When Doctor Who was revived, Russel T. Davies made the decision to scrap the bulk of the Classic Series' shambolic continuity through the device of the Last Great Time War, a conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords which tore through the universe, and ultimately left the Doctor the last of his race, and their destroyer. It was a bold step, and one which was largely successful, at least until the pressure to continually reuse the Daleks meant that the Doctor's sacrifice of his own people seemed increasingly pointless, but it did mean that our hero was a war criminal of unimaginable proportions, especially when The Day of the Doctor made it clear that the death of Gallifrey was not just a knowable consequence of the Doctor's last action against the Dalek, but that action's explicit purpose.
So, why make your hero the perpetrator of an act of unrestrained genocide?
In 1963, no-one knew what a Time Lord was. The Doctor was a nameless alien who traveled in his Ship, which looked like a police box, with his granddaughter (who was essentially the only one to call it a TARDIS); it was as simple as that.
The Time Lords only appeared at the end of Patrick Troughton's run in 1969, when he summoned their assistance to deal with the War Lord and was forced to face the consequences of his own transgressions as a result. They appeared as beings of tremendous power and vast technological supremacy, thwarting the attempted escape of the War Lord with dismissive ease before condemning the Doctor to a reduced budget, albeit in full colour.
As time wore on, the Time Lords appeared several times as mysterious figures; non-interventionists, but willing to use the 'renegade' Doctor as a catspaw to nudge events that needed nudging, and even instructing him to smother the Daleks in the proverbial cradle. This was all well and good, but then... but then came The Deadly Assassin, the first serial predominantly set on Gallifrey itself, and the show began to shine a light on the msyterious and powerful Time Lords, revealing them to be a pack of ineffectual incompetents in desperate need of the Doctor to solve any problem not encompassed by past experience.
While many media have since sought to restore the race to their former role, the need to conform to the levels of bureaucracy shown in Assassin and in the almost painful The Invasion of Time, in which Gallifrey is seen to be largely and randomly furnished with inflatable plastic things, meant that they could never be so mysterious again.
In an attempt to restore some of the mystery, showrunner Andrew Cartmel introduced the so-called 'Cartmel Master Plan', but with the cancellation of the series, this was never completed, leaving only hints at Gallifrey's darker past and the Doctor's role in it to be explored by licensed spin-offs. The web production Death Comes to Time made another stab at it, suggesting that the reason for the Time Lords' principle of non-intervention is the ability to destroy planets with their own personal power, if left unlimited, but it never took.
By the time the new series rolled around, the Time Lords had been explored by books, audio plays and webisodes. There was so much conflicting information, so many theories, that untangling them would have been an epic task, and one which new viewers would have little time for. The classic series Time Lords were pretty much exploded, reduced to pointless bureaucrats who couldn't achieve anything without the Doctor, and the spin-off versions had so much baggage - genetic looms which 'wove' children for a race rendered sterile by an ancient curse, living houses, the vaguely defined structure of Chapters and the triumvirate of Rassilon, Omage and 'the Other', the CIA - that they were all but unusual.
The Last Great Time War was the way around this, and also made the Doctor a unique figure. Unfortunately, the way it was done left a bad taste for many. The Doctor had been responsible for many deaths in his time, but to slaughter his own people was for many a step too far. In retrospect, it is beyond a bold move for a family scifi show to present us with a hero who killed his entire race, but it was oddly soft-pedaled in many ways, although usually only to be brought up and thrown at us by an episodic villain; Davros in particular dubbing the Doctor 'the Destroyer of Worlds'.
On the other hand, it really had to be the Doctor, in order to explain how he was the sole survivor. The destruction of two races was a terrible thing, but to have run off and let someone else do it perhaps more so.
As I have mentioned before, I always envisaged the death of the Time Lords as an inevitable consequence of the destruction of the Daleks; that rather than deliberately burning Gallifrey, the Doctor had been forced to burn the entire Time War out of history in order to preserve what remained of the universe. The End of Time then suggested that he might have done what he did because all that remained of the Time Lords was a corrupt and power hungry High Council, in their own monomaniacal fashion just as bad as the Daleks.
