Traits of a Time Lord
Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 02:22AM
BASIC PHYSICAL TRAITS
Time Lords may look like human beings but they aren't. For one thing, they have two hearts. Their blood is markedly different as well. In "Spearhead from Space", a physician looked at a blood sample from the Doctor and was convinced he'd been given some chemical mixture as a prank.
Some of the differences between Time Lords and human beings are a bit more obvious. The Doctor sometimes seems nearly twice as fast, strong and resilient as a normal person of his height and build. He also recovers from basic wounds and poisons more efficiently than humans. This increased immune system could be responsible for the Doctor's great stamina, since his body may be stifling the production of fatigue poisons in his body.
Along with these traits, there are others that are only occasionally mentioned. It's been said that the Doctor has an average body temperature of 15-16 degrees Celcius (which is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit). Time Lords are also known to possess a "respiratory bypass system", allowing them to go without air for brief periods of times.
The autonomic brain of a Time Lord is separated from the main brain that deals with conscious thought. A Time Lord brain also has a small tertiary lobe that deals with all the motor functions, allowing the higher functions to operate at maximum efficiency.
This separation of autonomic/motor functions and conscious thought may be responsible for the Doctor's ability to go into a self-induced healing trance, akin to a coma, which allows him to conserve and build up his energies. The Doctor went into such a coma immediately following his regeneration into the Third Doctor and his later shift into the Tenth Doctor, since both regenerations were rather hard on him. In the TV adventure "Smith and Jones", the Doctor may have entered this coma-like healing state again following a near-lethal loss of blood (though this was never clearly stated).
Gallifreyans are natural-born "time sensitives", able to sense the energies and flow of time fields around them. In training to become a Time Lord, they learn to hone their time senses so that when they travel to different places and time zones, they can feel whether or not their location is a "fixed point" in history or if it can be subject to some change without completely altering the "web of time" that underlies the universe. On some occasions, they can literally sense the possibilities before them stemming from that point in time.
Along with these advantages, the Doctor has also displayed weaknesses unusual to humans. His sensitivity to energy fields makes
him more vulnerable to certain forces. In his first incarnation, he was affected by the Cybermen's life-force draining technology so much that it forced him to regenerate, yet all the humans around him were completely unaffected.
In the Ninth Doctor adventure "The Doctor Dances", the Time Lord entered a room where a child had been imprisoned for several days, enduring psychological trauma and the physical interference of alien technology. While his human friends remained perfectly fine, the Doctor himself had an immediate reaction upon entering the room as his mind suddenly picked up on echoes of the child's suffering.
As for physical weakness, in the TV adventure "The Mind of Evil", the Third Doctor remarked that simple Aspirin was poisonous to the physiology of a Time Lord. This was confirmed when the Sixth Doctor was slipped Aspirin tablets in the audio play The Condemned and had what could have become a lethal allergic reaction if he hadn't countered it in time.
One final note concerns the connection between a Time Lord and their TARDIS.
In "The Two Doctors", we learned that when a Gallifreyan achieves the rank of Time Lord, they are injected with nuclei called the "Rassilon Imprimatur" which are designed to promote symbiosis with the TARDIS and eases the stresses of time travel on their bodies.
MANY PLANETS. IDENTICAL RACES.
It has been noted that many beings in the universe resemble the Time Lords in that they are bipedal humanoids who often have very similar physical traits and proportions (human beings on Earth, for example, look like Time Lords on the surface and are even said to have a similar DNA pattern). Some have claimed that this is because evolution finds the humanoid form to be the most adaptable for survival in the different environments of most planets.
In the audio play Zagreus, though, a different explanation was given. There, it was said that Rassilon, founder of the Time Lords, had actually decided in the early days of Gallifrey that the form of his people was the best and most worthy. Thus, he used his time travel technology to release a virus on several worlds scattered throughout the universe during the early stages of their evolution. The dominant life forms would be affected by this virus and would either die out or would be mutated so they would eventually evolve into beings resembling the Time Lords.
REGENERATION
If a Time Lord grows very old and weak or if they're inflicted with a fatal wound (or if they're simply very very bored and vain and decide they need a change), they can consciously choose to regenerate their forms. The cells are rebuilt, causing a new physical body practically from scratch.
