All New Who

{{ Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes }}

How are the critics rating it so highly?

{{ Critics cant seem to find a bad thing to say about our new female Doctor and her cast of diversity, as doing so wouldnt be progressive. Sadly they do more damage to their reputations than anything else by giving a big thumbs up to what is to everyone else self-evidently weak, insulting, badly acted and written material.
Its been like this since she got the gig- heres her debut series on Rotten Tomatoes which has a similar massive gulf between critics and actual viewers who, unlike the critics, dont think just casting a woman and some folk of colour equals instantly good. }}

{{ Im rather enjoying the Adams Krikketmen story- its a great deal of fun to see the Whoverse through what is essentially the Hitchhikers glasses.
Really loved his description of Gallifrey- }}

Nobody has ever written a tourist guide to Gallifrey because to be truthful no-one has ever really wanted to visit. Plenty of races have had angry tentacled thoughts about invading but that's not the same as fancying a holiday there.
If you find yourself with a fortnight to spare there is not that much to see. True there are silver trees, ochre mountains and the odd smug daisy, but mostly there is a lot of orange. Orange and beige. Two colours which whether on a planet or on wallpaper say whoever is in charge should be thinking hard about redecorating. The only problem with Gallifrey is that no-one has ever thought of redecorating. Gallifreyians more than any other civilisation in the universe don't like change. The mobile telephone has never taken off on Gallifrey because the entire population thought it a step too far. The orange skies reflect that reluctance to change, the whole day either looks like sunrise or sunset, perpetually stuck in the same moment in time and really that's just the way the people of Gallifrey prefer it.
In a rare, long ago racy moment the Gallifreyians became the Lords of All Time, they immediately decided the best thing to do with this vast power was as little as possible. If they did interfere in the affairs of others, and they did so with the soft pedal firmly pressed, it was with the intention of keeping the status most quo.
Just as nothing changed on Gallifrey nothing in the universe would either.
There were one or two flies in this orangey and beige ointment, most of the people of Gallifrey were happy to grow up, live long lives composed of identical marmalade days and then eventually potter off into an afterlife of more of the same thank you.
Instead of developing an internet the Gallifreyians had built a library of souls and opinions. A vast databank of 'I told you so'. The acquired wisdom was available to anyone who asked. This could be summarised as 'no sudden moves.'
By in large everyone was quite happy with life on Gallfirey except for a few rebellious souls who decided to leave home and wander eternity. A few such as the Master tried to take over as much of the universe as possible but most settled in a quiet corner and devoted themselves to harmless hobbies, such as beekeeping or making a really nice cup of tea. The Doctor was of course the exception to the exceptions to the rule, he had never made a  universal conquest and he was hopeless with bees. He strolled through eternity with the attention span of a gregarious goldfish, he somehow managed to fit saving galaxies between a rostrum of formidable interests, ranging from fishing, badly, to reciting poetry, loudly, to name dropping, badly and loudly. He did in fact very much enjoy making tea but did it with so much collateral damage that you could say the Doctor enjoyed making tea in the same way Daleks enjoyed landing softly on a planet and saying 'hello'.

That's really embarrassing for the critics. They should be expected to penetrate the mysteries of high art that the general untutored populace is not equipped to wrap their heads around, not pop their thumbs up at anyone who checks the right boxes.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ Critics cant seem to find a bad thing to say about our new female Doctor and her cast of diversity, as doing so wouldnt be progressive. Sadly they do more damage to their reputations than anything else by giving a big thumbs up to what is to everyone else self-evidently weak, insulting, badly acted and written material.
Its been like this since she got the gig- heres her debut series on Rotten Tomatoes which has a similar massive gulf between critics and actual viewers who, unlike the critics, dont think just casting a woman and some folk of colour equals instantly good. }}

This is a sign of society at the moment, the Labour leadership is a battle between those who think it should be won by a woman with a Northern accent because "its time to have a female Northerner"    just cos we haven't had one before ffs, and those who think it should be won by the person who will actually win the next election, and he is a Southerner.

well I stuck about 5 minutes before I turned over to watch Great Pottery Throwdown. They have recycled a monster, yet again. lazy.

