How a Gallifrey Story Could Be Done

[Tom]

Galifrey is in E-Space saved by Romana !! Now there you go

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

I think it's more "plausible" (to the extent that anything on this show ever is) that Gallifrey was destroyed but that some of the Time Lords escaped and have stayed in hiding, rebuilding Time Lord society in E-Space or some other parallel dimension. I have a story in my head called "New Gallifrey" and much of the emotional thrust centers on the fact that the reason why the Doctor didn't know about the other Time Lords surviving was because they purposely hid their existence from the Doctor because they blamed him for the Time War. In broad strokes, the conflict would be the Doctor's choice to either stay on New Gallifrey and give up traveling forever or be allowed to remain traveling in his TARDIS but with all of his memories of New Gallifrey erased.

 

[Turbo]

Galifrey is in E-Space saved by Romana !! Now there you go

They are releasing The E-Space Trilogy on DVD in January. *starts spinning conspiracy theories*

 

[Cutter John]

Actually it wouldn't surprise me iat all if there were some Time Lords in hiding somewhere. If the Daleks can keep finding ways of coming back, then surely the Gallifreyans found a way. They are fairly clever (devious) too you know.

 

[DWF]

I can't see the reason to bring back Gallifrey or the Time Lords at lest not right now. Here's Robert Holmes reaction to a review of The Deadly Assassin.

"The basic idea behind Assassin was to see if we could make a workable Doctor Who with the Doctor on his own - no travelling companions. Philip wanted the story to be set on the Time Lords' own planet, and we both felt that sufficient time had elapsed since Roger Delgado's death for us to be able to re-introduce the Master. However, we didn't want to tie our successors to a particular actor (by this point we knew that our time with the programme was coming to an end) so I got the idea that he was in the terminal stage of his existence. This led me to the story - the Master was back on Gallifrey to try to steal himself a new supply of the Time Lord life essence.

I had to decide what sort of people the Time Lords were. I noticed that over the years they had produced quite a few galactic lunatics - the Meddlesome Monk, the Master, Omega, Morbius. . . How did this square with the perceived notion that the Time Lords were a bunch of omnipotent do-gooders? Could it be that this notion had been put about by the Time Lords themselves? Heresy! But the Doctor himself, when one thought about it, didn't seem too keen on them. Remember in Morbius how he'd ranted about them not wanting to 'soil their lily-white hands'? Remember Linx saying that Sontaran intelligence considered that the Time Lords 'lacked the moral fibre to withstand a determined assault'? Most damning of all, at the end of The War Games, had they not condemned the Doctor to exile for interfering in the affairs of others' planets - and yet who had sent him on half these missions? They had! Obviously, either the Time Lords were all hypocrites or someone, unknown to their high command, was running a 'dirty tricks' department. Once I took this view of the Time Lords the bones of the story began to take shape."

They were hypocrites and did produce quite a large number of evil but powerful Time Lords, I don't see a reason to bring back Gallifrey or the Time Lords.

 

[Davros]

What better way for the time lords to avoid being destroyed than to make everybody think they had already been wiped out?

 

[DWF]

What better way for the time lords to avoid being destroyed than to make everybody think they had already been wiped out?

Well that would fooling the Doctor as well and I don't think that would work.

 

[Sci]

Bringing the Time Lords back would be like bringing back Atlantis. Boooooooooooooooooriiiiiiiiiiing. Their power is in their absence.

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Well, I'd expect that a returned Gallifrey would be redone just like everything else in the series, and that as a result the Time Lords would not only be interesting again, but actually COOL.

At the very least, we SHOULD probably re-estblish at least a few other Time Lords at some point. Not necessarily folks like the Rani, Romana, Drax, etc., but new people the Doctor could sympathize with or fight against.

Mark

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

Just because Gallifrey is destroyed does not mean we can't have a story involving it. There are many creative way this could be done without bringing Gallifrey back. The Doctor directly going back in time would not be a good idea either. Here is my idea:

The episode starts off with the Tenth (or 11th) Doctor waking up to find himself on Gallifrey, he does not know where his companion is or where the Tardis is. As he leaves his quarters to investigate, other Timelords refer to him as Valix (I just made that up, LOL) and tell him good morning and such. Another Timelord named Tuvan approachs the Doctor and says 'Ah, Valix I have been looking for you, the high council meeting starts in 10 minutes' , The Doctor looks at Tuvan and says 'I know you, your on the high council' , Tuvan replies ' You must have not had enough sleep, of course you know me and your a member of the high council too, so I don't understand were your coming from'.

We see the the Doctor and Tuvan enter the high council chamber were other timelords greet the Doctor as Valix. The Council then discuss what there going to do about the Daleks who have already made several incusions into Timelord protected area's (this is the very beginning of the Timewar). 'We are just not equiped enough to handle this' says one Timelord, 'we have brought the Master back to help us but now he is missing' says another. 'We need to recall the Doctor, he has saved Gallifrey before' , 'No' says Tuvan 'he is to much of a loose canon!'. 'What have you to say of this issue Valix?' says one of the timelords, The Doctor replies 'Well.. The Doctor, hmm' he rambles back still in thought about what is really going on.

Anyways, the council does vote and they recall the doctors Tardis, the council then walks into an adjacent room and we see the Tardis materializing, then we see the Eighth Doctor walk out and look around, 'Oh dear don't tell me this is another trial' , 'No doctor' the High Council president says, ' something far more serious..' We then focus in to the Tenth doctor's wide eyed face... Start the opening credits.

