Gee, you wait for one mail from IFIS to come along then 86 come along at
the same time.
Right. Even though I'm a physicist I'm not going to bother with the
arguments going on about light speed etc. as
a) I don't understand them myself
b) They're pretty damn dull and
c) I personally have no time for Eistein (or his contempories) and
believe that the laws of physics will probably be revised a good couple
of times before we get to stardate XXXXXXXXX (whenever Star Trek is
suposed to be set, or any of the others for that matter)
The cat thing is something that I've heard dozens of times before (the
humn of UFOs is merely the contented purring of pussy cats, and teh
crashes being due to too many cats being able to eat the butter
themselves etc....) and so won't mention it more than in this paragraph
The Dr Who question... now there is something that I do know at least
something about and so (given that in one of the many mails on this
subject Luke said something along the lines of "stand by for rantings
from Cwej) I shall put forward my opinions, half baked ideas and
anything else that comes to mind.
Let's start with the Doctor / Master issue. We know that there's at
least some connection between the two. In "Planet of Fire", just as the
Master "dies" in the flames, he utters something along the lines of "You
wouldn't do this to your own...". The exact wording may be slightly
different but as I haven't watched this particular story for a while
that's understandable. They were at the Academy / Universtiy together (I
think said in "The Five Doctors" but again, not entirely sure) and are
pretty much teh same age. (Side note: My own opinion is that we don't
know the Doctor's age exactly, only that it's roughly in the 900s
somewhere by now. He "adjusts" it too much for us to be certain) Being
brothers might be a possibility, or some kind of relation for that
matter. However, you then have to look into the birthing habits of
Gallifreyians to decide whether or not they're blood relations. (The New
Adventures don't always agree with the TV stories on the Galifreyains,
so in this mail I'm ignoring the New Adventures, especially as many
people won't have read them) Being blood relations might explain the
kind of bond between them, and their unwillingness to kill each other.
There simply isn't enough evidence to make a proper conclusion. It is
interesting to note that there was going to be a "final" Doctor v's
Master story around the end of Season 10 (Pertwee Doctor and Delgado
Master) in which we were going to be told the true relationship between
them. This was put on ice due to the untimely death of Roger Delgado in
a car accident. SO..... as there's not enough evidence to make a
conclusion, I'm going to suggest my own explanation, which I haven't
heard anyone else put forward.
The Doctor left Galifrey (reasons for which I'll get onto later)
possibly around the same time as the Master. Whereas the Doctor
(initially at least) was careful with his lives and didn't expend them,
the Master soon got through his allotted amount. When the Doctor was
exiled to the Earth, and thus was tied to one place and time, the Master
decided to visit him, maybe with the intention of "stealing" the
Doctor's remaining incarnations. Needless to say he failed. This is
where I get into new territory. Suppose at the end of "Frontier in
Space", after the Master has failed to help teh Daleks kill the Doctor,
they place him on trial, as seen at the start of the TV Movie. They
execute him, forcing the Master to initiate a failsafe plan, put into
effect in teh plot of the TV Movie. At the end of the Movie, the Master
is sucked into the Eye. The Time Winds batter him, but don't kill him.
Instead he emerges at some unknown point in teh decayed state we see him
in in "Deadly Assassin". He then steals himself a new body and changes
into Anthony Ainley. However, the process has been unkind on his mind,
adding a certain edge of madness, more evident in the later Master
stories...
Your (polite) comments on the above would be welcome.
Right, next step (and a quickie), why the Doctor left. Simply, he was
bored and fed up of teh Time Lords not doing anything with their powers.
Simple as that. His TARDIS wasn't equipped with a tracking device, that
was only added at a leter visit to Gallifrey (probably during "Arc of
Infinity" as it's already in place by Trial of a Timelord.)
The other big question raised has been the Doctor / Rassilon issue. So,
once more with my usual disregard for accuracy, here goes.
The Doctor is not Rassilon. At least, not yet. Omega doesn't recognise
him, and the Doctor should recognise his own "dead" body in the Tomb of
Rassilon if it was of a previous incarnation. There is nothing to say
that in some future, and as yet unseen incarnation, the Doctor doesn't
travel back in time to Ancient Gallifrey and become Rassilon but as
that's even more guess work than my Master scenario, I won't persue it
any further. However, there is evidence to suggest that the Doctor has
already been to Ancient Gallifrey, in stories such as "Silver Nemesis"
and "Rememberance of the Daleks". He knows more than he should about the
Dark Times, but not everything. It is possible that he either visited
there at some unknown time during the adventures that we've seen on
Television. My own placing for it would be between "Trial of a Timelord"
and "Time and the Rani". In this time he has to drop Mel off, meet her
for the first time and encounter the Vervoids. It mightbe the case that
in preparing his defence for Trial of a Timelord he saw more in the
Matrix than he was supposed to, thus leading him to set plans in motion
to deal with Fenric and friends. Certainly, somwhere in this gap he
decides to plan ahead as he's never really shown any signs of doing so
before. This is fine, except for the Hand of Omega. The Hand of Omega
was at some point in possesion of the first Doctor (the description of
the casket's owner in "Rememberance fo teh Daleks" certainly fits the
first, or at a pinch, the third). So, my conjecture (based on not much
more than an active imagination) is this.
