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capri0mniStill brushing off my inner Sadfan, in preparation for Gallifrey One convention next month...
About a week or so ago in the IRC room #drwhochat, we got on to the topic of the Doctor's origins, and whether we preferred the Loom idea or that he was half human, on his mother's side. Both theories leave me about as cold as a Christmas Squid that's been dead a week.
I'll start with the half-human idea, since that was the first I encountered, while watching the TVM. Frankly, the thought turned my stomach, and not because I'm turned off by the idea of Timelords being sexual (sex is, if you ask me, one of the most elegant developments in the entire universe, and may be what triggered the very idea of elegance and beauty). Being a human woman of child-bearing years, I cannot help but identify with that unnamed human mother. And the idea of carrying an alien baby in my womb full term fills me with horror -- no matter how loving and intelligent and handsome the father.
And then, there's the whole question of an unequal power relationship between a Timelord pilot and a human crewmember/companion. Even if the relationship is a trusting and respectful one, the very fact that the Timelord has a special telepathic with his Ship that a human does not have (a detail woven into Doctor Who continuity as early as the second serial) really means that any woman traveling with him puts her life in his hands. In such a situation, a truly free, consensual sexual relationship is almost impossible. Not to mention the power that comes from the differences in age and experience between them. We know, at a gut level, that sex between a twenty-year old college student and a forty-year old professor is inheriently wrong. But the writers expected us to find a rerlationship between an human in her 30's (say) and an alien who is in his 1,000's romantic? ... um ... no. Doesn't work for me.
BTW, I've talked about some of these ideas before ... doing a search of Google Groups, I think it started here, in: Doctor Too Human, Evil of Daleks scene, back on July 11, 2000 (this thread eventually branched off into another, where fellow sadfan Nyctolops and I develop a theory that keeps the Doctor wholly alien, and still allows the "half human" statement to be true).
The Looms idea isn't much better, though if I had to choose only between those two, it would be the one I'd pick.
Because of entropy, nothing produced by machine can be as complex as the machine itself. A bolt of cloth is less complex than the loom it was woven on. A newspaper is less complex than a printing press. an automobile is less complex than the robots on the assembly line. A Life-Loom must therefore be more complex than the life it produces, and even for the technologically advanced Gallifreyans, I don't see them capable of such a thing -- certainly not as early in their history as the reign of Rassilon.
And the idea that these Looms supposedly produce adults, bypassing childhood altogether, is even more unbelievable. Intelligence, particularly the flexible and quick intelligence that the Doctor displays, cannot be programmed -- it has to be learned, through trial and error, over time. Even folks who work in the fields of AI -- who are trying to program intelligence into computers -- are learning that they need to let their robots pick things up, bump into walls, make mistakes: to learn through experience, rather than input. In other words, intelligence must come from childhood. There's a reason the species with the most learning to do have babies that are born helpless that stay helpless for a long time -- otherwise, we'd have offspring who know nothing of the world outside the womb, but that are as strong and big as a 30-year old, wandering off the edges of cliffs, and trying to pick up pretty candle flames. It just wouldn't work -- not for very long, anyway..
Thankfully, Die Gedanken sind frei, and I don't have to accept either theory! :-P
I start with the assumption that the Gallifreyan civilization and spacetime travel technology evolved much as our own civilization and technology have -- slowly, over the span of many generations, with many false starts and outright failures.
Considering that, on the quantum level, atoms seem to be as equally influenced from the future as from the past, I imagine that the first trans-spacetime technology used was in the transfer of information, and politicians and historians might have "visited" past and future times by listening in on that information, like so many HAM radio operators.
Time travel in the flesh probably started for purely utilitarian purporses, to compensate for the time it takes to travel very long distances through space. Traveling from one galaxy to another by conventional means could take (say) four hundred years, if going at the speed of light, but if you could incorporate time travel technology into the middle passage, you could shorten the time aboard ship to one year (in effect, going back in time 399 years, even though you still arrived after you left, from your own perspective). This kind of technology was likely to be used by the Gallifreyan equivaliant of the merchant marine -- engaging in inter-galactic trade and colonization -- with large ships and large-ish crews, rather than the solitary explorer/observers of the Doctor's time.