Fire the makeup crew. Whoever did the scorpion chick probably did last week's catwoman too. Fire. Them. Now.

Also whoever makes the music. Try to be subtle, please! Try!

It's over. Whatever that was. Next week is the Judoon? Looking forward to the improved dialogue. Hope it's all in Judoonian. Or whatever it's called.

{{ I watched tonight's episode, Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror, in the company of Nagual and we mainly spent the time pointing out to each other all the different ways the plot didn't add up, we had time to do this because whilst lots happened, lots also didn't happen and lots was just people standing in a room talking to each other. It was all rather boring somehow and lacklustre.

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edit add- thankyou for the reminder Amarie- yes the music was particularly awful this week too, we both noted it here whilst watching.   }}

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Spoiler:

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{{ Checked the ending again Amarie- now Im more confused for what they were going for!  

Spoiler:

Yeah... I don't know either.

Remember that AI program thing that made a Harry Potter story? Just jumbled stuff you might recognise being from HP, but nothing that made sense. Is it making Who episodes now? I need some sort of explanation.

{{ I'm not sure thats too far off Amarie.
I rather imagine the writers room they just started by throwing historical figures out there and putting them on a whiteboard then cutting it down to those that meet their 'worthy' criteria.
Once they've got that they move onto aliens, setting and plot. Imagine it goes like this-

Spoiler:

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{{ Overnights are in 4.4 another consecutive drop of 0.5 million this time. }}

its all aboard the Derivative Train choo-choo!
I never thought I could be bored rigid by Victorian New York, what with bustles, but I was. Why is it never somewhere truly challenging like an Aztec pyramid or somewhere you would be killed dead within 5 minutes. why are they recycling older and better monsters/costumes, why is it so unutterably DULL? why do the fuqing fam just stand around in a straight line talking bilge? on the plus side the Great Pottery Throwdown was quite moving.

also watched a really fascinating program called 'All Aboard!-New Zealand by rail and sea. It was shot on a train going from North to South island with no commentary just a long filming of the journey. Seeing as I will probably never get to go in person it was utterly mesmerising having the opportunity to almost see it in person, well as near as possible. Its very beautiful and mysterious in parts, and other parts are a bit disappointing, but train routes sometimes are. On the whole North island had some magnificent forests and South Island had some serious volcanic beaches, and palm trees which is weird to see in such English looking scenery. If you get the chance to watch a repeat try to record it. Its got a spooky atmosphere in parts, particularly the sea journey into South Island. Its addictive, I imagined I was really there and couldn't stop watching it and letting the various atmospheres wash over me.

{{ Ai is in for this weeks episode and its 79- below 80 again. Just for context Tennant had 1 episode below 80, Capalid had 1 and Matt none at all. Weve had two in four episodes this series! }}

Can you at least give Chibnall and Whittaker credit for being consistently mediocre?

After the go for-broke zany lunacy and timey wimey experimentation of the RTD/Moffat years, perhaps it was time we had some simple straight forward storylines for a while.

Or maybe its just shite.

I dunno, can't be arsed to watch it.

Can you at least give Chibnall and Whittaker credit for being consistently mediocre? - Malick

{{Oh I will, if they ever raise the bar as high as consitently mediocre

'perhaps it was time we had some simple straight forward storylines'

Nothng wrong with that, its not what we are getting though. Things are not always simpler, the plot of the opening two parter Spyfall was so convulted it ended up not making the slightest bit of sense. And even when the story is very simple is terrible, Orphan 55 can be summed up as Doctor and friends go to holiday resort  which is a dome on a barren destroyed world whose mutated remaining population attack,

Spoiler:

This weeks is even simpler- alien space pirate scorpions have a broken ship and need a genius to fix it so kidnap Tesla for the job until the Doctor stops them by

Spoiler:

But even when its this simple go glance over my list for each episode of 'things which dont make sense' its most of it! Plot holes, character inconsitiences, unexplained events, sudden jarring narrative leaps and people who don't act realitically to anything or sound like people, combine that with a Doctor whose actor cannot command the role and three companions with paper thin personalities, almost nothing to do and  two of which also struggle in the acting department.

