CT 504 - Alan Stevens
Hi folks!
Through the millennia, the Time Lords of Gallifrey led a life of peace and ordered calm, protected from all threats from lesser civilisations by their great power. But this was to change. Suddenly and terribly, the Time Lords faced the most dangerous crisis in their long history, and subsequently perished at the hands of the Doctor during the Time War, only to be brought back by Clara Oswald, killed once again by the Master and revived as Cybermen.
And so it will no doubt continue: a cycle of death and rebirth for perhaps the most hypocritical alien society ever to have appeared on Doctor Who.
These are the self-styled Lords of Time, who repeatedly break their “most important law of non-interference in the affairs of other planets.” They wear priestly robes, and yet they have unleashed upon time and space a plethora of heartless sociopaths, including the Master, the Rani, the Monk, the War Chief, Morbius, Omega, and Rassilon. They claim to uphold law and order, but their ranks are filled with cowards, cheats, traitors, murderers, and liars, willing to torture, assassinate, and twist the truth, for reasons of duplicitous self-interest. They protest that Article Seven of Gallifreyan law forbids the act of genocide and “permits no exceptions”, whilst themselves wage war, both overt and clandestine, across the cosmos, with carnage and ethnic cleansing their only thought.
But most insidious of all, we now discover that their great power was built on the torture of a tiny, innocent child.
“Decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core”, the Time Lords are the scum of the multiverse.
So please join me for this latest edition of Celestial Toyroom as Paul Driscoll, Fiona Moore, Ken Shinn and Ian Scales discuss the Master, the police and Time Lord justice.
I’d also like to thank Andy Lambert for his marvellously sinister wrap-around cover of the decaying Master as he swings a noose for the Sixth Doctor, and also JL Fletcher and his my nephew Westley Smith, for this issue’s free colour postcard of a cigar chewing, Crime Lord-style, Delgado Master, wielding a pistol with silencer.
Kindest regards,
Alan Stevens (with thanks to Robert Holmes)