The Day of the Doctor however presented not only a very mundane sort of war, but also a very domestic Gallifrey, along with a very deliberate act of destruction which made the Doctor's actions seem far less justifiable, much more monstrous. I much preferred the Time War in my mind.
Do I have a conclusion? Not really, save to say that I understand entirely why the Time Lords had to go, and why the Doctor had to have done it, and that overall, I liked it better the less they tried to pin it down.
So, why make your hero the perpetrator of an act of unrestrained genocide?
In 1963, no-one knew what a Time Lord was. The Doctor was a nameless alien who traveled in his Ship, which looked like a police box, with his granddaughter (who was essentially the only one to call it a TARDIS); it was as simple as that.
The Time Lords only appeared at the end of Patrick Troughton's run in 1969, when he summoned their assistance to deal with the War Lord and was forced to face the consequences of his own transgressions as a result. They appeared as beings of tremendous power and vast technological supremacy, thwarting the attempted escape of the War Lord with dismissive ease before condemning the Doctor to a reduced budget, albeit in full colour.
As time wore on, the Time Lords appeared several times as mysterious figures; non-interventionists, but willing to use the 'renegade' Doctor as a catspaw to nudge events that needed nudging, and even instructing him to smother the Daleks in the proverbial cradle. This was all well and good, but then... but then came The Deadly Assassin, the first serial predominantly set on Gallifrey itself, and the show began to shine a light on the msyterious and powerful Time Lords, revealing them to be a pack of ineffectual incompetents in desperate need of the Doctor to solve any problem not encompassed by past experience.
While many media have since sought to restore the race to their former role, the need to conform to the levels of bureaucracy shown in Assassin and in the almost painful The Invasion of Time, in which Gallifrey is seen to be largely and randomly furnished with inflatable plastic things, meant that they could never be so mysterious again.
In an attempt to restore some of the mystery, showrunner Andrew Cartmel introduced the so-called 'Cartmel Master Plan', but with the cancellation of the series, this was never completed, leaving only hints at Gallifrey's darker past and the Doctor's role in it to be explored by licensed spin-offs. The web production Death Comes to Time made another stab at it, suggesting that the reason for the Time Lords' principle of non-intervention is the ability to destroy planets with their own personal power, if left unlimited, but it never took.
By the time the new series rolled around, the Time Lords had been explored by books, audio plays and webisodes. There was so much conflicting information, so many theories, that untangling them would have been an epic task, and one which new viewers would have little time for. The classic series Time Lords were pretty much exploded, reduced to pointless bureaucrats who couldn't achieve anything without the Doctor, and the spin-off versions had so much baggage - genetic looms which 'wove' children for a race rendered sterile by an ancient curse, living houses, the vaguely defined structure of Chapters and the triumvirate of Rassilon, Omage and 'the Other', the CIA - that they were all but unusual.
The Last Great Time War was the way around this, and also made the Doctor a unique figure. Unfortunately, the way it was done left a bad taste for many. The Doctor had been responsible for many deaths in his time, but to slaughter his own people was for many a step too far. In retrospect, it is beyond a bold move for a family scifi show to present us with a hero who killed his entire race, but it was oddly soft-pedaled in many ways, although usually only to be brought up and thrown at us by an episodic villain; Davros in particular dubbing the Doctor 'the Destroyer of Worlds'.
On the other hand, it really had to be the Doctor, in order to explain how he was the sole survivor. The destruction of two races was a terrible thing, but to have run off and let someone else do it perhaps more so.
As I have mentioned before, I always envisaged the death of the Time Lords as an inevitable consequence of the destruction of the Daleks; that rather than deliberately burning Gallifrey, the Doctor had been forced to burn the entire Time War out of history in order to preserve what remained of the universe. The End of Time then suggested that he might have done what he did because all that remained of the Time Lords was a corrupt and power hungry High Council, in their own monomaniacal fashion just as bad as the Daleks.
The Day of the Doctor however presented not only a very mundane sort of war, but also a very domestic Gallifrey, along with a very deliberate act of destruction which made the Doctor's actions seem far less justifiable, much more monstrous. I much preferred the Time War in my mind.
Do I have a conclusion? Not really, save to say that I understand entirely why the Time Lords had to go, and why the Doctor had to have done it, and that overall, I liked it better the less they tried to pin it down.
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