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Time and relatives in space
01/09/2007 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
The topic here is Doctor Who. More specifically, the Doctor himself and his relationship with his arch-nemesis, the Master. There has been much mulling in the Who fan community as to their relationship to each other. Rather than examine those opinions, Geoff prefers to examine the evidence to draw his own conclusions. Buy Doctor Who in the USA - or Buy Doctor Who in the UK  A speculative article by: GF Willmetts
I'm always in a quandary when I write these articles, especially when relating to on-going TV series. All it needs is its current writers to read the piece and smile smugly and go off in a different direction and the article is useless other than for speculation. On the other hand, if I'm right and anticipated this solution prior to filming, I can also come off looking like a predicting guru.
I do have an acknowledged record for doing this in the year dot with the X-Men. I was the first person to suggest that Mystique was Nightcrawler's mother when everyone else thought siblings. I got it right, too. My logic being that a shape-shifter could look any age. Just a level of compatible comparable lateral thinking unless the writer admits it's a good idea and had it first. That can happen a lot as well. Good ideas are good ideas.
If any of below appears long-winded, please forgive me but it should give some insight into my thinking process and hopefully indicate that I didn't leave anything out. For the record, I only regard the TV series as canon to the Doctor Who mythology. This puts me on the same level as the key production company.
The topic here is 'Doctor Who'. More specifically, the Doctor himself and his relationship with his arch-nemesis, the Master. There has been much mulling in the Who fan community as to their relationship to each other. Rather than examine those opinions, I prefer to examine the evidence to draw my own conclusions.
The only real significant information so far being that they both went to the same Academy where Gallifreyans are selected to become Time Lords. Then again, considering there is only one Academy on Gallifrey, that would apply to all the Time Lords anyway, irrespective of their relative ages. Quite what the overall qualification that gets such a nomination is hard to say. It can hardly be foreknowledge or ethics or the Master would never have gotten in.
To my mind, intelligence and space/time awareness sensitivity would surely be a better choices, especially as not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords. The selection would therefore appear to be those who are most time sensitive, especially as Gallifrey itself is on the edge and top of the time vortex. Indoctrination was probably seen as the best way for control than allow rogue sensitives loose in the universe. As can be seen, this plan was not exactly foolproof.
The Time Lords were the governors of reality. Watchers but not meddlers. With a few exceptions, of course, who fled in stolen TARDIS time machines than be restricted by an age old tradition. The results of this non-interference resulted in the Time Lords becoming a lethargic race who did little with the power they had, having reached the apex of their development and saw little else they could do with it. Granted this stopped lesser races seeming them as akin to gods but equally they also stepped away from responsibility when it came to action that could be construed for the greater good.
Had all Time Lords been like the renegade Doctor, time could well have become chaotic with every decision over-turned by a different individual not liking the outcome made by a different one. Removing one menace has also left others free to advance. Even the Doctor never hung around to ensure he made the right long-term decisions. If anything, this particular Time Lord is akin to a fisherman patching the net and moving on to the next place where there's a hole to be sorted.
Any attempt to resolve a bigger hole, as when he was coerced into stopping the genesis of the Daleks, he decided that more good than bad had happened. That being said, this did not stop a latter regeneration from annihilating both the Daleks and Cybermen. Considering the number of times the Doctor has meddled in the invasion plans and foiled other menaces, one would have thought the logic of non-interference and let things resolve themselves their own way would have made more sense but then he wouldn't have much to do. Alternatively, bearing in mind he has become recognised by many races, the Doctor is also a fabric of history and has to do what and where he goes.
Again, this is not the actual topic I'm addressing here but the more specific way the Doctor and the Master are related to each other. The end of the current Season Three has the Doctor urging the mortally injured Master to regenerate to save his life. Considering the atrocities that the Master had just carried out then and in the past, this is equivalent to Winston Churchill telling Adolf Hitler that he isn't a bad chap and all his sins are forgiven if he surrenders. As previous adventures have shown, the Doctor is not that forgiving. The Master might well be the second surviving Time Lord but as they are both male and there is no real record of them being capable of procreating with other species, I doubt if creating more Gallifreyans would have been on his mind.
I think there is a need to re-examine the past. When the Doctor is first encountered, he has in tow his grand-daughter, Susan. Both of whom later admit to fleeing from their home planet. Considering that of all the Doctor's companions, Susan is the only one to call him 'Grandfather' one must assume that the lineage is more than honorary. There is no indication that Susan attended the Academy but she was certainly getting her education through time and space from practical experience and was certainly a time sensitive.
Leaving Susan on Earth in 2150 to follow her love at the time with what we know about the Doctor might now seem a little odd but then, too, does the Doctor's desire to ensure the survival of mankind. Humans might have a destiny that involves at the very least, the galaxy, but in preserving them, he is also keeping his grand-daughter alive. With all of time and space at his disposal, it is also quite possible one day to pluck Susan back should she want to although clearly that occasion has not arisen yet. Certainly, without a TARDIS, she is marooned until such time occurs.
This does set some interesting perimeters regarding the Doctor's age and position at the Academy. It suggests that he was far from being a student or a recent graduate and more in terms of being a post-graduate and tutor. Cardinal Borusa is acknowledged as one of the Doctor's teachers but this is clearly no indication of age. The Doctor's accepted name might actually come from his revered position before he rebelled, realising that there was a responsibility to do something if he had the power to do so.
