The Book of the Ceasefires: The Eighth Man Bound, Introduction
This is not a straightforward chronology.
I don’t think it ever could be, really. I think historians as a whole need to forgo the idea of ever tying a Houseworlder to the concept of a “straight line.” It’s easy to make a simple timeline when they remain in their dark Cloisters on Gallifrey, certainly, where they gather dust by the inch and putter around like cardinals and clerics in a jade Vatican. But Gallifrey is a stagnant world of tradition and memory for a reason, and I think it’s more for the universe’s protection than anything else. Remember, the Houseworlders are not people. Sure, your typical Earthperson would only see the clumsy collars, the wrinkles, wizened hands clasping at ancient relics as they spout ancient protocols like Gospel, but that’s because human beings can only see three dimensions. When you look at a Time Lord, you’re only seeing as much as your brain can process.
I’m not implying that Gallifreyans are some sort of eldritch abominations, all tentacles and pinchers, drifting in the upper dimensions of reality. They’re subtler than that. They are, however, forces of nature, albeit sewn into the bodies of dusty mathematicians, philosophers, and librarians. They are beacons in Time. More than that, they are its architects. They anchored their laws and their will into the very fabric of creation. What we process as Time, the ever changing face on a clock, the ticking of seconds, minutes, hours, years, is the handiwork of Gallifrey. [1]
On their own planet, they may be inactive, all tedium and tradition, but they should not be viewed as the decaying relics of an old order. Instead, think of them as dormant. They are dammed up rivers, or thick clouds, fat and grey with the promise of thunder and lightning. They are brewing storms that could rewrite a textbook merely by disagreeing with it. The universe is perhaps at its safest when the Lords are in their glass castle, Time and Space free to shift, flow, alternate. It’s when they stand in the midst of the quantum foam that it has the potential to solidify, become ice of probability, and then the cold stone of certainty, an island of definition that forces possibles and maybes to part, to ripple, flow in numerous directions.
A known Houseworlder Renegade, self titled Marnal, said it best in his reiteration of the first Law of Time (written in his 1976 novel The Hand of Time):
There was structure, the universe was a web made not of spider’s silk but of space and time. But in such a cosmos, one of fluxing quad-dimensionality, who was to say what was cause and what was effect? Even the newly woven children of his world understood the solution to that solemn inquiry: there was no history, don’t you see, only established history. Time was an ocean of broth, rich in elements and possibilities. Observations could be made to spot trends and to predict, for the oceans of time were subject to the laws of temporal mechanics. But these were projections of reality, not the re- ality itself as long as the Lords of Time remained in their Citadel, merely watching. Yet, if a single one among them were to cease observation and to step out into the universe, they would freeze time wheresoever their feet touched the ground, wheresoever they drew breath from the atmosphere. At that moment, their mere presence would change time, from a fluid to a solid thing. If one of the Lords of Time but glanced into the night’s sky, the stars would become true in the instant they were seen, and thence back for every picosecond of the ten thousand years of the stars’ photons’ jour- ney. When a time-traveller swam in this ocean, it solidified around them, crystallised, became transmuted into that which could never change. And so was written the most sacred law of all – for even the softest touch of a Lord of Time could condemn a man to existence or nonexistence, bring empires into being and destine them to ruin, and blot out the sky or fill it with heavenly radiance. Observe. Never interfere.
A Time Lord cut off from the Homeworld, either by choice or exile, can be a very dangerous thing. They can also be a very confusing thing to document.
The Doctor, known Time Lord renegade (and perhaps the most infamous renegade, next to the Master) is no stranger to the notable temporal tangles caused by his reckless travels through history. His exile to late 20th century Earth is a prominent example, his presence and activities seemingly having combed the 1970s and 1980s into a conflicting mass of a single decade (a dating controversy many Earth experts are still bickering over). However, the Doctor’s life is incredibly hard to document once he enters the shadow of the War.
Many theorists and historians (this author included) have tried fitting the life (lives?) of the eighth incarnation of the Doctor into a single timeline. However, recent discoveries and analyses have led me to, instead, embrace the impossible contradictions, and see that the branches and alternate paths of this incarnation can still be connected. The life and times of the Eighth Doctor can be nothing but contradictions. This was an incarnation of temporal orbits, paradoxes, rewrites, and biodata shifting, who not only crossed the War, but two iterations of it. [2]
A note regarding this chronology…
It is understood that Time Lords are immune to the memory lapses expected with having one’s history rewritten. While there are (several) clear, documented cases of the Eighth Doctor experiencing amnesia, it can be assumed that many of the diverging paths, some of which led to completely separate Ninth incarnations, are not guaranteed divergences in memory.
This author would also like to make clear that the universe is a sprawling, ridiculous, messy place. Oxbow realities, parallel timelines, alternate dimensions, and bottle universe are just as real and genuine as ours to the people living in them. At no point does this author attempt to make an assertion that any of these realities, all linked by the same Doctor, are more “real” than the others.
[1] It has long been speculated that there would be some sort of chronological dimension without the “Time” decreed by the Time Lords. The little information gleaned regarding other dimensions such as the Divergent Universe certainly show that, without the presence of what certain Time Lords call the “universe of Time,” lesser species can still force the quantum muck into an adequate, if hazy, definition of cause and effect (however, as the only lesser species known to have experienced this sort of environment are known companions of the Doctor, it is unclear how much of this was due to the holding influence of a timeship).
[2] Technically speaking, the eighth Doctor is not the first incarnation to have encountered a time war. Ignoring the implications that the Doctor’s link to the Other creates (regarding the Time Wars at the beginning of Gallifrey’s history), the Doctor has either brushed against or been caught in several temporal conflicts. The Fourth and Fifth incarnations became tangled in Melanicus’ Millennium Wars, while the Sixth experienced the aftermath of the Millennium War of Bophemeral (which are more than likely linked to the former event anyway… it is possible that Melanicus’ symphony of war continued to race down the strands of history after he was killed and the Event Synthesizer’s function restored).
The Seventh Doctor was destined to, in some form or manner, take part in a conflict that eventually destroyed Gallifrey and left only a select few Time Lords in the universe. However, this was the timeline that followed the Sixth Doctor’s original regeneration into Time’s Champion and a true “God of the Fourth.” The Seventh Doctor, in this timeline, had powers and abilities beyond the normal capabilities of a Time Lord, as did the few survivors. This timeline, and the mysterious conflict, was unwritten when the Sixth Doctor replaced his regeneration with another, similar but different, version.
The Eighth Man Bound, Part One: Now Unto War
The Eighth Man Bound, Part Two: The Last Contact
The Eighth Man Bound, Part Three: Journey to the Needle
The Eighth Man Bound, Part Four: The Gallifrey of Charlotte Pollard
The Eighth Man Bound, Part Five: The Ninth Doctors