'Or maybe its just shite.'

In the words of Rose Tyler, "Now you're gettting it!" }}

{{ Think Ive found a winner over on Gallifrey Base for best summing up of curent Who. And the winner is-

"I miss the Doctor-lite episodes."



And I miss when the actors playing the Doctor commanded the role, stole every scene they were in and dominated every frame of their show imprinting their Doctor onto it. }}

{{ Ok its time for one of those big old posts. Settle in, crack open the buckie and enjoy some Who lore.
Keeping on the theme of Gallifrey history, as Chibbers seems determined to screw with it, here's the entire history of the place from the beginning of the universe to present. With the caveats where I've tried to include only stuff that is tv based, some tv stuff references stuff thats not been mentioned on tv but is in extended media so thats included. And secondly the exact order in which some events took place is also open to debate. So lets dive in.

In the beginning was the end. Which is very Doctor Who you have to admit.
Before our universe was, something else, and there were some things in whatever was before that which had found some way to survive the end of their own reality and into ours.
The most prominent example of such a creature in NUWho comes in the Impossible Planet/Satan Pit and the devil like creature known as the Beast. The Weeping Angels may also fall into this category.

Now our early universe was a bit weird, but exactly in what way weird is hard to envision. The laws of physics were in some fashion much looser and much easier to alter or manipulate, space and time were a bit chaotic, and along side all the usual forces we know about in the universe there was another force, what we would call magic and it was equally as strong as all the other ones.
Another feature of the early universe was just how varied the species that evolved in it were.
Among these early species were the Racnoss (huge spider like things capable of consuming whole planets by sheer number) seen in Runaway Bride, the Neestene Conscious, a sort of sentient plastic that feeds off toxins seen in Rose, the Carronnites, beaked bird like things,who were big on using the force of magic as seen in The Shakespeare Code, the Weeping Angels living statues seen in Blink, and a variety of other weird and odd shaped lifeforms, many of which made some use of magic.
And among these early species were the Gallifreyeans, who were humanoid and also made a lot of use of magic.
Early Gallifrey came to be ruled by a group of women, the Sisterhood of Pythia, and they were pretty brutal, but in fairness the early universe was a very brutal place with a lot of nasty species, not to mention everyone being able to use magic to muck about with the fabric of space and time itself.

After a very long time on Gallifrey a new group arose led by three people, Rassilon, Omega and the mysterious Other.
They seized power and exiled the Sisterhood who eventually settled on the planet Karn and over time became the Sisterhood of Karn, the ruling class of Gallifrey in exile as they continued to think of themselves.
This new breed of Gallifreyean was not very happy with the state of the universe at a fundamental level. They foresaw that it could not last as it was too unstable, what Gallifreyeans wanted more than anything was order and regulation in a stable organised universe. So they decided to make one out of what they had.

By now the Gallifreyeans had worked out how to manipulate dimensions, in other words how to make something bigger on the inside than the outside. But the first really major thing they did was try to capture an infinite power source, Omega and Rassilon's experiments with basic time manipulation and their new technology zeal led to the creation of the Hand of Omega, a stellar manipulator. The aim was to force a sun to collapse into a black hole, but to perpetually hold it on the brink of  collapse as a permanent power source.
It did not go well to start with and instead ripped a hole in the fabric of reality and let in things from 'outside'. These were the Vampires. Huge massive nebula sized beings capable of feeding off entire planets in a go and of turning our entire universe into a lifeless void.
Rassilon became a war hero in this era, leading his people in battle  to victory against the Vampires in Bow-ships, huge vessels that fired a massive bolt thorough the Vampires hearts.

