Gallifrey

This redirect is about the fictional planet. For the audio series of the same name, see Gallifrey (audio series).

Gallifrey
The Citadel of the Time Lords on Gallifrey (from "The Sound of Drums")
Genre	Science fiction television
In-universe information
Race(s)	Time Lords
Locations	Citadel, Panopticon, Academy, Death Zone, Eye of Harmony, Continent of Wild Endeavour, Mountains of Solace and Solitude, Mount Perdition
Characters	The Doctor The Master Romana The Rani Susan Foreman The Meddling Monk Rassilon Omega Drax Professor Chronotis K'anpo (or Cho-Je) Morbius

Gallifrey is a fictional planet in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who and is the home world of the Doctor and the Time Lords. It is located in a binary star system (Gridlock) within the constellation of Kasterborous (Pyramids of Mars, Attack of the Cybermen and Voyage of the Damned), at "galactic coordinates ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre" (Pyramids of Mars (1975), Full Circle (1980) and partially in "The Family of Blood" (2007)), which is some 250 million light years away from Earth (as stated in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie), or 29 thousand as stated in the classic series. This would put it far outside our Milky Way galaxy, which is about a hundred thousand light years in diameter, and indeed outside the Local Group and even the Virgo Supercluster; however, at this distance it would still be within the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex.

During the first decade of the television series, the name of the Doctor's home planet was not revealed, although it was actually shown for the first time in The War Games (1969) during the Doctor's trial. It was finally identified by name for the first time in The Time Warrior (1973). It is never definitively stated when the appearances of Gallifrey in the television series take place. As the planet is often reached by means of time travel, its relative present could conceivably exist anywhere in the Earth's past or future before the year 100 trillion, which the Time Lords never reached.

Gallifrey's position in the revived series (2005 onwards) was filled in slowly over the first three years of the series' run. In Series 1, it had been implied that it was destroyed along with the Dalek Empire, by the Doctor during the Time War. The planet was not referred to by name until the 2006 Christmas Special, was depicted in a flashback in "The Sound of Drums", and played an important role in the plot of The End of Time. It was seen briefly in the Series Seven finale, The Name of the Doctor, showing the moment when The First Doctor and Susan stole the TARDIS.

Geography and Appearances

File:Gallifrey2.jpg

A Vardan spaceship approaches Gallifrey from space (from The Invasion of Time)

From space, Gallifrey is seen as a yellow-orange planet and was close enough to central space lanes for spacecraft to require clearance from Gallifreyan Space Traffic Control as they pass through its system (The Invasion of Time, 1978). The planet was protected from physical attack by an impenetrable barrier called the quantum force field, named presumably after the Eye of Harmony, and from teleportation incursions by the transduction barrier - which could be reinforced to repel most levels of this type of technological attack. This prevented all outsiders (with hostile intent or otherwise) from approaching the planet and allowed the Time Lords to maintain their status of absolute neutrality. It also let them observe the actions of the rest of the Universe without actually taking part in its affairs. These security barriers were breached on only one known occasion by the Sontarans, by manipulating the more technological Vardans who had suborned the Doctor into sabotaging both of these from within (The Invasion of Time, 1978).

In the Last Great Time War, which occurred about the time of the Eighth or the Ninth regeneration (war doctor), the Daleks waged war on Gallifrey. This war was waged for years, and at some point the Daleks succeeded in breaching Gallifrey's supposedly impregnable defenses to make an assault on the Capitol itself. How they were eventually able or indeed solely capable of achieving this is unclear but in the end their attack was repelled, perhaps by the use of Validium in the shape of the `reformed` Silver Nemesis. The Dalek`s failed attempt to conquer Gallifrey is clearly shown by the remnants of their attack fleet strewn about the Capitol in the opening seconds of the second part of the The End of Time Christmas Special, but the Capitol dome is shown shattered and the internal structure is damaged and in flames in places about the city complex. Subsequent images in the revived series - "The Name of the Doctor" have presented us with more conceptual images of the Time Lord capital - The Capitol. Here it is shown that the whole central domed edifice is part of a wider set of massive foundations and engineering that is conceivably the structure designed and built in the time of Rassilon to bring the bounty of the Eye of Harmony to Gallifrey, as it is revealed in the The Deadly Assassin. Outside the Capitol is barren wilderness, as it is set amidst the Mountains of Solace and Solitude, and apparently entirely devoid of technology or signs of cultivation to support the casual wonderer in `outer Gallifrey.` And is to a large extent a terror to the Time Lords themselves who, as the Doctor says in the last episode of The War Games, are a `highly civilized race` which hints at the fact that Gallifrey is ancient in the extreme and almost all Gallifreyans have become entirely dependent on their technology, a weakness not present in the Doctor but certainly in the majority of `stay at home` Time Lords. Further in The Invasion of Time expulsion to the outside world of `outer` Gallifrey was held up to be a deterrent against insurrection in the time of the Vardan invasion, which underlines the point of Time Lord dependency upon their ancient technological invulnerability.

