What About the Day-to-Day?
All of this sounds very lofty and impressive, but consider why the Doctor left: what does the day-to-day existence of a Time Lord look like? Once you’ve gazed into the Untempered Schism, passed through the Academy, been given a regeneration cycle and all the biological additions that seem to be required for being able to activate a TARDIS… after all that, what then?
‘Why did you run away from them in the first place?’
‘What? Well, I was bored.’
The War Games, Episode 10.
It’s the Gallifrey stories after ‘The Deadly Assassin’ where things start to get really mundane. If anything, these stories undermine any sense of power and awe, while ‘The Deadly Assassin’ merely shows Time Lords as staid and archaic and unaware of their colossal power. After that, the depiction of Gallifrey really heightens the tedium.
In ‘The Invasion of Time’ we get to see, among other things, a Time Lady’s day-job. Rodan maintains the protective transduction barriers around the planet, monitoring threats and reporting them to her superiors (“Do you know, I’ve passed the Seventh Grade and I’m nothing more than a glorified traffic guard?”) – she doesn’t get to actually raise the transduction barrier herself, just tell someone else when it’s time to do so. Her job is to watch and, presumably, maintain excellent bladder control.
Romana, the Doctor’s companion from Seasons 16 – 18, worked in the bureau of ancient records for a time. What this means, essentially, is database maintenance. The next story set on Gallifrey, ‘Arc of Infinity’, shows us two technicians in the records section, Damon and Talor. Talor is killed early on, his last words unfortunately being “Impulse laser?” – something akin to Ned Stark’s last words being ‘Big axe?’ – and Damon is given a variety of technical jobs to do but his actual role seems to consist of monitoring and reporting. As with Rodan, despite his obvious talent, there isn’t a lot for him to do unless the planet is being threatened. This is presumably so they didn’t have to cast another actor in ‘Arc of Infinity’, but it gives the impression that there is only one technician on Gallifrey and he has to do everything, up to and including sharpening pencils because the Castellan doesn’t like the noise.
In what is possibly an ‘Arc of Infinity’ reference, ‘The Name of the Doctor’ starts with two technicians working on equipment in the bowels of Gallifrey, but who are also monitoring the security cameras in the TARDIS workshops. Presumably they report it to someone, but maybe not; the hierarchical system also indicates a sense of powerlessness: you have to report things rather than actually sort them out yourself. In ‘Arc of Infinity’ the entire story wouldn’t happen if the Castellan – the Head of Security in the Time Lord Capitol – actually did his job properly when Talor reported the data theft to him. Actually being a Time Lord or Lady sounds like – for the most part – administrative tedium with unreliable bosses.
In ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ the Time Lord messenger says “we foresee a time when they have destroyed all other life in the universe” and ‘The End of Time’ has The Visionary, who appears to have some prophesying abilities, but we’re not 100% clear on how well and how far into the future Time Lords can see. The implication of the ending of ‘Kill the Moon’ is that the Doctor can sense future timelines. However, this does not mean that you can simply do all the work in advance, because once you’d done all the work in advance, the results of that work would cause ripples in the fabric of space/time and necessitate further work somewhere else and that work would create more ripples and so on and so forth. This means that any sense of having power over Time – which you’d think would help in their work – actually makes it more frustrating.
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