Gallifrey

Gallifrey
File:Gallifrey The Sound of Drums.jpg 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
Characters	The Doctor The Master Romana The Rani

Gallifrey is a fictional planet in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The planet was home to the Doctor, other Time Lords and others of his species. It is supposed to be located in the constellation of Kasterborous, at "galactic coordinates ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre" (Pyramids of Mars, 1975), some 250 million light years away from Earth (as stated in the 1996 Doctor Who television movie). During the first decade of the television series, the Doctor's home planet was not identified by name. It was first shown in The War Games (1969), and was first identified by name 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.

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 established that it was destroyed during "The Last Great Time War" along with the Dalek Empire, at the Doctor's own hands. The planet was not referred to by name until the third series ("The Runaway Bride", "Human Nature") which would show scenes on the planet in flashback ("The Sound of Drums").

Geography

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

From space, Gallifrey is seen as a yellow-orange planet and is close enough to central space lanes for spacecraft to require clearance from Gallifreyan Space Traffic Control as they pass through its system. The planet is surrounded by a Quantum force field as well as an impenetrable force field called the transduction barrier. This prevents all outsiders (with hostile intent, or otherwise) from approaching the planet and allows the Time Lords to maintain their status of absolute neutrality. It also lets them observe the actions of the rest of the Universe without actually taking part in its affairs. The barrier was breached on one occasion by the Sontarans, when it was sabotaged from within (The Invasion of Time, 1978).

The Doctor's granddaughter Susan described her home world (presumably Gallifrey, but not named as such) as having bright, silver-leafed trees and a burnt orange sky (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, although Gallifrey's sky appeared blue and Earth-like in The Five Doctors (1983), albeit that was within the isolated Death Zone. In "Gridlock", the Doctor also mentions vast mountain ranges situated on Gallifrey, "with fields of deep red grass, capped with snow". He goes on to describe 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 Seven Systems.

In several spin-off novels, which are of uncertain canonicity, Gallifrey is said to have a copper moon, Pazithi Gallifreya (first named in Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible). The novel Lungbarrow also places Karn (setting of The Brain of Morbius) in Gallifrey's solar system, along with a frozen gas giant named Polarfrey and an "astrological figure" of "Kasterborous the Fibster".

The Citadel of the Time Lords stands on the continent of Wild Endeavour, in the Mountains of Solace and Solitude ("The Sound of Drums"), where the Capitol is also located. Within the Capitol is the Panopticon, under which the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole, is kept. 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 extradimensional 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, 1976).

Outside the city lie wastelands where "Outsiders", Time Lords who have dropped out of Time Lord society, 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).

History

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

On screen

File:Time War.JPG

The last great Time War, and the Destruction of Gallifrey, as depicted on the BBC Doctor Who website.

Few details on the history of the planet itself emerged from the original series run from 1963–1989. In the 2005 series episode "The End of the World", the Ninth Doctor stated that his home planet was destroyed in a war and that he is the last of the Time Lords. However, the episode also indicated that the Time Lords are remembered in the far future. In "The Runaway Bride", the Doctor's revelation that he is from Gallifrey elicits terror from the Empress of the Racnoss.

Subsequently, in "Dalek", it was 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-destructed, leaving the Doctor believing that he was the sole survivor of the Time War. However, the Daleks returned in the two-part 2005 series finale, "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways", as well as the two-part 2006 series finale, "Army of Ghosts"/"Doomsday" and in the 2007 series' two-part story "Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of the Daleks". It was suggested that other Time Lords might have survived the war when the Face of Boe uttered its final words to the Doctor: "Know this, Time Lord, you are not alone" ("Gridlock"). These suspicions were later borne out in "Utopia" when the Tenth Doctor discovered that the renegade Time Lord the Master had survived the Time War and had 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 it had been believed that no Time Lord had ever travelled there.

The Doctor's reference to Gallifrey in "The Runaway Bride" marked the first time the name of his homeworld had been uttered on screen since the revival began. John Smith (the Doctor in human form) also mentioned Gallifrey in "Human Nature".

