Theory:Doctor Who prose discontinuity and plot holes/Lungbarrow: Difference between revisions

::The concept of looming didn't originate in this book; as early as ''[[Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible]]'' (the 5th NA) they'd already incorporated the looms, and the [[Andrew Cartmel|Cartmel]] contingent (including [[Mark Platt], who wrote both ''Lungbarrow'' and ''Crucible'', and [[Ben Aaronovitch]] and a few others) had an explanation planned for how to deal with ''[[The Time Monster]]'', ''[[Shada (TV story)]]'', and other mentions of 'time tots'. However, after the TV movie came out, they had to revised everything to include the Doctor's half-humanness. Platt sincerely believed that ''Lungbarrow'' managed to explain everything, and if you dig up the old threads on rec.arts.drwho and interviews from the time and so on, he and his backers do at least make a case for it, but I don't feel competent to summarize it (especially since I never liked it).

::Some of the other writers (I believe it was originally [[Stephen Cole]]) came up with the idea that Gallifrey had both looms and natural birth, but the 'great houses' always used looms, and possibly only those who were loomed could become Time Lords (with the Doctor being, as usual, an exceptional case of some kind). Which explains why some of the NAs say that all Time Lords are loomed, and why it was a scandal on the House of Lungbarrow that the Doctor had a navel, and so on. The only big question here is why Romana, who's from a Great House (and isn't the Doctor), remembers being a 'time tot' (in ''Shada''). Anyway, in some of the early EDAs, we get hints that this was true until Romana III changed the policy to use the looms exclusively so they could crank out new Time Lords as fast as possible in preparation for the upcoming War, but that wasn't true in the era when the Doctor and Romana were born.)