Gatiss on Time Lords

Mark Gatiss spoke recently at a panel in Brazil about the Time Lords and the return of Gallifrey

Every time you go back to Gallifrey, it starts to make the Time Lords a bit too domesticated. I know that’s why Russell T Davies came up with the whole idea of the Doctor being the last one because eventually if you see them so often they become a bit like a bunch of MPs, whereas if you talk about them as this amazing, powerful force, they’re much more exciting.

On the prospect of writing a Gallifrey-based story

I don’t know if I would want to do one. I think the way the Time Lords were represented in The End of Time and The Day of the Doctor was very exciting because we’re seeing them in a crisis and they’re trying to come up with different ways of saving themselves. But I suppose if the Doctor ever does find Gallifrey again, then we might find out more. Who knows…

Possible Way Around the Regeneration Limit

As many of you are aware, it was stated in the classic series that Time Lords can only regenerate twelve times. After that, they're as mortal as anyone else. Given the recent reveal that Matt Smith's Doctor has regenerated eleven times, and not ten as previously thought, then it seems the upcoming regeneration this Christmas will the be last.

If Moffat wants to continue the show after Peter Capaldi, then he's going to have to find a way to eliminate the twelve regeneration limit. People have proposed that when River brought the Doctor back to life in Let's Kill Hitler, she gave him her remaining ten regenerations. Moffat could do that, but it would be more of a stop-gap measure that would simply punt the issue thirty or forty years down the road. What would be better is if he could find a way of using the Doctor's statement in Death of the Doctor that he can regenerate 507 times.

We already know from A Good Man Goes to War that Time Lords evolved their capability due to exposure to radiation from the Untempered Schism over billions of years. What I propose is that they gained their regenerations slowly, one at a time, over billions of years as they were exposed to more and more radiation. By the eve of the Time War, they had evolved twelve regenerations. During the war, they realized twelve wasn't enough, so they exposed themselves to more radiation and sped up the process. By the end of the war, the Time Lords (or at least the Doctor) had upped the limit to 507.

Given the tenure of the typical Doctor (three to four years), this would punt the issue well over a thousand years down the road. By the time of the 36th century, either the human race will be extinct, fiction will be a lost art/illegal, the show will have been cancelled anyway, or the writers will have had 1,500 years to think of a permanent solution. Either that, or everybody will have forgotten that the Doctor was only supposed to have a finite number of regenerations in the first place.

Who John Hurt Really Plays

I posted in this article about John Hurt possibly playing the Valeyard, but we now know that not to be true. The Valeyard was artificially created as an amalgamation of the Doctor's dark side. John Hurt's character isn't an artificial creation, he's just another regeneration of the character we all know and love. Also, the Valeyard was created between the Doctor's twelfth and final regenerations, meaning the Doctor hasn't properly met him yet. But the current Doctor seems to already be familiar with everything the John Hurt character did, suggesting he's already lived through that regeneration.

The current Doctor stated that taking the name "Doctor" is like a promise, and that the John Hurt character somehow broke that promise. The only question is, what did he do to break that promise? It was more than likely something involving the Time War (seeing as the only place we could have an extra Doctor is between McGann & Eccleston, during the war), but it could be anything really. If this were Davies, everything would relate back to the Time War, and this would probably be true, but this is Moffat. Moffat is likely to throw us a curveball, he could have done anything, really.

I'm really thinking that this promise is some sort of promise that all Time Lords and Ladies have to take, probably the promise not to interfere. We've already seen the Doctor interfere many times, and even get put on trial for it. He always managed to justify his interference by claiming to be saving innocent lives. Well, perhaps this regeneration killed innocents. He claimed to be doing it "in the name of peace and sanity," but the Matt Smith Doctor seems to think that it was a despicable act. He agrees with the motives, but claims it is something the Doctor would never do.

Nightmare in Silver Review

This is probably my favorite Cyberman story. I generally don't like the Cybermen, I don't like anything where humans or human society becomes "more perfect," but this episode was good.

It appears that the Cybermen have never actually fully upgraded their software. They've never done a full rewrite of their operating system, they've just stuck on a series of patches. The fact that the Cyberplanner fixed the gold bug probably means that we're never going to see that trick used again. That's too bad, because I wanted to see someone use a makeshift glitter gun like what was mentioned in Revenge of the Cybermen.