So the rest of the story the Doctor has to solve the following:
- Why is he here? (at this point right before the Time War heats up).
- Why does everyone think he is Council Member Valix?
- Where is his Companion?
- Where is his Tardis?
- Should he interact at all with the Eighth Doctor.
- Should he he do anything to affect the course of the Timewar and possibly save Gallifrey?

This story we would not see the Daleks or the actual Timewar, its an all Gallifrey story that would deal with the doctor emotionaly struggling with the fact that he has the opportunty to possibly save the Timelords vs. breaking the laws of time and also dealing with how to deal with his former self while at the same time trying to figure out just what is going on. By the end of the episode nothing will change in the timeline but something could be set up for a future episode.

Anyways this is my idea that i may write if i have time.

I like this idea. I think I may have even figured out why it's happening. Someone else is traveling back in time to somehow change the course of the Time War and the Doctor's consciousness has gotten caught in the backwash. Thus, there is someone else from the present trying to interfere with the past and the Doctor has to identify who it is and stop them before the alterations to the Time War destroy the entire space-time continuum.

At the end of the episode, the Doctor identifies the past identity of the mysterious other time traveler and stops him but doesn't yet know his/her real identity. (Both the Doctor & the other time traveler are doing the Quantum Leap thing. The audience sees the Doctor as himself but everyone else sees him as Valix. So the Doctor can only see the past identity of the other time traveler.) But once the Doctor "leaps" back into the present, he's able to trace the signal back to its source and finds the other time traveler, who turns out to be either Susan or Romana, driven mad by the guilt and loss of Gallifrey.

 

[Mr Light]

I don't think Gallifrey in its entirety should return, but I'd like to see a handful of scattered survivors. Romana most of all!

I would love to see the new series take on old Gallifrey but surely the whole thing is "time-locked" like the Time War period is. And we all know what happened to Dalek Caan.

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

^But shouldn't it still somehow be possible to travel back to Gallifrey in a pre-Time War period? Isn't that what the Valeyard did?

 

[Brendan Moody]

^But shouldn't it still somehow be possible to travel back to Gallifrey in a pre-Time War period? Isn't that what the Valeyard did?

Not necessarily. The Valeyard's origin is such metaphysical flimflam that he could come from almost anywhere.

I think it kills the pathos of Gallifrey's destruction and the Doctor's solitude if he can pop back and see Leela or whoever if the mood strikes him.

 

[Davros]

What better way for the time lords to avoid being destroyed than to make everybody think they had already been wiped out?

Well that would fooling the Doctor as well and I don't think that would work.

Why not?
The Doctor has been fooled before and with him running around claiming to be the last of the Time Lords, it helps sell their cover story to the universal masses.

 

[DWF]

What better way for the time lords to avoid being destroyed than to make everybody think they had already been wiped out?

Well that would fooling the Doctor as well and I don't think that would work.

Why not?
The Doctor has been fooled before and with him running around claiming to be the last of the Time Lords, it helps sell their cover story to the universal masses.

Well let's wait for this year's Christmas special then.

 

[Marc]

^But shouldn't it still somehow be possible to travel back to Gallifrey in a pre-Time War period? Isn't that what the Valeyard did?

I thought that Gallifrey had barriers that ensured that any Timelord returning would up in their correct timezone to prevent interferance in the planet's past or future.

The wiki entry mentions an event horizon having this effect after the events of one the 8th Doctor novels but I'm sure I'd come across reference else where).

 

[The Borgified Corpse]

^But shouldn't it still somehow be possible to travel back to Gallifrey in a pre-Time War period? Isn't that what the Valeyard did?

I thought that Gallifrey had barriers that ensured that any Timelord returning would up in their correct timezone to prevent interferance in the planet's past or future.

It probably does. Further, after re-watching "The Ultimate Foe," I agree that the Valeyard's origins are such vague BS that I wonder why they even bothered to say that he came from somewhere in between the Doctor's 12th & 13th incarnations.

 

[The]

^^My guess is that with Robert Holmes death, they just sort of needed a twist for the ending, since they didn't know where he was going with the story...

 

[Brendan Moody]

The original plan, in Robert Holmes' outline for episode fourteen and in the episode Eric Saward wrote based on that outline, was that the Valeyard was simply the Doctor's evil final incarnation, and the episode ended with the Doctor and the Valeyard (the Master in the outline) trapped in combat for all eternity. This ending had been planned so that if the show was cancelled after season 23 it would end on a dramatic note; if it continued, it would have been resolved somehow, of course. However, once the episode was written JNT decided he didn't want such a downbeat ending. But Saward had refused to write the story if JNT insisted on any changes to Holmes' outline apart from substituting the Valeyard for the Masteer in the final conflict. As such, he refused to change the ending and denied JNT permission to use his script, which meant that new episode fourteen writers Pip and Jane Baker couldn't have a copy of the Saward/Holmes version without violating copyright law. They had to develop their own ending based on Saward's characters and locations, and it was they who came up with the regenerative hybrid explanation of the Valeyard.

 

[The]

Ah!! Didn't know all that! Awesome. I didn't realize that was where the Eric Saward feud came from. He certainly remains bitter about it all, doesn't he? At least the little I've read about all that, and from what I've heard, he has publicly bad-mouthed everyone (including Colin himself). And then there's Pip & Jane. I sometimes think they don't deserve the thrashing they get over Trial of the Time Lord. I'm not certain I could have done better. I mean, I'd try of course. I guess Tom is the only Baker that came out of Who a winner. Ha!