wins (audio story)"]) Crazlus infiltrated the CIA for a considerable period, becoming a confidante of Acting Coordinator Narvin. The Master used Crazlus to reach Gallifrey, by fatally poisoning himself so he would be dead upon arrival on the planet until Crazlus revived him under the pretence of disposing of his body on Narvin's instructions. The Master then had Crazlus trick Narvin into checking the security of the Anti-Genesis codes, allowing him to bypass said security and steal the codes right in front of the Coordinator.
Using the Codes, the Master interfered with the creation of the Daleks on Skaro, arranging the death of Davros in a Thal bombardment, (AUDIO: From the Flames [+]Loading...["From the Flames (audio story)"]) and supplanting his place in the Scientific Elite. He created his own variant of the Daleks and accelerated their rise to power. President Livia and Narvin assigned Lamarius to travel to Skaro to stop him, but she was unsuccessful. Having seen to the extermination of the Thals and mutation of the Kaleds, the Master kept his Daleks entombed in the bunker and left them for a few years to develop. (AUDIO: The Master's Dalek Plan [+]Loading...["The Master's Dalek Plan (audio story)"]) He returned a few years later and arranged for his Daleks to ambush and exterminate the Fourth Doctor and his companions upon their arrival on Skaro.
A temporal shockwave was unleashed by the Master's alterations, threatening the existence of both sides of the Time War. Aboard the last Dalek timeship, the Dalek Time Strategist recruited the Master of a parallel universe. As the temporal shockwave altered Gallifrey's history repeatedly, the Strategist and parallel Master sought to identify the progenitor, however every candidate they found and exterminated proved incorrect and the timeship's power was limited as the original Daleks disappeared from existence. (AUDIO: Shockwave [+]Loading...["Shockwave (TWM audio story)"])
The Master's Daleks conquered the altered universe. The triumphant Master visited Gallifrey and found the shockwave had left the planet home to simple farmers, who he deemed "quite pathetic". The parallel Master and Time Strategist began stoking the Master's paranoia that his Daleks would inevitably turn on him and eventually he was convinced to undo this timeline. The Master took them back in time to the moment he had decided to have Krazlus infiltrate the CIA, with the two Masters urging the younger Master to abandon his Anti-Genesis plan. The past Master was reluctant, however the Strategist simply exterminated Crazlus and all the events which had resulted from Crazlus' infiltration were undone. The Master fled in his TARDIS, with the Time Strategist ordering the restored Daleks to pursue and capture him. (AUDIO: He Who Wins [+]Loading...["He Who Wins (audio story)"]) The Master was pulled out of his TARDIS by transmat, leaving his ship to crash on Gardezza. (AUDIO: Beneath the Viscoid [+]Loading...["Beneath the Viscoid (audio story)"])
Conscripted by the CIA
After Coordinator Romana was informed of Ace's "death", she decided to get the help of the Master. (AUDIO: Soldier Obscura [+]Loading...["Soldier Obscura (audio story)"]) The Master was on Gardezza when he received the summons to Gallifrey, posing as the Doctor to gain the trust of the Gardezzans and access the TARDIS he'd been separated from (AUDIO: Beneath the Viscoid [+]Loading...["Beneath the Viscoid (audio story)"]) after an encounter with a parallel Master and an annulled future self. (AUDIO: He Who Wins [+]Loading...["He Who Wins (audio story)"]) After betraying the Gardezzans and the Daleks he'd temporarily allied with, the Master retrieved his TARDIS and used it to return to Gallifrey. (AUDIO: Beneath the Viscoid [+]Loading...["Beneath the Viscoid (audio story)"])
Romana sent the Master and Leela to interrogate Finnian Valentine for the location of a power source that could fuel the Time Lord energy banks, (AUDIO: The Devil You Know [+]Loading...["The Devil You Know (audio story)"]) the Heart. (AUDIO: The Good Master [+]Loading...["The Good Master (audio story)"]) They discovered Valentine has been split in two separate beings by a temporal weapon he'd deployed. Discovering the Heart was on Arcking, the Master killed both Valentines. He subsequently betrayed Leela on the return flight by expelling her into the Time Vortex and headed to Arcking by himself. (AUDIO: The Devil You Know [+]Loading...["The Devil You Know (audio story)"])
Leela was saved from the Vortex by the Trell who brought her to their dimension, Nateus. Leela subsequently foiled a War Council agent, Lady Zeno, who was attempting to infiltrate Nateus, preventing the War spreading into that dimension. (AUDIO: Mother Tongue [+]Loading...["Mother Tongue (audio story)"]) Leela subsequently travelled to Njagilheim, which had been the site of a battle in the Time War leaving temporal storms in the skies, where she inadvertently created a time loop. (AUDIO: Nevernor [+]Loading...["Nevernor (audio story)"]) Leela eventually reached Unity. (AUDIO: Unity [+]Loading...["Unity (audio story)"])
Rescuing Cole Jarnish
The Master had in fact hatched a plan to alter history with a Time Lord weapon known as the Heavenly Paradigm, which needed a great deal of temporal power to function. As such, the weapon had yet to be used against Skaro to rewrite Dalek history. However, the Master hoped to use the paradigm to rewrite universal history, preventing the War and giving him a chance to rule over the universe. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) The Master tried multiple times to steal the Heart from Arcking, bringing the War to its temporal grace sanctuary, where a hospital had been established by non-combatants. When Arcking was eventually overrun by a Dalek invasion force that was pursuing him, the Master saved Cole Jarnish's life by taking him on as a companion as he made his escape, having also promised the young man a chance to save those affected by the War. (AUDIO: The Good Master [+]Loading...["The Good Master (audio story)"]) Having saved Cole from his original fate of being killed by the Daleks, the Master had made him a walking paradox and the key to his plan to power the Heavenly Paradigm. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"])
After travelling together for a while, avoiding helping others from the War, the Master offered Cole a challenge: to pick out a planet in peril and try and save its people from destruction with whatever means he saw fit. Cole choose a primitive farming planet, and the Master, claiming he could not interfere because he was a Time Lord, left him to his own devices, establishing a vineyard. (AUDIO: The Sky Man [+]Loading...["The Sky Man (audio story)"]) They developed a reputation as the "Sky Men" who promised to save the world, but the Master still made no effort to help Cole in such War-related matters. As he established his vineyard, the Master and Cole took a night to watch a meteor storm, which the Master assured Cole had nothing to do with the War, as an attempt to forget about the conflict and relax. Later, the Master and a local woman named Fenice discovered an alien entity, which he continued to claim was not related to the War, had fallen to the planet in the storm and was now spreading, transforming the landscape to a new form. He overwhelmed the entity after feigning letting it have him, with it unable to cope with his mind, destroying it. (AUDIO: Boundaries [+]Loading...["Boundaries (audio story)"])
Shortly afterwards, the Master was abducted by the High Vectors to face their justice for what he had done in the War. (AUDIO: The Players [+]Loading...["The Players (audio story)"]) The Master knew the Vectors as a race so old even the Time Lords respected them, but the Master believed they would eventually turn on Gallifrey for his people's recent actions. (AUDIO: The Last Line [+]Loading...["The Last Line (audio story)"]) First, he was placed in the Forest of Penitence as a chance for forgiveness by becoming part of the trees, but he rejected the Forest's influence and so was placed on trial, (AUDIO: The Forest of Penitence [+]Loading...["The Forest of Penitence (audio story)"]) telling the court of his visit to Thabus and recent defeat of the entity as his defence. The Vectors demanded a witness to verify his account of his character, so he suggested the Doctor. (AUDIO: The Players [+]Loading...["The Players (audio story)"], Boundaries [+]Loading...["Boundaries (audio story)"]) A telepathic summons was sent, embroiling the Tenth Doctor from the post-Time War universe by dragging him through the time lock.
Driven by the chance to save the Master, who by his time was dead, after he was sentenced to erasure, the Doctor played into the Master's hand by buying him time in a failed attempt to rescue him from erase by paradox inhibitors and forcing the High Vectors' telepath servant, Severine, to split her efforts containing him too. The Master was able to connect his mind to the Vector generator defining the High Vectors' reality and warp it to chaos, returning all the criminals they had erased from time at once to create a paradox that would destroy the Vectors. As the entire sector of spacetime began to implode thousands of times, destroying the entire Vector species in the process, he escaped in the Doctor's TARDIS, returning briefly to collect the Doctor himself, and then located his own TARDIS. Unwilling to face the Time War again as the timelines began to reset, the Doctor escaped before the time lock closed instead of chasing after the Master. (AUDIO: The Last Line [+]Loading...["The Last Line (audio story)"])
Targeting the Stagnant Protocol
Whilst running his vineyard, the Master targeted the Stagnant Protocol under the guise of a Time Lord ambassador. His initial attempts to find allies in the Empress' court were all rebuffed and he encountered a rival in Calantha. The Master finally convinced Prince Gardam he could rise to Emperor as a champion of the people, but a plague started by Calantha caused crisis which she exploited to have Gardam banished and to rise to Empress. The Master conceded defeat in his battle, but vowed to win the War. (AUDIO: The Sincerest Form of Flattery [+]Loading...["The Sincerest Form of Flattery (audio story)"])
Recognising the plague was a weaker form of a Time Lord virus designed to attack Daleks, (AUDIO: Unfinished Business [+]Loading...["Unfinished Business (audio story)"]) the Master obtained a vial of the plague from UNIT by manipulating Jo Grant and exploited Nyssa's research station to experiment on the plague. (AUDIO: A Quiet Night In [+]Loading...["A Quiet Night In (audio story)"], The Orphan [+]Loading...["The Orphan (audio story)"]) He returned to the court and unleashed the true plague on the Stagnant Protocol homeworld, creating a crisis which forced Calantha to appoint him Regent Chancellor and enabled him to grow his influence in court. After he created a cure but refused to reveal its composition, Calantha moved against him and had him imprisoned, claiming to the public he'd retreated to seclusion. Whilst she tortured the Master, Calantha was approached by an emissary of the Daleks, Lady Sumultu, who promised her masters would work on reversing the damage done by the weapon in return for the Master's gateway into the time lock being widened so Dalek forces could pass through the Protocol.
Calantha agreed and, after the Master faked his death, planned to reveal the deal at his public funeral. The Master revealed himself and exposed the Daleks' true involvement in the weapon and that they were intending to invade. As a Dalek fleet descended, he used his control of the gateway to narrow it to destroy them and revealed Calantha's initial releasing of the plague to the furious public. With Calantha forced to flee, the Master assumed control of the Protocol as Emperor, but promised to leave them to their own devices for the most part as their terror would keep the nobility obedient. (AUDIO: Unfinished Business [+]Loading...["Unfinished Business (audio story)"])
The Heavenly Paradigm
Meanwhile, Cole repeatedly tried to bring hope to the farming world, even as the population began to suffer from the impact of Temporal Decay caused by debris from the War. Ultimately, his final attempt to save the peaceful population of the planet backfired when he inadvertently turned them into a race of warlike semi-robotic creatures (AUDIO: The Sky Man [+]Loading...["The Sky Man (audio story)"]) who spread into the wider universe seeking retribution. Like Cole, the people of the planet were supposed to have been killed by the War, thus meaning that Cole, himself a paradox, had created a paradox. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) The Master rescued Cole in his TARDIS and assured Cole that he would help him to undo his mistake. (AUDIO: The Sky Man [+]Loading...["The Sky Man (audio story)"])
The Master and Cole travelled to No.24 Marigold Lane, where the Time Lord Tandeeka kept the Heavenly Paradigm and protected it with brainwashed residents. Using Cole's paradoxical temporal energy to power the paradigm, the Master sacrificed his companion to try and create his better timeline without the War. The plan backfired, however, and the Master unintentionally caused both the Time Lords and Daleks to win several battles they had once lost. Because of this, he then saw the Dalek Emperor take control of the Time Lords' Cruciform, taking it from a secret Time Lord base. Knowing it to be a power far worse than even the Heavenly Paradigm, the Master believed the Time War was lost if the Cruciform was under Dalek control, (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) even foreseeing that he would be killed by the Emperor if he stayed. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) The Master's diary claimed the Time Lords had specifically sent him to the Cruciform to stop the Dalek Emperor. (PROSE: The Secret Diary of the Master [+]Loading...["The Secret Diary of the Master (short story)"])
Achieving control over the Cruciform was considered a turning point in the War for the Daleks. With the Cruciform under their control, the Daleks were able to take the conflict to Gallifrey itself, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"]) which came to be the final battlefront of the War. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) At the same time as the Master's mission to the Cruciform, the Doctor was tasked with sealing the rift of the Medusa Cascade; (PROSE: The Secret Diary of the Master [+]Loading...["The Secret Diary of the Master (short story)"]) which the Master learned the Doctor achieved singlehandedly. (TV: Last of the Time Lords [+]Loading...["Last of the Time Lords (TV story)"]) A post-Time War Dalek Caan, having entered the War to rescue Davros from the Gates of Elysium, watched as the Doctor did so. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"])
Tired of the fighting and fill with fear (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) upon witnessing the Dalek Emperor take control over the Cruciform, (TV: The Sound of Drums [+]Loading...["The Sound of Drums (TV story)"]) the Master fled the War, escaping in his TARDIS to the Silver Devastation towards the end of the universe to hide. After ensuring his TARDIS dematerialised to a random point in time, the Master used a Chameleon Arch to turn himself into a human infant named Yana, (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"], TV: Utopia [+]Loading...["Utopia (TV story)"]) hoping the disguise would ensure neither side could find him. (TV: The Sound of Drums [+]Loading...["The Sound of Drums (TV story)"]) Believing the War was still a great chance to make plans, the Master, from inside the arch, told the infant that, once the War was over, the universe would need him to return. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) Later in the Time War, the War Doctor was tasked with finding his old friend but failed. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Return of Rassilon
Two months into the War, the Daleks discovered Project Revenant and thought it would be a way to convert Time Lords into Daleks, launching an assault into its pocket dimension. At the same time, Livia tended her resignation as President in favour of Admiral Valerian. Fearing he was a War Council puppet, Romana challenged the succession to an election. During the campaign, Romana used a back-channel setup by Braxiatel to secretly 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, but failed to make it see reason. This act caused her to lose the presidential election when Valerian exposed it at the presidential debate. The CIA managed to stop the Daleks from using Project Revenant against them or to access Gallifrey by arranging the pocket dimension's destruction, killing the Dalek Supreme and the rest of its taskforce.
Learning of the Supreme's death, the Emperor demanded the fleet chose a new Dalek to hold the title, while the Dalek Time Strategist began to devise a new plan for victory. Despite the destruction of the rest of Project Revenant and the loss of the Thirteenth Fleet, Time Lord agent Karla went rogue and took the resurrection engine's core into the Matrix. Upon Valerian's connection to the Matrix in the presidential inauguration, the War Council enacted their true scheme and used the power in the core to retrieve one of the oldest imprints from the Matrix: Time Lord founder Rassilon. Valerian was forced to regenerate, with his body being possessed by Rassilon. Resurrected, Rassilon was declared Lord President Eternal. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"])
Being part of a conflict full of ever-rewritten events, even post-War Time Lords were actually unable to place when they had resurrected their founder, with one authour merely writing that he was restored "at some stage" of the War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) Towards the end of the conflict, the War Doctor knew that the Time Lord founder had been resurrected in "the early days" of the fighting, (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) while post-War Dalek historians placed his return to life after the War Doctor's regeneration (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) in the Fifth Segment. (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]) Rassilon established a new regime, making Livia his Prime Minister, and pardoned Romana from the charges of treason she'd faced for negotiating with the Emperor. Rassilon announced the establishment of an Interior Defence Unit, commanded by Cardinal Mantus, to replace the Chancellery Guard. At this time a future incarnation of General Trave arrived on Gallifrey, killing a Guard on arrival, and warned his past self that Rassilon's regime would lead to Gallifrey's fall. He attempted to deliver a warning to Narvin too, but perished in the process. Trave was held accountable for his future self's crimes and publicly executed on Rassilon's orders. (AUDIO: Havoc [+]Loading...["Havoc (audio story)"])
By Rassilon's reign, the the General, the Ollistra, and Harlan had all been sent away from Gallifrey to the front lines. (AUDIO: Assassins [+]Loading...["Assassins (audio story)"]) While his ideology was outdated and brutal, it made Rassilon the prefect president to lead the Time Lords through the greatest battle they had ever faced. A historical chronicle recounted that great heroes rose and fell during the War, with it considering Rassilon among those who rose. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) In the first year of the War, Rassilon wiped out the Tharils, the Porfue and the Krajonnu so that they didn't threaten the Time Lords' supremacy; (PROSE: Lords and Masters [+]Loading...["Lords and Masters (short story)"]) the Tharils, who were encountered by the Fourth Doctor and Romana, (TV: Warriors' Gate [+]Loading...["Warriors' Gate (TV story)"]) had come to be treated as "valued allies" with their own embassy on Gallifrey after Romana became President in the pre-war period. (PROSE: Lungbarrow [+]Loading...["Lungbarrow (novel)"]) The Daleks eventually began to refer to Rassilon by a name that would horrify even his own guards. (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"])
Several months into the Time War, in 0.71 of the First Segment, Daleks from the future tunneled 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 [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"])
The planet Ysalus became embroiled in the War after both the CIA and War Council targeted it for interventions to ensure it did not fall into the hands of the Daleks, due to it having resources vital to fuel the Daleks' time machines. The missions were intended to turn the tide of the civil war to a more desirable outcome, but they instead caused the civil war on the planet to escalate, forcing the CIA to freeze Ysalus in a time freeze to prevent its devastation. (AUDIO: Partisans [+]Loading...["Partisans (audio story)"]) Rassilon subsequently decided to make an example of Ysalus, arranging for its destruction by intentionally breaching the time freeze to attract scavengers, thus forcing the War Council to erase the planet from time to ensure the resources wouldn't reach the Daleks.
After being contacted by Ysalus native Kynla Shen, General Dalia worked with the CIA to organise an evacuation, with agent Eris working with Kynla for a year to gather citizens. They saved a handful of citizens from erasure, but were too late for Kynla herself. Afterwards Romana discovered Eris had helped Kynla send a signal across Time calling for a resistance against the Time Lords. She had the signal preserved from erasure and helped Eris flee Gallifrey, believing he'd done the right thing. After the incident Narvin noticed Dalia had disappeared. He was told by Mantus that there was no Dalia on the War Council or on Gallifrey anymore.
The Sicari collective received Kynla's signal and accepted her call to arms, mobilising to Kasterborous. They targeted Rassilon, (AUDIO: Collateral [+]Loading...["Collateral (audio story)"]) beginning incursions on Gallifrey which were fought off by the IDU.
After learning he'd arranged the destruction of Ysalus, Romana began planning an assassination of Rassilon, receiving support from Livia who'd become disillusioned with him. They supplied with Gallifreyan technology to the Sicari to aid their breaches of Gallifrey's defences and manipulated the incursions to get Rassilon alone. At the same time, Rassilon and Mantus attempted to win round Narvin to their side by promising to restore his regeneration cycle, however he realised what Romana had been plotting and interrupted the process to go to her aid. The Sicari succeeded in wounding Rassilon's current incarnation, however failed to kill him completely. As Guards reached him, Rassilon was delighted that this generation's Time Lords were as cunning as his era and accepted Livia back into the fold, whilst Mantus arranged for Romana and Narvin to leave Gallifrey as exiles in a stolen TARDIS, believing executing them would only make them martyrs, and the CIA was subsumed into the IDU. To reinforce his power, Rassilon's regeneration was broadcast across Gallifrey. Narvin and Romana resolved to begin searching for Leela. (AUDIO: Assassins [+]Loading...["Assassins (audio story)"])
Operation Fury was subsequently initiated to study the Sicari. Dreadnought Septima was dispatched back in time to the Capristan system, identified as their origin point, to capture and study as many Sicari as possible. One Sicari captured during the incursions was kept as a control subject however began to mutate after exposure to the Time Vortex, gaining abilities to manipulate time and naming himself Qatal. An attack by ships from Capristan IV detonated the Dreadnought's core however Qatal froze the implosion in time to save Science Officer Trellick. He and Trellick were the sole survivors and fought each other endlessly.
In their exile, Romana and Narvin first arrived in the Capristan System and found the aftermath of Operation Fury. They ended the fight between Trellick and Qatal. (AUDIO: Hostiles [+]Loading...["Hostiles (audio story)"]) They then encountered the Orrovix in the time loop on Njagilheim. (AUDIO: Nevernor [+]Loading...["Nevernor (audio story)"])
The Eighth Doctor in the crossfire
Hunt for Quarren
Continuing to have no part in the Time War, the Eighth Doctor began travelling with a human companion, Sheena. However, with reality shifting around them due to the War, he could not remember how they met nor how long they had known each other. (AUDIO: The Starship of Theseus [+]Loading...["The Starship of Theseus (audio story)"])
The discrepancy in the timelines caused by Quarren Maguire erasing himself was noticed by the Chancellor, who assigned Aymor to trace the erased weapon and either claim or neutralise it. (AUDIO: One Life [+]Loading...["One Life (audio story)"]) Quarren and his wife Rupa went on the luxury spaceliner which the Eighth Doctor and Sheena happened to be investigating disappearances on, bringing the Time War to the Doctor. Aymor located Quarren yet was pursued and wounded by Daleks, so resolved to kill him to prevent him falling into the enemy's hands. Sheena, meanwhile, continued to lose herself to the War's shifts in reality, with her name constantly changing until she nor the Doctor could remember what it was.
Aymor arrived on the Theseus but died before he could shoot Quarren. As the spaceliner was approached by Daleks who had been 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 aboard one of their time machines with Quarren, Rupa, Bliss, and Jefferson. (AUDIO: The Starship of Theseus [+]Loading...["The Starship of Theseus (audio story)"]) They crashed on a jungle planet ravaged with temporal distortion, and were guided to a safe zone by a wounded Dalek which had amnesia. In the safe zone they found wreckage from the Theseus, including the Doctor's TARDIS. Time Lord forces, commanded by Cardinal Ollistra, arrived on the planet as part of a trap for a Dalek fleet, initiating the battle which caused the distortion. After the wounded Dalek was destroyed, she had the Doctor and his companions captured, intending to press him into service. (AUDIO: Echoes of War [+]Loading...["Echoes of War (audio story)"])
They were taken to a base on the Moon of Tenacity where the Doctor was enrolled in training program of Commander Harlan, whilst his companions were held for processing. The Doctor proved a disruptive influence, in spite of Harlan‘s best efforts to maintain discipline. A Dalek hunter drone arrived on the Moon and identified the Time Lord presence, prompting a full evacuation as the Daleks launched an invasion, (AUDIO: The Conscript [+]Loading...["The Conscript (audio story)"]) kicking off the Battle of Tenacity. (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror [+]Loading...["The Lords of Terror (audio story)"]) The Doctor was allowed to return to his TARDIS and reunited with his companions, however before they could leave he was confronted by Ollistra who threatened to force the Doctor's regeneration in hopes of his next incarnation being more compliant. (AUDIO: The Conscript [+]Loading...["The Conscript (audio story)"]) Before she could carry out her threat, the Daleks landed on the Moon forcing her to flee with the Doctor and his companions in his TARDIS, which was still recovering from exposure to distortion.
