Easy Peasy New Life Cycle

[magnusgreel]

This is the kind of idea that can turn from wonderful to the kind of idea you hate the most, halfway through explaining it. Here goes. I don't know of this is the appropriate part of DBA for this.

Anyway, I had a thought on the Dr reaching the end of life 13... say there's a lot of drawn-out doom hanging over things for many stories, the end is inevitable, agonizing efforts to circumvent it all fail... they've won over even a DW audience to the fact that there's no way out.

At some point Gallifrey is reconstituted, not in a cheap magical way, but credibly (ha!), perhaps long before these last few stories, but maybe as a result of all these tumultuous events and struggles the Dr has toward the end. At the very end, he's on Gallifrey, and in a casual depressive conversation with some minor functionary as he's waiting for this or that official whatever that you have to do before you die, the functionary says, oh, you want a new life cycle? Well you'd certainly qualify... looks up rules.... yes, he does.... he gives the Doctor some sort of abstract slightly surreal item such as a pass or key, a child's toy or something that looks like one (insert much better surreal item here)... says go down the hall, to such-and-such an office. He's given a new life cycle of 13 lives on the spot by the bureaucrat behind the desk, and Thirteen (now Fourteen) doesn't even begin to understand till he's told it's already over.

He asks guy behind desk why no one ever talks about it being this easy to get a new life cycle, who answers "Well, then everyone would want one. Now please leave, I'm really rather busy."

The End.

Rermember, the Time Lords were ready to offer the Master a whole new life cycle in Five Doctors, and who knows, they can't be lying all the time....

[merrythemad]

I reckon they will most likely do something very similiar. I'd write it before they do, lol.

[magnusgreel]

This must have been my unconscious reaction to all the bureaucracy lately.

[jjpor]

I'm guessing that if/when they do come up with a solution to the thirteen lives thing (assuming NuWho is still going after RTD's best efforts to torpedo Moffat/Eleven before they even begin!), it won't be anywhere near as elegant or as amusing as that. It'll be some handwavy thing involving some magical artifact or piece of technology we've never heard of before, with optional reversing of the polarity of the whatever.

Thinking about it from an in-story sort of viewpoint, I don't think it's ever been said that it's particularly difficult for a Time Lord to have more than thirteen lives; as you say, they offer them to the Master, and if the Valeyard is to be believed, they're even tranferable from one Time Lord to another... I seem to have picked up the idea from somewhere or other that it was a deliberate, self-imposed limitation, because Rassilon or whoever had the idea that true immortality was a bad thing (and, if it's the type of immortality on offer in the Five Doctors, you can't really argue with that! ;D)

Thinking on it, it probably involves Looms somehow...hmm, yes; Looms...

[Abbyromana]

Jul 12, 2009 22:00:56 GMT jjpor said:

I'm guessing that if/when they do come up with a solution to the thirteen lives thing (assuming NuWho is still going after RTD's best efforts to torpedo Moffat/Eleven before they even begin!), it won't be anywhere near as elegant or as amusing as that. It'll be some handwavy thing involving some magical artifact or piece of technology we've never heard of before, with optional reversing of the polarity of the whatever.

Thinking about it from an in-story sort of viewpoint, I don't think it's ever been said that it's particularly difficult for a Time Lord to have more than thirteen lives; as you say, they offer them to the Master, and if the Valeyard is to be believed, they're even tranferable from one Time Lord to another... I seem to have picked up the idea from somewhere or other that it was a deliberate, self-imposed limitation, because Rassilon or whoever had the idea that true immortality was a bad thing (and, if it's the type of immortality on offer in the Five Doctors, you can't really argue with that! ;D)

Thinking on it, it probably involves Looms somehow...hmm, yes; Looms...

LOL

Oh, JJ, you and your obsession with the looms.


As I suggested in another post sometime ago, there's nothing to suggest the BBC will keep the Doctor going either. I mean with the runoffs being created, they may very well just let him run out.

I still don't know how I feel about. I sort of want him to continue forever, but as someone else suggested in the other post, he could eventually out live his appeal.

[jjpor]

Funny you should say that, Abby:

community.livejournal.com/doctorwho/5293139.html

As loath as I am to agree with RTD on anything, I think he's probably right on this point.

As for NuWho, of course it won't last forever, any more than real classic Doctor Who did. I just would have to shake my head at the arrogance it would take for any one producer/head writer to end something that has gone on reinventing itself for 45+ years and been the work of so many different creative minds.

When the end does come, as it must, I'd prefer it to be like the ending of Survival; open-ended, with the Doctor walking off into the sunset to new adventures, leaving it ready for somebody else to pick it up sixteen years later and start it again (and the amazing thing about the end of Survival is just what a fitting ending for the classic show it actually is, considering that nobody knew for sure at the time that it wasn't coming back - although they probably had their suspicions). That's what I'd like to see, anyway.