Imperial March: Time Lords (probably Part I of many)

Trying to follow in the impressive footsteps of my dear friend Sam, I'd like to end Imperial March the same way I begun it - by describing a villain. Or a set of villains, in this case.

I haven't done much for Imperial March, partly because the Muses didn't grant me any sort of villainous inspiration (I've done loads of non-villainous artsy things, though) and partly because my PhD research is proving pleasantly time consuming.

But this post is part of a sort of side-project - my now year-old obsession with Doctor Who has proved somewhat productive as I will be talking about Time Lords at a symposium in Westminster in September.

Because that's the thing. Whereas Sam talks about outright, clear-cut villains, I have always had a soft spot for characters who aren't outright villains but who are merely morally ambiguous. Dorian Gray, for instance. It's why I favour the "The Master is basically a scorned lover and is merely trying to get the Doctor's attention by blowing up half the universe half the time"-explanation over "The Master is Evil, period."

And the Time Lords are a magnificent civilisation as a whole, in this regard. They aren't outright evil, oh no. They're just - misguided. Slow. Close-minded. Bureaucratic. But evil, no. Sure, there are some amongst them who could be construed as evil - the Master, despite my preference for an alternative explanation, could be evil, as could be the Rani (I've just heard of the death of Kate O'Mara, may she rest in peace - I've only seen her as the Rani but she was incredibly memorable in that role), despite the notion that the Rani just basically has no regard for anything but her experiments (which should not make her truly evil, really), or Borusa (who really is just too ambitious for his own good), or Goth (same), or the Monk (who just really takes the Doctor's meddling a bit further than the Doctor would). I suppose not even the War Chief is truly evil, just horribly, lethally misguided.

What we've seen of Time Lord and/or Gallifreyan society thus far is not much - just their political and judicial system. A lot can be said about a civilisation from this, but a lot has also been ignored - we haven't a clue what daily life on Gallifrey is like. My historian friend perhaps put it best when she told me that yeah, kings and all are really cool, but it's the real people who actually have to live with their decisions. Which is why I was over the moon - after re-watch, because it needed a re-watch - about The Day of the Doctor, in which we finally saw groups of regular Gallifreyans. Yeah, we saw a group of Outsiders before, in The Invasion of Time, but they were, indeed, explicitly Outsiders. Other Gallifreyans and Time Lords thus far seen were judges, juries, civil servants, guards, councillors, and other people high up in society.

I was also excited about the crack in the universe in The Time of the Doctor, for obvious reasons. Yeah, Mark Gatiss does have a point that the Time Lords shouldn't be featured too often because it makes them seem stuffy and domesticated. But I don't think that 'stuffy and domesticated' is necessarily a bad thing. After all, the Doctor ran from Gallifrey because "he was bored" (The War Games, episode 10) - doesn't the Time Lords being all-powerful but stuffy and domesticated completely justify that? It would justify the Doctor's entire defence in that serial, actually - he basically tells them that they're all-powerful but too content doing absolutely nothing and that therefore he finds himself compelled to go out and meddle in the affairs of other planets, breaking the Time Lords' most important law.

Mind, I'm not saying that they should be featured more often than only every once in a while. I agree with Gatiss there. I'd be perfectly content with seeing them only every three years or so - I'd hate for them to become as normalised as the Daleks.

But in any case, in fact, I think that stuffy and domesticated exactly describes the Time Lords as they ought to be. As they are, generally.

Consider this. For the longest time, they have been a stagnant, introverted, isolationist society. No real outside enemies. After all, it takes the Vardans and the Sontarans a mole to take down Gallifrey's defences from the inside. The Gallifreyans have nothing to worry about because normally Time Lords don't travel too far from Gallifrey - the Doctor, the Master, the Rani and the Monk are obvious exceptions, but despite all their mischievous natures (yes, you too, Doctor), none of them would consciously consider forming an alliance with any party that may actually, actively threaten their home planet. Gallifreyans just live their lives (plural, of course) in relative peace within the confines of the Gallifreyan sphere.