As the Doctor navigated his struggling ship through the reversal wave the Daleks had unleashed on the Tenacity system to break the Time Lord base's defences, Ollistra identified Quarren as the missing weapon. He refused to return to his Time Lord identity however. The Doctor's TARDIS escaped Tenacity and crashed on Jedris in the 53rd Segment of Time, where Ollistra summoned Time Lord forces via a hypercube. The Time Lords engaged the pursuing Daleks, accelerating time on Jedris. As the landscape shifted, the Doctor and his TARDIS were lost and Ollistra used a temporal flare to attract a Battle TARDIS to escape with his companions. Quarren refused to let the Doctor die and returned to his previous identity to save him. Quarren rescued the Doctor and his TARDIS, leaving Bliss aboard as he thought he'd like to keep her as a companion, and then completely erased himself from existence. (AUDIO: One Life [+]Loading...["One Life (audio story)"])
Travels with Bliss
Information from The Eighth Doctor: Time War: Volume Three needs to be added
Travelling together, Bliss and the Doctor visited her home planet Derilobia to inform her family she was safe. They discovered Derilobia had been taken over by Time Lords led by Commander Carvil, with its recent history rewritten, causing Bliss' family to be erased. Carvil had placed each city in domes, each building a single rocket to strike back against the Daleks. The Doctor confronted Carvil and his superior, Major Tamasan, who had regenerated from her fourth incarnation during the Battle of Tenacity. It was exposed that Carvil had lied about there being a Dalek attack on Derilobia in the past in order to have an excuse to take over the planet and its vast mineral deposits. He was blinded by his hatred of the Daleks after losing his family and orchestrated the takeover to create new missiles, which could wipe out the Dalek ships, in the vast planetary factory he'd turned the world into.
The Doctor refused to believe sacrificing a whole world was worth defeating the Daleks and rejected Carvil's attempts at explaining himself. At the same time, a Dalek agent managed to make contact and warn her masters about the Time Lords' arsenal on Derilobia. As the Daleks invaded, Tamasan organised an evacuation of Time Lord forces, leaving Carvil trapped in his TARDIS in the atmosphere as a distraction, with Tamasan also robbing power from Carvil's TARDIS to power the wider Time Lord force's escape. (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror [+]Loading...["The Lords of Terror (audio story)"]) Carvil nonetheless survived and later re-emerged as the leader of the Clock-People. (PROSE: Out of the Box [+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"]) The Doctor and Bliss, who was furious that her entire past no longer existed because of the Time Lords, fled the planet as well. (AUDIO: The Lords of Terror [+]Loading...["The Lords of Terror (audio story)"])
The Doctor and Bliss encountered the Salvage Train which was picking up refugees from the conflict in hopes of finding somewhere safe. They helped stabilise and camouflage it so the train could continue its travels in secrecy. (AUDIO: Salvage [+]Loading...["Salvage (audio story)"])
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The Doctor and Bliss were again embroiled in the War when the Twelve approached them to help investigate the arrival of Doctor Ogron on Gallifrey in the Doctor's TARDIS. The two Time Lords discovered the experiments that the Dalek Overseer had been carrying out in a Dalek base on the Ogron homeworld, including how it was inserting Ogron brains into captured Battle TARDISes. After uncovering the paradoxical creation of Doctor Ogron, who the Doctor let leave in his TARDIS to complete the loop, Doctor Ogron and Bliss inspired the Ogrons and their "crab gods" to overthrow the Daleks. Before they could leave, however, the Doctor, Bliss and Twelve were captured by a Dalek force that had been sent to relieve the Overseer of command, due to his experiments being seen as an abomination to Dalek purity.
Meanwhile, two Daleks from the Overseer's command cornered the officer and claimed it was "an insult to the Dalek race", ignoring the Overseer's rebuttals by exterminating the "impure" scientist. After the Dalek base on the Ogron homeworld was destroyed by a temporal grenade, (AUDIO: Planet of the Ogrons [+]Loading...["Planet of the Ogrons (audio story)"]) the Doctor, Bliss and the Twelve were held in the Dalek camp on Sangrey, with their memories being suppressed whilst on the surface and only returning when they were periodically teleported to the Dalek ship in orbit for interrogation. With the aid of her other personalities, the amnesiac Twelve was able to devise an escape plan and teleport herself, Bliss and the Doctor to the ship whilst the Daleks were transported to the surface. The Twelve then called for Time Lord forces to rescue them. (AUDIO: In the Garden of Death [+]Loading...["In the Garden of Death (audio story)"])
Ollistra discovered the Daleks had been interrogating the Twelve about her past visit to Uzmal, which the Daleks under the command of the Dalek admiral ravaged and occupied. She recruited the Twelve and the Doctor and Bliss to lead the native resistance, consisting of two submarines, in investigating the Daleks' interest. The Time Lords and resistance discovered the Daleks were attempting to unearth the Ouarshima, a mythical creature which would see possible futures and which the Twelve had made contact with on her last visit, though she struggled to remember it. As the Daleks and submarines battled to reach the creature first, the Twelve began behaving more erratically, which the Doctor realised was actually the Ourashima attempting to communicate through her.
The Daleks were unable to understand the Ourahshima, so decided to kill it at the cost of their entire task force. As it died, the entity offered to confer its powers to the Time Lords, but the Doctor refused, believing they should not have such power, to Ollistra's fury. (AUDIO: Jonah [+]Loading...["Jonah (audio story)"]) The Doctor and Bliss subsequently retrieved his TARDIS from Gallifrey, and Ollistra warned the Doctor about suspicious irregularities in Bliss' timeline before he left. (AUDIO: State of Bliss [+]Loading...["State of Bliss (audio story)"]) After reading Ollistra's report on Uzmal, the General placed the Twelve in stasis in the Omega Arsenal. (AUDIO: Dreadshade [+]Loading...["Dreadshade (audio story)"])
Destruction and rebirth of the Daleks
The Valeyard was reconstituted from the Eighth Doctor when he used a transmat to leave Thellian. (AUDIO: Fugitive in Time [+]Loading...["Fugitive in Time (audio story)"], The War Valeyard [+]Loading...["The War Valeyard (audio story)"]) Major Tamasan retrieved him after hearing of his existence and the High Council debated what to do with him, some favouring his execution owing to his past attempt to assassinate them. It was decided to stabilise his existence in return for the Valeyard fighting for the Time Lords in the Time War. Armed with all the Doctor's experience but without his morality, the Valeyard won many battles for the Time Lords by not hesitating to sacrifice people, planets or star systems when necessary, as the Doctor never would.
The Valeyard was sent on a mission to Dalek-occupied Grahv to secure a superweapon that completely erased species from existence by removing all memory of them, which the Daleks had developed but not deployed due the weapon's effects causing them to forget its existence. After fighting his way into the Dalek fortress, the Valeyard was able to successfully turn the weapon on the Daleks, but with the cost of damaging his own memory, along with the deaths of all the native Grahvians. (AUDIO: The War Valeyard [+]Loading...["The War Valeyard (audio story)"]) The Dalek Time Strategist escaped into a dimensional portal, which it had created to look for alternative forms of Davros, (AUDIO: Palindrome [+]Loading...["Palindrome (audio story)"]) through a multidimensional temporal irregularity, (AUDIO: The Famished Lands [+]Loading...["The Famished Lands (audio story)"]) promising the Valeyard that the Daleks would return stronger and that they would "rain fire" on the Time Lords. The Time Lords subsequently placed Grahv in a time lock, trapping the Valeyard there. (AUDIO: The War Valeyard [+]Loading...["The War Valeyard (audio story)"])
Across the universe, battle fronts fell silent as the Daleks disappeared and conscripted soldiers surrendered to the Time Lords, unable to recall who their superiors had been. The influx of prisoners overwhelmed the Time Lords' prisoner of war camps. Shortly before the Daleks vanished, (AUDIO: Dreadshade [+]Loading...["Dreadshade (audio story)"]) the Time Lord Rasmus regenerated on a battlefield (AUDIO: Light the Flame [+]Loading...["Light the Flame (audio story)"]) but, like the rest of his species, was suddenly unable to remember who the enemy had been. Although the seemingly-over Time War had shifted or removed entire planets, the Time Lords began to decommission the remainders of their War effort, with Rasmus helping in that decomission effort. (AUDIO: Dreadshade [+]Loading...["Dreadshade (audio story)"])
The Doctor and Bliss continued travelling together into post-Time War peacetime, but the Doctor eventually received a psychic vision from the Valeyard. After learning what had happened to the Valeyard from Tamasan, the Doctor and Bliss stole Tamasan's TARDIS to break through the time lock. On Grahv, they discovered the Valeyard was repeating his original mission against recreations of Daleks created from his memories, with his repeated firing affecting his memory so much he believed himself to be the Doctor, and that the Dalek Time Strategist had been there and had escaped. The Doctor and Bliss followed the Strategist through the portal, with the Valeyard deciding to remain trapped on Grahv as in the cycle there he could keep on being the Doctor. (AUDIO: The War Valeyard [+]Loading...["The War Valeyard (audio story)"])
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The Doctor and Bliss found themselves in a parallel universe where Kaleds and Thals lived in peace and Davros had never created the Daleks; their legends claimed their two species had joined together to fight off the Time Lords when they arrived in the distant past. Despite the Doctor and Bliss's efforts, the Time Strategist was able to manipulate Davros into agreeing to recreate the Daleks by merging his universe's Kaleds with echoes of their many parallel selves, which were mostly Daleks. Davros himself began merging with his alternatives, steadily becoming more and more like the Davros of the Doctor's universe. With the Daleks reborn, the Doctor and Bliss escaped back to their universe, intending to warn the Time Lords. (AUDIO: Palindrome [+]Loading...["Palindrome (audio story)"])
From the perspective of the Daleks, their universe's original Davros had already been lost (AUDIO: Palindrome [+]Loading...["Palindrome (audio story)"], Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"]) to the Nightmare Child, yet at least one account established that event had yet to happen for the Doctor. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) The alternate Davros was subsequently used as an anchor by the Time Strategist to generate Daleks from all possible universes, a process he found painful. Davros abandoned the Daleks and arrived in the Doctor's universe via the Gulf of Ithon, arriving on the planet Cosca where he set himself up as a scientist and began converting 40,000 natives into a new form of warrior, a cybernetic gestalt driven by hatred. The Time Strategist later returned to him to extract biodata from him as necessary to create more Daleks. (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"])
Upon arriving on Gallifrey, the Doctor and Bliss found their recent memories lost and fell victim to the side-effects of erasure of the Daleks that was affecting the Time Lords, being unable to recall who the enemy in the Time War had been. The Doctor worked with the General and Cardinal Rasmus to investigate, with him and the General deciding to interrogate the Twelve and Rasmus and Bliss going to a prisoner of war camp. The Doctor and General discovered the Twelve had escaped stasis in the Omega Arsenal by manipulating a Dreadshade and she attempted to force her way onto the High Council with it. The Twelve eventually lost control of the Dreadshade after reminding it of the Daleks, which also restored the Time Lords' memories. After Bliss calmed the Dreadshade, the Doctor took it away from Gallifrey only to finally remember the warning he and Bliss had gone there to give. (AUDIO: Dreadshade [+]Loading...["Dreadshade (audio story)"])
He and Bliss managed to warn the Time Lords as the Dalek armies began to manifest at the Gulf of Ithon. Whilst Rasmus and Tamasan organised an offensive against the Daleks, the Doctor and Bliss travelled to the nearby planet Cosca to warn the natives. They discovered Davros there and witnessed the Time Strategist arrive and extra biodata from him, with the Doctor being pulled back into its enclave outside of the universe when it departed. The Time Lords' assault was rendered useless by every Dalek loss being instantly replenished from the Multiverse and the Strategist used his latest extract to resurrect the Dalek Emperor, who appeared on a saucer above Cosca to Davros' horror.
As they observed events from its enclave, the Strategist made the captive Doctor an offer that if he destroyed Gallifrey, as the Strategist believed the War would culminate in, he could have a version of his deceased great-grandson Alex Campbell, who the Strategist had found in the Multiverse. Bliss contacted Rasmus and he came to take Davros into custody, just as Davros unleashed the converted people of Cosca on the invading Daleks. Davros offered this power to the Time Lords, however Rasmus rejected it. The Strategist countered Davros' warriors by sending an infinitely replenishing Dalek force to carve a line through them, but his planning was interrupted when his enclave was infiltrated by Tamsan, who attached a bomb to his controls. The Doctor used the opportunity to order Bliss and Rasmus to abandon Davros, correctly assuming the Emperor would have Davros brought before him.
The ensuing confrontation caused a brief civil war among the Daleks, paralysing the Strategist with all the variables it had to calculate. This enabled the Doctor and Tamsan to flee in her TARDIS, carrying the cryogenic chamber containing Alex, and detonate the bomb. With moments to spare before the enclave's destruction, the Strategist settled for stabilising the Dalek Empire's existence and escaped, losing the power of the Multiverse. The Emperor regained control of the Daleks and had the now-dimensionally unstable merged Davros kept on Falkus, believing he may still be of use in the Time War. With the Time War recommencing, the Doctor and Bliss departed the Time Lords with Alex, who the Doctor awoke onboard his TARDIS. (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"])
Travels with Alex and Cass
Due to a shift in the timelines, (AUDIO: Vespertine [+]Loading...["Vespertine (audio story)"]) Bliss disappeared leaving the Doctor travelling with just Alex, without any memory of Bliss having existed. The pair discovered fractures in time and eventually traced the source to the EC-141. With the assistance of the ship's engineer, Cass Fermazzi, they discovered the cause was a diplomat from the Council of the End, who was carrying out smuggling under guise of diplomacy, and resolved the temporal crisis. Feeling the need to fill a void on the TARDIS, the Doctor invited Cass to join them. (AUDIO: Meanwhile, Elsewhere [+]Loading...["Meanwhile, Elsewhere (audio story)"]) On her first trip, they found the preserved form of the Vespertine and encountered its captain, Hudson Sage, who had been kept alive for centuries in a time lock. Alex discovered Hudson's memories included an encounter with the Doctor and Bliss, though still neither he nor the Doctor could place the name, only able to speculate about a shift in time which Hudson's time lock might have protected him from. (AUDIO: Vespertine [+]Loading...["Vespertine (audio story)"])
Crash landing on an uninhabited planet due to disturbances in time, the Doctor, Alex and Cass discovered a group of Daleks building a retcon bomb out of a captured battle TARDIS to rewrite the galaxy's history so they always ruled it. The Doctor attempted to destroy it, but the Daleks pre-empted him and self-destructed the facility, throwing the trio back in time a year just before the Daleks' arrival. They discovered the temporal disaster had retroactively created a civilisation on the planet and sought to help them survive the Dalek onslaught, though the Doctor realised preventing the Daleks succeeding would paradoxically erase the civilisation too as their creation depended on the Daleks' bomb a year later, but saw no other option. Hijacking a disabled Dalek casing, he reached their ship and stole the battle TARDIS, which he set to destroy itself. The civilisation disappeared from time and Cass vanished at the same moment, leaving only the Doctor and Alex. They suddenly remembered Cass moments later, so set off to find out what had happened to her. (AUDIO: Previously, Next Time [+]Loading...["Previously, Next Time (audio story)"])
Susan in the Time War
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 [+]Loading...["Ghost of Christmas Past (short story)"])
Published during a time in the War when the Chancellery Guard still existed, the Dalek Combat Training Manual, a guide to the Daleks for Gallifreyan recruits written at least in part by General Kenossium, was published with information within taken from the Doctor's memories as well as the Matrix, including events from the Doctor's relative future. The General claimed these memories were willingly shown by the Doctor and that the exploitations of the future were to be taken as mere possibilities instead of straight facts. At this point in the War, the Time Lords were attempting to locate Susan, recognising her actions in the first 22nd century Dalek invasion, and interested in establishing alliances with the Thals, the Cybermen, the Humanised Daleks if any survived, and the early Exxilons. They also hoped to reprogram Mechanoids to serve as an anti-Dalek defense. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"])
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 [+]Loading...["All Hands on Deck (audio story)"]) The Battle TARDIS was immediately boarded in flight by Daleks who killed the anyone aboard, including the final incarnation of Strato, save Commander Veklin and Susan, who escaped by jettisoning the console room. The Daleks used the captured TARDIS to drain power from the Eye of Harmony and countered every attempt the Time Lords made it to remotely trigger its self-destruct, materialising a Dalek Battlecruiser in the Vortex around the captured TARDIS.
Cardinal Rasmus had Susan and Veklin recovered from the Time Vortex. Susan suggested the Time Lords recruit the Sensorites to trigger the captured TARDIS' self-destruct with their advanced telepathy. Rasmus agreed and had Ian Chesterton picked up from Earth to accompany Susan on a diplomatic mission to the Sense Sphere. With the War Council having sent agents back in time to create a centuries-long diplomatic relationship with the Sense Spuere, Susan, Ian and Veklin travelled to hold talks for an alliance. They found the Sensorites gripped by a sense of paranoia, making some react hostilely, which spread to Veklin herself. Discovering the source was a Dalek-Sensorite parasite implanted in the Interior of the Sense Sphere, Susan and Ian neutralised it after which the Sensorites agreed to dispatch warriors to Gallifrey. The warriors succeeded in telepathically triggering the TARDIS' self-destruct, ending the power drain. Ian was returned to Earth, wishing Susan well in the War. (AUDIO: Sphere of Influence [+]Loading...["Sphere of Influence (audio story)"])
Working with Veklin, Susan tracked down the Dalek agent who had infiltrated the Sense Sphere to Florana which about to be invaded by Dalek forces. Working with agents of the Anti-Dalek Force, she and Veklin found the spy, an enslaved Brancheerian, as an army of robotised Ogrons invaded to collect her, wiping out the natives. Susan and Veklin brought her back to Gallifrey and learnt from Rasmus there were 94 survivors of the massacre, who the Time Lords would now supply to fight behind the enemy's lines. (AUDIO: The Uncertain Shore [+]Loading...["The Uncertain Shore (audio story)"])
Rasmus brought Susan to Oreseia to use her telepathic abilities to assess Lord Vibax's project to weaponise Orrovix. When the Orrovix were set loose by Gallifreyan traitor Rennis Susan convinced them to stay put and helped Veklin capture Rennis. Afterwards Susan intended to recommend the War Council against Vibax's project and, though Rasmus and Veklin wanted to bring him back to Gallifrey for trial, left Rennis exiled on Njagilheim. (AUDIO: Assets of War [+]Loading...["Assets of War (audio story)"])
Susan was manipulated by a Dalek duplicate into using a time ring to follow her past self's trail through Earth's time lock to 1963 to retrieve the Hand of Omega from where the First Doctor had hidden it. The Daleks sent a signal in Susan's wake to take control of a group of bikers and followed her as she sought the Hand, only for her to be rescued by the Eighth Doctor, paradoxically summoned by a message she'd yet to send. After a failed attempt to leave due to a local Susan had befriended being threatened, and an encounter with Renegade Dalek agents in the time period, he tricked the Daleks into allowing him and Susan to deliver them a decoy Hand. When the Daleks discovered the trick, they exterminated the Doctor but he escaped using Susan's time ring. Though the Doctor still refused to take up arms, he returned Susan to Gallifrey where Rasmus informed her that President Eternal Rassilon wished to speak with her. (AUDIO: The Shoreditch Intervention [+]Loading...["The Shoreditch Intervention (audio story)"])
Fifth Doctor in the Time War
The Fifth Doctor accidently became involved in the Time War. His TARDIS crashed into a Dalek time machine. The only reason he had crashed into the space-time vessel was because the timeship was designed to break time, as the ship itself was a temporal bomb, with the four Daleks aboard on a suicide mission to destroy Gallifrey's past, present, and future. When the crash occurred, it created four Kaleds who were temporal echoes of the Daleks aboard. "Pre-incarnations" of these four and the Dalek weapon were sent throughout time, which was what even led the Doctor to make these events happen.
Speaking with the three surviving Kaleds after the death of Maran, which caused the death of her Dalek counterpart, the Doctor assumed the Dalek mission was revenge for the Time Lords mission to alter the creation of the Daleks, though he then recalled learning of a war. However, it remained "outside of [his] understanding." In order to save Gallifrey's timeline, thus protecting the Doctor from being erased from history, the three Kaleds then sacrificed themselves by confronting their Dalek counterparts, with each extermination resulting in the death of each Dalek as well. The Doctor and the Kaleds believed their destruction would leave the rest of the Dalek Empire without any understanding as to how the mission failed, meaning they would never try the strategy again. The Fifth Doctor then departed from the Time War, still not truly certain on the context for the events that had just taken place. (AUDIO: Effect and Cause [+]Loading...["Effect and Cause (audio story)"])
The Doctor joins the Time War
Twilight of the Eighth Doctor
Though some accounts suggested that the Eighth Doctor lived until the end of the Time War, (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"], COMIC: The Forgotten [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"]) later accounts agreed that he refused to fight in the war, claiming he was "a good man" and instead "helped out" when he could, until his eventual regeneration into the War Doctor (TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"]) within the first year of the Time War. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["Ghost of Christmas Past (short story)"]) The Eighth Doctor considered the Time War to be cruel and senseless. (AUDIO: The Sontaran Ordeal [+]Loading...["The Sontaran Ordeal (audio story)"])
The Doctor had wanted to only help those in need and the casualties of the conflict, as well as stop as much collateral damage as he could. However, as the Daleks and Time Lords employed ever more brutal tactics, the need for his involvement became apparent to him. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Ultimately, the Doctor, during a visit to a Velyshaan museum and questioning whether to get involved, decided to become part of the Time War after watching a child die at the hands of a Dalek. (PROSE: Museum Peace [+]Loading...["Museum Peace (short story)"])
During the period of helping, the Eighth Doctor attempted to save a group of sentient suns from falling into another universe. (PROSE: Osskah [+]Loading...["Osskah (short story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"])
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 [+]Loading...["Natural Regression (short story)"])
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 [+]Loading...["The Rulers of the Universe (audio story)"])
The Doctor travelled to the paradise of Drakkis, only to witness its timeline be devastated by a skirmish between the Time Lords and Daleks. On the planet now consumed by war, the Doctor discovered the Ninth Sontaran Battle Fleet had followed the Daleks and Time Lord forces in an attempt to join the War. Joined by Sarana Teel, a Drakkian dressmaker who had become a skilled soldier, the Doctor assisted Sontaran Commander Jask in surviving his Ordeal and to expose General Stenk's corruption. In return, Jask led the Sontarans away from Drakkis. Though the Doctor then helped Teel broker peace between fighting cities, she had learned the effect the War had on her planet would never allow ceasefires to last. Refusing to make up with him, she demanded he never return after revealing she would warn her people to never trust the Time Lords. (AUDIO: The Sontaran Ordeal [+]Loading...["The Sontaran Ordeal (audio story)"])
The Doctor followed a distress signal to Synthesis Station, though arrived before it had been sent. His arrival coincided with a visit by Cardinal Ollistra to inspect genetically-engineered Vashta Nerada that the station had been developing for the Time Lords to use against Dalekanium. Dendry, a disgruntled employee, caused a system-wide shutdown whilst he attempted to abscond with Vashta Nerada to sell for himself. This allowed Vashta Nerada to escape, causing the crisis which the Doctor's TARDIS has picked up the distress signal from. The Doctor and Ollistra managed to reach his TARDIS, as the Battle TARDIS she'd arrived in was contaminated by Vashta Nerada released when her Guards confronted Gendry, along with Eva Morrison and Commander Roxita.