When the Doctor regenerated into his second body, he described the process as "renewal" and likened it to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. It wasn't until the Third Doctor's final story "Planet of the Spiders" that we learned this process was called regeneration and what it really involved.
"When a Time Lord's body wears out, he regenerates, becomes new."
- Third Doctor, "Planet of the Spiders"
In the same adventure, the Brigadier asked if regeneration literally turned the Doctor into a "new man." A nearby Time Lord clarified to the Brigadier that the change was mainly in appearance, not in personality, but added "it will shake up the brain cells a little."
It seems then that the reason why Time Lords act a bit differently in each incarnation is because the brain chemistry, hormones and responses are altered, changing the "nature" part of his personality whereas the "nurture" component remains since they retain the same memories. The Sixth Doctor later expanded on this in the audio play 100 during a conversation with his companion, Evelyn Smythe.
EVELYN SMYTHE: "When you learn something, when you have life experiences, don't those things make you a particular way?"
DOCTOR: "Yes, as with you. But when one regenerates, one takes those same lessons and sees them from a different angle."
In the adventure "The Christmas Invasion", the Tenth Doctor made a similar statement, telling a friend that due to his regeneration, he was now able to look at the universe with new eyes.
Regeneration is not a process that immediately stabilizes. Although it takes only moments for the Doctor's outside appearance to change, his body and mind need time to adjust to their new state. Because of this, the Doctor is often very erratic during the first several minutes of his new life, his mind racing back and forth as he drifts in and out of consciousness. If all goes well, his memories and personality will come settle in less than an hour or so. If things go badly ... but more on that later.
During the first few hours post-regeneration, the Doctor's body is still bursting with energy. The Fourth and Eighth Doctor exhibited superhuman strength right after they regenerated but lost this ability several hours later. And it was revealed in "The Christmas Invasion" that it's even possible for a Time Lord to regrow an entire limb (except for the head, probably) if they're within 18 hours post-regeneration.
One advantage of regeneration is that it's possible for a Time Lord to meet himself without suffering the
Blimovitch Limitation Effect. This is an actual scientific concept which state, in a nutshell, that chaotic, potentially highly destructive disruptions in reality will occur if you ever go back and time and physically interact with yourself. When the Brigadier once met himself in the past and touched his younger self, the paradox caused a massive discharge of energies.
But because regeneration completely rebuilds the body, a Time Lord can interact with a previous or future incarnation without fearing the Blimovitch Limitation Effect (thought they still have to worry about affecting their own history). This isn't to say that the paradox of meeting themselves doesn't have some effect on them though. At least once, when the Doctor has met a past incarnation of himself, he noted that the previous incarnation looked older and heavier than it ever was and credited this as a side-effect due to their two personal time fields clashing with each other.
In the audio play Zagreus, it is said regeneration is not a natural born ability but one that is given to the Time Lords via some kind of injection of microscopic organisms that are capable of rebuilding the cells but can only do this twelve times before they wear out. This makes sense, since years before in the story "The Five Doctors", the President of the Time Lords offered to grant the Master a new set of regenerations. Since the Master was, at that time, inhabiting a non-Gallifreyan body, we can also conclude that it is possible to give at least certain non-Gallifreyan species the ability to regenerate.
From the same adventure, we must conclude that it is not possible to recharge any old Time Lord by simply injecting him with a new batch of lives at his pleasure. We know this because, in "The Five Doctors", a Time Lord went to great lengths himself to try and achieve true immortality beyond the limit of 13 lives, despite the fact that he had access to the science of granting regenerations in the first place. Obviously, simply injecting himself with a new set was not an option, perhaps because more than 13 regenerations is too much for the body itself to handle.
Of course, the villain known as the Master proved that there are ways of breaking the 13 lives rule, in his case by transmitting his consciousness into the body of another (he would've preferred the Doctor's but was forced to choose a non-Gallifreyan).