All references to the planet in the revived series clearly point to the assumption that the end of the Time War is the end of Gallifrey. And that the Doctor had to finally choose the fate of his own people who having fought the Daleks for so long in the Time War had taken in to themselves something of the worst aspects of their foes, and they had become entirely set upon a course of action that could conceivably win the war for them, but at the cost of all other life in the Universe by enacting what Rassilon refers to as the Ultimate Sanction. In contrast the Daleks being the supreme xenophobes they were sought to annihilate all life that was not their own and conquering Gallifrey and gaining access to the Time Lord ability to travel in Time in all alternate Universes would have helped them to further this their Ultimate Goal.

So the Doctor chose to destroy both to end the war in a moment of captured and continual time, effectively locking the entire extent of the Time War away from the main flow of time for the rest of the universe, but destroying Gallifrey and the Daleks in the process. The finer detail of the means by which the Doctor achieves this is unclear but one of the powers, or privileges, of a Time Lord is the ability to `Time Loop` a discrete moment of the time stream of any given material object, be it a person or planet. As was the case in the Image of the Fendahl where the 5th planet in Earth`s solar system was removed from all material existence including retroactively erasing all record and memory of it in the process. Similarly the Vardans were removed as a threat to Gallifrey and the Time Lords when their home planet was `time looped` ostensibly removing them from normal space/time. Another example of this ability is demonstrated even earlier by the third Doctor who had only the limited resource of a disabled TARDIS while in exile on Earth, and even in these reduced circumstances was able to `Time Loop` the Axon composite entity, The Claws of Axos , effectively removing the threat it posed to all other life forms after it had scanned his mind for the secret of time travel. Interestingly, the Time Lords convened by Rassilon on the last day of the Time War state that they are still trapped within the Time Lock which would suggest that there had been some effort made to limit the war from further effecting the rest of creation even before Gallifrey`s eventual destruction on the Last Day of the Time War?

After the destruction of Gallifrey the Doctor seemed in every way deeply scarred by his choice of effective genocide of both races, a concept he had wrestled with before in Genesis of the Daleks and again reviled against his culpability when accused by the Vallyard of contravention of Article 7 of the Gallifrey Legal Code, in regard to the complete destruction of the Vervoids in Trial of a Timelord - Episodes 9-12 (Terror of the Vervoids). However there were survivors to the Time War the Doctor and the Master being the two known Time Lords and the Daleks also survived, but in greatly reduced numbers of their eventual attack force of ten million ships about Gallifrey, as stated by the 9th Doctor in "Dalek". These survivors being in order of appearance the Dalek that fell through time to land on Earth and became part of Henry van Statten`s collection of Alien oddities. The Emperor of the Daleks who survived but entered real time at a different point that being Earth controlled space around the 50th century. The last Dalek survivors were the Cult of Skaro, who were uniquely different to usual Dalek soldiers in that they dared to have names and cultivated an imagination to think as the enemy thinks. They managed to escape the final day of the Time War by means of an extra-dimensional Void ship in which they had managed to secure what they initially refer to as the "Genesis Ark" that is finally revealed to be a Time Lord built Dimensionally Transcendental Prison Ship that contained millions of Daleks held in suspended animation, an artifact, which as they declared was all that was left of the Time Lords Home world Gallifrey.