But the lack of a common enemy divides, like a common enemy unites. Even a Time Lord would get right bored if every day was basically the same - especially if you'll have day after day after day of that for perhaps millennia (Seriously, what do they do?). Yes, they study the universe outside of their sphere, and they learn - no one knows precisely how long Time Lords exactly spend in the Academy, but given that in The Sound of Drums it is established that Time Lords get inducted at age 8 and Romanadvoratrelundar was 140 or 125 (even she forgets her age, and she's comparatively young) after just graduating - and she was a particularly gifted student, too - it's safe to say that Academy time may be well over a century.
For comparison, I've spent about two decades (Dutch primary school starts at age 4) in the education system and I'm currently working on a PhD. So multiply that by five (and the other four times twenty years aren't at all concerned with learning to read and write and do maths) and account for the much greater mental abilities of Time Lords and you may start approximating a bit of how much they could potentially learn. And that's just in formal education.
But it's established that the Doctor didn't like his education. If the like-to-dislike ratios in Time Lord society are anything like those I've observed here, I'm fairly certain most Time Lords get fed up with their education at one point or another too.
So that's all they have then. Millennia to live and nothing to do. So you get in-fighting.

Not, like, civil war of course, because Time Lords are highly civilised people. But politics. Cliques.

Chapters.

One thing that struck me (and many others too) is the notion that in The End of Time and The Day of the Doctor, the Time Lords and Gallifreyans seemed united in wearing dark red robes. It was established in The Deadly Assassin that generally, Time Lords wore colours following their Chapters - as Runcible so clearly explains in that serial, "the scarlet and orange of the Prydonians, the green of the Arcalians, and the heliotrope of the Patrexes, and so on". Of course, Runcible also explains in that serial that the robes and the insignia are seldom worn, but we see them in every serial - up to The End of Time - that features the Time Lords since then. Or at least, we see the colours, not the full regalia per se. But in The End of Time, Rassilon has taken over command in the Gallifreyan war against the Daleks, and suddenly the Time Lords are no longer divided into chapters but are instead all wearing dark red. United in a common cause, I expect. There's still internal politics - as the War Council of The Day of the Doctor explicitly references the notion that the High Council had plans of their own which backfired (though they managed to pull the Master back into the war - see The End of Time pt. 2 - poor Master, I hope they fixed his energy and drum issues in their pocket universe).

But not all Time Lords seem to wear the robes of their chapters, even during times of peace.

Guards don't. Andred in The Invasion of Time, and Maxil in Arc of Infinity don't, in any case, nor do any other official members of the Chancellery Guard. Which is really to be expected, them being guards and all - regardless of chapter, they need to stand guard. Of what, if Gallifrey has no 'natural' enemies? Of Outsiders, shobogans and internal politics, I presume. Regardless of chapter.
Magistrates don't, as can be seen in The War Games and The Trial of a Time Lord. I suppose then that justice, even on Gallifrey, is suppose to be impartial - magistrates wear black and white. As does the Valeyard, which we learn is Gallifreyan for learned prosecutor. And yes, prosecutors are generally expected to be impartial too, merely reporting and describing crimes and accusing the suspect regardless of who the suspect is. I do wonder what the difference is between the three-judge court of The War Games and the full jury plus magistrate plus prosecutor plus possibility for defence court of The Trial, but I expect this to be similar to a division between Crown Court and Magistrates' Court. In The War Games, the Doctor is merely a Time Lord hopping about space and time in a stolen TARDIS meddling in things he shouldn't meddle in, while in The Trial he is an ex-Lord President accused of, yes, meddling, as well as genocide and a whole host of other things. Also, you know, the High Council kind of wants him as a scapegoat in that one.
The black robes worn by Time Lord observers in The Three Doctors and briefly in Colony in Space intrigue me, too. Who are they? Canonically speaking, if they were mere Time Lords, they would be wearing their chapter colours, not black (of course from a production point of view, these serials were made before The Deadly Assassin, so before the establishment of chapters). But as we find out in serials such as The Deadly Assassin, as well as some others, the Doctor was forced to work for the Celestial Intervention Agency for a while whilst exiled to Earth after his trial in The War Games. And these black-robed Time Lords can be seen observing time lines and specifically lifting the Doctor out of his own time-line to do battle with Omega in The Three Doctors and diverting the course of the TARDIS to solve some minor crisis having to do with the Master and a human colony in Colony in Space. In fact, the Time Lord who shows up at the beginning of The Genesis of the Daleks to tell the Doctor to go meddle in the time-lines of the Daleks also wears black - it is therefore my hypothesis that these black-robed Time Lords, who meddle in time whilst meddling in time is strictly against the laws of Gallifrey, are indeed CIA-agents. Wearing black instead of their chapter colours, of course, because they are far above petty internal politics. These are intertemporal politics these Time Lords are dealing with, after all.

