The Man Hole

We are down to the big 5.  The Top 5 Dr. Who villains/enemies in the history of the show.  So on we go with: 

 

 

 

5. The Time Lords

 

The Time Lords are the rulers of the planet Gallifrey. The Gallifreyans had one of the oldest and mightiest civilizations in the universe. As the Time Lords, they would hold absolute power for ten million years. The Last Great Time War nearly wiped out the race. Like humans, Gallifreyans can be male or female. Females are sometimes referred to as Time Ladies. Their sex can change due to regeneration. Their life cycle seemed to include a phase similar to human childhood. A Gallifreyan ninety years old might still be considered a "kid", but after the age of two hundred years they wouldn't be seen as young. They could live for hundreds of years before regenerating. When a Time Lord eventually dies, either through the exhaustion of their regenerations or through circumventing the regeneration process, it was considered necessary to destroy their corpse soon afterwards. In at least one case, the death of a Time lord eventually left behind no body, but a dangerous index of their 'time stream'. This could be entered into by anyone, scattering them along the Time Lord's timeline, with potentially disastrous results. The protection of the Time Lords was carried out by the Chancellery Guard. They protected the Capitol, investigated crimes and captured criminals. The punishments used for crimes varied in severity. For his breaking of the non-interference policy, the Second Doctor was forced to regenerate and was exiled to Earth with a non-functioning TARDIS. For the various crimes the Master committed, his punishment would have been the reversal of his time stream, such that he had never existed. A similar punishment was carried out on the War Lord for his interference in human history which led to the deaths of thousands; he (and several of his guards) were dematerialized out of existence. The War Lord world was then placed in a time loop. When the Doctor was framed for assassinating the Time Lord President, he would have been vaporized if found guilty. During a darker, more barbarous time in the planet's past, Time Lords enjoyed watching time-displaced individuals fight to the death in a dedicated area called the Death Zone, but that practice had been entirely abandoned by the Doctor's day. The Time Lords are superlatively advanced in mathematics, biology, xenobiology, chemistry, physics and technology. Despite being one of the most powerful species in the universe, the Time Lords had little in the way of defenses and their offensive technology was lagging behind many other civilizations. This may be due in part to the transduction barrier, which covered the planet and which was almost completely impenetrable by outside forces or their general policy of non-interference. As such, when they were invaded by the Sontarans, they were unable to defend themselves with their regular tasers and the Fourth Doctor needed to use an ancient Time Lord weapon called the De-mat Gun. During the Last Great Time War the Capitol was protected by a set of Dual Turrets set around it, they were used to destroy attacking ships. This lack of military knowledge may have been a factor in their inability to defeat the Daleks by force of arms during the Last Great Time War. The Lord President Rassilon had a metallic glove which was capable of destroying a person by shooting out electricity and it reverted the Master Race to its human form. The most characteristic technology used by the Time Lords is their time travel technology of the TARDISes. The TARDISes are one of the few types of technology that was updated, from the obsolete Type 40 (from Mark I to Mark IV) to the more advanced Type 57. The Time Lords have the capability to control and use the power of stars. The Tenth Doctor went so far as to claim that the Time Lords "invented" black holes. Using the Hand of Omega, the Time Lords could speed up the development of stars. One such star had been turned into a black hole and was kept under the Panopticon as the Eye of Harmony to power the civilization of the Time Lords. They first appeared in the second Doctors story The War Games where they forced his second regeneration to the third Doctor. Over the coarse of the years they would appear in fifteen more stories for a total of 16 appearances. They have confronted Doctors one through six and the tenth and eleventh Doctors.

 

We are getting so much closer to the 50th Anniversary special that the excitement is becoming overwhelming.  Before that happens though we still have Halloween happening and if you are a huge Halloween fanatic you should be visiting out old friend Cerpts (and I do mean old!!) over at his blog The Land of Cerpts and Honey.  He has something going on the entire month of October!  If you don't go over there than I'm just going to have to send out an Adipose and give it specific instructions to not stop eating until you are totally devoured!  Then after you do that you can come back here in a few days when I will have #4 posted as we head toward Halloween night ourselves when we will be revealing the #1 Doctor Who villain of all time.  Until then run you clever boy (or girl) and ... REMEMBER!