To only be a 'doctor' and not a 'professor' could be attributed to him being unable to lecture against non-interference in the activities of other species. Despite his renegade status, the Doctor was considered highly enough to head the council having successfully defeated the Master in 'The Deadly Assassin' despite all his previous meddling. From this observation alone, there is clear indication that the Doctor was more than a pure academic. Considering he also fled from this job a second time, one gets the impression that Gallifrey is more like a prison planet to keep the Time Lords in rather than let them roam free across time and space.
Combine that with Susan being his grand-daughter, the Doctor must have also had a family of his own at some time yet nothing is said of his wife or off-spring - the terminology will have to suffice for terrestrial equivalents. Time Lords are not immortal. It is only through regeneration that they can have extended lives in more than one sense of the word. With such life-spans, one could well believe relationships don't last forever or even past a regeneration. This doesn't appear to be out of animosity but purely by change, especially if the regenerations don't happen together. The first Doctor we encounter had decidedly allowed himself to wear out his body before regenerating although it is also suspected that the faulty mechanism of his TARDIS at the time did not help the process.
Even so, there is still the question of what happened to the Doctor's off-spring who was either male or female as the missed generation between him and Susan. Likewise, why would such a level-headed intelligent person such as Susan desire to go with her grandfather than stay on Gallifrey? Granted that there might have been a shared idealistic bent towards doing something to help people in their travels but would the Doctor want to make such a decision for someone else from his own planet?
The early adventures of the Doctor tend to suggest that his interference was less intentional than it became later, although that could be attributed to how much he could do without damage certain aspects of any future time-line. The Time Lords might have located him by his actions for instance. When it became obvious they hadn't, he became more pro-active, although leaving quickly after accomplishing his tasks. No doubt there was some realisation that he was becoming part of the time-line that had to be there might have contributed to his acting with a great more impunity over his regenerations. This strongly suggests that there were other reasons why the Doctor and Susan fled Gallifrey.
When it comes to ethics, the Time Lords have shown themselves not to easily recognise enemies within, especially if they have authority as with Borusa in 'The Five Doctors'. The same Borusa who also taught the Doctor interestingly enough. Indeed, they have to do something pretty awful to grab their attention let alone do anything about it. One only has to witness Omega in his trapped exile in 'The Three Doctors' to realise things are left as done deeds with no one there to check the consequences.
A rather odd state of affairs given that the Time Lords are capable of changing events. This no doubt contributed to the reasons why such as the 'Meddling Monk', War Chief, the Master and the Rani were tolerated in Time Lord society until they escaped. None of them were seen as immediate threats and thought containable. Indeed, they were not even thought to be missing until some time later. These are not the only Time Lords to have left the confines of Gallifrey and seems deplorable that these renegades are just part of a long list and says little for the Time Lords in keeping their own people in check.
Of these four Time Lords, it is only the Master who has been seen as an enduring threat. The Monk was trapped twice. The War Chief was killed beyond any chance of regeneration at the end of 'The War Games'. The Rani was imprisoned by the Teraps in 'Time And The Rani'. The Master seems to go on and on in his purpose to dominate and control all he surveys. Considering how stolid Time Lord philosophy is, one could well believe that these four Time Lords had been tutored or led by the example of another renegade that change was possible but saw it as a means to future their own ends rather than that of keeping a healthy time-line. It is only fortunate that the Doctor has been there to prevent his former students from causing more chaos than they started. I have to consider the Doctor to being the tutor to one or all of them or there would have to be another Time Lord in the background who put such thoughts in their heads. The only other potential candidate for that would be Borusa but considering how he rose up through the Time Lords ranks, even before his own downfall, it doesn't seem likely that of all his students they would all be bad eggs bar the Doctor.
This takes us to the Master himself. To make the assumption that he chose his name from an early age to indicate his ambitions seems odd. More so, if we assume the same terrestrial notation until it is shown how young he was when selected to become a Time Lord. As such, being called 'master' has much to do with how we address young children. If he was thought to have potential for greatness, maybe even more than his father, the young master might have seen it from his own perspective for domineering rather than following his father. As he grew up and had his own family, his own father might have seen the bad influence he would have on his daughter. Leaving Gallifrey with his own objectives, it would be the Doctor and Susan who left, stealing the most available and unfortunately older model of a TARDIS and keeping her out of his influence.
It does leave an interesting question as to why the Master has never pursued his own daughter. Bearing in mind his megalomania, I would suggest that the Master doesn't care for anyone but himself. It was only the Doctor who was concerned that this shouldn't happen by not leaving such an opportunity around to be exploited. With Susan having a happy life, she would be neither a target nor influenced by either of them once she left them both behind. It would also explain why the Doctor became so upset when his own son would not regenerate to save his own life. It could only be a father who could forgive a son in that way.
The reason the Master is so interested in having the Doctor present in any of his conquests is to show how much better than he is to his own father. No doubt there is some element or feeling of abandonment involved here that is stronger than pure megalomania but also showing how much better he thinks he is as well. The fact that his own father can continually put him in his place only gets the Master to try harder each time. It is a sort of uneven balance of trying to belittle the Doctor's achievements by doing something equally bad in reverse combined with a desire to rub it in at every opportunity.
Of course, much of the above is conjecture based on the scantiest information regarding the Doctor's early background. Certainly, there is nothing that contradicts what has been said in any of the early and recent canon stories to suppose otherwise. That being said, everything could still change at the whim of a script even now. Until such time or new evidence presents itself, this rests the case for this belief.
GF Willmetts
August 2007
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