In the end Gallifrey and the Time Lords very nearly escaped the fate the Doctor had assumed they had suffered at his hands and manipulated the Master in to creating a physical link - a life line, out of the Time War and in to Earth`s relative time period. Initially allowing Rassilon to appear with four other Time Lords in Naismith`s Mansion just before Gallifrey itself later `materialized` TARDIS like in close proximity to Earth in orbit of the sun, and in so doing dwarfing the Earth in comparison. Which went a long way to explaining the greater than human physical strength and endurance the Doctor demonstrated at times because he originated from a planet with a higher than Earth gravity index, that could be the evolutionary impetus to native Gallifreyans developing a Binary Cardiovascular system to resist the gravimetric stresses of the enormous planetary mass of Gallifrey itself?

This momentary appearance of the massive planet Gallifrey in dangerous close proximity to the Earth was eventually reversed by the Doctor and a last act of uncharacteristic heroism by the Master. Thus Gallifrey was shunted back in to the Time Lock of the ever repeating last moment of the Time War but not without lasting consequences perhaps. Rassilon`s intent to use the act of tearing Gallifrey away from the Time Locked War to initiate a cataclysmic tear in the Time Vortex itself, ripping it apart, and triggering a transformation of the Time Lords to a higher form of being. So that: "We will ascend to become creatures of consciousness alone, free of these bodies, free of time and cause and effect." Could have been the reason why the Earth retained a `Time Fault` or Rift intersecting the city of Cardiff . The fact that the `rift` first appeared in Earth`s relative past is irrelevant as this is a `Time Fault` and linear rules of causality would not necessarily apply as the tear in time could conceivably be retroactively created `scar tissue` so that the tear would move in two directions away from the initial cause?

In the end the Doctor saved the Earth and the Universe from temporal dissolution and this was presumably the last time we were to see Gallifrey, but the forthcoming episode of The Day Of The Doctor will surely answer some of the nagging questions that the planets appearance and disappearance have since posed. These being, while in near space orbit to Earth, about our sun, did some of the Time Lords make their escape, as there were some who did not follow Rassilon`s planned Ultimate Sanction? Admittedly, neither Earth or Gallifrey could be conceived of as a Routemaster double-decker bus where passengers could `hop on, or hop off` of, but it is possible some others may have taken the opportunity to make good their escape in the end as easily as the Master `boarded` Gallifrey, by crossing the teleportation threshold, in the last moments of his attack upon President Rassilon in The End of Time ?

These speculations aside, it is the Doctor's granddaughter Susan who first described her home world (not named as "Gallifrey" at the time) as having bright, silver-leafed trees and a burnt orange sky at night (The Sensorites, 1964), features that the Tenth Doctor reiterates in the episode "Gridlock" (2007). This casts an amber tint on anything outside the city, as seen in The Invasion of Time. However, Gallifrey's sky appeared blue and Earth-like in The Five Doctors (1983) within the isolated Death Zone, but again this can explained away by the Doctor`s pronouncement of his people`s ability to control their own environment in last episode of The War Games and thus the local environment could be adapted to best serve the combatants of the Games. in The Five Doctors (1983) President Borusa, who had secretly taken control of the Death Zone could have easily adapted it to aid the Doctor and more importantly his predominantly Earth born companions.

In The Time Monster he reveals that "When I was a little boy, we used to live in a house that was perched halfway up the top of a mountain", explaining, "I ran down that mountain and I found that the rocks weren't grey at all - but they were red, brown and purple and gold. And those pathetic little patches of sludgy snow were shining white. Shining white in the sunlight". In "Gridlock", the Doctor echoes Susan`s description of the world now named as Gallifrey and goes further by mentioning the vast mountain ranges situated on Gallifrey, "with fields of deep red grass, capped with snow". He then elaborates how Gallifrey's second sun would "rise in the south and the mountains would shine", with the silver-leafed trees looking like "a forest on fire" in the mornings. In "The Sound of Drums", the Doctor says that Gallifrey was called the Shining World of the Seventh System which sets it apart as singularly beautiful but a garishly coloured world.