Eventually once all the carnage was over, they finally perfected their stellar manipulator and combined with the making things bigger on the inside, they put the entire collapsing star underneath  Gallifreys capital city providing Gallifrey with an infinite power source. Yes Gallifrey itself is bigger on the inside.
It wasn't all success though, whilst capturing the star the chief scientist of the project and joint founder of modern Gallifrey Omega was seemingly killed in the explosion. Though never proved there have always been mutterings that the accident which got rid of Omega was not entirely an accident and that Rassilon's hand was behind it.

However it was it left Rassilon effectively solely in charge as about now the Other also drops out of history never to be heard of again. Rassilon and Omegas breakthroughs greatly accelerated the fledgling Time Lords ability to order the universe as they saw fit. The first thing they did in that regard was to decide that one of the problems was species were all so different and had so little in common it nearly always ended in war, death and destruction whenever two species met.
So they created a universal morphogenic filed, which made the likelihood of higher species evolving into the, obviously superior and preferred, Gallifreyean humanoid shape much more likely. When 9 tells Rose Time Lords don't look like humans, humans look like Time Lords, he really meant it. There is however an alternative version of how this happened, which is having discovered time travel the first thing they tried to do was go back to the Big Bang and see how it all started, but their very presence there at that Time resonated their physcial shape as a template throughout the emerging universe.

The next undertaking was much more ambitious and much bigger. They wanted an orderly universe.
The end result of trying to make one was the Web of Time. In brief it somehow tightened up the laws of physics, making them more absolute and much harder to break or manipulate, with the important side effect that the force of magic was no longer equal to the rest but was very weak in comparison. Only species who evolved early on when it was strong would retain any magical abilities, such as the power of a name and the witchcraft used by the Caronnites, or the Gallifreyeans telepathic abilities. The weak magic force could though be harnessed alongside sufficiently advanced technology, which allowed for later inventions like the telepathic circuits in TARDIS's,  the sonic screwdriver, and psychic paper.

But the biggest effect was to bring stability, rigidly and permanent order to the entire universe. But the Web of Time had a weakness, for everything to stay stable  as intended certain things had to always happen in it, FIXED Points, which anchored the Web. If something occurred to change Time and break one or more of these points then the entire Web would collapse and Time would become a chaotic jumble and eventually the whole thing would collapse in on itself..
And in order to be able to regulate, monitor and where necessary interfere to keep things on track a boundary was created around Gallifrey that effectively took it out of synch with the rest of the universe, outside the Web of Time. This is why 10 tells Martha when he is describing Gallifrey that it is 'looking down' on the galaxies below. Its poetic but it effectively true.

Having achieved a stable organised universe to their liking, that they could sit smugly outside of and organise from afar, and with an infinite power source, Rassilon set about ruling the universe, early time travel experiments were conducted with the earliest TARDISes, the Doctor's TARDIS may well have been among these early ones as we are told it was already a museum piece when the Doctor stole her.
The Gallifreyeans also took to mucking about with other species for fun, for entertainment Rassilon opened the Death Zone, where they'd nab other species from space and time and have them kill each other or go through deadly games and traps. War TARDISes were built for conquering other species and soon Gallifrey was the only Empire worth noting in the universe and its rule was vice like and brutal.

There was one thing that still bothered Rassilon however, he was one day going to die, which he was not keen on, In fact Gallifreyeans in general were not keen on the idea at all and don't like endings, especially their own. What Rassilon really wanted was to find a way to make all Gallfreyeans immortal.
Luckily exposure to the Time vortex also had an effect on Time lord physiology, Time Travellers absorbed Arton radiation, and one of the effects it had on those travelling the vortex was some regenerative abilities. Rassilon started experimenting on this and eventually he created the regeneration we now know. It wasn't immortality as he'd planned it, but it was heading in the right direction. But it had a limit of 12 on it, officially because after that it became increasingly unstable and dangerous. But tellingly Rassilon never put that limitation on himself making him, with care, effectively immortal. Furthering the suspicion that everything Rassilon did for Gallifrey was really about him in the end. The ability to regenerate was reserved solely to those who graduated from the Academy, Time-Lords only, which by a happy coincidence also meant most of the Upper Classes, whilst he built into a virus the ability to resist all diseases, vastly improve healing abilities and general good health and released it into the population, but no regeneration for the plebs.
But now everyone on Gallifrey could live for centuries, and enjoy the Death Games for even longer.