The first Doctor was some kind of technician on Gallifrey, probably
involved to some extent with TARDIS design. He had only just scraped
through his exams on the third(?) attempt. During his work he not only
discovered just how much the Timelords could have helped people with
their power of time travel, but learned of the Hand of Omega's
existance. He definitely took the Hand of Omega with him when he left
Gallifrey, possibly because when he found of it's existance he thought
that it was too powerful a weapon to be used. He arranged for it to be
burried on the Earth, a planet that he at least knew something about. He
was forced to leave before it was burried, and lay forgotten in the
Doctor's mind until the gap between "Trial of a Timelord" and "Time and
the Rani", just after he had had access to the Matrix. He saw the
possibility of the Daleks trying to obtain the weapon themselves and so
returned to the Earth to set a trap for them. In this gap he also
travelled back to Ancient Gallifrey, to find out what other attrocities
the Timelords had carried out (to wit, the Ravelox incident). Here he
met Rassilon, Omega and the "Other" and it's perfectly possible that he
did influence Gallifreyian history to some extent. It's possible that
it's also in this gap that he made some repair to the TARDIS, mainly in
the navigation circuits. Certainly from this point on he seems to have
more control over where the TARDIS goes. He then picked up Mel at some
point and regenerated into the seventh version (McCoy) when he then set
about completing all his plans.
Right, I think that's probably all my contributions to IFIS chat used up
in one excessively long e-mail. I'm sorry to those people who don't like
Doctor Who and so, should they have got this far, have been thoroughly
bored by this e-mail but that's how I get when I receive endless e-mails
about B5!
Any comments on teh above flight of fancy would be more than welcome.
I've taken a great many liberties with established Doctor Who history
but have hopefully provided a semi-plausable explanation.
Cwej
the same time.
Right. Even though I'm a physicist I'm not going to bother with the
arguments going on about light speed etc. as
a) I don't understand them myself
b) They're pretty damn dull and
c) I personally have no time for Eistein (or his contempories) and
believe that the laws of physics will probably be revised a good couple
of times before we get to stardate XXXXXXXXX (whenever Star Trek is
suposed to be set, or any of the others for that matter)
The cat thing is something that I've heard dozens of times before (the
humn of UFOs is merely the contented purring of pussy cats, and teh
crashes being due to too many cats being able to eat the butter
themselves etc....) and so won't mention it more than in this paragraph
The Dr Who question... now there is something that I do know at least
something about and so (given that in one of the many mails on this
subject Luke said something along the lines of "stand by for rantings
from Cwej) I shall put forward my opinions, half baked ideas and
anything else that comes to mind.
Let's start with the Doctor / Master issue. We know that there's at
least some connection between the two. In "Planet of Fire", just as the
Master "dies" in the flames, he utters something along the lines of "You
wouldn't do this to your own...". The exact wording may be slightly
different but as I haven't watched this particular story for a while
that's understandable. They were at the Academy / Universtiy together (I
think said in "The Five Doctors" but again, not entirely sure) and are
pretty much teh same age. (Side note: My own opinion is that we don't
know the Doctor's age exactly, only that it's roughly in the 900s
somewhere by now. He "adjusts" it too much for us to be certain) Being
brothers might be a possibility, or some kind of relation for that
matter. However, you then have to look into the birthing habits of
Gallifreyians to decide whether or not they're blood relations. (The New
Adventures don't always agree with the TV stories on the Galifreyains,
so in this mail I'm ignoring the New Adventures, especially as many
people won't have read them) Being blood relations might explain the
kind of bond between them, and their unwillingness to kill each other.
There simply isn't enough evidence to make a proper conclusion. It is
interesting to note that there was going to be a "final" Doctor v's
Master story around the end of Season 10 (Pertwee Doctor and Delgado
Master) in which we were going to be told the true relationship between
them. This was put on ice due to the untimely death of Roger Delgado in
a car accident. SO..... as there's not enough evidence to make a
conclusion, I'm going to suggest my own explanation, which I haven't
heard anyone else put forward.