Now, here's where it gets into the oh-what-a-tangled-web-we-weave territory: Although the members of the crew would not be conscious of creating any paradoxes by their travels back and forth in time, those paradoxes would still be occurring. What can not be felt on the level of the individual would still have an effect on the cellular and molecular level. And just as, if you're not careful, these paradoxes could cause you to kill your own grandfather, or give birth to your own brother, these paradoxes could cause cells in your own body to kill each other off, or become dopplegangers.
And this would be particularly true in the early stages of pregnancy, when stem cells are just starting to form and multiply. Imagine several Gallifreyan woman, all in the early stages of pregnancy. In those embryos where the stem cells are 'killing off their grandfathers', the pregnancy would not take place, of course. In the embryos where the time paradoxes are creating dopplegangers, however, several different effects could happen. You could have babies born with organs where they shouldn't be, or duplicate limbs (or organs, such as hearts). Many of these paradoxes would be fatal, and the babies would be stillborn. Other paradoxes would be survivable -- even beneficial. And babies with these paradoxes in their genes would pass them on to future generations. This theory is one explanation for the great differences that exist between the Timelords and ordinary Gallifreyans. The former time time travel, the latter do not. More important, the former can regenerate, and the latter can not -- because Timelords and Timeladies are direct descendants of those earliest time travellers, and the "ordinary" Gallifreyans are descendants of those who stayed home.
And here, the idea of doppleganger paradoxes within the cells of a devolping embryo can go far toward explaining what regeneration is, and how it works. Imagine an embryonic cell just at the point of dividing -- right at the point that the double helix of DNA is replicating, and a time jump occurs, causing a second strand of DNA to come into existance, ever so slightly different from the first, and entwined or nestled around it. Imagine this process continuing and/or evolving from generation to generation, until a maximum stable number is reached (13, say ;-)). At any given time one set of DNA is dominant over the others, and dictates a Timelord's physical, and, to a certain extent, psychological, attributes. When Timelord has a life-threatening trauma, the dominate DNA disintergrates, and gives way to the next set in line -- voilà -- Regeneration! Romana II aside, I do not believe that Timelords can choose their appearance, or change radically from one regeneration to the next (such as changing gender or species) at least, not deliberately. The process of regeneration is one of such deep flux, however, that change may be injected from outside (as when the High Council forces the Doctor's second regeneration). If a human geneticist were to take a dna sample from the Doctor in each of his regeneration, after noting the completely alien nature of it, said geneticist would probably conclude that the Doctors were brothers -- or perhaps close cousins.
So -- that's my theory, and I'm sticking with it! :-P
About a week or so ago in the IRC room #drwhochat, we got on to the topic of the Doctor's origins, and whether we preferred the Loom idea or that he was half human, on his mother's side. Both theories leave me about as cold as a Christmas Squid that's been dead a week.
I'll start with the half-human idea, since that was the first I encountered, while watching the TVM. Frankly, the thought turned my stomach, and not because I'm turned off by the idea of Timelords being sexual (sex is, if you ask me, one of the most elegant developments in the entire universe, and may be what triggered the very idea of elegance and beauty). Being a human woman of child-bearing years, I cannot help but identify with that unnamed human mother. And the idea of carrying an alien baby in my womb full term fills me with horror -- no matter how loving and intelligent and handsome the father.
And then, there's the whole question of an unequal power relationship between a Timelord pilot and a human crewmember/companion. Even if the relationship is a trusting and respectful one, the very fact that the Timelord has a special telepathic with his Ship that a human does not have (a detail woven into Doctor Who continuity as early as the second serial) really means that any woman traveling with him puts her life in his hands. In such a situation, a truly free, consensual sexual relationship is almost impossible. Not to mention the power that comes from the differences in age and experience between them. We know, at a gut level, that sex between a twenty-year old college student and a forty-year old professor is inheriently wrong. But the writers expected us to find a rerlationship between an human in her 30's (say) and an alien who is in his 1,000's romantic? ... um ... no. Doesn't work for me.
BTW, I've talked about some of these ideas before ... doing a search of Google Groups, I think it started here, in: Doctor Too Human, Evil of Daleks scene, back on July 11, 2000 (this thread eventually branched off into another, where fellow sadfan Nyctolops and I develop a theory that keeps the Doctor wholly alien, and still allows the "half human" statement to be true).
The Looms idea isn't much better, though if I had to choose only between those two, it would be the one I'd pick.