Considering how much importance Time Lord society seems to place on training, education and scientific achievements, and since apparently you are not considered a Time Lord until you've graduated from the Academy, it seems likely to me that you're given the ability to regenerate at the same time, perhaps as part of the graduation ceremony itself. If that's true, then the Doctor's granddaughter Susan didn't have the ability to regenerate, since she was too young to have completed her studies when she left Gallifrey.
A WATCHER'S POINT OF VIEW
When a human being sees a Time Lord regenerate, they usually see the body surge with glowing energies and then alter within moments. But from the point of view of a Time Lord, it's a bit different. In the TV adventure "Logopolis" and the radio play Circular Time, we learn that during a regeneration, the Time Lord sees a featureless figure of white reaching out for them. This figure is essentially a projection of the future self, a self that has not yet been formed. The Time Lord reaches out to this figure and
merges with it and then they experience the transformation into the new being.
In "Logopolis", disruptions in reality caused this featureless figure to appear several hours ahead of schedule, acting as a "Watcher" who patiently waited for the Doctor to regenerate. It evidently was even able to achieve physical interaction with its surroundings, at least for brief moments.
THE DANGERS OF REGENERATION
"Regeneration ... is a swift but volcanic experience. A kind of violent biological eruption in which the body cells are replaced, changed, renewed and rearranged. There are bound to be side-effects."
- Sixth Doctor, "The Twin Dillemma"
"I was dead too long this time. The anesthetic nearly destroyed the regenerative process."
- Eighth Doctor, the TV-movie "The Enemy Within"
Regeneration is not a delicate or fool-proof process. Understandable considering that you're talking about rebuilding an entire body in a matter of seconds. So sometimes the regeneration goes wrong due to outside factors or overall damage.
The Fifth Doctor suffered a harsh death from poison that was affecting his mind (and evidently he also underwent a telepathic attack during the process, as revealed in the audio play Circular Time). So when the Sixth Doctor emerged, this new incarnation was subject to random moments of madness and paranoia for the next day.
The Seventh Doctor was pumped full of anesthetics when he died, causing the regeneration to be postponed until an hour or so after his death. When the Eighth Doctor awoke, he was almost a complete amnesiac for several hours afterward.
At least twice, the Doctor's body was so injured that he needed help in jump-starting his regeneration. When the First Doctor died, he was so weak that he apparently communed with the TARDIS to help him regenerate safely. When the Third Doctor died, he was so poisoned by radiation that he needed a fellow Time Lord to give his cells "a little push." So there are injuries that even regeneration can't fix.
In the novel "World Game", a Time Lord was instantly killed when she was shot through both her hearts. And in the TV adventure "The Deadly Assassin", a Time Lord was killed by a single bolt from a staser gun. From this, we can conclude that regeneration is not an autonomic process and must be consciously activated. If death is instantaneous, that's it.
The Sixth Doctor once fought a Time Lord called the Valeyard who was from a possible future. This villain seemed to be an incarnation of the Doctor's dark and base desires who had somehow split off from our hero during his regeneration into his twelfth form. Evidently, regeneration can actually cause a piece of the Time Lord to split off into a new and separate entity, under the right circumstances.
CHOOSING A BODY AND A SPECIES
When the Time Lady Romana was regenerating, we saw that she was able to shift between a few possible 
bodies during the first several minutes of the process before settling on one that became fixed as her new form (the Discontinuity Guide gives a different theory that Romana is actually displaying "projections" of her potential next self before she actually regenerates, which could explain how each different body changes clothes so quickly).
We also saw that, unlike the Doctor, Romana was actually capable of choosing her new appearance, even to the point that she was able to make herself identical to a woman she'd met days earlier and whom she'd found rather attractive. In "The Mark of the Rani", the renegade Time Lady who calls herself the Rani mentioned that, unlike the Doctor, she was able to choose her appearance during regeneration. It seems then that this ability may be specifically a female trait.
One hypothesis is that a Time Lord can choose their appearance if they simply regenerate without having the action provoked by natural death or a fatal injury. I guess this is possible but I haven't seen anything to really back that up.