It was also about this time the Matrix was begun. The Matrix is sort of a computer, in the same way an abacus is sort of a modern computer. It basically stored the memories and consciousness of  Time Lords when they did eventually die, and then it could access the Web of Time and based off a mix of good old fashioned computer calculating, dead Time Lords knowledge, and the information gathered from the Web, could make very accurate predictions about future events in Time. Giving the Time Lords even more power and knowledge over everyone else in the Universe and making them even more insufferable and more tyrannical.

But after a time Rassilon finally had a bit of an epiphany and realised if they kept going as they were the Time Lords were just going to be tyrants over the entire universe. So he took a complete reversal, he stopped the death games stuff. He greatly expanded the Academy opening it up to more, less prestigous Hiuses to enter and created Time Lords as we know them, and he instigated a strict policy of non-interference in Galactic affairs. The Time lords essentially became overseers and caretakers of the universe they had shaped.

Oddly enough, whilst this was good for everyone else in the universe and for most of Gallifrey it was not for Rassilon. And I say most of Gallifrey because as part of the Gallifreyean love of order their society was strictly organised along rigid class lines and social lines. At the top were Rassilon, the High Council and the Time Lords who had graduated from the Academy, and almost all of them came from a handful of Houses- the dominant large ruling families of Gallifrey. They also filled the massive bureaucracies that sprouted up. Below them were the people who did stuff for them, who built the stuff and made the tech, the engineers, the time specialists, the highly skilled but not necessarily Time Lords. And at the bottom were everyone else, the ordinary folk of Gallifrey who to the outside eye appeared to live lives no better than rustic often, working the land on farms and such like.

As it turned out Gallfryeans were naturals at being the pompous, smug, silly collar, big robe wearing, bureaucrats of Time. They were the most powerful species that had ever been with knowledge that transcended space and time which they had shaped, and they rather liked it. Soon Gallifrey had a massive Bureaucratic system of senators, and councillors and chancellors, and the Academy expanded and Gallifrey entered a long period of stable, calm, unexciting study, overseeing and being smug about it.

This however meant Rassilon was increasingly a bit of an embarrassment, a throwback to the dark old days. For whilst he was  legendary, had created the society, reshaped space and time he was also still a bit of a tyrannical dick, especially to the lowest levels of Gallifreyean society. So eventually he was overthrown. But apart from the problems of killing someone who had granted themselves infinite regenerations, it was also seen as a bit much given all he had done, so instead he was entombed and imprisoned in a Tower in the centre of what had been his Death Zone games arena and Gallifrey settled into aeons of quiet feeling good about themselves.

And so after a very long period of regulating everything and only ever interfering in the universe where it was absolutely necessary to maintain the Web of Time things suddenly changed.
You can think of it a bit like the Gallifryean equivalent to the counter-culture of the 1960's. Something was in the air.
A generation going through the Academy who were frankly a bit fed up and bored with stuffy, boring, calm, never changing days on Gallifrey.

They later became known as the Renegade Generation. Chief among them were the The Doctor, who we all know of course, the Master, who was like the Doctor but the other side of the coin, the Rani who was very big on science but a lot less keen on Gallifreyean stuffiness and rules, especially where it pertained to such things as experimentation on other species, the War Master who was keen on well, war stuff and the Monk, also know as the Time Meddler as he had a thing for seeing if he could alter historical events.

Whilst it hadn't been unknown for the odd Time lord to go retire out their in the universe or to do some field-work, or live out their last regeneration just seeing what it was like, this lot were different. Rebellious, uncontrollable and challenging. Eventually they either stole a TARDIS and left or got kicked out. The Doctor however was among the last to leave and was already nearing the end of his first body by the time he did.
The circumstance of which are still quite mysterious. We don't know the why, we do know he took his granddaughter Susan with him, that they were exiling themselves by leaving, that they stole an ancient type-40 TARDIS and that on the way out he appears to have also stolen the Hand of Omega, which he then hid buried in a coffin in a graveyard on earth in the 1960's after a period of popping about earths history for a bit (seemingly the 60's because it was Susan's favourite earth decade).

