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: 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.

---

*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. 

Doctor Who s7e6 sort-of-review

So yesterday I watched the new Doctor Who-episode (Who-pisode?).

I was quite excited for it, also because it had been promoted as being somewhat James Bond/Jason Bourne-like. It wasn't like that at all, though.
Seriously, the Doctor can't be like James Bond - the only character in the episodes I have watched so far that can make claims to being somewhat Bond-like would be Ian, the 30-something science teacher in a suit (but willing to dress in funkier outfits) and JFK-haircut who, together with Barbara and Susan, was one of the first companions back in the 1960s (I do have a bit of a weak spot for the Ian character).

But I quite liked the episode, apart from a few things I am all too willing to overlook. Except for Clara. I don't like this version of her. I liked her as soufflé-girl, and I liked her as Victorian Clara, but current-day Clara is just odd. She seemed to be trying too hard to be feisty but missing the actual spark to be feisty. A bit too-cute-to-be-true, in a sense (also, didn't she call him 'Doctor' before he'd properly introduced himself as such? Might have to re-watch).
Monsters in the WiFi, heck yes. Nicely done, too, with the Spoonheads and a creepy CEO-type lady.
Motorbike - why? He's got a bloody TARDIS. Seems a bit contrived and just a plot-thing to have the Doctor drive up the side of the Shard, which seemed slightly off. I watched it going "WHAT." in my best Tennant-imitation. Slightly deus ex machina - "You can't enter" "Well I can because this motor bike that I've been driving around because somehow I thought it wise to leave my TARDIS on the South Bank and that no one has ever seen before can suddenly defy gravity". Yeah No.
Seriously, that could've been done much more easily with the TARDIS, without having to stick in a deus ex motorbike - "Say Clara, let's have breakfast" "Did you just park the TARDIS on the pavement in the middle of London?" "Yes I did" "Awesome" - breakfast - "Oh No, I have to be in the Shard!" - TARDIS - "Hello creepy CEO lady".
But in general I liked the episode. Nice pacing (which is what has me screaming at my laptop about the early episodes - mainly going "seriously Ian, DO SOMETHING!"), nice baddies, nice TARDIS interior, nice purple coat (purple is cool).
I watched the episode expecting it to be part of a bigger whole, which is why I am willing to overlook things - if they bring back the motorbike for something that can't be done with the TARDIS later on in the series, I'll drop all my complaints about it.
The only thing I felt was truly missing was something of a transition between the Christmas special and this episode. I know the prequel is there, but it's not sufficient. Hope they'll come back to that later in the series also.
In general, therefore, nice opening for a new (half) series but only if the writers are willing to wrap up a big number of loose ends.

Very much looking forward to next episode, if only because 'Akhaten' reminds me of the name of pharaoh Akhenaten, which is cool because Akhenaten was not only the heretic king but also the father of Tutankhamun (who really isn't important but his treasures are still cool) and the spouse of Nefertiti - which is cool because we already saw Nefertiti in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship.
Besides, Akhaten seems to translate to something having to do with the solar-deity Aten (whom Akhenaten made the focus of his monotheistic religion) and pharaonic effectivenes, or something of the sort.
The summary on the BBC website says "The Doctor takes Clara to the Festival of Offerings, but the Old God is waking and demands sacrifice!". I've seen the preview and trailer, and there's definitely a fiery planet or even star in there, so that works too. Of course it's in space - but who's to say Akhenaten's religion didn't travel?
So, definitely something with Gods, and Festival of Offerings sounds quite like something that fits with the religions of the Egyptian and classical world. Cool. Fingers crossed that they're actually putting in allusions to Ancient Egypt, for that would forever solidify my fanship of Doctor Who. They've already done vampires and Napoleon, after all.

Time

Seeing as tonight sees the broadcast of a whole new Doctor Who episode, this might be the right moment to write about one of my greatest problems with the show: Time. And time travel. Especially the Earth-centricness.

I don't have any problems with space travel, mainly because space travel is just covering distance and whether covering a certain distance in little to no time passing at all might well be possible when technology improves. Sure, if one travels by coordinates - as the Doctor seems to be doing - one needs to be extremely specific in order not to land halfway in the ground somewhere, or stuck in a ceiling - one would need to know the exact location of every atom in the general area of where one would want to land (which, so I've been told, is one of Physics's major practical problems in making teleportation possible). But I'm sure the TARDIS is perfectly equipped for this, and there appears to be a Galactic Zero Centre (http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Galactic_centre), like our global coordinates are at 0 where the equator crosses the Greenwich meridian, just off the coast of Africa. Such a zero point is an agreed-upon point and so not an absolute, but can still be used to measure against and so base travel upon. There need to be no extremes known - you don't need to know the "end", just keep on counting. It does not even need to be a Galaxy-widely held convention, even if only the TARDIS would use such a zero point, it can be used for travel, as long as elevation or at least a third dimension is taken into account.