The Doctor left Galifrey (reasons for which I'll get onto later)
possibly around the same time as the Master. Whereas the Doctor
(initially at least) was careful with his lives and didn't expend them,
the Master soon got through his allotted amount. When the Doctor was
exiled to the Earth, and thus was tied to one place and time, the Master
decided to visit him, maybe with the intention of "stealing" the
Doctor's remaining incarnations. Needless to say he failed. This is
where I get into new territory. Suppose at the end of "Frontier in
Space", after the Master has failed to help teh Daleks kill the Doctor,
they place him on trial, as seen at the start of the TV Movie. They
execute him, forcing the Master to initiate a failsafe plan, put into
effect in teh plot of the TV Movie. At the end of the Movie, the Master
is sucked into the Eye. The Time Winds batter him, but don't kill him.
Instead he emerges at some unknown point in teh decayed state we see him
in in "Deadly Assassin". He then steals himself a new body and changes
into Anthony Ainley. However, the process has been unkind on his mind,
adding a certain edge of madness, more evident in the later Master
stories...
Your (polite) comments on the above would be welcome.
Right, next step (and a quickie), why the Doctor left. Simply, he was
bored and fed up of teh Time Lords not doing anything with their powers.
Simple as that. His TARDIS wasn't equipped with a tracking device, that
was only added at a leter visit to Gallifrey (probably during "Arc of
Infinity" as it's already in place by Trial of a Timelord.)
The other big question raised has been the Doctor / Rassilon issue. So,
once more with my usual disregard for accuracy, here goes.
The Doctor is not Rassilon. At least, not yet. Omega doesn't recognise
him, and the Doctor should recognise his own "dead" body in the Tomb of
Rassilon if it was of a previous incarnation. There is nothing to say
that in some future, and as yet unseen incarnation, the Doctor doesn't
travel back in time to Ancient Gallifrey and become Rassilon but as
that's even more guess work than my Master scenario, I won't persue it
any further. However, there is evidence to suggest that the Doctor has
already been to Ancient Gallifrey, in stories such as "Silver Nemesis"
and "Rememberance of the Daleks". He knows more than he should about the
Dark Times, but not everything. It is possible that he either visited
there at some unknown time during the adventures that we've seen on
Television. My own placing for it would be between "Trial of a Timelord"
and "Time and the Rani". In this time he has to drop Mel off, meet her
for the first time and encounter the Vervoids. It mightbe the case that
in preparing his defence for Trial of a Timelord he saw more in the
Matrix than he was supposed to, thus leading him to set plans in motion
to deal with Fenric and friends. Certainly, somwhere in this gap he
decides to plan ahead as he's never really shown any signs of doing so
before. This is fine, except for the Hand of Omega. The Hand of Omega
was at some point in possesion of the first Doctor (the description of
the casket's owner in "Rememberance fo teh Daleks" certainly fits the
first, or at a pinch, the third). So, my conjecture (based on not much
more than an active imagination) is this.
The first Doctor was some kind of technician on Gallifrey, probably
involved to some extent with TARDIS design. He had only just scraped
through his exams on the third(?) attempt. During his work he not only
discovered just how much the Timelords could have helped people with
their power of time travel, but learned of the Hand of Omega's
existance. He definitely took the Hand of Omega with him when he left
Gallifrey, possibly because when he found of it's existance he thought
that it was too powerful a weapon to be used. He arranged for it to be
burried on the Earth, a planet that he at least knew something about. He
was forced to leave before it was burried, and lay forgotten in the
Doctor's mind until the gap between "Trial of a Timelord" and "Time and
the Rani", just after he had had access to the Matrix. He saw the
possibility of the Daleks trying to obtain the weapon themselves and so
returned to the Earth to set a trap for them. In this gap he also
travelled back to Ancient Gallifrey, to find out what other attrocities
the Timelords had carried out (to wit, the Ravelox incident). Here he
met Rassilon, Omega and the "Other" and it's perfectly possible that he
did influence Gallifreyian history to some extent. It's possible that
it's also in this gap that he made some repair to the TARDIS, mainly in
the navigation circuits. Certainly from this point on he seems to have
more control over where the TARDIS goes. He then picked up Mel at some
point and regenerated into the seventh version (McCoy) when he then set
about completing all his plans.
Right, I think that's probably all my contributions to IFIS chat used up
in one excessively long e-mail. I'm sorry to those people who don't like
Doctor Who and so, should they have got this far, have been thoroughly
bored by this e-mail but that's how I get when I receive endless e-mails
about B5!
Any comments on teh above flight of fancy would be more than welcome.
I've taken a great many liberties with established Doctor Who history
but have hopefully provided a semi-plausable explanation.
Cwej