Vashta Nerada snuck aboard the TARDIS in Roxita's staser, forcing them to abandon the TARDIS in spacesuits whilst the Doctor programmed it to dump them in the Time Vortex. Roxita died initiating the programming and Eva was killed by Vashta Nerada hidden in her suit. Saddened at his failure to save lives, the Doctor dropped Ollistra off at the nearest Time Lord outpost, still refusing her request to join the War effort. Before falling victim to the Vashta Nerada, Dendry had planned to visit Maldovar's bar; (AUDIO: Day of the Vashta Nerada [+]Loading...["Day of the Vashta Nerada (audio story)"]) it would be in the final months of the War that Dorium Maldovar was advised to open a bar by the aged War Doctor. (COMIC: The Whole Thing's Bananas [+]Loading...["The Whole Thing's Bananas (comic story)"])
The Doctor heard of the destruction of a hospital ship named after its owner's home planet. Fearing this may be the Traken, commanded by his old companion Nyssa, the Doctor travelled back in time and joined the Traken's crew as "Doctor Foster" for several months. The Traken travelled to Reave, one of Gallifrey's neighbours, which was victim to a Time Lord bombing campaign after it refused to ally with them. Exposure to praxis gas there wounded the Doctor, exposing him as a Time Lord and leading to suspicion that he was the terrorist. However, he and Nyssa worked out the true Time Lord agent was Doctor Isherwood, who had removed her second heart to be unaffected by the gas, and foiled her attempt to bomb the Traken whilst it was treating victims of a previous bombing. Content the Traken was now safe, the Doctor left without revealing his true identity to Nyssa. (AUDIO: A Heart on Both Sides [+]Loading...["A Heart on Both Sides (audio story)"])
The Doctor investigated timeline alterations centring on Gernica, a planet destroyed by the Time Lords to prevent Dalek influence there. He discovered a native, Viola Wintersmith, had obtained a temporal weapon powered by the user's own past in the final battle and had been using it to attempt to prevent the destruction of her world, however had simply been manipulated by a Time Lord agent into attacking Dalek agents. He exposed this to Viola, who used the last of her past to kill the agent. The Doctor preserved the last fragments of her timeline in the hopes he could one day use them to restore her, and by extension Gernica, once the fighting had stopped. (AUDIO: Death Will Not Part Us [+]Loading...["Death Will Not Part Us (audio story)"])
After "so many tough decisions and so many good friends lost", the Doctor created Ria to comfort himself, designing her to approve of his choices amid the War. When the wreck of Tompino, Punshon, and Ankarrie's Prototype TARDIS appeared in the Time War (AUDIO: Lies in Ruins [+]Loading...["Lies in Ruins (audio story)"]) after its voyage from Henlen was sabotaged by the Sirens of Time, (AUDIO: Collision Course [+]Loading...["Collision Course (audio story)"]) the Doctor mistook it for the temporally displaced ruins of a future Gallifrey and sought a second opinion from a Luna University archaeologist. Bernice Summerfield and River Song both arrived shortly before the TARDIS was discovered by scavengers. The Doctor initially tried to merely defend the ruins from being bombarded by the scavengers, but after Ria was critically damaged the Doctor came close to killing the scavengers.
Realising the true nature of the TARDIS, River and Bernice talked the Doctor down. They left the Prototype TARDIS to be destroyed, accidentally freeing the Sirens of Time. (AUDIO: Lies in Ruins [+]Loading...["Lies in Ruins (audio story)"]) The paradox caused by the TARDIS explosion spread throughout time, (AUDIO: Relative Time [+]Loading...["Relative Time (audio story)"]) destabilising Earth history (AUDIO: The Split Infinitive [+]Loading...["The Split Infinitive (audio story)"], The Sacrifice of Jo Grant [+]Loading...["The Sacrifice of Jo Grant (audio story)"], Relative Time [+]Loading...["Relative Time (audio story)"], The Avenues of Possibility [+]Loading...["The Avenues of Possibility (audio story)"]) and threatening pre-Time-War Gallifrey during Romana II's Presidency. With the help of nine incarnations of the Doctor, Romana piloted the Prototype TARDIS back to Henlen, setting history back to normal. (AUDIO: Collision Course [+]Loading...["Collision Course (audio story)"])
The War Doctor begins
During the Fifth Segment of the War, (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]) which was several months before the end of the War's first year, (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) the Doctor tried to save gun-ship pilot Cass Fermazzi at the heart of the Time War, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) as her spaceship was on a collision course with the planet Karn. (TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"]) Cass and the rest of the crew had just defended the Vantross's feeding hives from a Dalek fleet, only for a Time Lord battle cruiser to shoot them down in order to get a better view of the escaping Dalek ships. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Being the only crew-member who was not in panic, Cass teleported her allies to safety, leaving her with no one to do the same for her. Neither Cass nor the Doctor remembered (TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"]) their travels together from earlier in the Time War. (AUDIO: Vespertine [+]Loading...["Vespertine (audio story)"], et. al)
When she sent out her distress call, she would have been yet another voice in the countless billions suffering in the War, with the only thing special about her being that the Doctor happened to hear it. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Nevertheless, Cass rejected his help after finding out he was a Time Lord, believing he was no different than the Daleks (TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"]) given that the Gallifreyans had become just as sweeping in their massacres as the mutants from Skaro. A sight that would stay with the Doctor for the rest of the War, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Cass choosing death over being saved by a Time Lord in the dying and war-filled universe showed him how far the conflict had pushed the other species in the universe. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Both Cass and the Doctor died in the crash, returning the Doctor, whom the Sisterhood of Karn hoped would be the man to end the War, to Karn for the first time in years.
Taking him back to their lair, the Sisterhood temporarily revived the Doctor and offered to control his regeneration with the Elixir of Life 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 Ohila's persuasive arguments (TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"]) when he saw that the cosmos needed him to bring an end to the Time War. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) He told them he needed to become a warrior, only for Ohila to claim she had made an elixir specifically for that purpose. Drinking this, he regenerated; this newly-regenerated incarnation took Cass's bandolier and rejected the title of "Doctor" immediately, his first words being, "Doctor, no more." (TV: The Night of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Night of the Doctor (TV story)"])
The Eleventh Doctor later thought that this was one of the millions of last days of the Time War. Unknown to the Eighth Doctor, the elixir the sisterhood had offered him was really just lemonade and dry ice, combined with Ohila putting on, what she later called, a "moment of theatre". She reasoned that darkness had always existed within him, a truth that the Doctor himself knew, but allowing him to pretend it came from elsewhere was, to her, a form of mercy. Now that the former Doctor had so much burden to bear, she did not want to add self-loathing, later stating his potential self-loathing "could take all day", but now he needed to act. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
The newly-regenerated Doctor spent his early days searching for weapons in Karn's wreckage, being shown an approaching enemy-controlled war front by sister Lithea. Ohila updated Commodore Tamasan on his recovery and two Time Lords, Cardinal Rasmus and Commander Sanmar, were sent from the front to repair his TARDIS. Unknown to Rasmus, Sanmar had secret orders to arrange the extraction of Karn's heart. Upon learning that Sanmar had gone to Karn's heart, the Doctor took Rasmus and Ohila down in his TARDIS to confront her. They discovered her plan and confronted her superior, Tamasan.
Tamasan disavowed Sanmar and the Doctor let the forces of Karn attack her. He threatened to use Sanmar's equipment to destroy Karn as the war front approached, forcing Tamasan to agree to arrange a time lock to protect the planet. The Doctor departed alone and Ohila arranged for the Sisterhood's powers to remove Karn before the time lock was in place. With nothing to defend, Rasmus arranged the withdrawal of Time Lord forces from the front. The Doctor contacted Rasmus, telling him he would find ways to help the war effort in his own way. (AUDIO: Light the Flame [+]Loading...["Light the Flame (audio story)"])
The universe's bloodiest campaign
The War Doctor launched the bloodiest campaign in the history of not just the known universe, but the unknown universe and partly known universe as well. It was said he grieved for every individual he killed and felt every blow he served out, yet none of the pain convinced him to slow his mission to end the Time War. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
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The Doctor renamed himself "the Warrior", (PROSE: The Stranger [+]Loading...["The Stranger (short story)"]) and, despite his protests, people insisted on calling him the "Doctor of War". (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Eventually, he decided against taking on a name all together. (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage [+]Loading...["The Eternity Cage (audio story)"]) The Daleks and Time Lords alike continued to call him "the Doctor" (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"], et al.) yet the Daleks, growing fearful of the new incarnation as he butchered their ranks, (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"], et. al) also gave him several other names; (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"], Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) the Daleks had long ago given their nemesis the names "Ka Faraq Gatri" (COMIC: Bringer of Darkness [+]Loading...["Bringer of Darkness (comic story)"], et. al) and "The Oncoming Storm", (PROSE: Prisoner of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Prisoner of the Daleks (novel)"], et. al) but the Doctor's actions as the War continued earned him numerous new epithets amongst the Daleks, who dubbed him the "Deathbringer", "the Executioner", "the Predator" or "Predator of the Daleks", "the Great Scourge", the "Dalek killer", "the Living Death", and, occasionally, "the One Without Mercy". (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"], Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"], Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"])
Although the Eleventh Doctor displayed unfamiliarity with the term, (TV: Asylum of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Asylum of the Daleks (TV story)"]) the War Doctor knew that the Daleks called him their "Predator." (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) He was in fact the first incarnation of the Doctor to be given the title, (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) which would remain as the Dalek word for the Doctor even after the War had ended. (TV: Asylum of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Asylum of the Daleks (TV story)"])
Seeing that he fought on the front lines alongside them, the soldiers of the Time Lord military grew to highly respect the Doctor, viewing him as a war hero. (TV: Hell Bent [+]Loading...["Hell Bent (TV story)"]) With even Lord Androgar growing enamored by the Doctor, the Eleventh General came to see the Doctor as the obsession of the entire Time Lord military, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) although he nonetheless knew how effective a soldier the Doctor had become. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) Even Rassilon came to realise how vital the Doctor had become to the War effort. (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"])
Sontarans told legends of the Doctor leading Time Lords into battle, (TV: The Sontaran Stratagem [+]Loading...["The Sontaran Stratagem (TV story)"]) and he at times used guns in combat. However, such instances (COMIC: Pull to Open [+]Loading...["Pull to Open (comic story)"], et al.) were rare. In fact, among the Gallifreyan soldiers, a wartime saying emerged that, upon seeing the Doctor of War, the first thing one would notice was that he was unarmed. However, this observation became the last sight of many of the War Doctor's victims, (TV: Hell Bent [+]Loading...["Hell Bent (TV story)"]) as the former doctor had become a warrior to end the War, fighting more fiercely than any soldier had before or, according to the Curator, since. Thus, his wrath became the last wonder that billions of his enemies ever observed. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
The Doctor's first battles
Into the flames
According to the Twelfth Doctor, the young War Doctor initially viewed the Time War as a challenge he had to overcome, (COMIC: The Clockwise War [+]Loading...["The Clockwise War (comic story)"]) but other accounts showed he had always understood the gravity of the conflict. (AUDIO: Light the Flame [+]Loading...["Light the Flame (audio story)"], et. al) He became steeped in the blood of the fighting, continuing to battle not because he believed in "the cause," but because he thought bringing the War to an end was his reason for being. (AUDIO: The Innocent [+]Loading...["The Innocent (audio story)"]) Stories spread about what the Doctor did, to the point where, if he was seen amongst the ruins of many Daleks, it was reasonable to assume he had killed them all, (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) although he never reveled in the Dalek deaths, or any deaths for that matter, that followed in his wake. Still, his mere appearance became enough to scare the Daleks, yet the Eternity Circle realised that also meant he was admired and revered amongst their kind, convincing them to begin working on the Predator Dalek to convert the Doctor into one of their own. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Always showing up at random in his old, worn TARDIS, (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) which became a symbol throughout the universe because it was clear proof that the Doctor of War had arrived to a battle, (COMIC: The Whole Thing's Bananas [+]Loading...["The Whole Thing's Bananas (comic story)"]) he could be seen doing anything from performing devastating attacks to fixing up beleaguered Time Lord defenses. To the confusion of the Time Lords, he also was known to lead defenses of non-Time Lord worlds. Thus, to the annoyance of the High Council, the Doctor and his TARDIS were at the center of discussions around sudden daring raids or suddenly missing Daleks, but other rumours told of how devastating his actions were. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) The Doctor carried on his efforts to end the War all the same, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) with the Eternity Circle believing he was effectively exterminating any Dalek he encountered with impunity, just as the Daleks tried to do to every non-Dalek lifeform they encountered. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Answering a distress call from Lady Valetta, the Doctor joined the mission of second-lieutenant Lorinus to rescue Biroc, a Tharil spy working for Time Lord forces fighting Dalek-aligned Vultarans on Vultaris. The Doctor arranged events to save a group of Tharils being held with Biroc whilst appearing to have killed them out of mercy, in order to protect them from both sides. Biroc and Lorinus returned to the Time Lord forces, with Lorinus passing on what the Doctor had supposedly done to Commodore Tamasan whilst Biroc gave his intelligence. (AUDIO: Lion Hearts [+]Loading...["Lion Hearts (audio story)"])
The Doctor traced a signal from the Dalek Time Strategist to Atherea and decided to assassinate it, encountering Tamasan who was on a mission of her own to the planet. After Tamasan's contact was erased from history, they completed her orders by making contact with a squad of Gallifreyan special forces who had been raised in secret on the planet to fight the Dalek presence there. On the planet, the Daleks under the Time Strategist were commanding a temporal assassination program; the Time Eradicator Dalek was dispatched to assassinate enemy soldiers vital to Dalek losses, turning the tide of recent battles. The Doctor used himself as a distraction to enable the squad to find the Dalek base and discovered the eradicator was one of the Strategist's engineers, now existing as part of the Vortex and able to see possible timelines.
As the squad took the base, Tamasan made herself crucial to their victory by destroying the Time Strategist, so the eradicator Dalek travelled back to assassinate her earlier in the mission. The Doctor and the squad's commander followed it and foiled the assassination. The Doctor ripped off the eradicator's Vortex anchor, causing it to be pulled fully into the Vortex and erased from history, undoing the Daleks' recent assassinations. In doing so, the Doctor also negated the recent battle on Atherea, restoring the Strategist, which he resolved to try to kill again. (AUDIO: The Shadow Squad [+]Loading...["The Shadow Squad (audio story)"])
The young War Doctor recruited Fey Truscott-Sade from World War II to fight alongside him. In the course of her fighting in the Time War, Fey earned many names including "Silent Shadow", the "Soldier of the Unknown" and the "Dark Reward". The Daleks called her "Haruk Za", meaning the "Death of Light".
On what the Twelfth Doctor later claimed was "the worst day of the Time War", the Doctor, Fey and the Sisterhood of Karn led Time Lord soldiers into battle against the Daleks and one of their allies, the chaotic Morlontoa of the Seventh Sky, on the Dorian Nexus. Hoping to save the planet as they battled on it, the Doctor constructed a machine that would shoot pulses of pure reason at the Mortlontoa while Fey ordered Captain Dolios to get the planet's childlike inhabitants, the Loshann, to a TARDIS. When the Sisterhood were struck by a stream of pure chaos, several Loshann were open to be hit by the Mortlontoa's spores, which quickly inverted and corrupted them into attacking monsters. To save themselves and the surviving Loshann, the Doctor had Fey to shoot each of the attackers, only the planet's fate to be sealed when his machine failed. As the spores saturated land around them, the Doctor ordered his allies back to his TARDIS. However, Fey went to save a child in the wreckage, only to be touched by the spores. Presuming Fey dead, the Doctor angrily departed with the Sisterhood. (COMIC: The Clockwise War [+]Loading...["The Clockwise War (comic story)"])
Starting his stand
Whilst still young and fighting independently, the War Doctor took on a companion named Petrella. He was lured to the site of a massive battle between a Supreme Dalek's flying saucers and General Voltrix's Battle TARDISes by the Supreme. After the Daleks destroyed the Time Lord squadron and the Doctor realising it had been an ambush, as the Daleks had given the Time Lords information about their location to bring him there, the Doctor decided to stop his independent travels and make his stand. Thus, aboard his TARDIS with Petrella, the Doctor told her to set a course to Gallifrey so he could have "a little chat" with President Rassilon. Meanwhile, the Supreme ordered the Daleks to activate a tracker and claimed that the Doctor would be bent to their will. (COMIC: Ambush [+]Loading...["Ambush (comic story)"])
The Doctor discovered a Dalek plot on Amperica Nova to use nanobots in the entire adult population to make a mirror Gallifrey. He foiled them by using a virus to wipe out the adults, orphaning an entire population. (AUDIO: Consequences [+]Loading...["Consequences (TWDB audio story)"])
The Doctor reluctantly worked with Time Lord agent Veklin, who forced him to use a Battle TARDIS instead of his own to make him more controllable. The Doctor rescued an Australian soldier named Albert Brown from the Gallipoli campaign due to his skills being useful to him. The trio went to Carter Baross whose population the Daleks had harvested to make cyborgs. Moments before the Time Lords destroyed the planet they rescued a failed conversion, whose Dalek conditioning was incomplete, Case, as the Doctor believed she could be of use as a weapon.
Immediately after escaping the planet, the Doctor picked up a distress signal he suspected was from a disguised Dalek harvester on a collision course with an inhabited planet, Tharius. He pretended to fall for the trick, connecting the Battle TARDIS to the ship to provide power as the Daleks wanted so they could land on and harvest Tharius, and then used Case to reach the flight deck to set the self-destruct. The Supreme Dalek aboard called his bluff by accelerating the ship's storm drive so its destruction would also wipe out the entire solar system and threatened to kill Veklin and Albert if he didn't stand down. The Doctor briefly stopped his hearts to trigger the Battle TARDIS's self-destruct, which destroyed the storm drive, and had Case stop the self-destruct. With the ship now doomed to crash on Tharius, he devised a plan to use the time drive to take an escape pod back in time a day to evacuate the planet's population first, however Albert was exterminated on the way to the pod and Case was incapacitated by the Daleks. (AUDIO: Saviour [+]Loading...["Saviour (audio story)"])
Crashing on the planet a day prior to harvester collision's with Tharius, with Veklin and an amnesiac Case, the Doctor discovered Tharius was in a constant state of warfare and decided to pose as their legendary Warbringer to get the attention of their leaders for an evacuation, much to Veklin's annoyance as she believed they should simply abandon the planet to its fate. After freezing a battle in time using an Artron generator, he was taken to the leaders of the two factions, but they began to doubt him after he refused to kill them to fulfill the Warbrunger scripture, (AUDIO: Consequences [+]Loading...["Consequences (TWDB audio story)"]) but they still let him use the generator to temporarily halt the falling harvester ship. After he did so, Veklin knocked him unconscious and fought her way out of the city, abandoning Case. In the desert, Commodore Tamasan arrived in a Battle TARDIS to take them away from the planet.
The ensuing argument was interrupted by sudden appearance of a Dalek Observation Squad, who knocked the Doctor unconscious, forcing Tamasan to carry him into the TARDIS while Veklin held them off. On a Time Lord carrier ship, Tamasan had the Doctor locked on the medical bay, only for the Doctor to escape and make for Tharius in a stolen Battle TARDIS, arriving back at the Artron generator as Veklin was about to deactivate it. Case arrived with Daleks, having been turned back to her conditioning, and he helped her overcome their control and destroy them. With more Daleks imminently arriving to harvest Tharius, the Doctor reluctantly conceded that whilst he could have saved the people earlier it was not possible now so deactivated the generator and escaped the devastation in the Battle TARDIS with Veklin and Case. (AUDIO: Destroyer [+]Loading...["Destroyer (audio story)"]) After the destruction of Tharius, the Doctor finally explained to Case how he'd rescued her and why they'd crashed on Tharius. (AUDIO: Saviour [+]Loading...["Saviour (audio story)"]) He then left her, wanting what she should do now to be entirely her own choice. Case saw this as her being abandoned and was subsequently recruited by Veklin for her taskforce. (AUDIO: A Mother's Love [+]Loading...["A Mother's Love (audio story)"])
The Doctor was sent by Tamasan to a research base over a gas giant, where he fell into a dream state due a chemical weapon being developed there, which she'd intended as a test. He forced himself awake from the dream state, in which he'd been the Doctor again alongside a companion named Layla Bridge, and was furious when Tamasan contacted him to reveal the test. Incensed and believing the weapon useless due to affecting Time Lords far more than it would Daleks due to their lack of imagination, the Doctor saw to the destruction of the base, ignoring Tamasan's protests. (AUDIO: The Keeper of Light [+]Loading...["The Keeper of Light (audio story)"])
The Doctor helped design a new state of the art warship to gift to the Thals, believing it could be the first of a fleet which might turn the tide of the war and named it the Temmosus after a figure in Thal history he'd known. The ship's commander, Dylon, however, had grown weary of fighting so made a secret deal with the Dalek commander of the Red Fleet to handover the ship in Dalek space in return for a truce between Daleks and Thals. The Dalek commander hoped the capture of the vessel would help its efforts to replace the Time Strategist at the Emperor's side, but the Strategist discovered the plot and had the commander tortured for details, ignoring its repeated requests to see the Emperor. The Time Lords and the War Doctor also became aware of the scheme, with Tamasan secretly arranging the ship be fitted with a bomb to detonate when the Daleks took it. As the Thals left Time Lord space, the Doctor boarded the vessel, deactivating the ship's defences to force them to slow down for repairs and fermenting mutiny against Dylon.