But Time. Time does not truly exist, does it, other than as a purely abstract idea to mark the duration of a sequence of events. Time, as a concept, is a human invention - the basic notion is the rotation of the Earth and the orbiting of the Earth around the Sun, nothing more. A day is the duration for one point - or line, the Greenwich meridian - to move from a specific location relative to the Earth's axis to that same location relative to the Earth's axis, or from Midnight to Midnight. But that's a modern invention, as for instance in the Ancient world, if I remember correctly, a full day lasted from sun up to sun up and so the duration of a day varied. But an agreed duration for a day is good, so humans could divide it by 24, and then by 60, and then by 60 again, and so forth, to find out hours and minutes and seconds and miliseconds. There wasn't even a unified time per country until railways demanded it, and then it still took a while for everyone - it took especially the French very long - to agree that time is to be derived from the Greenwich meridian.
A year is just the same, the number of days it takes to orbit around the Sun - 365.24... something, so we need a leap year every four years except some. To us, that is, because to the Ancient Egyptians a year was 360 days (12 months, 30 days per months, 3 weeks per month, 10 days per week) plus a festival of five days for the Gods, which fell outside the year.
And what is our zero for years? Some Pope decided that the birth of Christ was supposed to be zero, so he calculated zero, and still got it wrong, so that our calendar begins at a completely random point in time. Fair enough though if we can all agreed that that random point is zero, but then the Jewish are currently in the year 5773. And we can't even agree on the point when the year should begin - Midnight at the start of the 1st of January? Or later, in late January/early February, like the Chinese New Year? Roman New Year did not start until March, while Ancient Egyptian New Year was some time over summer.
Fine, so let's say the TARDIS travels by Gallifreyan time - one could presume that at least the Gallifreyans would agree on one time, some of them being Time Lords, after all.
Travelling forward in time should perhaps not be too difficult, if one can teleport or travel really really fast - something with time running slower than elsewhere, something Einstein, something relativity.
But travelling back in time should only be possible if each event, or each sequence of events, is stored in some dimension, and that time passing is just - I'm going fairly metaphysical here - our consciousness passing through those dimensions. A bit like our consciousnesses are watching a stop-motion film, but then they are part of that stop-motion film. I guess this could be possible with parallel universes etc., quantum physics and what not. Schroedinger's Cat and that.
Besides, time travel should only be possible if one can map time against something - but against what?

But perhaps I'm taking time too much as a linear thing and instead it is "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey... stuff".

Anyway. What I did realise is possible was what I realised yesterday as I was trying to fall asleep. Basically, we only see parts of the Doctor's adventures (most notably the Eleventh Doctor suddenly ages from 900-something to 1100-something over a series, and we don't really see what happens in the 200 years in between), so at any point in time, if the Doctor were real, we humans could meet just about every incarnation - a TARDIS could appear right here in the grad lounge and the First Doctor could come stepping out "hmm"-ing (or, more interestingly to me, the Tenth could step out brandishing the sonic screwdriver). Of course that would also mean (I haven't watched any episode yet in which the Doctor meets himself, so bear with me) that a Doctor with little to no hang-ups about crossing his own timeline could easily meet himself in an earlier (or even the same - but hang on, he did that more or less when Rose wanted to save her Dad) regeneration. I'd love for the First Doctor to meet the Eleventh and go all "hmm" and "my boy" and patronising and all that until the Eleventh points out that he is him but - hilariously - older.

What if time passed faster in the TARDIS (or any other other dimension) than it does in the outside world? It would explain why suddenly the Eleventh Doctor is 200 years older, for I doubt he'd travel without the Ponds for 200 years while the Ponds were still free. If one is used to a human pace, and time moves faster in another dimension, what would seem like a month could indeed easily be a year, or even two centuries.
It would also explain why some Doctors (especially the Tenth and Eleventh - I've yet to observe Two to Seven) seem a bit hyperactive compared to a human pace.
Sort of reversed relativity.
Perhaps it WOULD, in case of reversed relativity of time, be possible to travel back in time. Perhaps the pace of time inside the TARDIS can be altered so that travelling in time both ways is made possible. I don't know.
Hang on. Time goes faster on the inside than on the outside.
The TARDIS is Narnia.
That, or the Eleventh Doctor spent 200 years in Narnia.
Either one is cool.

Fascinating stuff, time. I just have difficulty grasping it - I do wish I hadn't dropped my science courses in secondary school. The upside of all this is that if time was a stop-motion film observed by our consciousnesses, I'd be totally right in believing there is no Truth and all there is, is our observed reality.

Physicists, do feel free to step in and answer my questions...

PS I love this: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970401c.html. I'm quite terrible at the whole sine/cosine/tangent bit of mathemathics (only mathematics test I failed back when I was still good at maths), but let's ignore that bit. This bit: "The Earth is doing a lot more than rotating, although that is certainly the motion we notice most, because day follows night as a result. We also orbit the Sun once a year. The circumference of the Earth's orbit is about 940 million kilometers, so if you divide that by the hours in a year you will get our orbital speed in kilometers per hour. We are also moving with the Sun around the center of our galaxy and moving with our galaxy as it drifts through intergalactic space!". Pure Epic. Basically, it tells me that there should be four basic units of time on Earth: a day (rotation), an Earth year (orbit), a Galatic year (moving around the centre of the Galaxy) and an Intergalactic period (a distance in drifting through Intergalatic Space). Yes, I *am* ignoring time derived from atom clocks etc.. So basically, the TARDIS would not only have to have a sort of internal library of the positions of every atom - impressive enough to start with - but also of every atom's movement through time - and surely this must include 'paths not taken', i.e. unrealised futures and disregarded pasts.
Whoa. Time Lord technology must be truly awesome. No wonder the sonic screwdriver can do lots of things that seem like deus ex machina plot-tricks to us mere humans...