From the TV adventure "War Games", we can infer that there is technology on Gallifrey that can control regeneration since the Time Lords actually offered the Doctor a choice of several new bodies and faces before he was to begin his temporary exile on Earth (of course, the Doctor couldn't decide and the Time Lords lost patience, but that's not the point). So, under the right circumstances, males can likewise choose their appearance.
One thing the Doctor mentioned in the TV-movie "The Enemy Within" was that a Time Lord could choose to become a different species (or at least outwardly similar to one) during the regenerative process. Evidence of this was seen years before when one of Romana's try-out bodies was definitely not a human being (though it was still humanoid). In the Fifth Doctor audio play Circular Time, the Doctor encountered a Time Lord who was living on a world of sentient avian life forms and who then, in order to fully integrate into the society, caused himself to regenerate into a Time Lord-avian hybrid.
So females can choose their appearance and males and females can choose certain genetic and physical aspects if they have access to the right science. But could there be something more subliminal to regeneration?
KISTLER'S HYPOTHESIS ON REGENERATION
It seems the Doctor has no control over what he looks like. But looking at the series as a whole, I believe that the Doctor's dying thoughts directly influence how his next incarnation will behave in general.
First, let's look at when the Third Doctor becomes the Fourth. The Third Doctor was forced to stay on Earth in one time zone for such a long time before his exile was removed. And even then, he found himself feeling bound to U.N.I.T. and returning to help them in the present day quite often. As he lay daying, I imagine one of his stray thoughts must have been "I wish I hadn't stayed stranded for so long. I wish I'd traveled more once I realized I could." And suddenly, we have the Fourth Doctor who, among other things, is the spirit of wanderlust.
The Fifth Doctor was a kind and compassionate man, everyone's older brother, and look what happened to him? A friend was killed, another left him very upset and abruptly, telling him very directly that his adventures were not "fun" and only involved death. One of his companions turns out to be a traitor, redeems himself and then later disappoints him, while another companion (albeit an android one) turns out to be a weapon designed to trap him. A former teacher and trusted ally attempted to use him and his friends in a deadly game that nearly killed them all just so he could become immortal. And he was often faced with situations that made him feel helpless and useless, such as when he was unable to save several plague victims or when he couldn't make himself kill one of his worst enemies.
As he lay dying on the TARDIS floor, experiencing a vision of the Master laughing at him (revealed in the audio play Circular Time to be a direct telepathic attack), I can't help but feel that the Fifth Doctor's last thoughts may have been "I should've have been just a little less vulnerable. I should've been stronger, harder."
And bang! We get the bombastic Sixth Doctor, who (at least originally) was very dismissive, caustic and quite up front about the fact that he operated by an alien morality and didn't always understand the overt politeness and compassion of his human friend.
The Seventh Doctor died many years after his last adventure on the TV series. During his TV adventures, we saw that while he was very manipulative and a bit of a jerk, he was also very haunted by the fact that he'd become so cold and harsh. How many times did he apologize to his companion and student Ace about his behavior towards her? This increased in the novels and audio plays until finally those tie-ins showed that he began to calm down and retreat ever so slightly from his role as a master-planner/avenger. Yet, I doubt he still wasn't haunted about the thing he'd done. Manipulating armies into fighting each other. Destroying planets. Using his friends as chess pieces at times.
In the radio play Time Works, the Eighth Doctor spoke of how, towards the end of his seventh life, he'd come to realize that all he ever wanted to be was more human.
Then he finally died, alone, surrounded by strangers. He died partly because he'd been manipulated by the Master, who had always prided himself on being able to use people without being troubled by a conscience. I wonder if the Seventh Doctor didn't think, just before he lost consciousness, "I hope I can be like some of my younger
selves again. I hope I can be more humane. More human."
And whoosh. We get the Eighth Doctor who not only acts very human but whose body actually registers as half-human!
That's my hypothesis. I think you can extend it to the other Doctors too, albeit to lesser degrees. If you disagree with me, no problem. I can still believe it in my head.
In conclusion ...
Regeneration is the most beloved ability and mystery of the Time Lords. Not surprising, since it allows the Doctor Who television program to renew itself every now and again, thus ensuring that our hero, along with his machine that can go anywhere, will always have a few more surprises for us whenever we think we've gotten too comfortable.
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