However, the crew loyal to him fixed the ship on its course for the Dalek rendezvous. The Red Fleet commander finally gave the Time Strategist the location of the rendezvous, so the Strategist gave it an audience with the Emperor, where it branded the commander a traitor. Incensed, the Emperor had the commander destroyed and praised the Strategist for exposing it, ordering the Temmosus be destroyed. Instead, the Strategist ordered its troops to seize the vessel, but, upon being boarded, the Doctor managed to use his TARDIS to transport the ship back to Time Lord space. There, he used the bomb still in place as leverage to negotiate with Tamasan for better Thal representation on the War Council and then gave Dylon a lift home to New Davius, as the commander was remorseful for his actions that cost the lives of some of his crew and the Doctor did sympathise with his desire for peace. (AUDIO: Temmosus [+]Loading...["Temmosus (audio story)"])
The War Doctor attempted to defend Lacuna from a raid of Berserker Daleks but arrived too late to stop the invasion. In a desperate gambit, he created a time loop of the last day before the planet was devastated using his TARDIS and spent hundreds of repeats trying to identify a timeline to save Lacuna, whilst the people of the planet endured remembering each cycle and their deaths repeating in them. He was finally convinced to break the loop and leave by Ignis Abel, though he promised to try to think of a way to return and save them in the 20 seconds left before the Daleks devastated Lacuna. (AUDIO: Rewind [+]Loading...["Rewind (audio story)"])
At some point during his younger years, the War Doctor responded, albeit late, to the Fourth Doctor's temporal meta-collision when a pandimensional entity threatened the Earth. Understanding that the cat pictures the Sixth Doctor shared were location vectors, he materialised his TARDIS at all the planned invasion points. With the crisis over, he went back to the fray of the Time War. (WC: Doctors Assemble! [+]Loading...["Doctors Assemble! (webcast)"]) Also during his younger years, after he had grown a beard, the War Doctor was ripped away from the fighting because of a white hole crisis caused by a rogue Type 1 TARDIS, but he was able to return to his proper location after helping his other incarnations solve the matter. (COMIC: The Lost Dimension [+]Loading...["The Lost Dimension (comic story)"])
The Nightmare Child
In the "first year of the Time War", (TV: The Stolen Earth [+]Loading...["The Stolen Earth (TV story)"]) a few months after the Doctor had changed his face and become a warrior from the Time Lords' perspective, the Doctor received a summons from Davros luring him to the Gates of Elysium, where the Dalek creator planned to kill the Nightmare Child, a new, "perfect Dalek" he had created at the request of the Dalek Emperor, who had promised Davros acceptance and his own legion in return. With the Child having grown hungry and out of control, Davros planned to kill it at the gates and called the Doctor to witness his death. On Davros' trail, the Doctor encountered a hundred TARDIS strong strike-force investigating Dalek activity in the Scaveline system, where they found nothing but the wreckage of many Daleks whose casings has been ripped apart by the Nightmare Child. Reluctantly the fleet's Commander agreed to accompany the Doctor. From the Commander's perspective this event occurred early in the War, when some on the High Council still held hope that one more show of Time Lord superiority in a battle would send the Daleks fleeing, and came following some weeks of silence on the front, which was actually due to the Daleks hunting the Nightmare Child.
At the Gates of Elysium, where they found what they believed to be a space station impossibly floating above the anti-matter of the gates. In reality, it was the Child, which unfolded itself just after Davros contacted the Doctor. Forming itself into a blizzard like form, the Child attacked and consumed nearby Daleks, with the Time Lords soon becoming trapped within the chaos of the massacre. When Davros' command ship began to force the Child into the Gates, the Commander's TARDIS held back the Doctor to ensure the Time Lord wouldn't rescue Davros, as the Commander was unwilling to allow Davros to be used by the Daleks anymore. Thus, the Doctor could only watch, helpless to save him, as Davros' command ship flew into the jaws of the Nightmare Child, with the gates closing behind them. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) From this point forward, Davros, even to the Doctor, was believed to have been killed. (TV: The Stolen Earth [+]Loading...["The Stolen Earth (TV story)"])
Despite losing Davros, the Emperor, with help from the Eternity Circle, continued to lead the Empire on behalf of the Dalek species. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) In events the Doctor had experienced in his previous incarnation, the Time Strategist eventually turned to the Multiverse in search of alternate versions of Davros. (AUDIO: Palindrome [+]Loading...["Palindrome (audio story)"]) However, the last survivor of the Cult of Skaro in the post-Time War universe, Dalek Caan, used an emergency temporal shift to travel back into the conflict to rescue Davros from his supposed death. Breaking through the time lock, which cost the Dalek its sanity, and "[flying] into the wild and fire" of the War, Caan "danced and died a thousand times", (TV: The Stolen Earth [+]Loading...["The Stolen Earth (TV story)"]) "skipped the light fandango", and "turned cartwheels across the floor" as he watched and took part in the Time War (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"]) for the second time in his life. (TV: Doomsday [+]Loading...["Doomsday (TV story)"]) However, this time around, Caan saw "things" he claimed a Dalek was never meant to see. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"]) Eventually making his way to the battle at the Gates of Elysium before the command ship crashed through the gates, (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) Caan rescued Davros and brought him into the post-War universe. (TV: The Stolen Earth [+]Loading...["The Stolen Earth (TV story)"]) The Advocate followed Caan and Davros's path out of the Time War. (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass [+]Loading...["Don't Step on the Grass (comic story)"])
The Time Lord Commander involved in the incident would later gain the rank of General. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) Many accounts showed him meeting the Eighth Doctor whilst holding this rank, (AUDIO: Dreadshade [+]Loading...["Dreadshade (audio story)"]) which he would hold until the end of the War. The General later reflected on the events of the Nightmare Child incident as the first time he had seen the War Doctor. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"]) Some historical accounts claimed the Eighth Doctor had been the incarnation present during the Nightmare Child incident. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"], Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) The Tenth Doctor also recalled laughing in the Child's face during his eighth life. (COMIC: The Forgotten [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"]) It was a known fact that there were seven recorded deaths of Davros during the War, but it was said the War Doctor had bore witness to all of them. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
No matter the case, the Nightmare Child survived the event, remaining an active participant in the War until its final days. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) By that time, the Earth had been duplicated thousands of times, becoming mere bullets shot into the Child's skull. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"]) Caan recalled facing the Nightmare Child after entering the War to save Davros. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"]) From her perspective, by only four years after she had joined her gunship crew, Cass Fermazzi had gotten through an encounter with the Child. The War Doctor fought to stop the rise of the Child, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) and had to make arrangements against it, seeking to make it never arise and be forever aware of not existing. (PROSE: Twice Upon a Time [+]Loading...["Twice Upon a Time (novelisation)"]) The General again met the War Doctor during the Hellion Blaze. (PROSE: The Third Wise Man [+]Loading...["The Third Wise Man (short story)"])
New fronts and third parties
Resistance to Rassilon
A resistance movement, opposed to Rassilon's rule over the Time Lords whilst still dedicated to combatting the Daleks, arose from the broadcast from Ysalus. The exiled Eris was a key player in it and they established a base on Misteria. Members included exiled and renegade Time Lords and aliens whose worlds had been impacted by Rassilon's campaign. During their travels in search of Leela, Romana and Narvin encountered agents of the resistance and were told the location of their base. (AUDIO: Deception [+]Loading...["Deception (audio story)"]) Romana also heard from others who had encountered the Doctor, learning that he had changed for the worse. To defend Epsilon Base, the Dreadnought Servia under Captain Zara was also deployed to the Jagbar Belt, which Romana also became aware of. (AUDIO: Beyond [+]Loading...["Beyond (audio story)"])
Romana and Narvin finally found Leela on Unity, where she had been living for years since leaving Nateus, caring for Veega and her son Rayo. Local crimeboss Jarred McKenzie noticed their TARDIS and attempted to use it as leverage with the Daleks, bringing Unity to their attention. The Daleks betrayed McKenzie and tracked down the Time Lords, cornering Romana whilst Narvin, Leela and Rayo fled. (AUDIO: Unity [+]Loading...["Unity (audio story)"]) Romana was rescued by Irving Braxiatel, who was in search of the Parallax, a supposed weapon that he hoped to use to erase the Daleks despite his understanding that the weapon would "extinguish" any unprotected world that they had invaded, such as Raxas, Plutonia 7, Armagedos, Aridius and Earth. To reach the weapon, Braxiatel took Romana into the Beyond.
Created as a result of the War damaging timelines, the Beyond was a multi-layered place where of the memories of rewritten strands of history were left to end up. A "memory" of the planet Excium, which was destroyed in a timeline that was then itself destroyed, was in the Beyond. In the Beyond, Brax and Romana were pursued by the Ravenous and ultimately discovered the Parallax was not a weapon: it was actually a gateway to possible timeline, where the Daleks never existed, created as an escape route by Braxiatel's future self. Braxiatel was infuriated by his older self's cowardice and set off back to his TARDIS but fell victim to the Ravenous, who consumed him and were then destroyed by the amount of temporal energy he'd possessed. The older Braxiatel suggested Romana come with him to the Dalek-free timeline but she refused his offer and he let her use his TARDIS to return to the normal universe. (AUDIO: Beyond [+]Loading...["Beyond (audio story)"])
Narvin took Leela and Rayo to the resistance at Misteria. There Leela and Rayo learnt the resistance were planning to use the Untempered Schism to pollute the Time Vortex, depriving both sides of time travel. (AUDIO: Deception [+]Loading...["Deception (audio story)"]) Daleks, pursing Romana's associates from Unity, attacked the base. (AUDIO: Dissolution [+]Loading...["Dissolution (audio story)"]) In the confusion, Leela boarded Eris' TARDIS as he was leaving to rescue two double agents from a deception field. She was able to help him retrieve one of the agents. (AUDIO: Deception [+]Loading...["Deception (audio story)"])
Narvin and Rayo escaped in their TARDIS but were ambushed by Daleks laying in wait for evacuees. Narvin managed to reach Micallon, a Patrex Chapter retreat, but was pursued by a Hunter Dalek. He, Rayo and the Apothecary managed to defeat it. Rayo persuaded Narvin to join the resistance effort, however he insisted Rayo stay behind with the Apothecary who raised the shield of Micallon to hide it from the War entirely. (AUDIO: Dissolution [+]Loading...["Dissolution (audio story)"]) Narvin made contact with Leela and Eris to rejoin the resistance and agreed to help their plan to pollute the Vortex. (AUDIO: Deception [+]Loading...["Deception (audio story)"])
Null space invasion of Gallifrey
The resistance created a stealth Battle TARDIS, which was primed a giant bomb intended to be detonated by the Untempered Schism. At the same time, the Daleks had created technology capable of time travelling through Null space instead of the Time Vortex, therefore allowing their fleet to bypass the Time Lords' defences. It required significant power, so the Time Strategist planned a gambit so the Daleks could conquer Gallifrey intact to obtain control of the Eye of Harmony. (AUDIO: Homecoming [+]Loading...["Homecoming (audio story)"]) After leaving the Beyond in Braxiatel's TARDIS, (AUDIO: Beyond [+]Loading...["Beyond (audio story)"]) Romana was ambushed and captured by the Daleks. The Strategist persuaded the Emperor to keep her alive to use in his plan. The Emperor‘s saucer was equipped with a null space power source and the Daleks used it to arrive over Gallifrey, catching the Time Lords completely by surprise.
The Emperor had Romana issue an ultimatum for the Time Lords' surrender; demanding the extermination of Rassilon and Romana to take power over a remnant of a Time Lords on Gallifrey. Rassilon mobilised the Fifth Battle Fleet which the Daleks quickly destroyed using their null space technology, though they were still waiting for the power source to recharge so they could bypass Gallifrey's defences and claim the Capitol. At the same time, Narvin and Leela were flying the stealth TARDIS through Kasterborous and decided to mount a rescue of Romana, with Leela using a short range transmat to infiltrate the saucer.
Rassilon had the General recall forces to defend Gallifrey and conscripted Prime Minister Livia and Cardinal Mantus into the effort, ordering them in a Battle TARDIS. Narvin intercepted their TARDIS and together they infiltrated the saucer, with Narvin realising the resistance's plan was pointless if the Daleks had null space technology which enabled them to bypass the Vortex anyway. After Rassilon forced the Battle TARDIS into the fray via the Rassilon Imprimatur, they found Romana and Leela but Mantus decided to surrender to the Daleks, believing he was important enough to be captured. The Daleks exterminated him and pursued the rest, wounding Livia. Narvin and Livia decided to return to the stealth TARDIS to detonate it by the null space power source, believing Romana and Leela were worth more to the war effort. They managed to materialise the TARDIS in the right place just before it exploded, tearing apart the saucer, whilst Romana and Leela escaped in Braxiatel's TARDIS. The Emperor and Strategist evacuated as Time Lord forces swiftly pushed back the Daleks, now deprived of their null space technology. (AUDIO: Homecoming [+]Loading...["Homecoming (audio story)"]) Narvin also escaped, continuing to work with the resistance. (AUDIO: The First Days of Phaidon [+]Loading...["The First Days of Phaidon (audio story)"])
Rassilon had Braxiatel's TARDIS diverted to the Cloisters. There, he had Romana imprisoned in a pocket dimension to archive records of Time Lord history, including her own past glories, and conscripted Leela to the war effort, ordering her to meet the General. Rassilon announced he would take personal charge of the War from then on, beginning by adding a Visionary to the War Council. He also proclaimed his hope for a "Final Sanction" with which the Time Lords could ascend. (AUDIO: Homecoming [+]Loading...["Homecoming (audio story)"]) According to a Field Log issued by UNIT to the participants of Operation Time Fracture, an evidently new incarnation of Romanadvoratrelundar was serving as a Lord Cardinal, who if alive could help in the operation. (PROSE: Lord Romanadvoratrelundar [+]Loading...["Lord Romanadvoratrelundar (feature)"])
Leela's service in the War Room
Following the Dalek attack, (AUDIO: Homecoming [+]Loading...["Homecoming (audio story)"]) Rassilon indeed took a more active role in the War effort, making the War Room into his center of operations. (WC: Gallifrey War Room [+]Loading...["Gallifrey War Room (webcast)"]) By this point in the War, the War Room was presided over by a Matrix projection of previous incarnation of Ollistra. Rassilon also forced Leela to comply by threatening to turn her over to Lady Vibax for experimentation and having a compliance collar fitted. (AUDIO: The Last Days of Freme [+]Loading...["The Last Days of Freme (audio story)"]) In secret, Leela only accepted her role as a warrior on the side of Gallirey for the chance to "have [her] revenge" on the Time Lords. While she did pledge to fight the Daleks on any world she needed to, she promised herself that she would enact vengeance on the Time Lords after they had taken so many of her friends away. (WC: Gallifrey War Room [+]Loading...["Gallifrey War Room (webcast)"])
For her first mission, Leela was assigned by Ollistra's projection to accompany the General and Veklin to destroy Freme whilst its people were evacuating due to environmental fisaster. Later in Fremian history, the Daleks had occupied Freme and used its sacred status as leverage to force an alliance with the Fremians, who had 30 planets under their control by this point, so Ollistra aimed to avert this by wiping out the entire planet and people with the cover of the environmental disaster. Leela sought to find an alternative to save the people and managed to make contact with the Fremians' leader. She convinced him to detonate Freme of his own choice to avert the future servitude to the Daleks, pretending the General's control for her collar controlled the planet killer weapon the General and Veklin had already planted. With Freme destroyed willingly and the Fremians aware of the threat of the Daleks, the alliance was averted as planned and groundwork for a new alliance between the Time Lords and Fremians laid.
As such, Ollistra and the General reported back positively to Rassilon on Leela's first mission. (AUDIO: The Last Days of Freme [+]Loading...["The Last Days of Freme (audio story)"]) Leela was subsequently trained under the General's supervision, being given the callsign Epsilon 3. Later, when an experimental Dalek ship from Zygor piloted by an unknown Time Lord was detected en route to Gallifrey, the General dispatched Leela to intercept it. She found Cato Kelgroth aboard, a lone survivor of Cassandia, and brought him and the ship to a research station in the Death Zone. After his initial interrogation by the General indicated Cato blamed only a Dalek attack for the loss of Cassandia, the General and Ollistra considered making a hero of him, and word already began to spread of his actions. Cardinal Rasmus, who had come back to Gallifrey from Space Station Zenobia after intercepting transmissions about the Dalek ship and suspecting Cato might know the truth, remained sceptical and was proven right when Cato tricked Vibax into detonating a bomb he'd planted on the ship, killing a thousand Time Lords.
Leela interrogated Cato again, learning he knew his ship had been destroyed by a dreadnought on orders of Ollistra and the General, who feared the Daleks attacking might gain control of the Battle TARDISes aboard Cassandia. Ollistra informed Rassilon the bombing was an accident and supported the General's suggestion to turn Cato human and exile him, fearing a trial or execution would only expose his motives. After he was turned human, however, she went further and deleted all record and memory of him via the Matrix, and Veklin killed Cato rather than exile him. (AUDIO: The Passenger [+]Loading...["The Passenger (audio story)"])
Ollistra dispatched Bandar to use an Oubliette to erase the Norvis galaxy after projections showed the Daleks exploiting it to produce a new line of Special Weapons Daleks. Bandar's TARDIS went out of control moments before the erasure however, disappearing with the galaxy, and a single planet from Norvis reappeared shortly aftereards, so she tasked Rasmus, Leela and Veklin with investigating before an imminent Dalek fleet reached the planet. They discovered the planet was actually Bandar's TARDIS, which had achieved full sentience and saved the Norvis galaxy by pulling it into its interior dimension. Though currently unstable, the TARDIS believed it could stabilise by merging with Rasmus' TARDIS and then keep merging with other TARDISes to hide the entire universe from the Daleks in this way.
Rasmus pretended to go along with this and returned to his ship with Leela and Veklin, however in truth believed it utterly impossible. Leela was furious at his betrayal, believing the plan worth trying to achieve peace, and nearly turned his TARDIS back after receiving knowledge on how to from Bandar's TARDIS, forcing Rasmus to stun her. He used his TARDIS to push Bandar's TARDIS towards the Dalek fleet, so its inevitable explosion would destroy them too. (AUDIO: Collateral Victim [+]Loading...["Collateral Victim (audio story)"])
The Daleks initiated Operation Intercept to obtain an ancient Time Lord artefact by restoring Phaidon to existence in its course. The plan was discovered by Narvin whilst he was carrying out a resistance mission to sabotage a Dalek ship. Leela and the General were assigned to investigate the restored Phaidon before the Daleks could, as Rassilon feared what the object might be. Whilst the General worked with a surviving group of Warpwrights to fend off the Daleks, ignoring Ollistra's orders to abandon them, Leela sought the artefsct and encountered Narvin working to the same goal. They found the artefact and deduced it was an ancient Time Lord sextant that had gained power to control a time storm on Phaidon. They helped the Warpwrights use it to destroy the Dalek invaders and secretly left it with them. The General deduced their subterfuge but indicated he wouldn't tell anyone. Parting ways with Narvin, Leela returned with the General to Gallifrey, where he publicly commended her in the War Room. (AUDIO: The First Days of Phaidon [+]Loading...["The First Days of Phaidon (audio story)"])
Cardinal Rasmus proposed to the Council an alliance with Orrison to obtain their sacred bolt which could enhance staser cannons, dispatching the General and Leela to the planet as a delegation to negotiate for half of the bolt. Leela alerted the resistance who sent their own delegation, Eris and Narvin, to secure an alliance with Orrison beforehand. Though Leela tried to undermine the General's negotiations, Prince Ferdi ultimately agreed to the Time Lords' proposal, though also agreed to the resistance's contradictory offer. (AUDIO: Collaborators [+]Loading...["Collaborators (audio story)"]) Wanting to steal Rasmus's success, Ollistra ordered for all of Orrison's bolt be seized by force. (AUDIO: Ambition's Debt [+]Loading...["Ambition's Debt (audio story)"]) As Veklin led an invasion of Battle TARDISes, Eris contemplated using his own contingency to ignite all of Orrison's bolt, however was dissuaded by Narvin. Inspired by his earlier conversations with Leele, Prince Ferdi turned the planet's Time Winds defences on the Time Lords, forcing a retreat. Believing both Gallifrey and the resistance posed a threat to Orrison, Ferdi approached their enemy. (AUDIO: Collaborators [+]Loading...["Collaborators (audio story)"]) The Daleks subsequently occupied and relocated Orrison to their space, setting up a temporal barrier to protect the planet and accelerate time so it would pass faster on the planet below. There they enslaved the people to construct Berserker Dalek casings and when they became too exhausted mutated them into Dalek mutants to occupy the casings they had built themselves. (AUDIO: Ambition's Debt [+]Loading...["Ambition's Debt (audio story)"])
With Leela confined to the Capitol for her disobedience on Orrison, Ollistra sent the General and Veklin to investigate a research station that had gone quiet. Suspecting a personal reason the General wanted to go due to a distress call from a survivor asking for his aid specifically, Rasmus accompanied them and found the survivor was the General's niece, Cresta. The trio rescued her and one other survivor, Teblin, from a Berserker Dalek unleashed on the station as an experiment by the Dalek Scientific Division. Afterwards Rasmus recruited Cresta as his aide so he could use her as leverage to get the General on his side in the Council. (AUDIO: Remnants [+]Loading...["Remnants (audio story)"])
After witnessing her treatment of prospective resistance defector Helico, (AUDIO: Transference [+]Loading...["Transference (audio story)"]) and several subsequent executions, Rasmus and the General began manoeuvring against Ollistra. She pre-empted them by allowing false plans for a catastrophic offensive on Dalek-occupied Orrison to leak, compelling them to seize control of the operation themselves and use Leela's method of contacting the resistance created by Clemantia, who was actually Ollistra's cousin, to infiltrate Orrison. Clemantia subtly altered the timing of their arrival so bringing down the temporal barrier defending the planet would also destroy the General's fleet of TARDISes poised to attack, wiping out Orrison entirely with mass release of artron energy at cost of thousands of Time Lords' lives. Ollistra revealed afterwards to Rasmus, the General and Leela that this had always been her true intent, and used their responsibility for the disaster and the evidence she'd gathered of their plotting to reassert her place as leader of the War Room. (AUDIO: Ambition's Debt [+]Loading...["Ambition's Debt (audio story)"])
Degeneration crisis
Brief summaries of Time Lord Immemorial (audio story) needed, in the same vain as Past Lives and Artist at the End of Time below. A summary of The Union (audio story) to close off the section is also needed.