Because of entropy, nothing produced by machine can be as complex as the machine itself. A bolt of cloth is less complex than the loom it was woven on. A newspaper is less complex than a printing press. an automobile is less complex than the robots on the assembly line. A Life-Loom must therefore be more complex than the life it produces, and even for the technologically advanced Gallifreyans, I don't see them capable of such a thing -- certainly not as early in their history as the reign of Rassilon.
And the idea that these Looms supposedly produce adults, bypassing childhood altogether, is even more unbelievable. Intelligence, particularly the flexible and quick intelligence that the Doctor displays, cannot be programmed -- it has to be learned, through trial and error, over time. Even folks who work in the fields of AI -- who are trying to program intelligence into computers -- are learning that they need to let their robots pick things up, bump into walls, make mistakes: to learn through experience, rather than input. In other words, intelligence must come from childhood. There's a reason the species with the most learning to do have babies that are born helpless that stay helpless for a long time -- otherwise, we'd have offspring who know nothing of the world outside the womb, but that are as strong and big as a 30-year old, wandering off the edges of cliffs, and trying to pick up pretty candle flames. It just wouldn't work -- not for very long, anyway..
Thankfully, Die Gedanken sind frei, and I don't have to accept either theory! :-P
I start with the assumption that the Gallifreyan civilization and spacetime travel technology evolved much as our own civilization and technology have -- slowly, over the span of many generations, with many false starts and outright failures.
Considering that, on the quantum level, atoms seem to be as equally influenced from the future as from the past, I imagine that the first trans-spacetime technology used was in the transfer of information, and politicians and historians might have "visited" past and future times by listening in on that information, like so many HAM radio operators.
Time travel in the flesh probably started for purely utilitarian purporses, to compensate for the time it takes to travel very long distances through space. Traveling from one galaxy to another by conventional means could take (say) four hundred years, if going at the speed of light, but if you could incorporate time travel technology into the middle passage, you could shorten the time aboard ship to one year (in effect, going back in time 399 years, even though you still arrived after you left, from your own perspective). This kind of technology was likely to be used by the Gallifreyan equivaliant of the merchant marine -- engaging in inter-galactic trade and colonization -- with large ships and large-ish crews, rather than the solitary explorer/observers of the Doctor's time.
Now, here's where it gets into the oh-what-a-tangled-web-we-weave territory: Although the members of the crew would not be conscious of creating any paradoxes by their travels back and forth in time, those paradoxes would still be occurring. What can not be felt on the level of the individual would still have an effect on the cellular and molecular level. And just as, if you're not careful, these paradoxes could cause you to kill your own grandfather, or give birth to your own brother, these paradoxes could cause cells in your own body to kill each other off, or become dopplegangers.
And this would be particularly true in the early stages of pregnancy, when stem cells are just starting to form and multiply. Imagine several Gallifreyan woman, all in the early stages of pregnancy. In those embryos where the stem cells are 'killing off their grandfathers', the pregnancy would not take place, of course. In the embryos where the time paradoxes are creating dopplegangers, however, several different effects could happen. You could have babies born with organs where they shouldn't be, or duplicate limbs (or organs, such as hearts). Many of these paradoxes would be fatal, and the babies would be stillborn. Other paradoxes would be survivable -- even beneficial. And babies with these paradoxes in their genes would pass them on to future generations. This theory is one explanation for the great differences that exist between the Timelords and ordinary Gallifreyans. The former time time travel, the latter do not. More important, the former can regenerate, and the latter can not -- because Timelords and Timeladies are direct descendants of those earliest time travellers, and the "ordinary" Gallifreyans are descendants of those who stayed home.
And here, the idea of doppleganger paradoxes within the cells of a devolping embryo can go far toward explaining what regeneration is, and how it works. Imagine an embryonic cell just at the point of dividing -- right at the point that the double helix of DNA is replicating, and a time jump occurs, causing a second strand of DNA to come into existance, ever so slightly different from the first, and entwined or nestled around it. Imagine this process continuing and/or evolving from generation to generation, until a maximum stable number is reached (13, say ;-)). At any given time one set of DNA is dominant over the others, and dictates a Timelord's physical, and, to a certain extent, psychological, attributes. When Timelord has a life-threatening trauma, the dominate DNA disintergrates, and gives way to the next set in line -- voilà -- Regeneration! Romana II aside, I do not believe that Timelords can choose their appearance, or change radically from one regeneration to the next (such as changing gender or species) at least, not deliberately. The process of regeneration is one of such deep flux, however, that change may be injected from outside (as when the High Council forces the Doctor's second regeneration). If a human geneticist were to take a dna sample from the Doctor in each of his regeneration, after noting the completely alien nature of it, said geneticist would probably conclude that the Doctors were brothers -- or perhaps close cousins.