I want to know what the 0.238% of the Doctor's brain that neither of them could control was. The Doctor initiated a complete mental block against the Cyberplanner, but was unable to block that tiny portion of the brain. It was probably either some low-level processing section, like the brain stem, or some special Time Lord thing with some unique purpose.

The Cyberplanner's comment that "he's had some cowboys in here" in reference to the Doctor makes it seem like the Doctor has undergone some sort of brain scan. Now, seeing as this was followed by a bit about "ten complete rejects", that could be referencing all the previous regenerations that have inhabited his mind, or it could be ten different mind probes that he's forced out. If it was the mind probes, I just want to know what happened to the 11th (was it successful?). This may be connected to the 0.238%, they could have stuck something into him that he couldn't control.

I really don't like just pointlessly reinventing the Doctor's enemies. I feel like the only reason the writers upgraded the Daleks and Cybermen was so that Matt Smith could have a new version. I suppose there is a point in that they don't want the bad guys to get too predictable, because that's when the ratings plummet. The problem with doing it with the Cybermen, is that they don't have time travel technology, but the writers are probably going to ignore that and put the Cybermen in the 21st century in the next episode. Without time travel, it's going to take some sort of extraordinary plot device to get the Cybermen back in time. Either that, or they're just going to put the Cybermen back in time with no explanation. Either of those is going to subtract from the story because the viewer is going to be distracted by these elements. The only other solutions are either limit all the stories to the distant future (after Nightmare) or give the Cybermen time travel capability.

Ultimate Jenna Theory - Revision 4

I'm Clara Oswald, I was born to save the Doctor.

So it looks like I was right in my last post, Clara does have something to do with Trenzalore. Only it sounds like she is going to save his life. Perhaps the Fall of the Eleventh does refer to the Doctor's death and is meant to happen at Trenzalore. Maybe she was created by someone to ensure that this doesn't go down.

Whether it was the Silence, the Great Intelligence, or the Whisper Men, is hard to tell. The Silence seem pretty intent on making sure the prophecy doesn't happen, though they don't seem to care when the Doctor dies, they just want the Question averted. The Great Intelligence is an enemy of the Doctor, so I can't see why it would want him alive, unless it still needs him for something. I still don't know what the Whisper Men want, so that makes it hard to guess for them, but it seems likely.

In the trailers, the Whisper Men seem to appear in a lot of the same scenes as Dr. Simeon and are wearing similar outfits. They may not be separate entities, but part of the Great Intelligence. They may be the new beasty boys to replace the snowmen, Spoonheads, and Yeti. I'm guessing they're a half-failed attempt to replicate Dr. Simeon, so they're him/the GI only with a sort of half-life.

Clara may also have been created by someone else entirely. The Doctor may not find out until the very end of the episode who she is or how she managed to save him. Then there's some big reveal and the Doctor rushes off to meet whoever it is and we pick up in the 50th Anniversary.

I like the idea that someone created an infinite series of Claras across time. They wanted her to meet the Doctor so one of them could save her, but they couldn't be sure the Doctor would actually be able to find her, so they created a near-infinite number of Claras and placed them across the entirety of human history. Inevitably, the Doctor did meet some of them, but he met most of them long in his past before he was meant to and forgot about them. He just happened to meet three of them within a short string of time and therefore remembered and it sparked his curiosity.

That would explain Jenna's recent comment about how the Doctor "hasn't just met Clara three times before." If the other times were long long ago, he might not remember them, so he only knows about the most recent ones.

Given the recent pic of the Citadel of the Time Lords labelled "Gallifrey, a long time ago" and someone saying that the finale is going to mess with classic fans, Clara being created by the Time Lords seems very likely. The Time Lords may have foreseen something far in the Doctor's future and created her to intervene in his timeline. Why they created so many of her, I don't know. Maybe she was created to police the Doctor and act as a check on his power or to prevent him from intervening at certain key points. Or maybe she was created to save the Doctor at certain key points, though I don't know why the Time Lords would ever intervene in history like that.

50th Anniversary Special

Okay, so there's a common them among the 10th, 20th, & 30th anniversary specials: they all have been multi–Doctor episodes that featured a Time Lord/Lady as the villain. First we had The Three Doctors with Omega, then we had The Five Doctors with Borusa, and then we had Dimensions in Time with the Rani. Moffatt had better darn well keep this tradition up, and have the Doctor team up with his other selves to go against some Time Lord for the 50th Anniversary Special. The Master seems like a bit too obvious a choice for this, I would actually prefer that the Doctor go up against the Valeyard.