Doctor Who Head-Canon Ideas and Scrapped Masterplans

Are any of you familiar with the Cartmel Masterplan?

Let me fill you in.

Andrew Cartmel felt that the Time Lords and the Doctor not only were no longer mysterious enough, but that they weren’t as distant and powerful as they should feel.  He wanted to give them a far more distant past that would be shadowed, and to partly erase their humanity.  He also hoped to answer some questions and raise some new ones in regards to this one super-question: Doctor who? 

So his plan was that the Gallifreyans were a primitive people until a stranger from beyond arrived, called the Other.  The Other wanted to turn the Gallifreyans into a scientifically advanced people, so he promoted the growth of two brilliant young minds, the minds of Rassilon and Omega, and encouraged them to build a fantastic civilization, with himself as the power behind the power.  Many of the original Gallifreyan priestly class were not too thrilled with this, they no longer had absolute power over the people, so they cursed the majority of Gallifreyans to be sterile for millions of years.  Rassilon and the Other, ever the biology experts, worked their way around this: They created looms to clone the Gallifreyans, and keep their race alive until the curse wore out.  Meanwhile, Omega and the Other, the physicists (the Other was a highly knowledgeable and versatile bloke) used advanced astro-physics to manipulate stars for energy, and to promote basic time travel.  Now, the Gallifreyans were Lords of Time, able to survive beyond their curse and completely independent from their corrupt priestly class.

However, Rassilon grew selfish and greedy, and threw Omega into a black hole to have all the power for himself, and deliberately promoted officiousness and bureaucracy in many of the Gallifreyans, now known as the Time Lords, to further secure his power.  Knowing his days were numbered, the Other threw himself into one of looms, to wait until better days to rebuild himself and emerge again, and thus liberate the Gallifreyans and to seek out a better race to turn into the Time Lords, even at the risk of having his entire body rebuilt with Gallifreyan physiognomy rather than his original physiognomy.  Millennia later, an unusually bright and imaginative boy emerged from one of the looms…one who was utterly obstinate and independent, and fascinated with humans, seeing their potential.  He eventually called himself, the Doctor, and left the planet, under the logic that being free was better than being in charge and became very involved with human development, seeing them as being more worthy of his gifts…

That’s the Cartmel Masterplan.  It answers lots of old questions and raises some new ones, as intended.  One of the new questions is, who is the Other, and where did he come from? In fact, some of the writers on the project provided not one, but TWO different answers to that question.  One of these was provided in the novelization of The Curse of Fenric.

<i style=”color: #000000; font-family: ‘Times New Roman’, sans-serif; font-size: 15.5555562973022px; line-height: normal;”>I know you, O Aboo-Fenrán [Fenric], shouted El-Dok’Tár [Doctor]. You are the Dark One, who is come from the time before Time; as I am Light, so are you Dark; and I shall banish you to the Shadows.”
“At first, Aboo-Fenrán did not reply; but presently he said, So, El-Dok’Tár; as you are Light, so am I Dark. I think that I know your true identity. I think, that you also come from the time before Time. How do you propose to defeat me, then?”

Fenric, or Fenrir, was the embodiment of Evil in our current Universe, and may have once been a Great Old One named Hastur the Unspeakable in his original Universe.  This would all imply that the Other was at most, some conceptual entity that was an element or piece of the original unity of good and evil, that was almost certainly more composed of good than evil, that survived the original shattering and has existed down through the various universes, serving as a balancing governor for the health of the cosmos, or at least he was some Great Old One, a higher dimensional being that was basically a God to lower dimensional types.

Another theory for the Other’s nature was provided in the novelization of Human Nature.  This was that the Other was a brilliant human scientist on Earth who built a prototype TARDIS and used it to travel in time and space to prehistoric Gallifrey, and feeling lonely and ready to be a parent and teacher to them all, he stayed there and taught them everything he knew.

I like the Cartmel Masterplan because it’s very Once in tone, and while it doesn’t make things as mysterious as hoped, it does answer a lot of old questions and raises some new ones, and doesn’t even have any one solid origin story for the being known as the Other, but rather offers two awesome ones.

There’s another masterplan that’s arguably more famous, but in spite of this, it doesn’t have an official name.  I’m giving it one: The Segal Masterplan.  Philippe J. Segal wanted to reboot Doctor Who for modern audiences, and created a totally new canon for background:

The plan was that the Doctor was half-human, on his mother’s side.  His father was of the noble line, descended from Rassilon, and he was both the great Explorer of Gallifrey and one of their brilliant Chronological engineers.  When he was testing a proto-type TARDIS, he got lost in space and time, until he crashed to Earth, probably in England or America.  He adapted to live among the natives, taking on the pseudonym “Ulysses” after the great explorer of Earth myths, and married a human of Earth named Penelope Gate, one of the humans privy to his actual origins.  They had a boy, whom they gave a proper Gallifreyan name, and when Penelope died, Ulysses sent his extremely son back to Gallifrey, under the care of his father, the future Doctor’s grandfather, Borusa, to learn from the Time Lords.