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The thirteenth incarnation of the Multitude, now going by the title the Union, developed a weapon to extract degeneration energy from Time Lords to control her regenerative dissonance at the Diamond Array. She captured numerous Time Lords who she tested the weapon on including the Master and the Corsair, causing them to degenerate through their incarnations. After she captured the Monk, her facility was discovered by the War Doctor who freed the Monk only to come face-to-face with the Union, who attacked the Doctor with her weapon. As he began to degenerate, the Monk sent the Doctor to the nearest Time Lord field hospital with instructions to find him as he’d encountered a degenerating Doctor in his past. (AUDIO: The Union [+]Loading...["The Union (audio story)"]) Rapidly deporting the field hospital as he cycled through his past lives and, with the TARDIS also affected, was able to leave the War in pursuit of answers to his current condition. In that search, the Doctor searched for the Monk, only to encounter him at a point before he was involved in the Time War. The Doctor next went to find his future daughter Jenny, (AUDIO: Past Lives [+]Loading...["Past Lives (audio story)"]) whom he found at the end of time. (AUDIO: The Artist at the End of Time [+]Loading...["The Artist at the End of Time (audio story)"])
In the War, the version of Davros imprisoned on Falkus, following his attempt to usurp the Emperor, (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"]) managed to gain control of the prison facility, including the Kaled clones who acted as his guards in a recreation of the Thousand Year War. He used this to send a message to the Time Lords, promising his aid in winning the War in return for the Doctor rescuing him. In truth, Davros hoped to regain the Daleks' attention through this gambit. The General and Veklin had a time scoop used to summon the Doctor to Space Station Zenobia, (AUDIO: A Genius for War [+]Loading...["A Genius for War (audio story)"]) dragging him back into the War after his adventure with Jenny. (AUDIO: The Artist at the End of Time [+]Loading...["The Artist at the End of Time (audio story)"])
Still in the midst of the degeneration crisis, the Doctor stabilised as the Seventh Doctor for the time being. Agreeing to answer Davros's request but remaining suspicious of Davros's motives, the Doctor travelled to Falkus in his TARDIS accompanied by Veklin, where they retrieved Davros from the Kaled clone guards. At Zenobia, Davros met with the General and explained his idea to create a hybrid creature of both sides to emerge triumphant, as he believed the War would inevitably wipe out both sides otherwise. Though reminded of the prophecy of the Hybrid, the General let Davros proceed. However, the Daleks, led by a Supreme, invaded the station in pursuit of Davros. The Daleks captured the Doctor, the General and Veklin along with Davros, destroying Zenobia as they left. Davros attempted to pitch his hybrid creature to the Supreme as he'd hoped, but the Supreme rejected him and ordered he be returned to Falkus, along with their Time Lord prisoners and the Doctor's TARDIS.
On his return to Falkus, Davros revealed his control of the Kaled clones and used the prison's defences to trap the Daleks there as well. He attempted to merge the Doctor's DNA with a Dalek mutant as an experiment, only for his currently unstable genetics to cause it to explode. The Doctor and Veklin escaped in the confusion and repeated the act with the giant mutant at the heart of Falkus, destroying the moon entirely. Davros escaped, landing on Skaro near the Lake of Mutations, whilst the Doctor and Veklin were rescued by the General in the Doctor's TARDIS. The Doctor returned the General and Veklin to Time Lord forces, after which they returned him to his timestream. (AUDIO: A Genius for War [+]Loading...["A Genius for War (audio story)"])
Still suffering amnesia of the source of his degeneration, the Doctor arrived in 21st century London where he encountered an earlier incarnation of the Multitude, the Two, (AUDIO: Two's Company [+]Loading...["Two's Company (audio story)"]) and then travelled to a terraformed planetoid where he found the degenerating Master. The Master had found temporary solace by assuming the form of a future incarnation, Missy; a solution which she extended to the Doctor, causing him to become the Tenth Doctor for a time. After losing her stability, Missy departed to degenerate alone and told the Doctor to find the Union. (AUDIO: The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 [+]Loading...["The Martian Invasion of Planetoid 50 (audio story)"])
The degeneration crisis ended with another battle against the Union. (AUDIO: The Union [+]Loading...["The Union (audio story)"])
The Barber-Surgeon
- Main article: The Barber-Surgeon's campaign
A Renegade Time Lord, the Barber-Surgeon, emerged as a third faction in the Time War and a true threat to both Gallifrey and Skaro. He used Temporal Abominations created at a factory in a pocket dimension to carry out, as the War Doctor dubbed it, "total war in four dimensions". (AUDIO: The Horror [+]Loading...["The Horror (audio story)"]) The Time Lords first suspected this third faction at the recursive inversions at Lakertya, where Dalek casualties outnumbered their own despite them losing the conflict. (AUDIO: The Mission [+]Loading...["The Mission (audio story)"]) At one battle where Dalek drones and Spider Daleks fought, with the latter variant marching across the ruined casings of their fellows while exchanging fire with their foes, one drone survived the destruction of its casing and declared it had witnessed a new threat from "beyond the storm". (WC: He Who Fights With Monsters [+]Loading...["He Who Fights With Monsters (webcast)"]) At the Quantum siege of Zanak, the Barber-Surgeon made himself officially known to the Time Lords.
Neither side knew who the Barber-Surgeon truly was, (AUDIO: The Mission [+]Loading...["The Mission (audio story)"]) though the Daleks believed he'd initially been equipped by the Time Lords to create weapons. (AUDIO: The Abyss [+]Loading...["The Abyss (audio story)"]) The Barber-Surgeon himself seemed unsure, claiming to have many "missing episodes" from his memory, though he was certain he'd always been a surgeon and never a doctor. He claimed to have encountered a version of the Doctor who remembered a different past to that of the War Doctor, specifically surrounding the circumstances of his first meeting with Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton in 1963. (AUDIO: The Horror [+]Loading...["The Horror (audio story)"])
The War Doctor clashed with the Barber-Surgeon's forces when Peladon was "consumed"; an incident that proved to the Doctor that the War could grow even darker. The General noted a change in him after this, realising the Doctor had become what the Time Lords had wanted and he didn't like that. (AUDIO: The Mission [+]Loading...["The Mission (audio story)"])
The Time Lords decided it would be best to send an assassin after the Barber-Surgeon. With Leela's agreement, the War Council dispatched the War Master with two handlers. While the Master managed to track the Barber-Surgeon to prehistoric Earth, (AUDIO: The Abyss [+]Loading...["The Abyss (audio story)"]) he was killed by the Barber-Surgeon, (AUDIO: The Horror [+]Loading...["The Horror (audio story)"]) who left his corpse hanging for the Doctor to eventually find. (AUDIO: The Abyss [+]Loading...["The Abyss (audio story)"]) His two handlers, meanwhile, were captured and brainwashed by the Barber-Surgeon, turning them into the Constable and the Companion. He also brainwashed a Dalek and turned it into a nostalgic throwback, dubbing the unit D9. (AUDIO: The Horror [+]Loading...["The Horror (audio story)"])
Eventually, Barber-Surgeon's attacks on both the Gallifreyan and Dalek homeworlds threatened both their time locks. After he helped bring down one of Barber-Surgeon's abominations threatening Gallifrey, the "inner circle" of the War Council recruited the Doctor to assassinate the Barber-Surgeon. He followed his trail to Kembel, where a recent attack on the Daleks had left the planet "cooked" in the Doctor's words, unaware he was being followed by a Dalek Hunter-Killer assigned by the Dalek Time Strategist to use him to find the Barber-Surgeon. Finding a Dalek survivor, the Doctor learnt more information could be found in the Dalek imperial databanks, so set off to Skaro. (AUDIO: The Mission [+]Loading...["The Mission (audio story)"]) His arrival coincided with an attack by the Barber-Surgeon's forces, though he was still caught soon after arriving in Kaalann by Spider Daleks. They took the Doctor before the Time Strategist who chose to let the Doctor escape with his stolen information, claiming Skaro could not withstand another attack and the Doctor had the best chance of finding their mutual enemy, though still raised the alarm so as not to raise suspicion.
The Doctor was intercepted by Time Lord captain Narthex, who revealed he'd been sent by Leela to assist the Doctor, as she was aware of the Master's previous failure. The Doctor deduced the entrance to the Barber-Surgeon's dimension was located on Earth in 100000 BC from information given by the Barber-Surgeon in messages to both sides, unaware he was still being followed by the Dalek Hunter-Killer. (AUDIO: The Abyss [+]Loading...["The Abyss (audio story)"]) The Barber-Surgeon had left these clues deliberately to lure the Docror to his dimension, knowing he would die before he could end the Time War by finishing his the doomsday weapon, the Unforgiving Minute, and wanting to be sure the Doctor would do what had to be done to end the War. (AUDIO: The Horror [+]Loading...["The Horror (audio story)"])
Upon arriving near Earth, the Doctor's TARDIS was attacked by one of the Barber-Surgeon's creations, causing the ship to perish and crash land. Exploring the area, the Doctor and Narthex found the Master's corpse and worked out ot had been arranged to direct them towards a cave, where they found a portal. They were ambushed by the Hunter-Killer who killed Narthex and then was tricked by the Doctor into triggering the portal's defences, immobilising it. The Doctor was then seemingly ambushed by Dalek reinforcements, (AUDIO: The Abyss [+]Loading...["The Abyss (audio story)"]) but this was a trick, with him actually being brought into the Barber-Surgeon's dimension and subjected to fake Dalek capture being the first of the Barber-Surgeon's tests for him.
Having lost contact with the Doctor, the War Council ordered the General to command a taskforce to his last known location in hopes of seizing the factory. The Daleks responded in kind, with the Emperor now learning of the Time Strategist's secret scheme and ordering Special Weapons Daleks to exterminate it for its treachery. The Hunter-Killer recovered and commandeered a Dalek saucer to invade the Barber-Surgeon's dimension in pursuit of the Doctor.
Escaping the fake Dalek custody, the Doctor encountered the Constable and the Companion and then finally met the Barber-Surgeon himself. The Barber-Surgeon revealed the nature of the tests and deemed the Doctor to have passed, content he was still the Doctor at heart and would do what was necessary to end the Time War. As the Hunter-Killer's Daleks invaded, he gave the Doctor a time ring to escape and then activated his unfinished prototype of the Unforgiving Minute, which erased him, his factory and the Dalek invaders from history.
After the Barber-Surgeon's erasure, the Doctor was reunited with his restored TARDIS by the General and reasoned that the whole campaign had been averted as well, thereby saving all the Barber-Surgeon had killed himself and the deaths his campaign had caused. (AUDIO: The Horror [+]Loading...["The Horror (audio story)"]) Indeed, the Master would continue to be a part of the conflict until he fled at the sight of the Dalek Emperor claiming the Cruciform, (TV: The Sound of Drums [+]Loading...["The Sound of Drums (TV story)"]; AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) and the Time Strategist continued to lead Dalek forces later in the conflict. (AUDIO: Agents of Chaos, Casualties of War)
Case's role to play
The Doctor answered a distress signal to Time Lord field hospital Haven but when he arrived found the station unharmed and the Medbay Operation Mainframe (M.O.M.) managing the facility working fine, though it's caretaker had seemingly depleted leaving their daughter, Runa, behind. His visit was interrupted by the arrival of Veklin and Case, fleeing a Dalek attack which had left Veklin injured. Whilst Veklin was treated, he caught up with Case, until M.O.M. insisted on containing her. He and Veklin began investigating the facility after she found herself unable to contact Gallifrey, discovering M.O.M. had actually frozen all her patients, and her caretaker when he'd tried to stop her, to keep them safe. Realising Battle TARDISes were on their way to destroy the facility due to it not checking in, the Doctor ignored Veklin's demands to simply flee and convinced Runa to help reset M.O.M. Afterwards Case refused to return with Veklin due to her willingness to abandon her and stayed with him. (AUDIO: A Mother's Love [+]Loading...["A Mother's Love (audio story)"])
Under the guise of a Dalek Killer and her squire, the Doctor and Case joined a mission on Sunspire, a world that had been attacked by the Daleks and suffered a near-total genocide at their hands. The last surviving people of Sunspire were working to retrieve their gene bank from a bunker, where a Berserker Dalek was trapped. In truth the Doctor hoped to freeze and study the Berserker for tactical advantage as well as help Case with her unstable Dalek technology that was harming her health. The mission went awry and Case was furious at after discovering his true agenda. The Doctor helped the last survivor of the mission reach the gene bank and then found Case had become fused with the Berseker when it tried to reconstruct itself using her. The result had been them merging, becoming "something new" which he anticipated both sides of the war would want to control. (AUDIO: Berserker [+]Loading...["Berserker (audio story)"])
The Doctor took Case to Memnos, a facility run by two Time Lord conscientious objectors to document the victims of the Time War, nominally so she could recover, though in truth he hoped she might be able to safely awaken a temporarily frozen harvester ship with more cyborgs like her aboard. However as Case used their systems to relive her homeworld Carter Baross, the Dalek Time Strategist had infiltrated her experience telepathically. In response the Doctor connected to her and tried to help her resist the Time Strategist's attempts to reassert their control, prompting the Daleks to invade in person. They fled to the frozen harvester, exposing his true agenda. In response to Case's anger at being used, the Doctor saw to the destruction of the harvester to honor her choice. As the Daleks closed in, he alone was rescued via teleport by the surviving objector. Unknown to him, Case had survived as well, being captured by the Daleks. (AUDIO: Memnos [+]Loading...["Memnos (audio story)"]) Through emotional manipulation, the Daleks slowly conditioned her into serving them.
After he spent a month in solace following the apparent loss of Case, Veklin recruited the Doctor to help her investigate reports of a new Dalek weapon in the field. They traced it to a facility run by the Dalek Time Strategist and discovered it was actually Case. The Doctor connected to a dreamscape the Time Strategist was using to commune with Case and tried to help her see through their lies. In her confusion however Case refused to go with him, but prevented the Daleks attacking him and Veklin which allowed them to escape. (AUDIO: The Hybrid's Choice [+]Loading...["The Hybrid's Choice (audio story)"])
The Doctor continued searching for Case however his TARDIS was diverted to a dry dock by Commodore Tamasan, who presented him with a new Dreadnought TARDIS that she’d had developed and which she wanted him to command. During their tour, the TARDIS was infiltrated by Case on her first solo mission for the Daleks to assassinate Tamasan. The TARDIS began to go awry as Case pursued the Time Lords through the interior, resulting in a technician, Jodall, being fatally injured. Case felt remorseful at her death and fled. (AUDIO: Fear Nothing [+]Loading...["Fear Nothing (audio story)"])
For her failure Case was taken before the Dalek Emperor who ordered the Time Strategist to make improvements to her. With Tamasan stalling the War Council taking an interest, the Doctor tracked her down to the Strategist’s secret facility and instigated a plan to neutralise her. Knowing captive Time Lord medic the Nurse was aboard and would likely be forced to treat Case, the Doctor met him prior to his capture and planted an upload of his eighth incarnation’s personality on his implants. The construct was transferred over to Case during her treatment and placed her in a dream state, during which the Eighth Doctor helped Case see through the Daleks’ conditioning, using the Pathweb so she could briefly commune with the Emperor and see how little it cared for her. This brief exchange alerted the Emperor to the Time Strategist’s secret facility and he sent troops in force to shut down the experiments there as it deemed them contrary to the Daleks’ purity. Whilst the Time Strategist was being taken captive, the Eighth Doctor construct took Case’s mind into a permanent dream state travelling with him after briefly exchanging words with the true Doctor via his TARDIS’ telepathic circuits. The Daleks destroyed the facility and took the Strategist before the Emperor, who ordered that their minds be linked to remove the Strategist’s independence. (AUDIO: Exit Strategy [+]Loading...["Exit Strategy (audio story)"])
The Sontaran gambit
The Sontarans devised a gambit to trick the warring Time Lords into intervening in their long-running conflict with the Rutans to achieve victory for themselves. Developing Sontaran-Rutan hybrids with the ability to shapeshift from genes of Rutan-created hybrids that had infiltrated Sontaran ranks on Taxodon, they had the hybrids kill and replace the crew of a Time Lord diplomatic mission to Sontar led by Cardinal Blaxill. The faux Time Lords returned to Gallifrey whilst one hybrid used their captured TARDIS to attack a Time Lord station in Rutan space under the guise of being a Rutan. The impersonator of Blaxill then rallied the Time Lords into an attack on Ruta III to erase the Rutans from existence, planning to use an anomaly cage to contain the ensuing paradox.
As his people prepared for the assault, the War Doctor investigated as he was sceptical of the Rutans’ apparently random attack. He visited Sontar to seek the aid of a Sontaran veteran from Taxodon he’d met in his sixth incarnation, Skole. The pair discovered the hybrids and deduced the scheme, making for Ruta III to avert the Time Lord assault. En route the Doctor deduced the hybrids were part of a second, bigger paradox which would overload the anomaly cage, as the destruction of Ruta III would result in some being flung back in time to Ireland, where he’d encountered them in his eighth incarnation, and then Rutans he’d encountered in his third incarnation would recover their genetics and then use them to make the original hybrids deployed on Taxodon. As they arrived at Ruta III they found the assault had begun and time was already disturbed by the paradoxes. Though Blaxill turned the Time Lord fleet against them, the Doctor and Skole were able to board the flagship and fought through the hybrids to destroy the ship and stop the assault, with Skole dying in the process. Prior to the destruction the Doctor retrieved the anomaly cage which preserved the paradox of his previous encounters with the hybrids, even though the event scattering them back in time had been averted. (AUDIO: In Name Only [+]Loading...["In Name Only (audio story)"])
Fighting intensifies
Escalation of the War
The Time Lords began to use doomsday weapons from their Omega Arsenal (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) against the Daleks, eventually using every single one of them except the Moment. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) With history itself beginning to unravel, there was officially no turning back. The Could've Been King, along with his Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres, was unleashed, and the beginning of the apocalypse was heralded. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) After he entered the Time War to save Davros, Dalek Caan's casing was torn apart by the Could've Been Kings. He also faced the Horde of Travesties. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"])
Losing their planet (PROSE: A Short History of Everyone [+]Loading...["A Short History of Everyone (novel)"]) and, according to them, even their bodies, (TV: The Unquiet Dead [+]Loading...["The Unquiet Dead (TV story)"]) the Gelth needed to take on a gaseous form to survive. Entire species were eradicated. In fact, some of the races that fell, including the Malfinions, Hederons, Scarbians, were so completely removed from time that, after the war ended, their names only survived as footnotes in old Time Lord records, later being mentioned in a historical chronicle as well. Indeed, no one in the universe even remembered these races existed. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) When the Time Lords feared that the Compassionate would side with the Daleks, Rassilon sealed them in a rift at the heart of the planet Galen and told the War Doctor that the Daleks had done it. (AUDIO: The Bleeding Heart [+]Loading...["The Bleeding Heart (audio story)"]) In the midst of the conflict, Rassilon was taken to the Death Zone by Pandoric, allowing him to talk to one of his former selves and tell him that Gallifrey would face greater threats than the Nestene Consciousness in his future. (PROSE: Pandoric's Box [+]Loading...["Pandoric's Box (short story)"])
During the worst of the fighting (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) and at the heart of the conflict, millions of individuals (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) and millions of lesser species (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) died every single second, lost to the insanity and bloodlust of the War. However, these millions of fatalities were then resurrected, again and again, by time itself to find new ways of dying, (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) creating a cycle of rebirth and death. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Manipulations from both the Daleks and Time Lords also contributed to the countless resurrections (AUDIO: Legion of the Lost [+]Loading...["Legion of the Lost (audio story)"]) and deaths that lasted until the end of the war. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"])
At the time of Strax's birth and first deployment, the Sontaran Subliminal Education Matrix contained an entry on Time Lords which noted that "perhaps there is a universe-spanning war going on just out of sight, an apocalyptic crusade fought in the space between one second and the next". Strax read this line when he selected the education matrix's entry on the Time Lords to learn more about them. (PROSE: A Soldier's Education [+]Loading...["A Soldier's Education (short story)"]) A Dalek Patrol Ship skirting the shoulder of the Epsilon Reach was flung through a temporal schism by Time Lord forces and became stranded on a mining planet in the 64th century. There, they confronted humans who had believed the Daleks to be extinct. (PROSE: Lost Patrol [+]Loading...["Lost Patrol (short story)"])
At a time when Leela and the General were both reflecting on the changes the War had brought to Gallifreyan society, the Daleks, under the command of an Emperor's Guard and a drone, launched another attack on Gallifrey. (WC: Gallifrey War Room [+]Loading...["Gallifrey War Room (webcast)"]) Leela fought with the Time Lords until the Battle of the Pillars of Consequence. There, she was shot by a Disruptor Dalek, which displaced her from time and space until she reformed with her memories altered to include all of her possible timelines. She would later resurface as the Lady of Obsidian. (AUDIO: The Lady of Obsidian [+]Loading...["The Lady of Obsidian (audio story)"])
The War Doctor grows old
The War Doctor's appearance in Death Will Not Part Us needs to be added
The War Doctor, meanwhile, continued his bloody campaign. He 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 [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) with Gastron fighting alongside him; (TV: Hell Bent [+]Loading...["Hell Bent (TV story)"]) led a Shrikefleet against a fleet of Plasma-Wheels at Vexa; (COMIC: Pull to Open [+]Loading...["Pull to Open (comic story)"]) and led a final charge up the slopes of the Never Vault. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Missy would later claim she fought a Supreme Dalek on the Never Vault's slopes; (TV: The Witch's Familiar [+]Loading...["The Witch's Familiar (TV story)"]) indeed, the War Master once noted during the War he had encountered a Supreme, whom he considered a worthy adversary. (AUDIO: The Good Master [+]Loading...["The Good Master (audio story)"])
At an earlier point in her timeline, Cass Fermazzi, the very person who had led to the Doctor's regeneration into his War incarnation, had been at Skull Moon and wept at the battle's massacre. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) The post-War Dalek Caan saw the battle after entering the War to rescue Davros. (COMIC: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"])
As the War continued, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) the Doctor slowly aged. He became an old man (PROSE: A Prologue [+]Loading...["A Prologue (short story)"]) but, over the course of centuries, continued his effort to end the fighting once and for all. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"], et. al) As noted within William Shakespeare's lost prologue to his play Henry V, the Doctor's old age did not stop him as he fought "the Time War's troops", including the Meanwhiles and Neverweres, the Horde of Travesties, and the Skaro Degradations as well as their standard Dalek brethren. (PROSE: A Prologue [+]Loading...["A Prologue (short story)"])
The degradations were a type of Dalek (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) that began to be fielded a short time before the Battle of the Althos system (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"]) and were inspired by the Time Lords' and Fourth Doctor's attempt to alter the Daleks' creation. The Daleks conducted experiments on their own species, entering alternate realities and tampering with the history and DNA of their counterparts. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) These twisted mutants were then taken from their redundant timelines and used as soldiers in the War. General Artarix saw the degradations first hand and considered them horrific. (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"]) Dalek Caan claimed that he had "been to" the degradations but had not "been to" himself. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"])
The War Doctor once overlooked a battle between Dalek flying saucers and purple craft, (COMIC: The Then and the Now [+]Loading...["The Then and the Now (comic story)"]) arranged for the Advent of Woe to be closed, (PROSE: Twice Upon a Time [+]Loading...["Twice Upon a Time (novelisation)"]) and, after finding it alive while looking over a major battle's aftermath, invited a Dormouse to come with him in his TARDIS. (PROSE: The Red and the Blue [+]Loading...["The Red and the Blue (poem)"]) The Doctor aided the Voord, who had sided with the Time Lords and mounted a resistance against the Daleks, in defending Marinus in the year A10%?. He defended the planet with a chronic tripwire, which aged the Daleks in an attacking flying saucer to dust. He subsequently promised the Voord that he would speak to the Time Lords on their behalf, as the Voord feared the Time Lords would revert them to the weaker state they had been in prior to the Time War. (COMIC: Four Doctors [+]Loading...["Four Doctors (comic story)"])
Nestene Consciousness
Developing epoch bombs that could destroy whole eras of time and therefore wipe Gallifrey from history, the Daleks prepared to conquer and mine the gas giants of the Althos system. Desperate to stop the Dalek plot and not seeing any other way, Rassilon sought to exploit the Doctor's reputation among the infantry as a way to lead General Artarix and thousands of Time Lords under her command into a suicidal counterattack that could distract the Dalek armada, allowing the rest of the fleet to surprise the Daleks. (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"]) Despite the war between Gallifrey and the Nestene Consciousness in their distant pasts, (PROSE: Pandoric's Box [+]Loading...["Pandoric's Box (short story)"]) he was able to ally with the Nestene, bargaining for an Auton duplicate of the Doctor that would convince Artarix's fleet to play their part in the Battle of the Althos system. According to Rassilon, he was unable to replace the entire armada with Autons because the Daleks would detect the lack of organics.
