The Fury of a Time Lord
My Doctor Who headcanon:
This is one of my favorite things from New Who. In my head, this is the Time Lords. You can’t really see what they are. They don’t unfurl themselves. It’s not really safe for the universe for them to do so.
In my head, this is what Rassilon did for them, you see. Old Who told us that before him, they were barbaric. What’s a barbaric Time Lord like? Living hubris. As humans fall to wrath and war when civilization is stripped away, Time Lords fall to pride. A Time Lord unleashed is a pitiless god. There’s nothing to stop her from playing with creation any way she likes. And we’re told that they did, once upon a time. They destroyed races that crossed them, races that were themselves nearly gods. They played with time like a Tinkertoy set.
Rassilon, we’re told, taught them control. That’s why they revere him. After him, they damped themselves down. Made themselves small. Retreated into their little bubble on the planet Gallifrey where they quietly smoothed out the kinks of time and space and took care of accidents and messes in the space-time continuum and otherwise stopped interfering.
Which is why Time Lords like the Doctor and the Master are anathema. They interfere. Which matters in a far greater sense than some Prime Directive. A Time Lord overrides time. The Doctor’s actions leave scars on the universe. He can change the flow of time, but the things he does are inviolate—to him, at least. Perhaps other Time Lords could change it, but imagine what a disaster it would make to have two Time Lords careening around, crossing paths and doing whatever they wanted. Imagine the havoc that would be wreaked by a whole planetful of them behaving like that.
Once upon a time, the Doctor didn’t have to worry about it. The Time Lords were there to fix things when he sent things off-kilter. Now, though, it’s only him.
The thing about him becoming a monster when he doesn’t have people to bring him under control irritates the heck out of me. As though somehow he has no personal self-control? (Well, okay, it doesn’t always look like it, does it? But come on, his people spent BILLIONS of years sitting quietly and behaving themselves. It’s not like they turn into psychopaths every time somebody drops a plate.) But the thought that he has a burning core of hubris beneath the cheerful smiles? The idea that he’s insanely, incomprehensibly dangerous somewhere under that goofy exterior? Oh yes. In my head, you never really get to see the Doctor. He keeps so much of what he is buried down inside himself, because what he is in the core of him is more than any other creature can fathom.
But he mainly refuses to be that. Because that is what a Time Lord is, and he disowned them ages ago.
I tell myself a lot of stories about Doctor Who.