But in the end, yes, stuffy and domesticated and all-powerful. And boring in the most exciting way. That's what Time Lords are, or what I believe them to be. How I perceive them.

Not villainous per se. Just fascinatingly uncaring.

I expect I will continue writing about them some other time. They're a fascinating fictional society.

Imperial March: The Scarlet Pimpernel

Technically, today's post is not dedicated to an outright villain.

Though he can be a villain from a certain point of view.

You see, yesterday, one of my fellow EvilCo'ers posted a list of villains elsewhere, sourced from 'The Oxford Book of Villains' by John Mortimer*. This reproduced list contained a villain whose inclusion at first I found somewhat surprising - Chauvelin from The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy (1905).

Now, I have recently read this book for various reasons but mainly because I wanted to read something entertaining, and a turn-of-the-century book of a swashbuckling adventure set in Revolutionary France seemed to fit the bill.

Both Chauvelin and the Scarlet Pimpernel can be construed as both heroes and villains.

Chauvelin, as an agent of the French revolutionaries, seeks out French aristocrats for guillotining.

I like the French Revolution as a historic era on its own and as a sort of prequel to the Napoleonic era, and I fully sympathise with the ostensible aims of the revolution - liberté, fraternité, égalité. Without the French Revolution, our world today would've looked much different, perhaps we'd still be living in a more or less feudal age, with a wealthy upper class, the 1%, and the rest of the world being peasants - okay so perhaps the French Revolution in the end didn't change all that much when it comes to wealth inequality, but at least it led to some new political philosophical ideas, plus the veneer of democracy that we all enjoy today.

So to a certain extent Chauvelin can be construed as a hero of the French Revolution.

But the random guillotining of aristocrats doesn't sit right with me - killing people just because they or their parents were born aristocratic is not particularly egalitarian. You can't really change what you were born as. So in that sense he's rather a villain.

This random killing of aristocrats also doesn't sit right with the Scarlet Pimpernel, who happens to be an English aristocrat and who swoops in and out of Paris to save more or less innocent people who have been condemned to the guillotine. So he's a hero, but he appears to oppose the revolution and in that regard is a villain.

As the book was written by the daughter of a Hungarian baron, who fled Hungary in fear of a possible peasant revolution, the author is clearly sympathetic to the Scarlet Pimpernel, painting him as the swashbuckling hero and Chauvelin as the clear-cut villain.

"six foot odd of gorgeousness, as represented by [**]", p. 55, is indeed rather sympathetic to the protagonist - I had to giggle when I first read that because it feels rather Twilight-esque to describe a protagonist as such. Very much the author-narrator's voice bleeding through, there.

But my egalitarian ideals force me to disagree, not with the Scarlet Pimpernel as the hero because in the end he's the one (well, with his friends, of course, especially Sir Andrew Ffoulkes) who ends up saving innocent people from an unfair death, but with Chauvelin as the villain. Sure, he is rather extreme in following up on his revolutionary ideals, and I can't in anyway condone murder - because that's what it is, in the end - but I do agree with the revolutionary ideals, and part of me also warns that there's a distinct possibility that Chauvelin mainly did his perceived duty under societal pressure. That's not entire the reason for his murdering people, of course, he does seem to rather relish it, and he does pose a considerable threat to the Pimpernel (well...). Though I am not really certain whether he's so keen on capturing the Pimpernel because the Pimpernel deprives him of his opportunity to carry out more or less institutionalised murder or because the Pimpernel's actions pose a dangerous loss of face to Chauvelin - I think that there is a considerable threat that if Chauvelin is found wanting, he could end up under the guillotine instead.

Legally speaking, that's called duress - he'd still be guilty of murder, but wouldn't be entirely responsible for it. I'll leave it to a lawyer to interpret whether Chauvelin's situation fully counts as duress, but it does negate his villainy somewhat.

Of course the heroic thing to do would be to say "I'd rather get killed than murder!" or for him to decide to sneakily cooperate with the Pimpernel, but real people often aren't that heroic.

I'll leave it to my dear friend Samantha Schäfer to identify what sort of villain Chauvelin in that regard then is, if he is a villain at all.

Of course the Scarlet Pimpernel remains the hero. He saves people and swashbuckles. I'm sure that's enough to qualify as such.