When the real Doctor learned of this plot, he negotiated with the Nestenes to give him control of the Auton and for another duplicate to be made. In return, the Doctor promised to fight alongside the Nestene if they ever needed his aid. As his second copy quarreled at Rassilon, who became angered but only learned he was talking to an Auton upon destroying it, the Doctor stole several proximity mines from the Panopticon to destroy the Dalek fleet, convincing a Time Lord guard who spotted him to let him go upon revealing Rassilon's short-sighted plan. Mining the uninhabited system as his original copy ordered Artarix's fleet to retreat, the Doctor ensured the Dalek fleet and the uninhabited system were both destroyed, telling Rassilon over communications that a leader needed to be willing to put themself in harm's way for the good of others. Realising what the Doctor had done, Artarix ordered her adjunct to return them to Gallifrey so she could meet with Rassilon. (PROSE: Decoy [+]Loading...["Decoy (short story)"])
The Nestene Consciousness was embroiled in the War again at a later point in its existence, when it had forsaken conquest for a rapport with the Embodiment of Gris on Nestenia. A skirmish in the War opened above Nestenia, making the Consciousness see a hundred Gallifreys, a thousand burnt-out Skaros and a dozen Earths which had been taken from different moments in history to be used as weapons. Fallout from the skirmish hit Nestenia; many of these planet copies smashed into the Nestene's planets, a cloud of Early de-aged the Consciousness, a cloud of Late destroyed its food stocks and a blizzard of Tick-Tock drove the Embodiment insane. This wave of destruction lasted only a second, yet it had brought about the fall of Nestenia. (PROSE: Revenge of the Nestene [+]Loading...["Revenge of the Nestene (short story)"])
The Nestene's loss of its protein worlds, which rotted away, was devastating. (TV: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (TV story)"], PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Its biology was drastically changed, mutating until most of its form became composed of plastic as result of the temporal stress. (PROSE: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (novelisation)"]) These were not even the first losses experienced by the Nestene during the conflict; earlier in the War, the Eighth Doctor was unable to prevent the destruction of Polymos after the activation of the Dalek's Time Destructor. (PROSE: Natural Regression [+]Loading...["Natural Regression (short story)"], A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) Dalek Caan saw that destruction after he entered the Time War to save Davros. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"]) After everything it had lost, Nestene was pushed to resume its conquests in search of new food stocks. (PROSE: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (novelisation)"])
Schemes of the Volatix Cabal and involvement of the Cyclors
Pull to Open needs to be added.
The Dalek Volatix Cabal deployed the Squire, who was secretly one of their members, (COMIC: Fast Asleep [+]Loading...["Fast Asleep (comic story)"]) undercover as a sleeper agent, making her become the War Doctor's companion. (COMIC: Gently Pulls the Strings [+]Loading...["Gently Pulls the Strings (comic story)"]) As the Squire was unaware of her true nature, (COMIC: Fast Asleep [+]Loading...["Fast Asleep (comic story)"]) the Doctor and her shared a number of, what she deemed, "glorious adventures" (COMIC: The Then and the Now [+]Loading...["The Then and the Now (comic story)"]) against the Daleks and their allies; she was with the Doctor when he led a Shrikefleet; the two of them were at the chronofracture of Borun, where they held the line by fighting against six Barrage-Leks before defeating the exotic-plunger; they also fought the Heisenberg mutations on Kether Prime. (COMIC: Pull to Open [+]Loading...["Pull to Open (comic story)"]) Additionally, the Squire and the Doctor teamed up with the Master, who had regenerated into the body of a child. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder [+]Loading...["The Organ Grinder (comic story)"])
The Squire, the Doctor, and the Master took a Chroleen megarythmic anodizer, a mimetic whisperfield from the Terrorsmiths of Diwoon, and the Psilent songbox of Karn. (COMIC: The Organ Grinder [+]Loading...["The Organ Grinder (comic story)"]) 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 Cybermen took part in this battle as well. The War Doctor transported part of Veestrax to another part of the universe in order to wipe out three Dalek assault battalions. The Daleks destroyed the rest of Veestrax, resulting in the deaths of the entire planetary population. (COMIC: Outrun [+]Loading...["Outrun (comic story)"]) Soon, however, 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.
Stepping out of the TARDIS, which had landed near several dead Time Lord troopers, the Doctor overlooked an active battlefield on Golgauth before the Master asked him what he would do. Priming his gun, the Doctor answered that he would do whatever he needed to (COMIC: The Then and the Now [+]Loading...["The Then and the Now (comic story)"]) before realising the soldiers they stood over were the Thirteenth Vexillatio. Realising the Cyclors had indeed been recruited, the Doctor and the Master fought a member of the Volatix Cabal, further revealing to the Doctor that the rumours of the "impure" Dalek "death cult" were true.
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 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 [+]Loading...["The Organ Grinder (comic story)"]) The Master left before the Doctor carried his plans out, believing them to be too evil even for him, using the chaos of battle as a cover to escape to his future-self's TARDIS, where he found a chronal tumour implanted in it. (COMIC: The One [+]Loading...["The One (comic story)"], Kill God [+]Loading...["Kill God (comic story)"]) Believing he could now escape the Time War, he tried to do so, only to create a paradox; by trying to leave the War in his TARDIS, he could never implant the tumour. With this and the tumour reacting with the songbox, a paradox was made, and the Master's current regeneration was unwritten as his TARDIS burned. (COMIC: Fast Asleep [+]Loading...["Fast Asleep (comic story)"])
Now never having been in his child body, (COMIC: Fast Asleep [+]Loading...["Fast Asleep (comic story)"]) the Master remained present in the War's early days, still in his older "War Master" body, until he left the fighting after the events involving the Heavenly Paradigm. (AUDIO: The Heavenly Paradigm [+]Loading...["The Heavenly Paradigm (audio story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["Fast Asleep (comic story)"]) The Malignant went on to wipe out over fifty generations of the Overcast. (COMIC: The Then and the Now [+]Loading...["The Then and the Now (comic story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["Fast Asleep (comic story)"])
The Doctor was later surrounded by members of the Volatix Cabal when Abslom Daak descended from the skies, ever accompanied by the corpse of Princess Taiyin of Mazam, preserved within a cryogenic freezer-unit. The Doctor expressed his concern as Daak fired upon the Volatix. (COMIC: Physician, Heal Thyself [+]Loading...["Physician, Heal Thyself (comic story)"])
Keska incident
- Main article: Operation Thousand Worlds
When a Dalek time fleet under a Dalek Time Fleet Commander began massing for a planned final assault on Gallifrey, the War Ollistra ordered two Time Lord soldiers, Bennus and Arverton, on a suicidal mission to destroy the fleet by detonating a Time Destructor on Omega One. The War Doctor arrived on Omega One and activated the Destructor himself, surviving by crash-landing his TARDIS on the planet Keska, where he entered a healing coma that lasted 100 days, during which he was nursed to health by a Keskan named Rejoice. Upon regaining consciousness, the Doctor helped the Keskans stop the Taalyens from wiping them out in their war, constructing a force field to protect Keska. The Doctor remained on Keska until he was found by Commander Veklin, who dragged the Doctor back to Gallifrey in the TARDIS under Ollistra's command. (AUDIO: The Innocent [+]Loading...["The Innocent (audio story)"])
Assigned a mission to locate one of Gallifrey's top strategists, Seratrix, in the Null Zone with Veklin, Bennus, and Arverton, the Doctor decided to enter the Null Zone on his own. He landed on Keska again and discovered that the Daleks had helped the Taalyens bypass the force field. Meeting up with Rejoice again, though many years later from her perspective, the Doctor discovered that Seratrix, along with Bennus and Arverton, was part of a Time Lord sect who were so desperate to end the War they had made an alliance with the Daleks to ensure peace, promising them dominion over the Null Zone out of the fear that, if the Time War continued, no one would survive. However, the Doctor learned this plan would come at the cost of the Thousand Worlds within the Null Zone, with each of the planets set to be destroyed in the Daleks' final assault on Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Thousand Worlds [+]Loading...["The Thousand Worlds (audio story)"])
In truth, the Dalek plan was to, when each of the Thousands Worlds had been equipped with engines, fire the planets at Gallifrey at fifty times the speed of light. The Doctor and Rejoice tried to convince Seratrix of the Daleks' deception, but Seratrix sought out the Commander Dalek to try to beg for peace, only to be exterminated by the officer. After Bennus and Arverton, also made aware of the Daleks' treachery, were killed by the Daleks, the Doctor allied himself with the leading Taalyen to destroy the Daleks by deafening them and had his Keskan allies detonating the drill early to stop the Daleks' scheme. Despite defeating the Dalek plot, the Doctor was betrayed by the Taalyens, and Rejoice was killed by Traanus. The Doctor and Veklin were then collected by Ollistra, who revealed the entire incident was her attempt to purge out Seratrix's conspiracy. She also showed that the Doctor that Keska was destined to become a peaceful world thanks to his actions. (AUDIO: The Heart of the Battle [+]Loading...["The Heart of the Battle (audio story)"])
Anima device affair
Travelling to Vildar to destroy the Annihilator, which the Daleks intended to use to wipe out the Vildarans, the Doctor was assisted by a reluctant soldier named Collis, but she was killed protecting him from a Varga plant. Knocked unconscious by the destruction of the Annihilator, the Doctor was deemed dead and taken to Aldriss, the planet of the Technomancers that had been reviving dead Time Lords, such as Collis. Discovering that the Valdarians were being sacrificed to revive the dead, and that a small part of the Technomancer's masters, the Horned Ones, were being placed in the revived Time Lords, the Doctor and Collis ran to the Crypt of Non-Time, where the Annihilator resided after the Doctor had used it to wipe itself from time. After Collis died at the hands of the Technomancer leader, Shadovar, the Doctor set the Annihilator off, wiping the Technomacers and the Horned Ones from time.
Escaping Aldriss with co-ordinator Jared, the Doctor was apprehended by Ollistra, who informed the Doctor that he was to be arrested as a war criminal. (AUDIO: Legion of the Lost [+]Loading...["Legion of the Lost (audio story)"]) The Doctor was placed in an Artron leash, and tasked with discovering the purpose of the anima device on Asteroid Theta 12 with Ollistra, Jarad and Captain Solex. After losing Jared, they discovered that a rogue faction of Scientist Daleks were retro-engineering themselves back into Kaleds to try to gain a new insight into war. After Solex sacrificed himself to save him, the Doctor allowed Ollistra to use the anima device for their escape and then freed himself from the Artron leash to leave in his TARDIS. (AUDIO: A Thing of Guile [+]Loading...["A Thing of Guile (audio story)"]) However, Ollistra had programmed the TARDIS to travel into the explosion of the anima device; the Neverwhen. There, the Doctor initially helped a set of soldiers against an aggressor, until the time phasing revealed he had been assisting retro-evolved Kaleds battle primitive Time Lords.
Once Ollistra caught up with him, and told him to dismantle the Neverwhen so that she can use it in conjunction with the anima device to destroy Skaro, the Doctor instead stopped it from working in the first place, attempting to use it to create a state of peace where both Daleks and Time Lords were farmers. However, the conflict was so ingrained that the residents of the new timeline still ended up fighting. When Ollistra insisted on resuming her initial plan, the Doctor modified the Neverwhen so that the experiment would be deemed a failure, as he felt that there was no way to predict the side-effects of Ollistra's plan on the wider universe. (AUDIO: The Neverwhen [+]Loading...["The Neverwhen (audio story)"])
The Dalek Time Strategist's front
Chasing the War Doctor
Amid the time battles and other great engagements of the War, (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage [+]Loading...["The Eternity Cage (audio story)"]) Dalek Time Strategist decided to wound the Doctor's timeline by destroying Earth before the native eras of most of the Doctor's human companions. It ordered Lara Zannis, who had been recruited during the Battle of Zahl, to breach the quantum shield around Earth—which was placed around the world to protect it from the Daleks—by operating the Shadow Vortex in Berlin in the year 1961, which was in flux and thus was part of the reason the shield had been established in the first place. The Daleks began an invasion of Earth, but the War Doctor used his TARDIS to contain it in an alternate timeline.
Returning to the War, the Doctor was informed by the Time Lord engineer Heleyna that Ollistra had been kidnapped; (AUDIO: The Shadow Vortex [+]Loading...["The Shadow Vortex (audio story)"]) the Eighth Sontaran Battle Fleet under General Fesk sought to join into the Time War, even if they could not secure alliances with the Time Lords or Dalek Empire. The War Doctor devised a plan to get onto Rovidia to rescue Ollistra from the Sontarans, who were also ransoming the Dalek Time Strategist to the Daleks. Using a stealth ship, the Doctor and Heleyna led a platoon of Time Lords with Muren, arrived on Rovidia, and, with the help of Kalan, they got to the citadel where the Sontarans were holding Ollistra. While experiencing a psychic pain, the Doctor came to realise that the Sontarans were aiming to become a third front in the war and that their hostages were bait for a trap.
Stopping the Sontarans from using the Eternity Cage with the aid of Vassarian, the dying Time Lord powering the cage, the Doctor managed to escape in Vassarian's Battle TARDIS with Ollistra, Kalan and Heleyna, only for Ollistra to expose Heleyna as a traitor. Heleyna tried to kill the Doctor by ejecting him from the TARDIS, (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage [+]Loading...["The Eternity Cage (audio story)"]) but Ollistra used the TARDIS' transmat to bring him back on the ship after Heleyna was dealt with. However, Heleyna, secretly a Dalek spy who wanted revenge for the death of her grandfather, was able to escape into the ship with Ollistra, leaving the Doctor and Kalan to avoid her traps as they searched for them. (AUDIO: Eye of Harmony [+]Loading...["Eye of Harmony (audio story)"]) With the Daleks having wiped out the Sontaran fleet, (AUDIO: The Eternity Cage [+]Loading...["The Eternity Cage (audio story)"]) the Time Strategist ordered its forces to attack the TARDIS to destroy its Eye of Harmony chamber, intending use the chamber to destroy the Eye and wipe out the Time Lords.
The Doctor and Kalan eventually located them at the chamber, just as the Dalek Time Assault Squad arrived in the ship. He used Heleyna's idea of manipulating the reconfiguration system and destroyed the chamber to stop the Daleks, stranding the TARDIS in the Vortex. With Kalan fatally wounded, the Doctor convinced Heleyna, who betrayed the Daleks after learning of the Time Strategist's plan, to detonate a Dalek Dark Matter bomb to give the TARDIS enough energy to materialise into real-time, at the cost of her life. (AUDIO: Eye of Harmony [+]Loading...["Eye of Harmony (audio story)"]) Escaping the Time Vortex to civilian Space Station Delta 49, (AUDIO: Pretty Lies [+]Loading...["Pretty Lies (audio story)"]) Kalan died from his injuries as the Daleks arrived after them, with the Daleks beginning to scoure every timeline to find the Doctor. (AUDIO: Eye of Harmony [+]Loading...["Eye of Harmony (audio story)"]) The Doctor and Ollistra were then captured by the station's governing committee and sent to the Daleks as a peace offering. As the Doctor managed to avoid capture by flying the capsule to the planet Beltox, the Dalek fleet opened fire and destroyed the space station.
Crashing on the planet, the Doctor and Ollistra were met by journalist Schandel, who wanted to interview the Doctor as a war hero, much to his irritation. After Schandel let slip that the Daleks were due to arrive on Beltox, which the Time Strategist had ordered the complete annihilation of, the Doctor alerted the locals in the city of Fergil. As the Daleks under the Taskforce Commander attacked, the Doctor helped to defend the city by augmenting their climate control system to become a shield. When Schandel offered his assistance, the Doctor realised he could trick the Daleks into thinking that he had tremendous firepower by editing a message to them, securing his victory. After Schandel was killed by a Dalek straggler, the Doctor and Ollistra took Schandel's time ship to its next destination in the hopes they could contact Gallifrey. The Daleks returned to Beltox after they'd left and devastated the planet. (AUDIO: Pretty Lies [+]Loading...["Pretty Lies (audio story)"])
Return of Leela and the Engima plot
Leela information from Splinters (audio story)
The Doctor and Ollistra reached Grend, but were aware that the Time Strategist was still in pursuit. Learning of someone called the "Lady of Obsidian" who commanded formidable forces nearby from Schandel's files, the Doctor asked Rosata Laxter to help him locate her while Ollistra remained on Grend to contact the Time Lords. Arriving at the Obsidian Nebula, the Doctor discovered that the Lady was really Leela, whose memories were still confused since being struck by the Disruptor Dalek and had been leading a fight against the Unlived. The Doctor was able to convince Leela of their shared history and friendship and helped her close a breach that caused the Unlived to get into the universe, though at the cost of Rosata's life. Leela's forces, combined with the small amount of Battle TARDISes the War Council had sent to retrieve Ollistra, were able to defend Grend from the Daleks.
Afterwards the Doctor was reunited with his TARDIS, and took Ollistra and Leela back to Gallifrey. (AUDIO: The Lady of Obsidian [+]Loading...["The Lady of Obsidian (audio story)"]) When Leela began feeling a sadness and seeing Dalek shadows on Gallifrey, the Doctor and Ollistra found that a force from another universe called the Enigma was communicating with them through Leela, before it erased the Time Lords from history on the orders of the Dalek Time Strategist.
Escaping the onslaught in his TARDIS, the Doctor, Ollistra and Leela ventured into the Enigma's dimension, where the Doctor learned that the Enigma was being forced to do the Daleks bidding and was using emotions to communicate with Leela, and had given the Doctor a warning due to Leela's trust in him. While Ollistra wanted to use the Enigma to restore the Time Lords and wipe out the Daleks, the Doctor instead chose to ask it to bring an end to both races to truly end the Time War. However, the Enigma chose to do neither, restoring the Time Lords and the Daleks. The TARDIS and the Daleks were then ejected from its dimension. (AUDIO: The Enigma Dimension [+]Loading...["The Enigma Dimension (audio story)"])
Final days of the Time War
Hell unleashed
- Main article: Final days of the Time War
The Eleventh Doctor would later admit to himself that millions of days along his timeline were the last day of the Time War. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
As recounted by the Tenth Doctor, by the end of the War, the conflict had reduced billions of galaxies to ruins and "hallowed out" the universe itself. (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead [+]Loading...["The Knight, The Fool and The Dead (novel)"]) Similarly, the Twelfth Doctor recalled that he had seen galaxies implode and stars die during the Time War, with billions of people, no matter their species or homeworld, dying in the struggle. (PROSE: Big Bang Generation [+]Loading...["Big Bang Generation (novel)"]) Nevertheless, even during the Darkest Days of the fighting, it remained impossible for the conflict to enter the Dark Times of the universe, with no one managing to break through the barrier surrounding those earliest days of the universe. (PROSE: Secrets of Time Lord Victorious [+]Loading...["Secrets of Time Lord Victorious (short story)"])
Towards the end, the Daleks began to deploy a bronze model of Attack Ship. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) In the later days of the conflict, Ollistra ordered the Great Vampires released from their prison, wanting them to be deployed against a Dalek Fleet. Although the War Doctor arrived at Space Station Zenobia II and objected to the plan, Councillor Voltrix followed through on her orders, opening a portal that let the Great Vampires arrive and begin to fight Dalek saucers. After the Doctor watched the attack begin, (COMIC: The Bidding War [+]Loading...["The Bidding War (comic story)"]) he was forced to clean up the mess the Vampires and their opponents left in their wake. (PROSE: Preternatural Nights [+]Loading...["Preternatural Nights (short story)"])
In the last months of the war, the War Doctor enlisted the help of Dorium Maldovar to help him destroy the thirteen weapons factories of Villengard before the Dalek Fleet arrived to take control of them. Using a molecular fruit bomb, the Doctor transformed the factories into palm trees, creating a banana grove. (COMIC: The Whole Thing's Bananas [+]Loading...["The Whole Thing's Bananas (comic story)"])
Towards the end of the conflict, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) it was evident that the Time Lords were thinly spread throughout different epochs and losing on every front. While the Doctor recognised the unlikelihood of a Time Lord victory, the High Council refused to acknowledge they were outclassed and outnumbered by the Dalek Empire. Meanwhile, wherever and whenever the Time Lords looked, the xenophobic mutants were raising new armies by seeding progenitor devices into countless time zones, which would then become new fronts when the already thinly-spread Time Lords responded to try to hold back their foes.