In The Brain of Morbius when the Doctor & Sarah Jane Smith are diverted to Karn by the Time Lords remote control of the TARDIS` navigation system. He states that "I was born in these parts... within a couple of billion miles", a distance which would place Karn within the same solar system as Gallifrey. The Sisterhood of Karn also state "Our senses reach beyond the five planets", intimating Gallifrey's solar system comprises five worlds. Indeed the number of crashed spacecraft, as Sarah describes "... there must be at least a dozen wrecked spaceships, it`s like the Sargasso Sea ," would go some way to support Karn & Gallifrey`s being in the same Solar System because it was later established in The Invasion of Time that Gallifrey had a dedicated Space Traffic Control as it seemed extraordinarily close to commercial space traffic lanes. Which could indicate that the Time Lords were not the only space faring inhabitants of their own Solar System, or those in near light distance to themselves, albeit not nearly as advanced? However, these civilizations could conceivable have evolved in the "...Billion years of Time Lord History...` as Rassilon proclaims in The End of Time and were not contemporaries of the Time Lords, like the Sisterhood of the Flame seemed to be?

As the revised series progressed more details on the Time Lords and their The Citadel, referred to by the Time Lords themselves as the Capitol, is revealed and that it is situated on the Continent of Wild Endeavour, in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude ("The Sound of Drums"). However it is the earlier story of the The Deadly Assassin by Terrance Dicks, page 44, where Chancellor Goth clearly states "...the Time Lords are in disarray... to prove to Gallifrey that the High Council are still in control," that strongly indicates that the oligarchic Time Lords in their Capitol are the perceived rulers of the planet of Gallifrey. And it is within the confines of this complex of buildings that the Time Lords reside further establishing that the Capitol is also Gallifrey's capital city and seat of government. Within the Capitol is the Panopticon, under which is located the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole that is their power source. The Eye provides the power required for time travel (The Three Doctors, 1973; The Deadly Assassin, 1976), and all Time Lord TARDIS time machines draw their power from it (the 1996 television movie). Also situated in the Capitol is the Matrix, the vast extra-dimensional computer network which acts as the repository of all Time Lord knowledge as well as containing the memories of dead Time Lords (The Deadly Assassin).

The Deadly Assassin mentions the existence of a section of the Citadel's population called the Shobogans and references the "plebeian classes". This further implies that not all people native to Gallifrey are Time Lords, but there are few details other than broad or incidental references. Such that the entire canon of the Doctors travels rarely touches upon his home world and little is really known of it`s peoples or other indigenous wildlife except Romana`s supposedly frivolous remark about creatures called Gallifreyan Flutterwings (mentioned in The Pirate Planet). And the Master`s thinly veiled rebuke about the Rani`s experiments causing her exile The Mark of the Rani implying that a species similar to cats and mice also exists, but its conceivable that these Earth mammals may have been collected by itinerant Time Lords and brought to Gallifrey instead of being indigenous species?

Outer Gallifrey`s wastelands are where the "Outsiders" reside, Gallifreyans who have dropped out of Time Lord society, who `fell from the Capitol` as Rodan put it, and live in less technological tribal communities. The wastes of Gallifrey include the Death Zone, an area that was used as a gladiatorial arena by the first Time Lords, pitting various species kidnapped from their respective time zones against each other (although Daleks and Cybermen were considered too dangerous to use). Inside the Death Zone stands the Tomb of Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society (The Five Doctors).

Somewhere on Gallifrey there is also an institute called the Academy, which the Doctor and various other Time Lords have attended. It is not clear whether this building is in the capital complex or outside it, and equally it is unclear whether it is a single building or different for each group of Time Lords; as Borusa refers to Prydon Academy in The Deadly Assassin. However, the Doctor in The Time Monster and The Sound of Drums refers to it as a single Academy, and so could be considered analogous to our Earth premier Universities of Oxford or Cambridge in constitutional arrangement, and that it is made up of distinct individual Colleges, or School Houses. In The Deadly Assassin Runcible, a colleague of the Doctors from his time in the Academy describes the various orders of the Time Lords and their colourful insignia of affiliation as: "...the orange & scarlet of the Prydonians, the green of the Arcalians, the heliotrope of the Patrexes, and many others." But further in that scene we see Cardinal Borusa leading four other cardinals dressed in purple robes, on their way to a meeting with Chancellor Goth, which would seem to indicate there were in fact 5 separate Colleges within the institute of the Academy itself, each presided over by a Time Lord cardinal as head of that House.