So, my tiny little artsy project for today is a rendition of the Pimpernel's calling card, which he often leaves for Chauvelin to find out that he has yet again foiled his guillotining (I'm taking the inspiration for this more from the 1956 tv-series than from the novel, mind).

The main thing to conclude from this tiny artsy project, however, is that I need new nibs for my calligraphy pens. I like how the flower worked out, though.

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* I am dying to read this book now. My library doesn't have it. I'm annoyed by that.
** I really don't want to spoil it. Read the book. Watch the series. Read the wikipedia page.

Imperial March: Celebrate Your Inner (Doctor Who) Villain

Evil Greetings.

It is Imperial March once more, meaning that I get to spend a month exploring and celebrating my inner villain as part of EvilCo's celebrations. 

I wrote a post last year about what Imperial March actually is... in short, it is a month (March - ah. yes.) in which one celebrates villainy in fiction - films, novels, video games, anything that tickles your fancy*. 

A year has passed since, and in that year I have grown - as cannot have escaped anyone's notice as it is one of only two things I talk about these days - into an almost hard-core Whovian. 

In that year, I have fallen in love with the evilness of the Daleks (they just need a hug, honest) and the Time Lords (because if anything they're the real proper villains of 70s and 80s Who - I can't wait for them to come back) and simply the way in which Doctor Who portrays villainy - sometimes it's rather camp (The Master, anyone?) and sometimes it's a bit wobbly (Ice Warriors - they do look like muppets) and sometimes you have a hard time believing something so cuddly can be evil (The Yeti - I just want to pet them), but so often it's much more complicated than just putting down a flat, two-dimensional monster. 

Yes, the Daleks are pretty much the embodiment of evil - they were based on the Nazis, after all, who are a go-to standard if you want a shorthand for something really evil in fiction - but yet this is explained because in the end they are the result of a mad scientist's meddling with genetics and there's an almost touching scene in the Eccleston serial Dalek when the last remaining Dalek (or is it?) gets really rather desperate.

The Master - well, he and the Doctor are basically the embodiment of the Foe Yay trope (I heartily support any Doctor/Master shipping) - see also this - but in the end his evil is because the Time Lords caused him to go insane and because he really wants to attract the Doctor's attention (this latter interpretation may also be due to me spending too much time reading fan fiction, which isn't nearly so bad as people make it out to be). 

Sure, there's plenty of villains and monsters that are really a tiny bit, well, shit (looking at you, Dominators), but this is off-set by having villains like - is it spoilers if the episode aired 30 or more years ago? - a former Academy lecturer rising through the ranks of Time Lord society until he becomes acting Lord President and basically being willing to sacrifice all of time and space and the Doctor in return for immortality, or an earlier example of a Time Lord Judge (then Chancellor) willing to falsely accuse the Doctor of murder so he (the Judge) can be elected Lord President by default. 

Or what of a power-hungry scientist playing the media and politics in a scheme to take over the world (I love Enemy of the World, and that has only partly to do with the fact that Patrick Troughton is in it twice). 

So, as a first part of my Imperial March celebration, I made a set of election posters for EvilCo (click for large - warning, quite large indeed)**. 

The rest of the month will be spent doing other artsy things. Writing blog posts about other villains. I may put in a post about Michael Corleone and the Corleone family - I haven't lost my Godfather-fanness yet. Doing drawing - I can't draw but practice makes, well not perfect obviously, but better - and doing poetry because I like poetry.

Fiction, perhaps - I still have last year's Imperial March story to finish.

I cannot update daily, due to thesis work, but I will put a new Imperial March thing online whenever I have something. 

And that's a promise. I may even keep it. 

Or not. MUAHAHAHA.

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*is it just me or does 'tickle your fancy' sound rather smutty?
** Yes, I know. Obviously the Cybermen and the Ice Warriors don't do elections, and I daren't be sure about the Daleks seeing as they have a parliament and also an emperor (constitutional monarchy? Which also forces one to ask - how can there be a Dalek Emperor? Unless I am mistaken in my belief that an emperor is different from a king in that an emperor generally rules multiple territories and peoples, and Daleks are a bit too genocidal to rule over other species. Unless of course you consider several Dalek factions to be different peoples. Also, how is there a Dalek Emperor in the first place - is he somehow more Dalek than all other Daleks? Or what?). I know the Time Lords do have elections, but they're too xenophobic to even consider letting non-Gallifreyans (or even just non-Time Lords!) run for office. This poster is meant as a bit of a joke.