However, the Daleks' mass-recruitment efforts belied the fact that they reciprocated the desperation felt by the Time Lords; as specifically pointed out by the Doctor, the Daleks' experiments that involved turning humans into Daleks to use as foot soldiers against the Time Lords indicated that the Daleks were no longer as concerned with racial purity as they once were. The Doctor also sardonically noted that it was unsurprising that the Daleks' had set aside their most fervent beliefs in order to win the Time War, given that their backs were also up against the wall. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Additionally, the Dalek armies and fleets were not the only threat to the universe. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) Unimaginable horrors, whether they be ancient or new, were reborn and born during the fighting, with the (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) Nightmare Child, the Skaro Degradations, the Horde of Travesties, and the Could've Been King with his Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres taking part in the final days of the conflict. Ultimately, the Tenth Doctor described the War's final days as "hell". (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) The Twelfth Doctor later stated that, if war was hell, then the Time War was what created hell and the beings that lived in it. (PROSE: The Dangerous Book of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Dangerous Book of Monsters (novel)"])
Around this time that the Doctor was sent to look for the Master, but could not find him. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Activity in the Tantalus Eye
Several key battles of the Time War were the Fall of the Riven Manciple, the Maldervian Cluster, the Nevermass Reach and the Ending of Fulmarch, the Krovian Delay, the Night of the Reborn, the Severance of Skaro, and the Resurrection Breach.
Another key event was the Battle for the Tantalus Eye, which occurred towards the end of the conflict (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) 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 and its temporal nature meant the conflict had been raging forever. It started with the War Doctor, who had been fighting in the Time War for a hundred years or more, leading 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; the Daleks planned to create a paradigm of Temporal Weapon Daleks, all of which were equipped with De-mat weapons that could erase their victims from history. Using the power of the Eye to make a massive Temporal Cannon as well, 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. Joined by Cinder, the Doctor spoke to Rassilon and the High Council of Time Lords in a meeting, where the Doctor castigated them for their failings and warned them about the Dalek operation. As suggested by the Castellan, 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 Lord Cardinal Karlax and the Castellan to receive a mind probe to back up the Doctor's claims that the Daleks were going to eliminate their world, horrifying the Castellan.
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, before escaping Gallifrey with the Castellan's help. 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.
After considering using Borusa to resurrect Cinder, he decided it would be wrong to alter time in such a way, realising that Cinder would never want him to use their one chance at destroying the Dalek plot to save her life alone. Thus, he ordered Borusa to wipe out the Dalek presence from the Eye and end the Dalek plan, after which Borusa, who had endured all of his regenerations time and time again from the Eye's temporal energies, passed away. 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 [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Eighth Doctor at the end
According to some accounts, the Eighth Doctor had survived to the end of the Time War to destroy Gallifrey. (PROSE: Have You Seen This Man? [+]Loading...["Have You Seen This Man? (short story)"], Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"], COMIC: The Forgotten [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"]) According to one account, he was also involved in the Battle of Rodan's Wedding, during which, like a number of other battles, years were used as ammunition; in this one battle alone, mere shrapnel from the fighting aged the Eighth Doctor to be five million, only for him to then regress to a whimpering infant. By the end of the War, he felt as though, after all the time he had aged through, he had been left as a thousand year old, though he went onto call himself nine hundred because he believed it sounded better. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"])
Prior to the end of the War, the Eighth Doctor tried to regain the Great Key of Rassilon, (COMIC: The Forgotten [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"]) which had been missing since before Rassilon's presidency. (AUDIO: Desperate Measures [+]Loading...["Desperate Measures (audio story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"]) By one account, this modified De-mat gun was the Moment, (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass [+]Loading...["Don't Step on the Grass (comic story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["Don't Step on the Grass (comic story)"]) and "doom[ing] them all". (COMIC: The Forgotten [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"])
Predicted as "the final event" by the Deathsmiths of Goth and Bettan, another account held that the Moment was a weapon, which begged to be used, chained to an N-Form. As the Doctor prepared to pull the handle on the last extrusion of the Moment within his reality, Daleks and Time Lords alike screamed for him to not use the weapon, although they were too far away to stop him as he stood atop a wooden platform, itself connected to Morbius's Red Capitol and Yarvelling's Church, on a backwater filled with the wreckage of a thousand planets, including Skaro, Gallifrey, and the Earth. Before she crumbled to dust before him, the Doctor's saviour's "final song" told him of how he would have "a whole new body to expiate the guilt" and gave him a kiss, which secretly passed the Restoration to him so he could regenerate after the War, though he failed to understand what she meant.
After watching her die, the Doctor, taking a moment to look down at the broken fragments of the War below him, activated the Moment after deciding he needed no last words. With that, the War ended and the universe had a chance to sing in victory; Gallifrey Original and the Dalek warships around it burst into flames, and a time lock sealed the conflict away from reality. Either saved or damned by the shadow of the Moment, the Doctor, meanwhile, was left to fall away from the destruction into plasmaspace, then foulspace, and then beyond into whatever came next, only to be saved by his TARDIS. While he figured he would die after the Moment had fixed his existence, his saviour's kiss allowed him to regenerate into a ninth incarnation, leaving the Doctor to shout out his last words and regenerate with "a curious new gold". (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Time War [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Time War (short story)"])
Another account indicated that a weapon was indeed used to end the Time War, being fired by the Doctor during the Last Battle of the Seventh Galaxy, (PROSE: The Eyeless [+]Loading...["The Eyeless (novel)"]) which, according to one account, was the location of Skaro. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors [+]Loading...["The Infinity Doctors (novel)"]) Ultimately annihilating the Time Lords and most Daleks, the weapon notably matched some descriptions of the Moment. (COMIC: The Forgotten [+]Loading...["The Forgotten (comic story)"], Don't Step on the Grass [+]Loading...["Don't Step on the Grass (comic story)"], PROSE: The Eyeless [+]Loading...["The Eyeless (novel)"]) The weapon backfired, possibly because of its protective field, which was why it destroyed the Time Lords in addition to most of the Daleks. Ultimately, the weapon destroyed countless systems, with the two million deaths on Arcopolis being considered a small fraction of the total causality count. The Tenth Doctor once remembered this battle as the end of the War. (PROSE: The Eyeless [+]Loading...["The Eyeless (novel)"])
In yet another account, the fact that the Doctor had forsaken his name, becoming the War Doctor, during the Time War was acknowledged, but the Eleventh Doctor was shown encountering evidence that the deaths of Time Lords and the subsequent uploading of their minds to the Matrix, had driven it to insanity by the shock of it. (COMIC: Sky Jacks [+]Loading...["Sky Jacks (comic story)"])
Siege of Gallifrey
- Main article: Fall of Gallifrey
At the end
Even though their conflict was bringing about the utter destruction of time and space — with the War Doctor saying that "every moment in time and space [was] burning" because of the War (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) — and despite the years that had passed, the mighty armies of the Daleks and Time Lords still continued their clash, (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) but the Daleks found their campaign going exceptionally well. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) A fragmented Dalek transmission from the Time War, one of several salvaged and recorded in The Dalek Conquests having been found echoing through the Void or squeezed through temporal anomalies and black holes, spoke of an attack formation, the extermination of the Time Lords and an impending Dalek victory. (AUDIO: The Dalek Conquests [+]Loading...["The Dalek Conquests (audio story)"])
Around this time, the Dalek drone that would later be dubbed "the Metaltron" was created in a Dalek nursery to be one of the countless drones thrown into the War to die for the Dalek cause. After excess limbs were removed from the mutant, with those parts then being placed back into the incubation vats to create new troops, the Dalek was assigned a training squad, later being told it would die in the most significant war its species had ever fought. (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) Despite the Dalek advances, the day before the end of the Time War, the War 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 [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) By the end of the War, (TV: Daleks in Manhattan [+]Loading...["Daleks in Manhattan (TV story)"]) the conflict's devastation brought about the destruction of Skaro, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) leaving only ruins behind. (PROSE: Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"]) The Doctor remembered seeing the capital of capital of Kaalann left in ruins after the Daleks fled Skaro, leaving destroyed casings behind in the wrecked halls. (GAME: City of the Daleks [+]Loading...["City of the Daleks (video game)"])
Although the Dalek Empire had long since created a hypnoscape simulation of Gallifrey's second city, Arcadia, (AUDIO: The Shoreditch Intervention [+]Loading...["The Shoreditch Intervention (audio story)"]) ensuring they were ready to invade, (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"], et al.) Gallifrey remained at the furthest edge of the conflict for most of the War. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) By the end of the conflict, however, the Daleks had pushed the Time Lords back to their home planet, setting the stage for an invasion. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) The Daleks launched a successful attack into the constellation of Kasterborous (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) where Gallifrey was located, (TV: Pyramids of Mars [+]Loading...["Pyramids of Mars (TV story)"], et al.) leaving Gallifrey open for invasion. (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"], et al.) This victory came a mere day after the Metaltron was assigned its Commander, which was killed in the assault. The drone was certain its officer had fought bravely to help the empire secure a victory and was assigned a new Commander. (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"])
Earlier in the War, the Time Lords saw a projection of Gallifrey's "fall" through the Matrix but, in contrast to other future events, did not allow section leaders to observe tactical analysis concerning it due to the sensitive nature of the information relating to the outcome of the War. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"]) Narvin had also long since known that Gallifrey had the potential to fall, having received a holographic message from the future incarnation of General Trave before the officer's past self was killed on Rassilon's orders. The message was recorded by Narvin's future self as the Capitol was attacked by the Daleks, with the older Narvin warning his past self that Rassilon's rule would only ensure they lost the War. (AUDIO: Havoc [+]Loading...["Havoc (audio story)"]) However, the past Narvin was unable to prevent Rassilon from gaining more power in the early days of the conflict and ended up exiled with Romana. (AUDIO: Assassins [+]Loading...["Assassins (audio story)"])
After its journey through the Multiverse, the Dalek Time Strategist had also foreseen that the War would end at Gallifrey, even telling the Eighth Doctor that he would be central to events that led to Gallifrey's destruction, which it proclaimed would be the War's "final end". At the time, the Doctor rejected the idea of being involved in the War, (AUDIO: Restoration of the Daleks [+]Loading...["Restoration of the Daleks (audio story)"]) but the War Doctor also encountered evidence that the War could end in Gallifrey's defeat; whilst in the Death Zone during the Battle for the Tantalus Eye, Borusa warned Rassilon and the Doctor that "the age of the Time Lords [was drawing] to a close", but Rassilon proclaimed that victory in the Tantalus Eye would buy them more time to strategise. When Borusa died at the close of the battle, Rassilon lost access to the possibility engine he had tortured the Time Lord into being, robbing him of the advisor who could look into every possible future. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"])
Arcadia falls, the siege begins
- Main article: Fall of Arcadia
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While the Time Lords still had what one author called a "great battle fleet", (PROSE; A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]), the Daleks were able to begin an invasion of Gallifrey itself on what would become the final day of the War. (COMIC: Sky Jacks [+]Loading...["Sky Jacks (comic story)"], TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"], The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) On this final day, after an invasion fleet made up of millions of Dalek flying saucers laid siege to it, a key battle came with the Fall of Arcadia (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) during the "final moments" of the War. (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Secret Lives of Monsters (short story)"]) Even though it was known a single Dalek drone could wipe out the second city, Arcadia was thought to be impenetrable thanks to its 400 sky trenches, which were supported by soldiers who manned turrets; (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"]) these postings were seen as desirable postings for a trooper, (AUDIO: The Conscript [+]Loading...["The Conscript (audio story)"]) with the commander of operations, Hedigar, often giving an intimidating speech about how secure they apparently were.
On the last day, a new recruit was being guided through how to man a turret by a more experienced trooper when (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"]) the Dalek assault on Gallifrey's second city began. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) As Dalek drones broke their way through all 400 sky trenches, the recruit froze up upon seeing them, failing to fire on them before being exterminated. The experienced soldier (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"]) went onto fight on the ground of the city. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) Also involved in the combat was the "Metaltron" Dalek, which had never seen battle before the attack, and the rest of its squad, which were designated to be amongst the first casualties. Anticipating the battle to be a great victory that would end in Arcadia's conquest, the squad's current commander nonetheless warned them that the Doctor would be present; even though the Metaltron realised it contradicted Dalek nature to fear, the commander ordered the squad to fear their greatest enemy, claiming that any Time Lord soldier they found could be the Doctor. (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"])
Arcadia was all but destroyed in the ensuing Dalek invasion; (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) drones swarmed the ground to attack soldier and civilian alike, while attack Ships and flying saucers provided air support, with the former craft swooping down to fire upon ground troops and defense turrets. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) The battle at Arcadia became a horrific sight (TV: Doomsday [+]Loading...["Doomsday (TV story)"]) that was filled with carnage, with broken bodies and Dalek casings left littered across the ground; as the Metaltron Dalek saw, bodies and casings were left broken in the dirt, smashed under rubble, and cracked apart because of enemy fire. As such, dead Dalek mutants were visible through their shattered casings. The Metaltron's commander even was blasted apart by a staser blast, only for three Time Lords to be exterminated in retaliation, making the Dalek believe its officer's death had useful for the War effort. (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) As the Daleks continued to descend (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) and overwhelmed Gallifrey's defences, including soldiers and bowships, (PROSE: A Prologue [+]Loading...["A Prologue (short story)"]) it was clear Arcadia had fallen to the exterminators. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
Having travelled to the horrific battle, the Doctor was present at Arcadia, just as the Metaltron's commander had warned, and fought on the front lines. (TV: Doomsday [+]Loading...["Doomsday (TV story)"], The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"], PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) When the experienced soldier from the sky trenches (TV: The Last Day [+]Loading...["The Last Day (TV story)"]) tried to report a Priority Omega message that Arcadia had fallen, the Doctor appeared to him and borrowed his fusion blaster to write the English words "NO MORE" on the side of a wall. He was detected by a nearby Dalek squadron, which turned their sights away from a group of Time Lord civilians to attack the Doctor, only for the Warrior to crash through the wall between him and the Daleks with the TARDIS, wiping out the squad and only leaving one Dalek alive, which was then shot by the soldier whose blaster he had borrowed. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) The Doctor's simple message blasted into the wall became the most famous writing the Time Lord ever transcribed, (PROSE: The Time Lord Letters [+]Loading...["The Time Lord Letters (novel)"]) even coming to the attention of Gallifrey High Command, which assumed the message was only for the Daleks. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
The Metaltron Dalek saw and killed a number of Time Lords during the battle. Despite the promise that it would be amongst the first killed, the drone found itself alive and alone amid a city consumed by death, making the mutant fear it was the last of its kind as it picked through the rubble of Arcadia for "eternal minutes". Unsure about whether the distant gunfire it heard was real or imaginary, the drone continued to feel fear until it sighted a Time Lord moving through the smoke, only for that Gallifreyan to spot it; it was in fact the Doctor, which the Dalek realised when it saw the Warrior was unarmed and staring with contempt. Staring at each other for both "forever" and "a few seconds", the Dalek was so overcome with fear it was unable to shoot its race's great foe, only for the Doctor, refusing to dignify the Dalek with so much as another glance, to vanish into the fog.
Completely consumed by terror, the Dalek was left to fire aimlessly into the chaos as it both tried to find and tried to hide from the Doctor in a contradictory quest to exterminate him and be killed by him. As such, the drone stayed in the wreckage of Arcadia, moving through the fallen city's darkness until "the ground gave away" and it fell for longer than was supposed to be possible, eventually crashing into the Ascension Islands of Earth (PROSE: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (novelisation)"]) in 1961. (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Secret Lives of Monsters (short story)"]) The Dalek later claimed it had fled the War in fear. (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"]) Nonetheless, after Arcadia fell, the Daleks began to attack (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) and move towards the Capitol, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) ordering their fleet to completely surrounded Gallifrey (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) and bombard it (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) from space, though the sky trenches defending the Capitol held, whilst the High Command debated the Doctor's "NO MORE" message. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
The final hours
Even though some believed the Dalek attack on Arcadia was the final battle of the Time War, (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Secret Lives of Monsters (short story)"]) the Fall of Arcadia had actually set the stage for the rest of Gallifrey to be the conflict's final battlefield, with every Dalek ship in the universe arriving to bombard the Gallifreyan homeworld. However, now having witnessed the Fall of Arcadia and vowed "No More", the Doctor moved forward with a plan to end the fighting once and for all. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["The Plague of Dreams (audio story)"])
In the final hours of the War, as Daleks approached the Capitol after the fall of Arcadia, (COMIC: The Memory Feast [+]Loading...["The Memory Feast (comic story)"]) hundreds of Time Lords recorded their cherished memories into memory lanterns and set them adrift in the Time Vortex (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"], AUDIO: The Memory of Winter [+]Loading...["The Memory of Winter (audio story)"], COMIC: The Memory Feast [+]Loading...["The Memory Feast (comic story)"]) in an effort to seed remnants of Gallifrey in the distant corners of the universe. (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) By the end of the War, Gallifrey was close to being no more than ruins, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) with the Dalek attack bringing destruction to the planet's surface; the ground of Gallifrey, the valley between Solace and Solitude, and various objects in the ancient edifices beneath the Capitol—metal, ancient stone, and broken roofs—were all aflame. The flaming Gallifreyan ground, (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) including the ground outside the Capitol, (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) was also filled with downed Dalek ships. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) Additionally, even the glass dome of the Capitol had been breached by the Dalek flying saucers, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) leaving the city exposed to nature. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"])
As Leela observed the attack on the Capitol from a nearby cliff, believing the Time War lost, a soldier, Axton delivered her a wayfinder from the Doctor who wished for her to use it to escape Gallifrey. As a group of Daleks surrounded her, killing Axton, Leela defiantly told them their victory would be short-lived and activated the device, which took her to the Fourth Doctor’s TARDIS. (WC: The Final Battle)
Though the sky trenches of the Capitol held, they would inevitably falter to the endless bombardment. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"]) With little to be done, the Lords of Time were on the brink of extermination, with it clear that what remained of the universe would be destroyed with them if they lost the War. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["I Am a Dalek (novel)"])
The Doctor had told the Time Lords and Daleks the fighting would go on "no more" because he had come to believe his fight was ultimately for nothing, fearing that, as long as the two factions existed in the universe, the Time War would never end. Also seeing that his own people had become just as vengeful as the Daleks, the Doctor decided there was only one way stop the conflict; he would destroy both his own people and the Dalek race. Thus, the Doctor stole the Moment from the Omega Arsenal and, as he took it to a barn in Gallifrey's drylands, knew his people would be looking for him as the planet fell around them. As he approached the barn, the only place he knew he could find the strength to use the superweapon, his voice —ordering that the War would stop on this day and that both factions had left him no choice — repeated throughout every Dalek base in the known space of the universe, throughout every building yet to be destroyed on Gallifrey, and in the ears of every Dalek and Time Lord fighting, no matter where they were in time or space. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Indeed, as he looked over the Moment, the Doctor sought to use it destroy Gallifrey, (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"], The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) knowing that neither side possessed the emotion needed to deduce where he had gone. Additionally, he had walked miles from his TARDIS (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) to make sure she did not have to watch him use the Moment, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) meaning his people could not simply track the capsule and find him. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) 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 [+]Loading...["Sky Jacks (comic story)"]) Other accounts showed the Matrix still on Gallifrey after this point, however. (TV: The Timeless Children [+]Loading...["The Timeless Children (TV story)"], et al.)
In the barn, the Doctor struggled to work out how the device operated. While in the midst of examining it a woman in the form of Rose Tyler appeared. After conversing with her for a time he worked out that she was the Moment's interface and it told him that as punishment for his actions he would survive the War and have to live with his guilt. Then, a time fissure appeared and a fez came out of it. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
Rassilon's Ultimate Sanction
As the Dalek Empire circled Gallifrey, President Rassilon grew more desperate and refused to admit defeat, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) proposing the Ultimate Sanction. The Time Lords would become creatures of pure consciousness and all of creation would be destroyed. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) Rassilon reasoned that, if the universe was to fall, they needed to survive without it. According to a history of the universe, it was learning about this plan, and seeing just how far his people had fallen, that made the Doctor steal the Moment. (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) Learning the Doctor possessed the Moment, the Time Lord High Council tried to escape the time lock by implanting a signal in the form of the heartbeat of a Time Lord 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 the 2000s,[nb 1] 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 Earth, flanked by four Time Lords including the Woman (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) and the Patriarch of Stillhaven. (PROSE: Lords and Masters [+]Loading...["Lords and Masters (short story)"]) Gallifrey itself started to return and everything from the War could escape. The Tenth Doctor, who had been warned this would be his final adventure before facing regeneration, 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. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"])
Indeed, the Master (TV: The Doctor Falls [+]Loading...["The Doctor Falls (TV story)"]) and Gallifrey itself were thrown back into the Time War. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"]) The Moment foresaw the battle between the Master and Rassilon ending with both Time Lords regenerating, (PROSE: Pandoric's Box [+]Loading...["Pandoric's Box (short story)"]) but the Master in fact did not. (TV: The Doctor Falls [+]Loading...["The Doctor Falls (TV story)"]) Rassilon, however, did; reportedly, the Master had choked the Lord President with several White-Point Stars, killing Rassilon's current incarnation and forcing him to regenerate into a new body. Rassilon screamed through the entire regeneration, forcing Ohila of the Sisterhood of Karn of make the Lord President a special potion. (PROSE: Lords and Masters [+]Loading...["Lords and Masters (short story)"])
Meanwhile on Earth, while the planet and the universe as a whole had been saved from the Ultimate Sanction, Wilfred Mott had become 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 [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"])
Multi-Doctor event
Summons to the National Gallery
In September 2013,[nb 2] (TV: The Zygon Invasion [+]Loading...["The Zygon Invasion (TV story)"], COMIC: Clara Oswald and the School of Death [+]Loading...["Clara Oswald and the School of Death (comic story)"]) needing the Doctor's assistance regarding figures that had apparently broken out of their paintings, Kate Stewart and UNIT airlifted the TARDIS by helicopter to the National Gallery, unaware that the Eleventh Doctor and Clara Oswald were inside at the time. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) Before reuniting with Clara, the Doctor had finished up conversation with Coal Hill School headmaster Frank Armitage about what time her work day ended, only for echoes of the War Doctor's proclamation about ending the Time War to leak into Armitage's responses. Shaken, the Doctor was left unsure why he was hearing words from the days he tried to forget, with even the TARDIS control console shaking in fright as the Doctor failed to bury the memories. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Reuniting with the Doctor at the Nation Gallery, Kate told the Doctor that UNIT were acting on orders from Queen Elizabeth I and they went inside where Kate showed him her credentials: a Gallifreyan painting, seemingly titled either "Gallifrey Falls" or "No More", that depicted the Fall of Arcadia on the last day of the Time War. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) It was at that moment the Doctor remembered the various last days of the War and christened this day one of them, realising that the Time War was not over for him yet. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) They proceeded to the Under Gallery, where the Doctor saw empty 3D paintings that used to have figures in them. After determining from the shatter pattern that the glass was broken from the inside and that lots of dangerous somethings had escaped, a time fissure appeared. The Doctor first threw his fez in and then jumped through himself, leaving Clara and Kate in the Gallery. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
Seducing the queen
Acting on intel from River Song, the Tenth Doctor travelled to England in 1562 to track down a Zygon nest. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Several weeks later, the Doctor had infiltrated the Royal Court and become romantically involved with Queen Elizabeth, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) who had one point was replaced by a Zygon. A moment where the fake Elizabeth kissed the Doctor became a contender for the "last day" of the Time War. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
At a picnic with, unknown to him, the real Elizabeth, the Doctor proposed to her and she accepted, which he believed confirmed his suspicions about her being a Zygon. However, she was not the Zygon, and his Machine That Goes "Ding" detected that their horse was actually the Zygon Commander. The Doctor and Elizabeth fled and they reunited in the forest, only for the Zygon to take on her form, leaving the Doctor to be confronted by two versions of her.