Of the many artefacts and technological wonders of Gallifrey it is perhaps the portal known as the Untempered Schism - a gap in the fabric of reality that is one of the most awe-inspiring. And as such plays a significant role in the life of Time Lords in that as Eight-year-old Gallifreyans they are brought before the Schism and made to look into the Time Vortex as part of an initiation ceremony into the Time Lord Academy. According to the Doctor, some are inspired, some run away, and some are driven mad. ("The Sound of Drums"). In "The End of Time, Part One", the Master refers to his father's land on Gallifrey which had red grass and stretched across the slopes of Mount Perdition.

When the question of Gallifrey's location is discussed by humans, it is presumed to be located somewhere in Ireland. Examples include episode one of "The Hand of Fear" (1976), episode two of "The Invisible Enemy" (1977) and "Human Nature" (2007), see below for details.

Spin-off material

Several of the spin-off novels have further information about Gallifrey. It is said to have at least two moons, one being the copper-coloured Pazithi Gallifreya (first named in Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible); the novel Lungbarrow also places Karn (setting of The Brain of Morbius, 1976) in Gallifrey's solar system, along with a frozen gas giant named Polarfrey and an "astrological figure" of "Kasterborous the Fibster". Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible also mentions edible rodent-like mammals called tafelshrews. Gallifrey will also appear in the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special. Due to air on the 23rd November 2013

History

For general Time Lord history, see History of the Time Lords.

On screen

Few details on the history of the planet itself emerge from the original series run from 1963–1989. In "The End of the World" (2005), the Ninth Doctor states that his home planet has been destroyed in a war and that he is the last of the Time Lords. The episode also indicates that the Time Lords are remembered in the far future. Subsequently, in "Dalek" (2005), it is revealed that the last great Time War was fought between the Time Lords and the Daleks, ending in the obliteration of both sides and with only two apparent survivors; the Doctor and a lone Dalek that had somehow fallen through time and crashed on Earth. At the conclusion of that episode, that surviving Dalek self-destructs, leaving the Doctor believing that he was the sole survivor of the Time War. However, the Daleks return in "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways" (2005), and subsequently in "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" (2006), "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks" (2007), "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End" (2008), "Victory of the Daleks" (2010), and "Asylum of the Daleks" (2012) the antepenultimate of these being the series 4 finale where Davros also returns, and the second-to-last of these being the first time the Eleventh Doctor meets the Daleks. During that episode, a new race of Daleks is created.

It is suggested that other Time Lords might have survived the war when the Face of Boe utters its final words to the Doctor: "Know this, Time Lord: you are not alone" ("Gridlock"). These suspicions are later borne out in "Utopia" (2007), when the Tenth Doctor discovers that the renegade Time Lord the Master has survived the Time War and has been living in human form in the year 100 trillion, at the end of the material universe, a point so far forward in time that no Time Lord has ever travelled there.

The Doctor's reference to Gallifrey in "The Runaway Bride" marks the first time the name of his homeworld has been uttered on screen since the new series began. The Doctor's revelation that he is from Gallifrey elicits terror from the Empress of the Racnoss then the Gallifreyans were not so adverse to genocide as they brought the Racnoss to near extinction, as indeed they did to the Great Vampires in the time of Rassilon - State of Decay, with the Doctor finishing the act in both instances. John Smith (the Doctor in human form) also mentions Gallifrey in "Human Nature" and that it was in Ireland, this was a clever echo of the same question asked of the Leela when she accompanied the Doctor in his admission to the medical centre near Titan Methane Refueling base in The Invisible Enemy.

The planet makes its first appearance in the revived series in "The Sound of Drums", where the Citadel, enclosed in a glass dome (as described by the Doctor in "Gridlock"), is seen in flashback as the Doctor describes it. Also seen is a ceremony initiating 8-year-old Gallifreyans — in particular the Master — into the Time Lord Academy.

