People Used to Dream About the Future

"Torchwood? Why that's an anagram of…are you feeling fit Harry?"
"Never felt fitter, Doctor"
"Good. Now, Captain Harkness, you're going to lead us out of this institute of yours. "
"Never."
"You won't get an medal for being stupid, Captain. In fact, you won't be getting any more medals at all."
- recorded on camera #A-063, time index 02/11/06 14:43

If I were you, I wouldn't believe a word of this.

You'll find, you see, that under certain circumstances there was a runaway Time Lord who was snatched out of all his time streams in his fifth incarnation and forced to return home to play a game. A deadly game of course, where the stakes were not quite clear and the villain was not wholly expected. See how, at the end of the game, the most powerful figure in Time Lord history, Rassilon, the father of their great civilisation appeared before this renegade Time Lord. He was good and kind and fair and he did not interfere. He just sent them all home again.

(Other accounts will argue that Rassilon was a monster responsible for genocide on a universal scale, leading to the dominance of the humanoid form in almost all the galaxies of this universe.)

But it is this prodigal son that you and I are concerned with. For after he said farewell to his earlier selves, let us say that he did not run away.

Let us say that he became President.

There is, it is rumoured, a time stream in the Matrix that catalogued this event and showed that a human was sent home before she shattered into pieces and a Trion didn't manage to save his brother before he burned in a volcanic explosion and that the Time Lord as President would have been good and kind and fair and nothing that he ever did would have stopped the last great Time War.

Nature abhors a vacuum and sometime after the death of all the Time Lords and the death of all the Daleks, a great rip would have opened in space-time connecting normal space to E-Space and bringing home a lost Time Lord, and the last of her species.

She would have been brilliant and clever and witty. She would save planets, and civilisations and more than one plane of reality.

And, eventually, she would have given up.

(That didn't happen.)

Under other circumstances, the renegade went free, returning to his wandering ways for centuries and centuries and his race died quietly. So quietly that nobody noticed, not even him. It was only when there were handful left and Time was unravelling into brightly coloured fraying threads and twisting round and round into knots and jumbles that he paused.

Let us say that he used the last of his great power to cast down the well meaning Minister of Chance and his TARDIS.

Let us say that he left his companion to another Time Lord, ancient and dying, as he extinguished himself.

By all accounts the companion fought. Evidence of her exact activities is considerable and varied and contradictory. There is a curious record stating that not only did she take possession of a TARDIS but became a Time Lord in her own right. The last Time Lord, a human born of Earth and carried off into space by a time wind.

Such a thing is, of course, impossible.

And, in any event, eventually she would have died.

(That didn't happen either.)

The Doctor doesn't give up.

The Doctor doesn't die.

And the Doctor can never go home again.

Ah, and here he is now. See that little bob of blue on the time-tracks? How old his ship is, how worn, how tired. It's lucky the seas of time are calm (and why wouldn't they be?) else this poor TARDIS might be shaken into so many of its constituent parts.

Closer - ignore that cracked blue paint, it is a poor metaphor - and we can see inside. We can see him, standing there, still proud, still confident. Note the leather jacket, and do not believe for an instant that leather is any more effective an armour than any metal alloy.

This is the Doctor; this is our hero. When faced with injustice, he will not run, he will fight and at the end he will leave things better than what they were.

But he will leave.

Perhaps he is a coward, of sorts? Certainly there are those who held that opinion. But they are all dead now and quite unable to substantiate that hypothesis.

For the time being, let us not debate the point but consider him a hero in general and the protagonist of our tale in particular.

That girl who has just come in is a human. She is our heroine, though not, it should be emphasised, in the classical sense. Her name is Rose (a highly useful name for making any number of literary allusions and/or extended metaphors) and she has travelled with the Doctor for some time - relatively speaking, of course. Occasionally, she believes that she knows him. Infrequently, she believes herself in love with him.

She is quite wrong on one account.

The part she plays is to provide us with our way into the story. We must identify with her, we must sympathise with her. Shortly, we will discover her planet has been invaded and one would hope that you will empathise with her feelings about this event for it is your planet too.

The final companion in this little group is Jack. Former criminal, former Time Agent and missing two very important years of his life. The latter has no relevance whatsoever here, but one should not forget the important details.

He is sleeping at this very moment, and so our hero and our heroine who are very much not in love can share a moment of subtext without worrying about what it will look like to a third party.

We'll join them later. In an hour or so, after a particularly vicious argument.

Time passes so quickly nowadays, doesn't it? Here, listen, they've started…