So -- that's my theory, and I'm sticking with it! :-P
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Date: 2004-01-12 07:55 am (UTC)I think that's where opinions of ours might diverge. I'm a true believer in love, and if you love someone, you're not thinking about how different you are. You're only thinking about how much you care about them, and that was a product of that love.
Of course, there's my own theory that humans are in fact the race that will eventually *become* Time Lords, in some distant, distant future, so I don't think it's that far-fetched.
There's also a possibility that his mother didn't know his father was a Time Lord. Who knows.
That whole 'alien baby' thing, though - I mean, let's take Amanda from the Star Trek series, with Spock. I doubt she felt squicked by it, or she wouldn't have done it. She did it for the love of Sarek.
Hmm
Date: 2004-01-12 09:24 am (UTC)Ooh. That would tie in rather nicely with my theory of how Time Lords became Time Lords -- the side-effects of time travel created them.
There's also a possibility that his mother didn't know his father was a Time Lord.
Yeah, I think I mention that possibility in that RADW thread of 2000. But if the mother didn't really know who the father was, than the chances are the Doctor would have grown up on Earth, instead of Gallifrey ... Unless his father came to fetch him, after he was born. Which opens another whole can of emotional worms.
That whole 'alien baby' thing, though - I mean, let's take Amanda from the Star Trek series, with Spock. I doubt she felt squicked by it, or she wouldn't have done it. She did it for the love of Sarek.
I don't like the idea much better in Star Trek than I do in Doctor Who, frankly, though I understand that it was written into the series to illustrate the philosophical conflict between logic and emotion, so I can put up with it on those grounds (though I've always found Spock one of the most annoying characters).
Oh, well, they're all just stories, after all, and we can tell them and retell them any way we please. That's part of what makes it fun.
Re: Hmm
Date: 2004-01-12 09:43 am (UTC)I'm good for something then ;)
But if the mother didn't really know who the father was, than the chances are the Doctor would have grown up on Earth, instead of Gallifrey ... Unless his father came to fetch him, after he was born. Which opens another whole can of emotional worms.
Or she died in childbirth. Who knows what era she could have been from?
I don't like the idea much better in Star Trek than I do in Doctor Who, frankly, though I understand that it was written into the series to illustrate the philosophical conflict between logic and emotion, so I can put up with it on those grounds (though I've always found Spock one of the most annoying characters).
Odd, since he's one of the most popular - and I believe he is because not only was he of both worlds, he was trying to come to terms with each side; and as a character his was the one that got the most development and growth as a result. Searching for your roots is something a lot of people can identify with. Not feeling like you belong is a common feeling among a lot of individuals.
The Doctor, equally, doesn't seem to belong among his peers; I think that's one of the main reasons fans love him so much.
Re: Hmm
Date: 2004-01-12 10:22 am (UTC)Oh, you're good all the way around!
I believe he is because not only was he of both worlds, he was trying to come to terms with each side; and as a character his was the one that got the most development and growth as a result. Searching for your roots is something a lot of people can identify with. Not feeling like you belong is a common feeling among a lot of individuals.
*Nod* I guess what annoys me about Spock most is the "Black or White" nature of his attitude -- that, and the idea that such internal conflict must come from being a "mixed breed."
According to a history of the early origins of Doctor Who, which
I find these philosophical conflicts much more interesting than ones that are explained with simplified genetics...
Re: Hmm
Date: 2004-01-12 10:57 am (UTC)Of course, one has to take into account that Vulcan philosophy is very black and white - logical and illogical - that is the nature of his upbringing. I think part of what was so interesting about him was that he was seeking a way to think outside that upbringing, to understand what the grey areas were in his life; to understand human philosophy. It's always interesting to see human beliefs from an outside perspective. By the time Star Trek VI rolls around, the difference in his outlook is noticeable, but at the same time, he hasn't lost his essential self - he's reconciled the two.
You also have to take into account the time the program was conceived - it was way ahead of its time when dealing with such issues.
Data, from TNG, is also another example.