Hardly a toddler when it happened, and heavily protected by his grandfather from much of Time Lord society because of the racist tendencies of the Time Lords to children of mixed race, the Doctor learned none of this until he was much older.  He also learned something else:  His father returned to Gallifrey as a decorated hero, and never saw his son in the meantime to protect him.  He moved on with life, got married into nobility, and had a new child before he began exporling again: This son would grow up to be the Master.  There was a prophecy that a man descended from Rassilon would emerge upon Gallifrey, and lead the people out of Darkness.  The Master was certain he was the one, and promptly tried to take over Gallifrey and attempt murder on the Doctor to prevent opposition, whose secret he knew.   Though the Master quickly failed on both counts, the Doctor fled the planet because it wouldn’t be safe for long, and to search for his father and clarify things, but the Master found ways to manipulate events from a distance, to constantly trouble the Doctor while he was searching and fleeing.

I like this as well, it’s also very Once.

Now, to combine the two and make it even more Once….

There was a race of beings existing independently of the Realms, able to travel between the Realms freely, known only as the Great Old Ones.  Most of them were indifferent or hostile to lesser beings, but there was one who was neither.  He traveled to Earth, and posed as a human of that world, and took on the pseudonym, “Ulysses Smith”, after the explorer of myth and to suit his occupation as an engineer of that world.  He married another brilliant engineer, Penelope Gate, and they had three children.  When Penelope died, Ulysses couldn’t bear to stay on Earth any longer, and traveled to another planet.

One of his sons used his mother’s and father’s notes to build an advanced dimensionally transcendent device that could travel anywhere in Time and Space, a proto-type TARDIS, and used it to track down his father.  Eventually, he crashed on the primitive planet of Gallifrey, hoping to find his father there, but he just barely missed him.  However, he found a special boy whom he recognized as a son of his father, and therefore his half-brother and half-Great Old One like himself.  Seeing his potential and determined to protect him from being shunned by the racist and superstitious people of Gallifrey, the son of Earth, called by the Gallifreyans, “the Other”, sought to turn the Gallifreyans into an enlightened and sophisticated people, while repairing his traveling device and bringing up his younger half-brother, whom would later be called the Master.  This wasn’t easy, the Master was mentally troubled, later revealed to be part of the machinations of Rassilon from the future, but the two became close, and when the Other finished repairing his machine, he flew took the Master with him as a traveling companion, but always he returned to Gallifrey at the Master’s behest, for Gallifrey was his home planet.  The Other felt he had not choice but to educate the Gallifreyans, in order to keep up being around his half-brother, so that they wouldn’t kill them both.

To achieve civilizing the Gallifreyans, the Other taught the Gallifreyans many things he knew, and in particular fostered the intelligence of two independently thinking locals, named Rassilon and Omega, and pushed them into making greater and greater achievements.  The priestly class that ruled over Gallifrey was officious, prone to debauchery, and absolutely corrupt, and when their position was challenged, they promptly cursed the people of Gallifrey to never again reproduce.  That nearly was the end of his plans, but the Other and Rassilon developed cloning chambers called looms to keep the Gallifreyans alive.  That ultimately secured their power.   Then taking advantage of this power, Omega and the Other developed forms of stellar manipulation to properly fuel the equipment the Gallifreyans needed to use Time Travel.  Now, they were Lords of Time.  Meanwhile, the Other and the Master grew closer, and became good friends and truly brothers, whereas the other two members of the team, Rassilon and Omega, grew apart because of Rassilon’s selfishness, greed, and jealousy, which ultimately culminated in Omega being cast down a Black Hole and cursed as “an enemy of the state”.  The Other never figured out what happened, but he comforted Omega’s wife, Patience, and the two fell in love.  Patience soon got re-married, this time to the Other, with the Master as the Other’s best man.  The Other  and Patience soon had children and grandchildren, one of whom would go under the pseudonym “Susan Foreman”.  The Master was the fun uncle, and he nearly forgot the drums that tormented him as a child.

But Rassilon? He only got worse and worse, fostering bureaucracy and officiousness in the minds of the Gallifreyans, making it easier for him to control the planet without opposition…well, almost without opposition.  He needed to keep the Other and the Master from getting in the way, so he had to affect their families.  He turned the Other’s own firstborn son against him, kicked Patience out of their home world, and executed most of the Other’s remaining family.  The Other threw himself into the looms, promising to return on better days, and then flee the planet, even at the risk of having Gallifreyan physiognomy, and the Master, the drums now louder than ever before, fled the planet, planning on taking it back when the time comes, because unlike the Doctor, he was born on Gallifrey, half-Gallifreyan in blood, and saw it as home.  That is why the Master constantly fights the Doctor.  He’s hoping that by breaking his spirit, he will bring the suppressed Other out of the Doctor, and with him, will take over Gallifrey, and overthrow the system developed by Rassilon.   The Master has gone through more lives than the Doctor because he didn’t get a chance to re-loom himself, and has to artificially extend his life.  As for the Doctor? The  first thing he did when the TARDIS stole a Time Lord was go back to ancient Gallifrey, and rescue Susan, who knew him better than he knew himself.  He never wanted to rule anything ever again and deliberately avoided being in charge of anything in the Classic Series because his experiences with rule proved to him that being free is better than being in charge.   He did however sometimes influence the development of other species, namely humans, because subconsciously, he was aware of his human ancestry and because he saw humans as being more worthy of what he had to offer than the Gallifreyans.  The way to resolve this would be let the Master overthrow Gallifrey and reform it WITHOUT breaking the Doctor, and let the Doctor continue to remain free and let him continue helping humans develop, and become greater than the Time Lords.

And that’s my headcanon, and how I might approach it all if I somehow combined Doctor Who with Once.  What do you think?