The next major event in Gallifreyean history was a huge miscalculation on the Time lords part. By now they had stuck a deal with the renegade the Doctor, they would let him wander him about doing whatever he was doing so long as he maintained the Web of Time by not screwing up something important and breaking a fixed point, and secondly that from time to time when they did have to interfere, he would act as their agent.

When the Doctor was on his 4th regeneration he was called upon, much to his annoyance, to do the Time Lords a  favour. The Matrix had prophetised that a time would come when the Daleks would actually pull off their aim of wiping out every other sentient species in the Galaxy and ruling over all, which seemed even to the Time Lords sitting outside of events to probably be a bad idea. So they made a risky move, they sent the Doctor to the home planet of the Daleks, Skaro, at the point of their creation by the scientist Davros, to wipe them out before they could begin. However in the end the Doctor could not bring himself to commit genocide, even on the Daleks, and instead he only succeeded in slowing their advancement by a few hundred years.
The mistake however was in not thinking how the Daleks might see things if it the plan didn't work and they weren't wiped out. They saw it as an act of war, and this attempt by the Time Lords to wipe the Daleks from existence was with hindsight seen as the first shot fired in the coming Time War. From this point on among their usual galaxy conquering plans the Daleks got down to seriously thinking about how to get rid of the Time Lords and ideally Gallifrey altogether.

The next bit galactic event of note was more personal on the Doctors part, in his 7th incarnation Davros discovered the hidden location on earth of the Hand of Omega, unfortunately for Davros at the same time Dalek society was having some issues and had split into two factions, those who still supported Davros and those who didn't. Davros succeeded in gaining the Hand of Omega, but when he tried to use it he discovered that the Doctor, who had had some time to reconsider the merits of the whole genocide thing as far as Daleks were concerned, had made some changes and it instead blew up one of the stars in the system of the Daleks homeworld Skaro, causing it to go supernova and wiping out all the Daleks and whate remained of mutated life on Skaro leaving nothing but ruins and a poisonous atmosphere.

These two events set the stage for what was now inevitable, the Time War was about to begin.

When it did start it caught Gallifrey completely off-guard even though they knew it was coming. After aeons of complacency, bureaucracy and being smug they lacked the skills, knowledge and instinct to win a war of this nature. Not only was it brutal and relentless, the Daleks had mastered time travel too and the entire thing was being fought and refought over and over  everywhere in time. Not only was Gallifrey at risk of falling it was also risking the entire Web of Time and galactic collapse.

Deciding that what they needed was to be utterly ruthless and to fight as dirty as possible the Time Lords decide to resurrect two of Gallifreys most notorious warmongers, Rassilon, who had been in his Tower all this time, and the Master who had got himself sucked into the Eye of Harmony. But even then, though the odds were evened with their help and brutal strategies there was no end in sight to the war. At which point the Doctor entered the fray, leading on the front lines and breaking everything that being the Doctor meant in the name of ending the war.
But the war was having a brutal effect on time and space itself, whole planets histories would be rewritten as war raged over them, species would cease to have ever existed, time would be rewound and replayed over and over so battles could be refought to try to change the outcome, reality was put through the wringer and it began to break at the seams. And when it did stuff started appearing that should never have been- the Nightmare Child with its gaping jaws, the Amy of Neverwheres and Meanwhiles, monstrosities suddenly manifesting in the real universe, reality breaking apart. The collapse of the Web of Time was imminent.

And so Rassilon came up with the ultimate plan, he devised a way for the Time lords to transcend the physical realm entirely and to become immortal beings of pure energy. The one snag to doing so, the energy cost of it was everything else in existence. The material universe would  cease to be.