The planet made its first appearance in the revived series in "The Sound of Drums", where the Citadel, enclosed in a transparent globe, 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.

Novels

Various spin-off novels have expanded on the history and nature of Gallifrey, although not all fans consider the information in them to be canonical.

In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Ancestor Cell by Peter Anghelides and Stephen Cole, Gallifrey was 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. This also apparently (and retroactively) wiped 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 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 was revealed that while Gallifrey was destroyed, the Time Lords were not erased from history. However, the cataclysm set up an event horizon in time that prevented anyone from entering Gallifrey's relative past or travelling from it to the present or future. The Time Lords also survived within the Matrix, which had been downloaded into the Eighth Doctor's mind, but their reconstruction required a sufficiently advanced computer. At the novel's end, the question of whether or not the Time Lords would be restored remained unanswered.

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. Presumably, if the novels and the television series events are to be reconciled, at some point Gallifrey is restored, only to be destroyed again in the Time War. 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 A History, 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).

Gallifrey audio series

For a list of episodes, please see Gallifrey (audio series)

Gallifrey is also the umbrella title of a line of audio plays set in the Doctor Who universe, produced by Big Finish Productions, featuring Louise Jameson as Leela, Lalla Ward as President Romana, and John Leeson as two K-9 units, Mark I and Mark II. Like all spin-off media, its canonicity in relation to the television series is unclear, although the rise of Romana to the presidency of the Time Lords echoes a similar event in the novels. The first play in the series, Weapon of Choice, was released in 2004.

The Gallifrey series focuses on political struggles within the leadership of the Time Lords, centred around Romana's presidency. In the first series, Romana's progressive policies and desires to open Gallifrey up to the outside universe faced opposition from more conservative cultures. In addition, a terrorist group known as "Free Time", who want to break the monopoly on time travel technology shared among the Time Lords and the few other temporal powers, stole a timeonic fusion device. The inquiry into Romana's handling of the incident revealed a dark secret surrounding the Time Lords' policy of non-intervention.

The second series saw the admission of non-Gallifreyans into the Time Lord Academy, leading to even more tension within the Time Lord political elite. Romana had to deal with Free Time infiltrators as well as an attempted coup by Inquisitor Darkel. In addition, an ancient Gallifreyan evil escaped from the Matrix: Pandora, a megalomaniacal personality who manipulated Romana and others with the goal of regaining life and power. At the end of the second series, Pandora managed to manifest herself in the form of Romana's first incarnation (played once again by Mary Tamm). Both Romanas claimed the title of Imperiatrix, absolute ruler of Gallifrey, leading to civil war.

In the third and supposedly final series, Romana trapped Pandora in the Matrix once again, and destroyed her by sacrificing the Matrix. After an election fraught with political manoeuvring, one Lord Matthias becomes Lord President. The series ends on a cliffhanger, with Gallifrey on the brink of economic and social collapse as well as in danger of being overrun by a Free Time virus, while most of the cast are trapped with no apparent means of escape.

As Big Finish's license forbids them from using aspects of the revived television series, the Gallifrey series does not explicitly acknowledge the events of the Time War. However, in the final chapter of the third series Irving Braxiatel speaks of "rumours out there in the big wide universe — more than rumours, in fact — that something's coming to Gallifrey, something worse than you could possibly imagine".

Because of these rumours, Braxiatel engineers the removal of the Time Lord biodata archive from Gallifrey, in order that the Time Lords might someday be restored after their planet meets its doom. Former Big Finish producer Gary Russell indicated in a forum posting on Outpost Gallifrey that this was a reference to the television series' Time War.

It is unclear how the destruction of the Matrix in the Gallifrey audio series can be reconciled with the events of the Eighth Doctor Adventures; some stories have suggested that the novels and audios take place in separate continuities.

See also

• Outpost Gallifrey, a Doctor Who fan website named for the planet

External links

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