Reaction post for The Ultimate Foe

[elliptic_eye]

Apologies for a tardy post once again--had sudden death of laptop yesterday. So you'll all be spared the atrocious photoshop of Six in an eyepatch

Comments

[scarfman]

Two points I like to make in discussing Trial of a Time Lord and specifically The Ultimate Foe.

• The Valeyard. People who've just reviewed the serial probably don't need this point driven in, but the Valeyard is not a normal incarnation of the Doctor. He's a "distillation" of the Doctor's dark side "from between his twelfth and final incarnations". Remember the projection of Cho Je the Doctor's Teacher had running errands for him in Planet of the Spiders, before the Teacher actually regenerated into that appearance? Remember the Watcher from Logopolis, who was projected backwards in time from the middle of the Doctor's upcoming regeneration in order to keep the Doctor on track in the events leading up to it? Like those. How the Valeyard was generated, and by whom if anyone, we're not told. I initially assumed the corrupt High Council which used him to try keeping the Doctor from exposing the Ravalox coverup, but it could have been a project of the Master's own gone awry. It'd almost have to be a Time Lord(s). But to a certain degree it depends on how much you believe what the Master says about him, since he's the only source. At that point in the story, if that point alone, the Master is the Merlin/Guinan/Giles figure, rendering exposition that we the viewers are to trust at face value. But if you particularly like a fanfiction story written by someone who didn't realize the Valeyard isn't a proper incarnation (there's at least one very good one out there), you could argue that the Master lied.
• Peri. In this serial the Master, adjunct to his bout of merlinism, tells us that Peri didn't after all die at the end of the previous serial but one, and instead survived to marry Brian Blessed. This makes Peri the first companion to leave the show both by dying and by getting married (and in that order). But we're not really given an alternate scenario to explain how Peri survived the events depicted by the Valeyard-doctored Matrix five episodes ago, just a quick repeat shot of her with Yrcanos from earlier in that story. And there are people who prefer to grant the character the more dramatic exit. So it comes down to who you believe, the Master or the Valeyard. The Valeyard's possible motivations for falsely reporting Peri dead are more obvious than the Master's for falsely reporting Peri married, but notice that the Master contrived to have his version of the story reported to the Doctor by someone else than him. So that he'd have no cause to question it, to go back and investigate? Not something ever likely to be explored in the screensource or in licensed tie-ins, which leaves it to us in fanfiction. I like to think, if Peri did marry Yrcanos, it was as a temporary measure to ally with the most powerful person onsite till the Doctor came back for her; and that the Doctor, mistrusting contradictory data, did go back for her (after returning Mel to his future self), upon which they continued traveling together, the end of Peri's time maybe even overlapping with the beginning of Mel's. Perhaps one day I'll write it up properly as a series.

[hexiva]

Does he necessarily have to have been made by anyone? The Watcher, from what I understood, was a natural occurrence -- I thought it was just something that happened sometimes during regenerations.

[scarfman]

I assume he was made by someone because our previous examples of the same sort of thing (a) were not the regenerater's distilled dark side only (b) projected backwards in time only a short distance before the relevant regeneration (3 c) did require special circumstances to manifest: Cho Je was manifested by a Time Lord so steeped in the ways of Time that he didn't need a TARDIS to get to Earth from Gallifrey, and the Watcher (according to the screenwriter in later interviews) was manifested by the cataclysmic events surrounding the regneration. These projections don't occur naturally in the first place, or they don't occur without special circumstances; and the Valeyard has additional anomalies when observed next to our other two datapoints.
That said, I could still be wrong. We just don't know.

[hexiva]

But the Thirteenth Doctor(that's right, isn't it?) could have been in any of those situations when the Valeyard manifested. I don't know about Cho Je, but with the Watcher, it's possible it was only one aspect of the Doctor's personality.

In addition, in 'He Jests at Scars,' which is, I suppose, not exactly canon, the Time Lords are behaving as if the Valeyard is some sort of naturally occurring anomaly, and wish to capture and study it-- him to figure out how it occurred.

[scarfman]

Yes, Doctor Thirteen could have been either as accomplished as his Teacher or have regenerated under similarly cosmic circumstances as Doctor Five, or both; but that still leaves the dark side and backwards-projection length anomalies.
In He Jests at Scars, do the Time Lords figure out in the end where he came from?

[hexiva]

My theory is that he'd already somehow succeeded in stealing Thirteen's life, which let him properly exist but left him regeneration-less.

Nope. He gets a hold of a doomsday weapon and, well, they don't have a chance after that.