The 2009 story The End of Time once again featured Gallifrey, which the Master releases from the Time Lock the Doctor had created to contain the war. However, Gallifrey's reemergence is eventually stopped and reversed after it was made clear that the release of Gallifrey would lead to the Time Lords destroying time - in effect destroying the universe - in order to defeat the Daleks and ultimately to preserve the Time Lords at the expense of all creation. Resurrected Lord President Rassilon also believed that this action would elevate them to a higher form of existence, becoming "pure consciousness." Upon realizing the scope of Rassilon`s plan for self preservation the Doctor had attempted to stop them. Eventually the Master came to the Doctors aid and prevented Rassilon from exacting revenge for breaking the link that held Gallifrey in relative time to 21st century Earth. The Master used the unstable regeneration energy burst to cripple Rassilon stepping over the Gallifrey/Earth material threshold at the point Gallifrey phased back to the Time War and disappearing with it in to the Time Lock that bottled that battle in its entirety away from affecting the Universal Time Stream.

Clearly by the end of the war, Gallifrey was in ruins. The dome of the main city, the Time Lord capital, the Capitol, was shattered and dozens of Dalek saucers were crashed on the plains below. When Gallifrey appears over Earth, it appears as a huge orange sphere with lakes of lava or vast fires covering the surface, but this could just as easily be the local flora that the Doctor described in "Gridlock" that the sky was burnt orange, and that grasses of Gallifrey were red in colour. And the leafs on the trees of that planet were silver and would catch the light of the second sun of the Binary system reflecting it back to appear like a vast forest fire. Which in turn echoes how the Doctor`s granddaughter Susan describes her World in the Sensorite`s story, except in this case Gallifrey`s flora is reflecting the diffuse light of our own Sun and Earth light as it comes in to close proximity of our World.

It was stated by the 10th Doctor in The End of Time that Gallifrey was not how he and The Master knew it in their youth. Implying that the Time Lords had resorted to desperate and deplorable measures to fight the Daleks, the Doctor was willing to break his code of non-violence to stop the return of the Time Lords.

In the series seven finale, The Name of the Doctor, two Time Lords were seen on Gallifrey watching The First Doctor and Susan steal a TARDIS.

Novels

Various spin-off novels have expanded on the history and nature of Gallifrey.

Marc Platt's novels Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible and Lungbarrow, provide a detailed backstory for the civilisation seen in the main series. In the Dark Times (occasionally mentioned in the televised serials such as The Five Doctors), Gallifrey was at the centre of an empire covering dozens of worlds and continually being extended by heroes such as Prydonius (whom the Time Lord chapter is named after). Ancient Gallifreyans are all telepathic and were ruled by a female cult centred on a figure called the Pythia, who controlled the population through mysticism and prophecies. When the prophetic powers of the last of the Pythias failed her, Rassilion, Omega and a shadowy figure known as The Other seized power in the name of science and rationality. Seeing this the Pythia committed suicide and cursed Gallifrey, killing all children in their wombs and making the world sterile. To combat this Rassilion restructured society and used genetic looms to create new generations of Gallifreyans, who emerge from the looms as fully grown adults. Each of the Great Houses is allotted a total of forty five cousins and given a regeneration cycle of thirteen lives. The Houses themselves are to some degree alive, in the same way TARDISes are and the furniture can move about, occasionally growing into 'Drudges' who function as servants for the family. The Doctor was loomed in the House of Lungbarrow in the mountains of South Gallifrey, but unique among the house's cousins he has a belly button (Lungbarrow suggests this is because he is a re-incarnation of The Other, but later BBC books featuring the Eighth Doctor suggest he actually has a Gallifreyan father and human mother as stated in the 1996 telemovie). This backstory explains why no children are seen in the classic series Gallifrey stories and provides an explanation for the male-centric nature of Time Lord society. This backstory is hard to reconcile with The Sound of Drums which shows the Master as a child and the Doctor's reaction to Jenny's creation through a process similar to looming in The Doctor's Daughter. However, BBC books such as The Infinity Doctors and Unnatural History imply that the Doctor's origin is complex and that every version is somehow "true" (such as Susan's claim in the original version of An Unearthly Child that she was born in the 49th century). Unnatural History contains a flashback in which the Doctor sees himself as a child in the House of Lungbarrow playing under the watchful gaze of his father. The Infinity Doctors implies that the "womb-born" did not completely die out and some families continued to exist in secret. This provides a possible explanation for existence of Irving Braxiatel, a Time Lord who claims to be the Doctor's brother yet is not one of the cousins from Lungbarrow and the implication in The Gallifrey Chronicles that the character Marnal is The Master's father (whose existence is mentioned in The End of Time).