This rather drastic solution to the ongoing chaotic stalemate was not taken well by the Doctor when he learned of it, the war and the endless killing had worn him down, he had had enough of it all, no more. And so he broke into the Omega Arsenal, where safely stored away were all the most insanely dangerous weapons that the ancients of Gallifrey at the height of their universe ruling tryanny under Rassilon and Omega had created. All but one had been used already, the one left was called The Moment, and the reason no one had used it was that it was so powerful the operating system itself had become sentient and would sit in judgement over you and it was powerful enough to manipulate the fabric of space and time itself. Not even Rassilon dared risk using it, only an idiot would. So the Doctor stole it.

He planned to use it to end the war, to wipe out the Daleks and all his own people at the same time.

As it turned out thanks to the Moment and a meeting with his future 10th and 11th incarnations he did not in fact destroy Gallifrey, rather it was hidden in a pocket universe, taken completely out of normal space and time, whilst the Dalek fleet who had the planet now surrounded and were simply pummelling on it with fire power, die of suprise when they blew each other up in the crossfire when the planet suddenly and unexpectedly vanished.
However thanks to the side effect of crossing your own time stream the Doctor when he then regenerated into his 9th incarnation had no memory of the events of saving the planet and instead believed he had done what he intended to do, wipe out the Daleks and his own people to end the war and save reality. Leaving him as far as he believed the last of his kind left alive in the universe as well as guilty of double genocide.

The next major event in Gallifrey history is slightly confusing due to its timey-whimey nature, it being Time Lords and all. In brief as possible the universe got cracked, cracks in space and time in the fabric of the universe. The Time lords, stuck in their tiny bubble universe discovered these cracks and realised they could send a signal through one  and see if it led back to the universe, if it did they could then return through it.
Problem was any signal they sent would broadcast through the entire universe, and given a lot of the universe was very pissed off at the whole Time War thing, and the Daleks had survived the War anyway and rebuilt, it might not be safe to come back. They would have to be sure. And there was only one Time Lord in the universe left who could tell them if it was safe. The Doctor. But how would they know it was him? The signal they sent through the crack was “Doctor Who?” As only the Doctor and the Time Lords have the knowledge of his real name. And the place the signal came through was a crack on the planet Trenzalore.

And this is where the Doctor comes in and it therefore gets complicated. You see the Doctor had discovered that Trenzalore was the place he would die on in battle and where he was buried, and this being his final body having used all his regnerations, it was really dead this time. However not knowing the planet is called Trenzelore he goes to investigate the signal emitting from the crack, which as well as asking a question only he can answer is encrytped in a way only he can decode.
Arriving to investigate the Doctor finds that most of the rest of the universe has turned up too, and when he signal is translated and boradcast as "Doctor Who?" and identified as originatingon Gallifrey all hell breaks loose as everyone wants to prevent the Time Lords ever coming back and risking another Time War. And acting as neutral arbitrator is the hugely powerful Galactic Church. The result is a stand off- The Time Lords cannot come through till the Doctor signals to them it is ok to do so, if he does signal them then an entire fleet of the galaxies finest are waiting to blast them back out the sky and another Time War will begin, and if he just leaves the planet the same fleet will blast the planet to smithereens and its innocent inhabitants to close the crack.
So the Doctor stays for a thousand years defending the planet from all sides in a seemingly endless seige, and now on his last and final body.
Its about now the complicated bit comes in, as a faction of the Church, fed up with all the siege and dying business getting in the way of all the worship stuff, decides to break away and come up with their own plan. You see the cracks only exist in the first place because this faction go back in time to try to stop the Doctor ever getting there in the first place, and think blowing his TARDIS up in the past while be a good idea. It wasn't. It really wasn't. The resulting explosion happened throughout all of time and space at every moment in time and space, the Doctors efforts to restore things succeeded but left the cracks in the fabric of the universe, allowing the Time Lords to signal through them, calling the Doctor to Trenzalore and the Church to start a war that a faction of the Churh would get so sick of fighting that they'd travel back in time to stop him.
Things don't always happen in the expected order with Time Lords.

