tennantsbutterfly
Where's the fount of Whovian knowledge that is Richard_Swift? He'd clear this up...
biggrin Well, I'll have a go.
smile The Doctor does indeed tell us in
The War Games that his people live forever, baring accidents. Which would seem to suggest they'd be immune to dying from old age. Since aging, for those subject to it, is hardly an accident so much as a given.
Trouble is, as you've all spotted, we
see a Time Lord body wear out through old age when the First Doctor carks it in
The Tenth Planet.
Since the First Doctor must be somewhere around 450 at that point
(the Second Doctor gives that as his age in Tomb of the Cybermen and hasn't had any time away from his human companions in which he could have been doing any signifigant off-screen aging between The Tenth Planet and then) then it seems like "forever" = 13 X 450ish. Which gives us a rather pathetic 5850ish years.
So what's to be done about this? The Doctor doesn't seem to be lying, simplfying or exaggerating when he says his people live forever, and indeed he's got no reason to in
The War Games with so many of his secrets laid bare.
One obvious answer, given the controversy over whether or not the Doctor's first incarnation has one heart or two, is to think that a Time Lord's
first body is subject to ageing and that subsequent bodies are capable of living forever unless they do anything silly like fall off radio telescopes or get themselves operated on by Grace Holloway.
Unfortunately, this idea also doesn't fit with what we've seen on-screen. Time Lords we've seen in their thirteenth incarnation include the Master in
The Deadly Assassin and Azmael in
The Twin Dilemma. Neither of which seem poised to sit out eternity; One's a wizened and zombiefied ol' walking corpse and the other's an ancient duffer who looks about fit to keel over any minute...and eventually does. If Time Lords like these are going to live forever, then they aren't going to be pretty pictures when they do so.
The novels solve this in an interesting way.
Naturally born Time Lords, from before the Pythia's curse, are indeed immortal and immune to aging, but later Time Lords born from the Looms age in the way we've seen.
The best example we've seen of this is Patience, an early Time Lady and Omega's wife, who is still alive by the Fifth Doctor's time. Since at least ten million years have passed, that gives her a lifespan somewhat in excess of the 5850 years it seems the Doctor's generation can hope for.