At this moment, the time fissure appeared and a fez emerged. Soon after, the Eleventh Doctor came through as well and greeted his tenth incarnation. They were joined by the War Doctor who, at first, did not recognise the two men as his future incarnations. The trio were then surrounded by guards who they presumed were being commanded by the Zygon Queen. After a brief conversation with Kate and Clara, they were escorted to a prison cell in Richmond. (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"])
Stopping the Zygon invasion
The three Doctors talked in the cell about the War, with the Tenth Doctor becoming violent when the Eleventh Doctor couldn't remember how many children supposedly perished on the last day. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) The War Doctor, meanwhile, found it hard to believe the two were his future, but the spirit of the Moment told him of how they reflected upon his decision to destroy Gallifrey; the Tenth Doctor would regret the choice, while the Eleventh Doctor tried to forget the action.
Writing on the wall, the Eleventh Doctor inscribed the codes for Jack Harkness' vortex manipulator, which was then found by UNIT in 2013 and almost used by the Zygon copy of Kate, but Clara activated the device first and teleported to the Doctors' location in time. Clara burst into the unlocked cell just as the Doctors had devised a clever plan to break down the door. Elizabeth then appeared and took all four of them to the Zygon ship, where they saw the Zygons put themselves in the paintings from the Gallery via stasis cubes. After they all left, Elizabeth revealed herself as the real Queen and she and the Tenth Doctor got married before the Doctors and Clara tried to travel to the Gallery in the TARDIS.
After calling McGillop from the past and ordering him to take Gallifrey Falls to the Black Archive, as the archive was shielded from TARDIS landings, the Doctors and Clara used stasis cubes to gain access to the Archive, where Kate was threatening to destroy London to prevent a Zygon invasion. Having entered the Gallifrey Falls painting to access the Archive, the Doctors found themselves in the Fall of Arcadia and attacked by a Dalek drone, only for the three to use their sonic screwdrivers to push the exterminator back, scattering the painting in the archive and allowing them and Clara to exit the War. Entering the archive, the Doctors wiped the memories of everyone in the room so a treaty could be agreed fairly. The Osgoods discovered who was who (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) and this fact would later be crucial to Operation Double and preserving the treaty.
Being a "very important day" for the Doctor, they ensured there were "safeguards beyond safeguards" involved in the preservation of the treaty, (TV: The Zygon Invasion [+]Loading...["The Zygon Invasion (TV story)"], The Zygon Inversion [+]Loading...["The Zygon Inversion (TV story)"]) although the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors did take a prolonged break to look around the archive and watch its copies of the Peter Cushing Dalek films. The War Doctor declined their offer to join in and spoke with Clara, who told him of how he would regret the way he ended the War. Having figured his future selves were looking for distractions instead of trying to remember the day, he understood but figured that regret would push his future selves to save more worlds, such as how their regrets led to the peace negotiations going on before them. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Relocation of Gallifrey
After the War Doctor returned to the barn on Gallifrey, the Moment allowed the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors through the time lock to support and console him in the destruction of the planet. Just as they were about the use the Moment together, Clara Oswald asked them about their promise to help others, making the three incarnations suddenly realise a plan they had, unknowingly, been coming up with for centuries, which would allow them to save Gallifrey, end the War, and deal with the Dalek Fleet above, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) which was intent on destroying the planet. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) Journeying in the TARDIS, the Eleventh Doctor contacted those they needed by warning them that "the Moment" had arrived, (WC: An Announcement from the Doctor... [+]Loading...["An Announcement from the Doctor... (webcast)"]) recruiting all of his previous incarnations to join together to save their homeworld by transporting it into a pocket universe.
As opposed to what the post-War Doctors had always believed, Gallifrey was not destroyed at the end of the War; (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) after the Eleventh Doctor travelled back to him in the TARDIS, (WC: An Announcement from the Doctor... [+]Loading...["An Announcement from the Doctor... (webcast)"]) the First Doctor and the TARDIS computer began solving the calculations needed to transport the Homeworld to safety, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) with every subsequent incarnation unknowingly carrying on the work needed to figure out the best way to put the planet into stasis, waiting to be recovered. With many thousands of years between them all, the Doctors, rallied together by the Tenth, Eleventh, and War Doctors, united above the war-torn planet amid the Daleks' bombardment. Joined by the Twelfth Doctor, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) who had helped rally the various incarnations together, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) "all thirteen" incarnations of the Doctor appeared on scanners, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) striking fear into the Daleks. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Some Gallifreyan research even suggested that every incarnation of the Doctor had arrived to save Gallifrey; (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"]) there were indeed enough versions of the TARDIS suddenly present in the war-torn skies to look like, as the Twelfth Doctor put it, a "blizzard", with the Twelfth Doctor also admitting he did not know how many of his incarnations had arrived. Mortified at the sight before them (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) and realising their greatest enemy had a plan, the Daleks began increasing their fire-power in a last ditch attempt to win the War. However, this increased attack was the final straw for the General, who gave the Doctors permission to save Gallifrey (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) despite his fear over what the transportation would entail. He and the rest of the War Council were also suddenly joined by the Twelfth Doctor, who arrived in the War Room to help coordinate disaster relief. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Dalek Caan watched the end of the Time War unfold. (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"]) Rallying together, the Doctors flew towards Gallifrey, and the planet vanished in a flash of light; all of the Daleks, having surrounded Gallifrey to bombard it from space, suddenly became a spherical firing squad when the planet vanished, destroying themselves in their own crossfire. The destruction of the Dalek Fleet created 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 [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) In two accelerated seconds, the Daleks had watched as their campaign went from triumph to failure, watching helpless as the skies filled with a "blizzard" of their greatest enemy. Instantly, Gallifrey had vanished before them, leaving the entire fleet to be faced with its own fire (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) in what Caan dubbed "the old circular firing-squad gag." (PROSE: Dalek Caan [+]Loading...["Dalek Caan (short story)"])
While it vanished instantly for the Daleks because the mutants were acting in a slower gradient of time, Gallifrey's relocation took almost a day to complete for the Doctors and everyone on the planet, longer than the Doctor had predicted. As the Twelfth Doctor helped coordinate relief with High Command, every incarnation of the Doctor arrived to the site of the many calamities occurring across Gallifrey as the planet "screamed and burned and raged" into the pocket universe. Not allowing anyone to burn, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) with the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors also saying they never wanted to see their homeworld burn again, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) the Doctors made sure every civilian in danger would be saved from death, and these acts of kindness occurred across the planet as it was wracked by calamities. To the Twelfth Doctor, this is what made the final day of the War "the day of the Doctor".
Cities, villages, and towns alike were saved, with a version of the Doctor's TARDIS always emerging from the smoke to rescue anyone in danger, even if people needed to be saved from rooftops, windows, or the high seas. When town on the shore of Lake Calasper was ripped apart by a massive earthquake, every running citizen found a police box waiting to save them. The Ninth Doctor took control of a sky transporter before it could crash into the Capitol, even getting out onto the wing to rewire a malfunctioning engine, while the Second Doctor stopped a vessel on Gallifrey's high seas from capsizing. The Seventh Doctor kept teachers and children laughing as they ran from a school about to be crushed by a collapsing mountain, while the Fifth Doctor arrived at a flaming hospital, taking control of the situation.
As the Fifth Doctor rescued patients and completed an operation in the hospital, the Third Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to stop a tsunami from destroying a beach-side town, and the Sixth Doctor rescued a crew of miners from the crumbling tunnels by leading them to the surface. The Fourth Doctor, at one point, used his long scarf to rescue four children, who had thought no one was coming for them, trapped on a cliffside. As the Twelfth Doctor later recalled, the last day of the War was not a day of fire for Gallifrey, but a day when the "people of Gallifrey rose up and put 2.47 billion children to bed". As they saved every Gallifreyan from certain death, the Doctor swore to never forget their promise to help others. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Establishing the time lock
- Main article: Time War time lock
In the universe itself, the Time War was time locked by either the surviving higher species (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) or the Doctor (COMIC: Don't Step on the Grass [+]Loading...["Don't Step on the Grass (comic story)"], et. al) to entrap the entire conflict within its own, specific timeline. Having seen that the War had nearly destroyed the entire universe and themselves, the higher species wanted to make sure no individual or faction from the new post-War universe could time travel into the conflict to try change or interact with its outcomes, believing that interfering with the conflict would be a danger to the integrity of the Time Vortex (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) and the universe. (PROSE: The Secret Lives of Monsters [+]Loading...["The Secret Lives of Monsters (short story)"]) The Doctor knew the same, understanding the time lock stopped the Daleks, his own people, and the other horrors of the War from escaping its now-sealed events. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"])
The War that had spread throughout time and space (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"]) was thus effectively sealed off in another version of reality, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"]) leaving the Daleks, unable to escape from the War's specific timeline due to the time lock, almost entirely extinct after they were caught in their own crossfire. (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) Siblings Different and Same of the Faction insisted that the Doctor's actions had erased the Time War from history, (PROSE: The Paradox Moon [+]Loading...["The Paradox Moon (short story)"]) but every other account showcased that was not the case; the War had happened, but now it was inaccessible to the rest of creation, (TV: The Stolen Earth [+]Loading...["The Stolen Earth (TV story)"], et. al) leaving the great conflict between the Daleks and Time Lords to become the stuff of legend. (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"])
Whilst the War had spread across the universe and throughout time, (PROSE: Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"], A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"], et. al) locking the conflict within its own timeline saved the universe (PROSE: Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe [+]Loading...["Dalek: The Astounding Untold History of the Greatest Enemies of the Universe (short story)"]) from continuing to being a place (TV: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (TV story)"], et. al) of battlelines and fronts. While the War had turned planets, space, and beyond into battlegrounds, (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"], Engines of War [+]Loading...["Engines of War (novel)"], Meet the Doctor [+]Loading...["Meet the Doctor (DWAN 2006 short story)"], et. al) locking the War away saved the post-Time War universe from being a continuation of that fate. (TV: The End of Time [+]Loading...["The End of Time (TV story)"])
With the Last Great Time War over, with the exception of a very few survivors, the Time Lords and the Daleks thus disappeared from time and space. (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"], et. al) With the disappearance of Gallifrey being instant to the rest of the universe, it looked as though both sides had wiped out the other, and the Dalek crossfire created a supernova that burned over one thousand years. Nonetheless, many historians pondered whether it was true that every Dalek in the fleet was destroyed that day. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) At least one Attack Ship did indeed survive but was sent flying off by the blast, (TV: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (TV story)"]) and the Curator believed any Dalek that had survived the Doctors' display would be so consumed by fear that they would run away forever. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
The Dalek Emperor's flagship had been present to lead the Daleks to victory, only for the Emperor to watch as its species was consumed in the "inferno" created by the Doctor. Although the Ninth Doctor believed the Emperor was destroyed with the rest of the Dalek Empire, the Imperial flagship was actually sent tumbling through time (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) and the Void, (PROSE: The Whoniverse [+]Loading...["The Whoniverse (novel)"]) leaving the Emperor "crippled but alive". (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) Nonetheless, the Tenth Doctor and subsequent incarnations involved in the salvation of Gallifrey knew that the Emperor would survive (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"]) but also knew the Dalek monarch would meet its end during the Battle of the Game Station. (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"])
Denouement of the War
Non-linear conflict
As the Time War did not exist in a linear sense, after what most considered the end with the Doctor relocating Gallifrey to a different universe and wiping out the Daleks, some events still occurred which were described by the Doctor or others as part of the conflict. (TV: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (TV story)"], Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"], et. al)
Looking into what they believed to be mere possibilities for the Doctor's future via the Matrix, the Time War-era Time Lords watched some of these events, along with other post-War events involving the Daleks. Electing to treat post-War information as confidential, the data gleamed from these "future projections" was reserved for the eyes of section leaders only. As was noted in the Dalek Combat Training Manual edition that included these projections, some information about the post-War universe, such as data about the end of the Time War, was redacted from their security level as well. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"])
Nestene invasion of Earth
- Main article: 5 March 2005 incident
The aftermath of the Time War caused the Nestene Consciousness' biology to change drastically, leaving most of its form to be made of plastic. The effects of the Time War rewrote the Nestene's nature, rewriting much of what it used to be. (PROSE: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (novelisation)"]) Having lost their protein planets in the conflict, the Nestene sought to compensate for its losses by invading the Earth.
On 4 March 2005, the Ninth Doctor blew up Henrik's as it had been infested with a Nestene nest, where he met Rose Tyler. They tracked the Nestene to the London Eye using the head of an Auton duplicate of Mickey Smith, Rose's boyfriend. The Doctor intended to end the conflict peacefully but brought a vial of anti-plastic as insurance. When the Consciousness discovered this it begun a full-scale invasion of Earth, first taking control of all plastic objects from London (TV: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (TV story)"]) and then using satellites above the Earth to spread all over the planet. (PROSE: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (novelisation)"]) Rose knocked the anti-plastic out of the hand of an Auton and into the Consciousness which destroyed it and stopped the invasion. Rose later joined the Doctor on his travels to become his companion. (TV: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (TV story)"])
During their confrontation with the Nestene, the Doctor translated to Rose that the invasion was the Consciousness still fighting "the war". (PROSE: Rose [+]Loading...["Rose (novelisation)"]) One fragment of the Nestene survived in the body of an Auton and recalled its losses during the Time War as it walked through the post-invasion destruction. It decided that, in order to defeat the Doctor, it would need to form an alliance with the likes of the Daleks and Cybermen. It then formed its Auton into a copy of a blond haired politician. (PROSE: Revenge of the Nestene [+]Loading...["Revenge of the Nestene (short story)"])
The Metaltron
- Main article: Battle of Geocomtex
Before the end of the War, one Dalek fell through time and landed on the Ascension Islands in the 1960s. Insane and screaming, it passed through several private collections in the 20th and 21st centuries. By 2012, it was in the possession of billionaire Henry van Statten, who kept it in the Cage. With the intention of reaching other Daleks, it sent out a distress signal which was detected by the Ninth Doctor and Rose Tyler. Initially unaware of the source of the distress signal, the Doctor came to investigate it.
The Doctor and the Metaltron had a hostile discussion about the end of the war and the Doctor tried to kill it before being stopped by van Statten. When Rose met with the creature, it seemed to be a harmless victim and, in an attempt to comfort it, she touched its dome. It absorbed her artron energy and DNA and regenerated itself, escaping from the Cage and making its way upwards through the Vault to the surface, killing van Statten's personnel as it went.
By the time it reached the surface, it had begun to mutate and had started feeling emotions due to absorbing Rose's DNA. Considering all the new emotions to be "sickness", the "Metaltron" asked Rose to order it to self-destruct, preferring death to a life with emotions. She refused at first, but eventually gave the order, and it destroyed itself.
After the ordeal, Rose asked if, with the death of the only other known survivor, the Time War was over, which the Doctor affirmed, sadly declaring that he had won. (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"]) Watching a projection of the "Van Statten Incident," the War-era Time Lords saw that any Dalek they encountered could absorb temporal energy from a time traveller to repair itself. Disturbed, the military ordered that no Time Lord have direct with a Dalek casing, (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"]) which also had the ability to burn those who touched it. (TV: Dalek [+]Loading...["Dalek (TV story)"]) Meanwhile, the Time Lords began to experiment to see if they could introduce unfamiliar emotions to Daleks like Rose had, albeit without putting their own personnel at risk by seeing if it could be done remotely. (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"])
The Battle of the Game Station
- Main article: Battle of the Game Station
A lone ship containing the Dalek Emperor of the War also barely survived the Time War, falling through time in a heavily damaged state. It went into seclusion at the edge of the Solar system "damaged but rebuilding" during the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Circa 199,909, it secretly installed the Jagrafess aboard Satellite Five to play the "long game" of slowly manipulating humans and re-establishing the Dalek species and fleet. A hundred years after the Jagrafess was killed, in the year 200,100, the Emperor was still using Satellite Five (now renamed the "Game Station") to manipulate humanity and conceal his fleet. (TV: Bad Wolf [+]Loading...["Bad Wolf (TV story)"]) The Emperor secretly used transmat technology aboard the space station to kidnap humans for nearly two hundred years. The kidnapped humans were harvested for their genetic material, and "one cell in a billion" was used to rebuild a new race of Daleks (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) numbering roughly half a million aboard a fleet of 200 ships.
When the Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Jack Harkness were transmatted into the games, they quickly escaped and discovered from the Controller that the Daleks were her masters. Once detected, the Daleks begun their invasion plans (TV: Bad Wolf [+]Loading...["Bad Wolf (TV story)"]) and quickly killed all the humans that had either not evacuated yet or chosen to fight, including Jack, with the Doctor sending Rose back to 2005 to protect her. To make the Earth into their "paradise", the Daleks also heavily bombed the Earth with continents such as Australasia, being described as "gone" in the aftermath. Just as the Daleks were about to exterminate the Doctor, the TARDIS materialised and Rose, who had absorbed the energy of the Time Vortex and had become an entity known as Bad Wolf, stepped out.
She scattered the words "Bad Wolf" across time and space to inspire Rose to become the entity in the first place. She then divided the atoms of the entire Dalek fleet, turning them all, including the Emperor, to dust, (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) though at least one time limpet survived. (AUDIO: The Year After I Died [+]Loading...["The Year After I Died (audio story)"]) Then, in what would be called by the Tenth Doctor the "last act" of the Time War, she resurrected Jack from the dead, accidentally giving him immortality. (TV: Utopia [+]Loading...["Utopia (TV story)"]) To save her life, the Doctor absorbed the Time Vortex from Rose which caused him to regenerate into his next incarnation, with the Ninth Doctor being confident that the human race would rebuild. (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"])
Indeed, after making it to the ravaged Earth, Jack was responsible for overthrowing the Hope Foundation, composed of a rich elite of humans in space that sought to exploit the survivors of the Dalek invasion. When Trear Station, formerly the Game Station, crashed to Earth, Jack was confident that humanity would ultimately rebuild itself as he saw that an abundance of resources was salvaged from the grounded station. (AUDIO: The Year After I Died [+]Loading...["The Year After I Died (audio story)"]) Jack eventually left this time to search for the Doctor. (TV: Utopia [+]Loading...["Utopia (TV story)"]) Prior to his regeneration, the Ninth Doctor had joked to Rose that he had defeated the Daleks by singing a song that forced them into a retreat, (TV: The Parting of the Ways [+]Loading...["The Parting of the Ways (TV story)"]) but A Brief History of Time Lords recorded this as the actual end of the battle. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords [+]Loading...["A Brief History of Time Lords (novel)"])
The Time War-era Time Lords also watched a projection of this incident, teaching them that the already-known to be dangerous Dalek Emperor could survive the War. Nonetheless, they were relieved to see the Emperor would play a long game for centuries, rather that launching a new campaign right after escaping the Time War. The Time Lords also kept an index file on Rose under the name "Bad Wolf." (PROSE: Dalek Combat Training Manual [+]Loading...["Dalek Combat Training Manual (reference book)"])
The day of the Doctor ends
Years later, in their thirteenth incarnation, the Doctor met Cass Fermazzi again and gave her a bandolier from a man that had recently perished and asked her about her life. She told the Doctor that she had been ready to fight all her life because she had a therapy bot growing up that was intended to take away some of her memories but instead someone else's memories kept spewing out about fighting for what was right, but never trying to hurt people and the promise to "Never be cruel and never be cowardly". Cass wrote it off as "cheesy stuff" but admitted that it got to her. This confirmed what the Doctor had already worked out: she was indirectly responsible for Cass' death by shaping her childhood in such a way that she became a fighter.
The Doctor lamented that she was impossible to save as she was too wrapped up in her timeline but was happy Cass had met her once without hating her. She wondered if the lesson the Moment was trying to teach her was that you can't save everyone, just the ones you can. After reflecting on the Moment's further conversations with her in Henry VIII's third-favourite garden and the banana groves of Villengard, she decided that she had done enough brooding and that the day of the Doctor was finally over.
Additionally, using the Doctor Papers, the Doctor wrote a book about the end of the Time War. The Curator had told Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart about his desire to write the book, explaining he would get around the fact that he needed to use classified material by marketing the book as fiction. The various chapters were authored by incarnations of the Doctor and others. (PROSE: The Day of the Doctor [+]Loading...["The Day of the Doctor (novelisation)"])
Aftermath of the War
- Main article: Aftermath of the Last Great Time War
Footnotes
Notes
- ↑ Both Planet of the Dead and The End of Time are referred to in dialogue as taking place after the end of Journey's End, which is set in either 2008, according to TV: The Fires of Pompeii, TV: The Waters of Mars, and AUDIO: SOS, or six weeks after the middle of May 2009, circa June, according to PROSE: Beautiful Chaos. However, the year of The End of Time is unspecified, as is whether or not it is intended to be the Christmas immediately after Journey's End.
- ↑ The Day of the Doctor is established as taking place two years before The Zygon Invasion. Clara Oswald and the School of Death establishes that The Zygon Invasion takes place in September 2015.