Finally the Time Lords, who despite their long lives and eons of existence are somehow still never very patient people, decide maybe now is not the time to come back, granted the Doctor a new regeneration cycle for his efforts and because they might need him later and started working on plan B.

Plan B as it turned out was to get Gallifrey out the bubble universe but to place it at the very end of time after everyone else has died out and therefore would have stopped wanting to kill them. In this way they could go back to maintaining the Web of Time, keeping an eye on things, and as far as history was concerned they all disappeared so long ago they were nothing but legends and stories.

The next major event for Gallifrey concerned a prophecy. For aeons the Matrix had been making a prophesy of a creature known as the Hybrid, it would stand in the ruins of Gallifrey and threaten the Web of Time. And now it wass becoming more and more likely to come true.

It turned out to be the Doctor, or more precisely the Doctor paired with a human called Clara who was very like him in temperament, and who would go to extremes to protect each other.
The Doctor on his 12th incarnation lost his companion Clara as a side effect of the Time Lords trying to capture and trap him in order to extract from him what he knew about the Hybrid. This was another classic case of things not happening quite in the expected order where Time Lords are concerned, and of how, even after all this time Rassilon had not changed much. The Matrix predicted that not only was the Hybrid coming, but that the Doctor probably knew something about it. So the Time Lords decide the best line of action was to kidnap the Doctor, imprison him in a Confession Dial and force the information out of him, rather than say just asking. However in the attempt to kidnap him they accidently killed his closest friend and companion Clara, and once imprisoned the Doctor remained there refusing to give the information for four and a half billion years, all the time vowing to avenge her death and make the Time Lords pay for it and fix it. And in attempting to do so he became the very Hybrid the Time Lords were trying to prevent.
The Doctor returned to Gallifrey, took control of the military who revered him as a war hero and the man who won the Time War, exiled Rassilon and the High Council, appointed himself ruler of Gallifrey and then used Time Lord tech only allowed by the rulers to extract Clara an instant before her death from time.
Unfortunately Clara's death is one of those fixed point moments, and can't be broken. Despite this the Doctor carried out his plan and in attempting to save Clara takes her to the very ends of time to escape the Time Lords, where in the final moments of the universe standing in the ruins of Gallifrey he realises what he has become and how far he as gone trying to save her, risking the Web of Time. The Doctor wipes Clara from his memory, and she, after a bit of wriggle room, returns to Gallifrey and is put back to the moment of her death where she dies and in doing so maintains the Web.

Now we are almost at present day, but this is where its a bit messy an less consistent, we are in Chibnal era, and some things might just be that we don't know what happened exactly yet, and other things might be because Chibbers has made some errors.

Anyhow the next major event for Gallifrey is that it has been annihilated, again.

The Master has learned some secret about how Time Lord society was really founded, apparently the version of Time Lord history given above is in some fashion a lie, some terrible secret involving its founding and the 'Timeless Child'. Something so severe that the Master apparently has wiped Gallifrey out as punishment, and once more it has been destroyed and reduced to ruins.

I say its messy because the Master tells the Doctor he returned to Gallifrey in 'its bubble universe' when it was hiding out near the end of time and no longer in it that bubble universe when last we saw it. And because it is unclear where in the Masters timeline this Master is from as a result.

Well if you'd made it this far well done. More or less the history of Gallifrey from start to present day. }}

{{ Chart plotting the audience during last episode. Blue line is Who orange Dancing on Ice on ITV.
The peak for Who was 4.1 the trough about 3.6.



As you can see it lost a lot of the auidience that had been watchng Countryfile before it, and they came back at the end for start of Call the Midwife.
But during Who folk are either turning over, or turning off. }}

{{ Happy Birthday couple days ago to Tom Baker!

Time is catching up with him, but fortunatley he seems determined not to let it, as you'd expect of a Time Lord! Good health Tom! And may you continue to delight by providing new 4th Doctor stories for BF for long to come! Thankyou! }}