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icon_uk (icon_uk) wrote in scans_daily,
@ 2009-04-15 22:59:00

Entry tags:

char: doctor who, creator: alan moore, creator: john stokes

When Alan Moore wrote Doctor Who... sort of
Many moons ago (29 years ago to be precise), before he even wrote for 2000AD, an up and coming UK writer wrote for Doctor Who Weekly. Fresh faced and sprightly (Well, actually probably not, but it's a fun mental image) this eager young creator wrote, amongst others, a little trilogy of back up strips detailing some unseen elements of the past of the Doctor's people, the Time Lords of Gallifrey. Even with Maxwell the Magcial Cat under his belt, who knew Alan Moore would go so far! :) The triology also introduced a couple of characters who would go on to bigger, and better, things, but not yet.

At this point in the shows history we had met Omega, the Gallifreyan scientist and solar engineer whose apparent death whilst trying to first utilise the power of a newly formed black hole allowed his people to develop their time technology (he had actually survived in an anti-matter universe and became an insane threat to the entire universe in "The Three Doctors", but that's the way it goes sometimes), and Rassilon had been identified as a semi-mythical figure, who had actually done the developing the technology that allowed them to become the "Time Lords".

This first story went a little further into the events, in a sort of behind the scenes special, which plays, as he would often do, with the concept of what past and present and innovation would mean to a society with time travel capability.

Spot the bad guy.... go on... I dare you

As the years went on, Rassilon had more details revealed about him in the show (though still not many), but various books and lateral references in the show added (or detracted, if you liked mystery) to Rassilon (Who has had so many things named after him that he makes Walt Disney look like a piker at self promotion) and Omega, and the occasional sly reference from the Doctor that he might have been somehow involved too.

I was never a fan of the Time Lords being used too often in the show, as every time they did, a little more mystery and magic was stripped away from them, and "The Deadly Assassin" is primarily responsible for their REAL decline as a concept, revealing the to be a bunch of impotent, hidebound fuddy-duddy's who had almost nothing interesting to say or do, but spent ages saying it anyway.

Once the show finished in 1989, the fanbase started writing novels many of which, IMHO, went too far into fanwank, and I'd sooner eat live scorpions that read sub-Gormenghast claptrap like the DW novel "Lungbarrow" which over-egged the pudding by covering how Time Lords were the sterile products of genetic looms (With the Doctor being an aberration who might be the genetic reincarnation of a mysterious THIRD legendary character of Time Lord legend, known only as "The Other"), living in Houses with sentient furniture, but I know it has it's fans.

Next time, what next for the Time Lords, and why was Fenris even there...

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	espanolbot 2009-04-15 06:52 pm UTC (link)
	Didn't he also write one involving Cybermen and a creature designed to kill anything? :) And the planet involved was kind of referenced in the new series, Goth or something. (Reply to this) (Thread)

	icon_uk 2009-04-15 07:04 pm UTC (link)
	Yup, "Black Legacy", where the Cybermen land on a world fabled for the deadliness of it's weapons and find that some are smarter than others He also wrote "Business as Usual", an Auton story which IIRC is really quite creepy (though the Autons ALWAYS creep me out) (Reply to this) (Parent)

stratosfyr
2009-04-15 07:14 pm UTC (link)

I only started watching it in 1989 as a wide-eyed young innocent. I thought it was great, except for my two big concerns: the original opening sequence and theme was the only one that was any good, and the Doctor was going to run out of incarnations way too soon because at five episodes a week, he was regenerating every two or three months. (I had mixed feelings when it went off the air with 6 incarnations to spare.)

I watched the new series last year, then started on the old series with the knowledge that the Time Lords were all doomed anyway. (And a weird delight that the Doctor would miss them even though he sometimes despised them.) With the new series canon pretty firm in mind, I could happily ignore all the weird expanded universe stuff that I didn't like.

Strangely, I find I don't mind a lot of episodes that people say are the "worst ever." I didn't even dislike Adric that much. (Tegan is another story.)

The Deadly Assassin, although I mostly enjoyed it, I mainly have to blame on a small cast and budget. I don't think you see more than 20 Time Lords in the entire episode, and mostly you just see one or three in a corridor or a room smaller than the TARDIS' console room. It just had no sense of grand scale. The "grand hall" was about a tenth the size of a high school auditorium. Gallifrey itself seemed terribly unimpressive in this and later episodes. (There is also never more than one Time Lady in any episode. Weird that.)

It could have done with some exterior establishing shots or something -- c.f. Star Trek TNG episodes where you see a painting of a Klingon city from the air, and suchlike.

The personalities of the Time Lords didn't bother me too much. They had to be smart, but they also had to be boring, difficult, and corrupt. The Doctor left for a reason.

The novels are really a mixed bag. Some of them are just dire, while a few (like Alien Bodies) have some great ideas and/or good character moments. But I've really loved the Big Finish audio dramas, which I tend to think of as slightly more canonical (usually) if only because the actual actors are involved.

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khaosworks
2009-04-16 01:03 am UTC (link)

What's interesting about this story is how it actually influenced Who canon. Prior to this, the series had mentioned Omega as the Time Lord who blew up a star to provide a power source for the Time Lords, and Rassilon, who harnessed the power of a black hole to power the Time Lords... but nothing ever said the two were contemporaries, or even that the supernova that Omega engineered became the black hole. It was Moore who first made this connection and it somehow seeped into the fan-accepted mythology even though it was never stated on screen.

When Ben Aaronovitch wrote the serial Remembrance of the Daleks, he introduced the Hand of Omega as the device that created that supernova. Again, there was no on-screen mention of Rassilon and Omega being buddies, but in the novelisation (which he also wrote), the connection between Rassilon and Omega was made explicit, obviously drawing from Star Death. So Aaronovitch had this in mind.

Ask any Doctor Who fan now, and it's accepted as virtually indisputable that Rassilon and Omega were contemporaries, but that's not what the series ever said. And it all started here.

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rab62
2009-04-16 01:58 am UTC (link)

Lungbarrow isn't Gormenghast, it's Cold Comfort Farm.

Personally, I liked it -- and I'd be quite happy to consider it canon as it was going to be a real episode, though it was heavily rewritten to become Ghost Light -- but we can agree to disagree on this. That business about "the Other" wasn't very persuasive, I'll grant, but the mystery of the Doctor's childhood nickname and its ultimate explanation really worked for me.

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	lonewolf23k 2009-04-16 06:31 pm UTC (link)
	I have to agree that the more the Time Lords were unveiled, the less they seemed like powerful beings and more like squabbling bureaucrats. I guess that's probably why the New Series killed them off, thus leaving them permanently off-screen. (Reply to this)