The Last Great Time War: part I

Author's note

(This part is not essential to the story, but I had to put it somewhere. Go ahead and skip it if you want.)

I am writing this for several reasons. First, I have always been curious about what happened during the time war, and the meaning of the mysterious elements mentioned about it. E.g. the gates of elysium, the cruciform, (not to be confused with the crucible from journey's end), the skaro degredations, the horde of travesties, the nightmare child, the could've been king with his army of meanwhiles and neverweres, as well as the huge battles, superweapons, and its ravaging effects on and across time and space. It must have been an epic conflict indeed.

Sadly, depictions of the war in Moffat's era have fallen short of or contradicted what Russell T Davies established about it and intended it to be. RTD stated that the war was not only fought across history, but inside the time vortex itself, as well as other higher realms. This goes with the Gelth's statement in "The Unquiet Dead" that the war was "invisible to smaller species but devastating to higher forms," and Captain Jack's in "The Parting of the Ways" that "[the Daleks] vanished out of time and space." The author of Engines of War has obviously forgotten this, and depicts the Daleks and Time Lords shooting at each other only in real space, being unable to fight or even track each other inside the time vortex.

Remember that this was the war between the two most powerful civilizations in the universe, both with time travel, the ability to destroy star systems with ease, erase people or planets from history, create time loops, freeze objects in time, harness black holes, build ships that are bigger on the inside, and other equally astounding technological feats. This was the war fought for the sake of all creation, where both sides would have thrown everything at each other and used every trick they had up their sleeves.

Considering this, the war should have looked like the most violent, mind shattering temporal hell you can imagine, and not the Star Wars-esque laser shootouts seen in "The Day of the Doctor," and the somewhat better but still disappointing sequences from "Engines of War."

The excuses I see for this all over the internet all go something like this:

"It was the end of the war, everything had petered out, all of the mind shattering stuff was over because both sides had used up all of their best weapons and were making their last desperate push with what little they had left, they only had lower level tech left by then, the horrors and abominations were all gone by that point... And so on.

Essentially, the excuse everyone makes is that it since it was the end of the war, everything had wound down significantly and wasn't nearly as bad.

Not so. The statements made about the war before TDOTD clearly indicate that the final days of the war were the very worst. The war was not burning itself out, but growing and accelerating towards consuming the entire universe (if not the multiverse) and to the total destruction of everything. Here are a couple quotes from "The End of Time" to show what I mean.

The Master: "But this is fantastic, isn't it? The Time Lords restored!"

The Doctor: "You weren't there, in the final days of the war. You never saw what was born. But if the time lock's broken the everything's coming through. Not just the Daleks, but the Skaro Degredations! the Horde of Travesties! the Nightmare Child! the Could've-been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres; the war turned into hell! And that's what you've opened, right above the Earth! Hell is descending!"

The Master: "My kind of world."

The Doctor: "Listen! Because even the Time Lords can't survive that!"

Time Lord council woman: "This[Gallifrey] is only the furthest edge of the Time War. But at its heart, millions die every second, lost in bloodlust and insanity, with time itself resurrecting them, to find new ways of dying, over and over again, a travesty of life. Wouldn't it be better to end it, at last?"

People also say that the War wasn't like that around Gallifrey because it was only on the edge, and the gigantic timey-wimey battles with the Could've Been King et. al. were happening elsewhere.

That is the view supported by TEOT, but using it to reconcile TEOT with TDOTD raises another huge problem. Namely, making Gallifrey vanish would not stop the war!

Let's use a comparison to demonstrate. Imagine that the USA, Germany, and Japan (minus the other lands they conquered during the war,) suddenly vanished at the height of WWII. Would this bring a sudden and clean stop to the war? Of course not! It might end the main conflict, but not right away. There would still be millions of soldiers fighting all over the rest of the world. When they found out that their homelands were gone, they would not disappear too! Instead of a tidy resolution, there would be chaos and pandemonium rivaling or even exceeding that of the war!

Another decision I really dislike, but am going to partially stick to, is having Arcadia be on Gallifrey. The Fall of Arcadia was one of the most remembered mentions about the Time War other than Gallifrey and the Daleks burning. A lot of fanfics covered it, and most people assumed it was a planet. Making the Fall of Arcadia be on the last day of the war was even worse. The final Dalek assault on Gallifrey and the fiery cataclysm that ended the War are supposed to be the climax of a long era of conflict. With the Fall of Arcadia lumped in with it, that's now all the Time War is to many people. To me at least, viewing the War as just the final battle takes away much of the impact.

The effect of this has been disastrous. Virtually every Time War fanfic written since TDOTD came out and Arcadia was taken away from our imaginations has shown the War not as the epic multidimensional conflict it should be, but a ground battle on Gallifrey!!

This is one of the things that bug me the most. There is enormous creative potential with the vague but encompassing statements made before. E.g. "fought...for the sake of all creation," "the whole universe convulsed," "ten million ships on fire," etc. And there's the the fact that it's called the Last Great Time War, for Heaven's sake! Civilizations as powerful and advanced as the Time Lords and Time War-era Daleks would have moved past WWI and WWII style warfare a long time ago, just as we don't do a lot of fighting with sticks and rocks anymore!

Granted, there was some ground fighting on Gallifrey, but that was only a very small facet of a much larger and more epic conflict, and should not be taken to be the main part of the War.

It isn't a bad thing to show ground fighting on Gallifrey if it's well written and not to the exclusion of all else, but there are far too many stories that focus on it. One of the goals of my story is to reverse this trend.

I don't think that Moffat has completely ruined the Time War, however. I do like "The Night of the Doctor," and the idea of the warrior incarnation of the doctor who was willing to use weapons and set aside his normal standards in order to protect the greater good.("In the name of peace and sanity") The novel "Engines of War" was a great story, but it fails to set him aside as being different from the Doctor. He was portrayed as just another incarnation of the Doctor, not the one who was created by sisterhood of karn specifically to be a warrior, whose very nature was different from that of the Doctor. I think a big part of the problem is that people call him the "War Doctor," since that is still calling him the Doctor.

The depiction of the Time Lords was also disappointing. In the book, they planned to deploy a weapon that would stop a Dalek plot to erase Gallifrey from history, but would destroy 12 or 13 human colony worlds in the process. This is stated to be a big step, and crossing a line they can never come back from. While wiping out a dozen worlds is pretty bad, (although after so many years of Dalek occupation their population would be mostly gone anyway), from what I saw in "The Night of the Doctor" and "The End of Time," it should have been a line they had already crossed long before.

I imagined the Time Lords destroying uninvolved worlds just to try to shift the timelines in their favor, or even imploding entire galaxies with thousands of worlds just to get rid of the Daleks massing there, and I imagined that the "War Doctor" (in my story he will simply be called the Warrior), would have fought against both sides of the war long before the end.

I have yet to see a fanfic that covers the entire war from beginning to end. This is my attempt to do that, and to do the war justice. It will have elements from the 50th, but it will be different, and a story that lives up to RTD's statements.

Ok, rant over.