Can someone who has clearly watched more Doctor Who than I, explain Gallifrey... it was the home planet of the Time Lords... were there many Time Lords... was everyone on Gallifrey a TL? Was Gallifrey an important planet? I.e. did it control a whole lot of others/earn the respect of other planets/was the capital of some sort of planetary federation a la Earth or Courouscant?
Andrew
Posted by PsyLiam (Member # 73) on :
Everyone on Gallifrey was a Time Lord, I believed. They weren't the head of any sort of Alliance or Federation, but they were a revered and powerful species, fairly well known throughout the galaxy.
Fan theory has it that Gallifrey exists far, far in the past, and that time on there goes forward like for everyone else. A Time Lord could not go back to yesterday on Gallifrey, for instance. And the Time Lords time machines could only go forward in time from that point. This is how they explain the fact that Gallifrey stories are always chronological from each other.
When we first see the Time Lords (outside of an occasional renegade) in the final second Doctor story, "The War Games", they are portrayed as being immensley powerful. They were able to slow down time with Magical Hand Gestures, and stuff. But it's during the tenure of The Forth Doctor, in "The Deadly Assassain" (I think), that the Time Lords were really laid out. Gallifrey was actually in the nadir of it's civilised time, rather like the Republic in episodes I and II. The Time Lords had become lofty, arrogant, ill concerned about helping others, hiding behind their belief that they knew best. As the sixth Doctor put it:
"In all my travellings throught the universe, I have battled against evil, against power-mad conpirators. I should have stayed here! The oldest civilisation, decadent, degenerate and rotten to the core! Power-mad conspirators? Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen? They're still in the nursery compared to us! Ten million years of absolute power - that's what it takes to be really corrupt!"
It's also worth noting that, for a period of time the forth, fifth and possibly sixth doctors were actually president of Gallifrey. Although they didn't do much, er, presiding.