The Virgin New Adventures establish a religion on Gallifrey centred around the three main gods, Time, Death and Pain. The Time Lords use these figures to understand the concepts they represent and in some cases make deals with them and become their chosen champions. The Seventh Doctor is Time's Champion (as well as someone who makes frequent deals with or wages against Death to save his friends) and the audio play Master states that the Master is Death's champion. It's also briefly implied in Vampire Science, that the Eighth Doctor is Life's champion, implying the existence of another unseen figure. Happy Endings and other books imply that these gods are Eternals as seen in the serial Enlightenment.

In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, Gallifrey is destroyed as a result of the Eighth Doctor's desire to prevent the voodoo cult Faction Paradox from starting a war between the Time Lords and an unnamed Enemy. Hints about this future war are dropped in several books earlier in the series beginning with Lawrence Miles's Alien Bodies and the war itself plays out as it would have originally done in Miles' Faction Paradox series in which certain names are changed for copyright reasons (the Time Lords become the Great Houses and Gallifrey becomes the Home World). The war is fought across four dimensions and whole sections of history are blocked off by either side and it is also suggested that events cross into different universes (such as the events of Dead Romance). In order to have boltholes or decoys in case of attack, the Time Lords have created nine separate planet Gallifreys (it even hinted that the original Gallifrey may at some point be reduced to ruins) and special looms to constantly produce new soldiers. By this time TARDISes have evolved to point where they appear human and reproduce sexually (the Doctor's companion Compassion is the first such TARDIS). It is also hinted that the Celestial Intervention Agency will evolve into the beings of pure thought known as the Celestis, who observe the war from outside this dimension (the Last Parliament in which they sit resembles the Panopticon on Gallifrey and the closest anyone gets to describing them is similar to the Time Lords' robes). Faction Paradox itself is a counter to Time Lord society, dedicated to creating time-travel paradoxes, in contrast to the Time Lords' web of time. It was founded by a mysterious figure Grandfather Paradox, who it is believed was once a Time Lord from the House of Lungbarrow. The Ancestor Cell suggests that he is a future version of the Doctor, but this is retconned in The Gallifrey Chronicles, to him being everyone's potential future self. When the Doctor destroys Gallifrey the war no longer happens and his actions also apparently (and retroactively) wipe the Time Lords from history. It is unclear what the attitude of the new Doctor Who television series is toward the information in the novels and audio plays, the latter produced by Big Finish Productions. However, a number of writers of the novels and audio plays are also writing for the new television series, and Russell T Davies refers to the comic strips, audio plays and novels in an essay describing the Time War, written for the Doctor Who Annual 2006.

In the last regular Eighth Doctor novel, The Gallifrey Chronicles by Lance Parkin, it is revealed that while Gallifrey was destroyed, the Time Lords were not erased from history. However, the cataclysm sets up an event horizon in time that prevents anyone from entering Gallifrey's relative past or travelling from it to the present or future. The Time Lords also survive within the Matrix, which has been downloaded into the Eighth Doctor's mind, but their reconstruction requires a sufficiently advanced computer. At the novel's end, the question of whether or not the Time Lords will be restored remains unanswered, although if the events of the novel are to tie in with later events in the TV series it must be assumed that Gallifrey was at some point restored, only to be destroyed again during the events of the Time War. This could also provide a possible explanation for Rassilon apparently being alive in The End of Time, where previous stories show him having died millennia before.

Television series executive producer Russell T Davies wrote in Doctor Who Magazine #356 that there is no connection between the War of the books and the Time War of the television series. In the same Doctor Who Magazine column, Davies compared Gallifrey being destroyed twice with Earth's two World Wars. He also said that he was "usually happy for old and new fans to invent the Complete History of the Doctor in their heads, completely free of the production team's hot and heavy hands".

Despite Davies' unequivocal statement that the two wars are distinct, Lance Parkin, in his Doctor Who chronology AHistory, suggests in a speculative essay that the two destructions of Gallifrey may be the same event seen from two different perspectives, with the Eighth Doctor present twice (and both times culpable for the planet's destruction).

External links

• Rassilon, Omega, and that Other guy — every fact about Gallifrey no matter how apocryphal