Mythical Creatures Commentary
Obviously, I’ve introduced some fairly significant new ideas here, most of which I pulled right out of my arse. I don’t think I’ve seen them anywhere else (mind you, I haven’t finished reading any of the novels yet). So I thought I should elaborate on (or defend!) them here. I’ll throw in the minor ones as well.
The Time Lord sex drive (or lack thereof) (scenes 2, 6, 8, and 9)
If a species lives as long as Time Lords do, they would either reproduce less or get very overcrowded. We are seeing this on Earth right now, as we improve medical care to the point that infant death is very rare in most countries, and the average life expectancy is somewhere around 75 years. Put in a life expectancy in the hundreds, or possibly even thousands (the best indication we have of how long one life can last is a mention that the 1st Doctor was about 500 years old), and the problem is infinitely worse.
My solution? Simply that they don’t have the same drive to copulate as humans do. Because let’s face it; over half the population of the US was born not because their parents decided to have a child, but because their parents decided to screw around and either didn’t use birth control, or they did but it failed. There would be an awful lot less of us if we weren’t hormonally driven to have sex.
This is not to say that Time Lords never have sex unless they want a child; I figure they would also do it for emotional reasons (but, seeing as most of them are not very emotional, most of them wouldn’t do that very often either). So there are other factors to reduce the birth rate, but I’ll address them in the xenobiology section of this website.
But for the system to work once activated, there would have to be biological factors to keep it going. Hence, once a Time Lord is physically aroused, he does have a biological need to finish it.
(So you have a very vague idea what happened on Delavega… but the details of the story are forthcoming.)
NOTE: In the novel Lungbarrow, Time Lords are completely sterile, and new ones are created by machines following a DNA template. I think this is complete bunk.
Time Lord blood curing vampirism (scene 3)
Well, why not? It must be a very strong life force, to be able to maintain itself for so long. If you want some technobabble, maybe she got some of the nanobots involved in regeneration, and they noticed she was mostly dead and fixed her.
Effects of blood loss (scene 4)
Again, why not? Just because he has two cardiovascular systems, doesn’t mean he won’t be affected if only one of them is partially drained. The effects at this level are subtle, and anyway, how much blood would a vampire drink in one attack? Possibly well more than the pint that makes a lot of humans giddy when they donate it.
Time Lords evolved from humans (scene 6)
There are some who say the Gallifreyans evolved well before humans did, and there are others who say they are from the very distant future. In fact, I’m told there is a mention in the classic series that the Doctor can not travel into his own real future – i.e., the time after he lived naturally. In a non-canon story, this is ignored, as he visits the end of the universe. However, I choose to believe it. For one thing, I never liked the idea – popular in sci-fi – that there were some kind of highly civilized, extremely powerful, beings who existed before our ancestors even crawled out of the sea. It just doesn’t make scientific sense to me. Our planet isn’t that much younger than others, is it? And if extreme longevity, high intelligence, and psychic power evolved that long ago, why would later species not have them? Maybe it just smacks too much of intelligent design for my tastes.
Anyway, if the two species are separated by that much time, and yet they are similar enough to be able to intermarry (though the only indication that they can interbreed is not from the show and therefore not canon), it seems to me they could be related.
I’ll be addressing this point in more detail in a later story. See also Xenobiology: Genetics.Conscious control of nerve impulses (scene 6)
This is basically an expansion of the idea of biofeedback: controlling bodily functions that are normally involuntary, such as the amount of blood flow to extremities. I figure this control is part of the 100 years of education it takes to become a Time Lord (rather than just any old schmuck from Gallifrey). The Doctor, being more emotional and tactile (and less stuffy) than the others, has thought of other uses for it.
Sexual telepathy (scene 8)
I don’t know that this has ever been addressed in a Doctor Who novel or other medium (I haven’t had a chance to read any of those that include the Doctor having sex, though I’m told there are some), but it has been in other sci-fi settings (Babylon 5 leaps to mind). Sharing of the body includes sharing of the mind. Perhaps a strong telepath could prevent this connection, but we already know the Doctor was not at the top of his class. And anyway, I don’t figure he’d generally want to block it, because he’s not the sort who would go to bed with someone he didn’t trust enough to open his mind to. Hell, he trusted Letitia enough to cry in her lap the first time they met, and despite dealing with a biological drive he wasn’t used to, he still waited three days to sleep with her.
The ending (scene 9)
I absolutely love this ending. Yeah, okay, I wrote it, except for his last line, of course, but that’s not the point. The idea that he’s gone through all this, and then returned to Rose within seconds of leaving her, just makes my heart all fluffy. I’m not sure why, really.
But it does, of course, lead to one important idea, not mine, but held by many fans: that the second or two in which the Tardis was gone from Rose’s alley was much longer for the Doctor. I didn’t like that idea at first; I thought that everything he’d done in the pictures Clive had, and anything else that might be written about the ninth Doctor, had happened before he traced the Nestene Consciousness to Earth. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the possibility that he was traveling for years during that tiny gap. If nothing else, there’s the scene in Rose’s flat where he looks in the mirror, and apparently hasn’t done so since regenerating, so he can’t have been traveling long at that point.
What it comes down to, for me, is this: Rose was always the one for him, but he couldn’t go back to her in the condition he was in at the beginning of this story. He needed to be with Letitia first.
Scene Selection
1. The Earth Line 6. Three Days 2. Based on a True Story 7. Cassiopeia 3. Tempus Vivat 8. Connection 4. Green Light 9. No Happy Endings 5. Reunion Commentary