Talking 'Bout My Regeneration....and Other Theories.

popebenny16

So, Time Lords, aint they great? I mean, the "ability to live forever, barring accidents" really sounds cool, even if aul 10 got a bit freaked out by it last December.

"If I die before I regenerate I'm Dead" he sayeth. "and even then, some other guy just walks away, I'm gone" he moans.

So, what about this regeneration thing? What is it really??? This is my take on it anyway...

Firstly, we are told that Time Lord regenerate. This seems to be their ability and thiers alone. So, the guards we see in those Gallifrey based stories (like the five doctors for example) are they also Time Lords, or just guards?? Is everyone on Gallifrey a Time Lord? I think the answer has to be no, they are The Time Lords of Gallifrey, like the Hairdressers of Gallifrey.

So they, and they alone, have this ability, which is important, as it means that it is not a natural occourance. It is artificial in some way, either by Generic manipulation or by the usage of some device to do it. The use of an device to do it seems most likely as part of this tech is stolen by others to try and live forever (Mawdryn Undead) and there is a sort of Fail Safe they use in case it breaks down (The Brain of Morbius).

So it is an artificial device which is used in an emergency ("to cheat death" according to Doctor number 9) and if you dont use it in time you die, and from what we know, only a member of The Society of Time Lords have access to it, in other words the rest of Gallifrey can sod off.

So this device was invented by someone, for some purpose. Now, we already know that the Time Lords were a bit of a nasty bunch when they set out - The Black Tower/Death Zone attribute to that that, as well as the war or conflict with the Racnoss (whom they wiped out). So perhaps regeneration was developed to enable conquest without being killed? Am image I have in my mind of the time war for example is a time lord leading a massive army out of a TARDIS on a planet to fight an army of Daleks. They had TARDIS prisons so why not TARDIS troop carriers with God knows what inside them waiting to get out?

This of course is another interesting idea - perhaps Gallifrey developed the TARDIS technology first - without the "T". After surviving a genocidal war with the Racnoss they decided to develop the ultimate method of defence - time machines to rule everywhere at everytime with. This was, by all accounts billions of years ago, there may have been few competing races out there at the time.

Why that did not happen Who knows....

anyway, so this may also explain the two hearts. Rassilon explicitly refers to it at the heartbeat of a time lord, not a gallifreyan. So, maybe they are been bred that way, again, to give them a better chance of surviving in hostile situations. If that is the case perhaps The Society of Time Lords is a closed one, you can only be born into it, or, as we have seen with The Master, reborn into it.

So, what happens when they regenerate? Obviously there is some sort of master-persona that each person has, and that each time they regenerate all we see is the slave-persona, the master persona seems to exist within (as 11 can remember everything that has happened to all 10 of him) but each slave-persona has its own personality, psyche and sense of morals. As we see with 10, this persona also wants to exist independently of the master-persona. How this master persona exists is a matter we dont know about - the Time Lord in effect seems to be put into some sort of energy blender to come out a new man. What controls this process is not known but we know that on gallifrey the time lords can do it at will (offering a "new life cycle" to the master, bringing him back for the time war, changing the second doctor against his will without him being in any physical peril at all) but Gallifrey is gone. So, it must be within the Tardis, as 9,10 have regenerated there and indeed 10 makes every effort to ensure he gets into it to do it. The Masters last reincarnation is connected with his ring and some potion, maybe because it was a DIY job that it went do badly wrong.

So..... thats my view on it. A process born out of war and conquest but not used for that purpose anymore (well, till the time war anyway) and a society that was bred to rule at home and do.... what Time Lords do, and who were dying out (in Death Comes to Time) before the Time War ( for which they woke Rassilon up... or maybe we woke and started it)...

and in the middle of it all "the emnity of the ages" who we are hinted at was there with Rassillon and Omega, and who may well have had a bigger reason to get away from Gallifrey then we may have thought about and who, in effect, did it again in the Time War with "the moment".... stopped the Time Lords maybe not once, but twice, from doing the nasty to the universe.

dancingmonkey08

I agree with your view that the Time Lords are only a certain section of the Gallifreyan society. In my opinion, the Gallifreyans were always a long living people being able to live to the age of the shrunken Doctor in "Last of the Time Lords" thanks to their Dual cardiovascular system and they had special abilities such as the ability to get rid of poisons out of their body as the Doctor did in "the Unicorn and the Wasp". But as it says in the spin-off media, that in the early days of Gallifrey when the Pythia cursed the Gallifreyans with sterility, my idea is Rassilon created the process of regeneration to make his people live for longer by regenerating. But as you said, it would only be for Rassilon and his higher classes who would become the Time Lords but there would be no regeneration process for the non Time Lord lower classes that live outside the Capitol

Then the Time Lords came up with the looming process to produce new Time Lords. I know the looming process has sorta being taken out of continuity because the books say Time Lords came out of them fully grown and the show has shown the Master as a child. This can be retconned easily by saying that a looming machine needed the DNA of two Time Lords of different genders to reproduce a Time Lord who came out of the Looms as a baby.

So basically what I am saying is Time Lords came out of the Looms as babies. They didnt age like humans as it says in one of the audios that even though Susan was 15 years old she was considered a baby in Time Lord society. They reached a certain age (or as in the case of the Doctor got mortally wounded), they regenerated into a new incarnation.

When it comes to the idea of different incarnations, I do agree with your view. I see it as when a Time Lord regenerates, they keep all their original memories but a new facet of their personality emerges which becomes their dominant personality. So essentially, the Time Lords sorta have a controlled version of dissociative identity disorder or split personalities. Thats why the Doctor was afraid to regenerate, because he will never know what personality he will end up, he could have the personality of Colin Baker again for all he knows which would be terrible! lol

And yea, the TARDIS is supposed to be part of the process because thats what the Second Doctor says after his first regeneration in the Power of the Daleks. And the First, Second (its implied), Fifth, Sixth, Eighth (Im guessing), Ninth and Tenth Doctors all regenerated inside the TARDIS while the Third & Fourth needed a little help from Cho Je and the Watcher respectively to regenerate. Dont ask me about the Seventh Doctor, he was far away from the TARDIS and he had no help but then it did take him a little longer to regenerate.

Oh and in my opinion, when it comes to the psychic powers of the Time Lords, I think it is caused by the Untempered Schism which could act like the Cardiff rift giving people psychic powers but as the Schism is a big gap in the fabric of time and space meaning Gallifrey is on the edge of the Time Vortex, maybe it altered the make-up of all Gallifreyans minds, giving them psychic powers. It would tie in with the spin-off novels where the Pythia had the power to see into the future. The Pythia first took advantage of these powers and later Rassilon and his Time Lords used them to first interfere in the universe until they adapted their non-interference policy and until the Time War, they used their powers to watch over Time and Space (occasionally using the Doctor to break their non-interference policy)