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I mean, even the Master admitted in front of everybody how dangerous an immoral Doctor (the Valeyard does possess the knowledge of the Doctor--some of it annoys him, but it's there) is. He'd way rather face the Doctor as he normally is than this guy!

And by loyalty, I mean I don't think the Valeyard would feel he owed them anything. He'd ditch the CIA in a heartbeat and go his own way. The Doctor gets really ticked off at being dragged around without asking him about it, but most of the time he does take care of the job at hand (yelling about it, but even so) because much as he hates to admit it, there usually IS a job that he agrees needs doing. The Time Lords know if they stick the Doctor down somewhere where there are conquerors or destructive monsters, he won't take one look at the situation, walk straight back into his TARDIS & save his own neck, he'll try to fix it. That is an aspect of his morality that is (or was?) pretty predictable and got used by the CIA a lot.

Again, the more dangerous this guy this person is the better an agent he is to have under you control if you're arrogant enough to think you can keep him there. And the only thing more arrogant that a Time Lord is an Interventionist Time Lord. smile


Absolutely. For the CIA to run the Valeyard there's no way they'd be relying on his finer feelings. It'd have to be a "We created you, so we could destroy you" situation.

If the CIA are happy to alter history to pre-emptively uncreate the Daleks, and the CIA created the Valeyard themselves, it would be child's play for them to just uncreate him as soon as be rebelled. And the Valeyard would know this.

That's what they'd have over him, rather than needing to trust to him wanting to repay a debt.



3nodding They can certainly use the Doctor to do things that he would have done anyway, but what happens when then need an agent of equal potency for the dirtier jobs? The sort of thing that might be in the CIA's self interest is not always going to be about taking down the baddies.

As I think we've both shown, we can do arguement/counter-argument over this one until Kingdom Come. I absolutely get your logic, and agree that it does describe the likely catastrophe that would result from the CIA attempting to manipulate the Valeyard. But I hope we've done enough circles that you can by now see that it wouldn't be "ridiculous" for the CIA to desire the Valeyard as a pawn and to think they could get away with it.

The arguement in my first post? Oh yeah, that all depends on the "CIA created the Valeyard" proposition. Which I think I conceded there's no obligation for you Telly-Only types to go along with as soon as you (rightly) called me on it. My arguement there makes no sense at all for people who haven't got the novels&audios in their canon. Ya got me. smile

My arguement since then hasn't depended on the CIA having created the Valeyard, it's just served to illustrate that the idea they could have isn't inherrantly 'ridiculous'. smile

ok this is going to sound extremely stupid but what exactly is the Valeyard.... redface

Who is the Valeyard?
BEWARE--FULL OF CLASSIC SERIES SPOILERAGE!

I think the Virgin novels' problematised and challenged their own "proto-Seven aborted Six" arc as they went along.

Even in the scene in which it was first clearly said, then Death told the Doctor it was that action that would lead to him becoming the Valeyard - thus making the Seventh responsible.

And Millennial Rites showed the whole thing from the Sixth Doctor's perspective.

As you say, Room with No Doors established that the danger to the Doctor's soul was never really from some 'caged' Sixth Doctor operating as a seperate entity inside the Doctor, or from some callous 'Time's Champion' personna operating as the Doctor's dominant aspect. The danger to the Doctor came from him thinking in those terms and seeing all those sides of himself as different, warring individuals, rather than understanding himself as one (incredibly complex) person and accepting that person.

I thought the arc made for some great drama as it rattled on, as the Sixth and Seventh Doctors both have such different attitudes to violence. One's likely to brutally kill you in an act of passionate murder, and the other's likely to cooly sit back, barely registering a raise in blood-pressure, as he destroys your planet. Comparing savagery versus atrocity is an interesting moral story to tell.

That said, I'm as glad as you are that the story ended the way it did with a rousing, optimistic flourish that put all that to bed and asserted the fundamental, transcendant Doctorishness of the Doctor. All of him.


Fine by me! smile

We didn't for the first twenty years of the original series. Indeed one story pretty explicitly said there were lives before the first.

But then The Five Doctors came along and established that the first was the first.

Nevertheless, the 'Cartmel Masterplan' behind the last two seasons of the classic series (and subsequently the New Adventures novels) implies that before 'the First Doctor', the Doctor had been as 'The Other', one of the founders of Time Lord society along with Rassilon and Omega.

As Rassilon's rule moved closer to despotism and Gallifrey's borders were sealed, the Other escaped the planet by hurling himself into the Looms to await eventual reconsitution. Ten million years later he gets put back together as the Doctor.


You've got a lot of it right, but a bit mixed up.

The Master had used up all his regenerations by Season 14 of the original series, and by the end of Season 19 had abandoned his Gallifreyan body altogether to possess a Trakenite (pretty much a human).

This new body doesn't have a regeneration cycle at all, although it's revealed that it would be possible for the Time Lords to bestow an entirely fresh one on him (which raises the interesting possibility of Time Lords being able to give a Regeneration cycle to any humanoid if they wished...).

If you just go by the telly then this Master never gets more regenerations, and if you include the books then he does. Either way, its a fat lot of good it does him as he then gets that new body totally obliterated by the Daleks.

This happens at the start of the McGann telemovie which then sees him posessing another human body to use as a vessell. So presumably he's got no regeneration cycle at this point as his conciousness is back in an unmodified human body.

Then he gets trapped in the Eye of Harmony at the end of that flick. When and if he gets out depends on whether you include the BBC novels and the comics in your canon and in what order you think they occur, but the important thing is sometime before the Last Great Time War, the Master dies.

The Time Lords then resurrect him to fight in the Last Great Time War. It's this resurrection that gives him the regenerative powers seen towards the end of NewWho Season three. Not the fact that he subsequently scaled himself to human for a bit using a Chameleon Arch. That would have no effect either way on regeneration cycles once the user's Time Lord nature was restored.

Concise version...

• Master uses up all his regenerations.
  
• Possesses a (near)human body.
  
• Either does or doesn't get a new Regeneration Cycle for that body depending on if you count the books.
  
• Gets that body exterminated and possesses another human body
  
• Dies.
  
• Gets resurrected to fight in the Time War with a full Time Lord body.
  
• Puts that Time Lord body aside using a Chameleon Arch to hide as Yana.
  
• Reverts to his Time Lord body.
  
• Gets shot.
  
• Regenerates.
  
• Gets shot.
  
• Seemingly dies after refusing to regenerate.
  

God, I know that feeling of terror. All through Season Seven of Buffy I kept thinking, "If you guys don't wrap this up right, then you've just turned the entire narative of the show into a big thumbs up for Facism." And with no idea if anyone was awake at the wheel.

Back in Doctor Who-ville I think the Worst happened in the Eighth Doctor novels where the Ancestor Cell ruined pretty much everything that series had been doing up antil then, more or less on purpose.

We risk so much by caring about series fiction. If we were sensible people we'd just trust our hearts to single stories by solitary authors we could rely on. But who wants to be sensible? smile



I think they did, and those some authors were called Steve Lyons and Steve Lyons.

You've got the wrong guy in Cornell though, officer. I submit as evidence his 100 Days of the Doctor script for Big Finish which is one long love letter to ColDoc. From what I recall of his critical writing, Cornell's in the "Like the Sixth Doctor, hate all the things Eric Saward made him say and do" camp, like all right-thinking people. wink