In Running through Corridors 2, Rob Shearman observes how all the Time Lord mythology that suddenly rears its head in Part Four comes completely out of leftfield. It’s only the fact that subsequent Gallifrey stories returned to that mythology that, in retrospect, lends it a bit of weight (3). Since the novelisation also predates ‘The Invasion of Time’, that mythology’s still all up for grabs, so what does Dicks decide is worth preserving for posterity?

    Well, not the 13-incarnation limit for a start. It gets hinted at once, the elderly witness at the Doctor’s trial (the one who heard the Doctor say ‘they’ll kill him!’) attributing his poor hearing to ‘the end of [his] twelfth regeneration’ (4), but it’s never specifically stated, unlike on TV, that the twelfth regeneration is the final one (5). Indeed, the fact that the elderly Time Lord is approaching the end of an incarnation is explanation enough for his decrepitude in light of Engin’s earlier reflections on his next regeneration being ‘long overdue’ (6), his ‘present body […] almost worn-out’ (7) and only sufficient because his duties are physically undemanding.

    Instead, the focus is wholly on the ‘regeneration cycle’, and it doesn’t seem as simple as a 13-and-out set-up. Observing the Master’s ‘extremely decayed’ body, Spandrell presumes he must have ‘come to the end of his regeneration cycle prematurely’ (8). This suggests a Time Lord’s lifespan and the number of times they can regenerate aren’t necessarily connected – the Master has used up all his incarnations thanks to his lifestyle (9) and, instead of that simply leading to an early death, that has left him trapped in a decaying body rather than simply dead. What’s more, just as Elgin’s been shown to cling on to bodies past the point when it’s implied others would choose to regenerate, so it seems the demise of the final incarnation is similarly a choice, at least to some extent. The Master is able to keep going in his final body, even as it starts to putrefy, and it is only once he has ‘triggered the end of his regeneration cycle’ that his final death becomes inevitable (10).

    The Master’s plan to extend his life makes the details of regeneration even murkier than that. On TV, all he’s seeking to do is ‘regenerate himself’ (11), to get one further incarnation, and, though it’s not wholly clear, that requires he release the power of the Eye of Harmony and stand in its vicinity wearing the sash of Rassilon; in the novelisation, he’s attempting ‘to renew [his] regeneration cycle’ (12), presumably granting himself a whole new lifespan with however many incarnations that involves, and that, rather more clearly, involves stealing steal the Eye of Harmony (13) and bunging it in his Tardis (14). There’s two possibly interrelated issues here: firstly, it’s explicitly a renewal he’s after rather than the second regeneration mentioned in ‘The Five Doctors’ and seen in ‘The Time of the Doctor’ (15), which suggests a Time Lord’s lifespan is something that recharges rather than extends; secondly, the energy required to recharge one Time Lord is the same as ‘the power of the whole of Gallifrey’, said to be the same as the power that allows them to travel through time (16). Setting aside the remarkable suggestion that each Time Lord is somehow equivalent to their entire home planet, does this mean that the ability to regenerate is somehow connected with time travel?

    Dicks also has some very specific ideas about Gallifreyan society. Holmes, writing the scripts, had, according to Shannon Sullivan, decided to portray the Time Lords as ‘a decaying, corrupt and stagnant civilisation’ (17) and that, according to Holmes himself, led him to take inspiration from ‘scholastic’ institutions (18). Reviewing the novelisation, however, Andrew Feryok finds himself reminded of Hogwarts, the wizards’ school in the Harry Potter series (19), partly because of how the Chapters seem chiefly motivated by rivalry with all the other Chapters (20) and partly because each Chapter seems to have a distinct personality of its own (21).

    Assuming Dicks has deliberately taken Holmes’s university trappings and made them more closely resemble a private secondary school (22), and considering his now long-standing habit of taking Robert Holmes scripts and sharpening their attack on the British ruling classes, this has to be read as a comment on the ‘aristocracy’, especially as he labels the Time Lords as such (23). It has the obvious advantage of painting them specifically as childish and makes sense of the odd detail that all the chancellery guards are selected from the ‘oldest families’ (24) – they’re prefects, and nasty ones at that, the sort who take pleasure in torturing helpless victims (25) but are utterly incapable of doing their jobs, as when the Doctor gives them the runaround in the cloisters.

    More significantly, a private school is a decidedly more exclusive, cossetted and nepotistic environment, pretty much by definition, than a university, fitting more seamlessly the increasingly clear hallmarks of Dicks’s preferred portrayal of ‘decaying, corrupt and stagnant’ civilisations. These are institutions that embrace ‘a complex web of family and political alliances’ (26) and boast of steering their wards towards their ‘unavoidable destiny’ (27), as well as being a better fit for the Doctor’s accusation of ‘the endless accumulation of second-hand knowledge that would never be used’ (28).

    Finally, there’s the matter of the Doctor’s departure from Gallifrey. We’re still in ‘bored’ (29) territory, what with the Doctor’s ‘steadily growing […] frustration’ at the Time Lord way of life, but now a mysterious ‘final crisis’ (30), referred to by Runcible as a ‘scandal’ (31), provoked his ‘borrowing’ a Tardis and legging it. Is this Dicks’s version of the Cartmel masterplan? Something from the Doctor’s past to constantly hint at but never reveal after he, alongside Malcolm Hulke, personally blew away the original version of that in ‘The War Games’? If so, he’d clearly forgotten by the time of ‘State of Decay’ and ‘The Five Doctors’.

    Against this suggestion of a meaningful ‘rebellion’ though is the manner in which, on receiving a premonition of the President’s assassination, he dumps Sarah and returns to Gallifrey because ‘at heart he was still a Time Lord’ (32). However much he may rail against them, as when he suspects their involvement in Doctor Who and the Brain of Morbius, he’s still willing to drop everything not only to help his people in times of crisis but to protect their institutions and ceremonies – identifying as a Time Lord is even more explicitly not the same as identifying as a Gallifreyan in the novelisation. In other words, once a toff, always a toff. That was all very well with Pertwee’s Doctor, and it’s basically the reason given in Doctor Who and the Mutants for his immediately heading off to Solos, but Dicks always gave the impression of liking Tom Baker’s Doctor.

    A solution seems possible by looking at Spandrell. He’s not tarnished with the same callow childishness with which Dicks portrays the Time Lords in general, presenting an ‘unusually broad and muscular’ physique (33), and he’s clearly presented as sympathetic, a man of ‘integrity and […] efficiency’ (34). What makes him different is ‘his blunt no-nonsense manner’ and his engagement with ‘the underside of Time Lord life’, a domestic path equivalent to the Doctor’s universal wanderings. Maybe Dicks’s disdain for the ruling classes isn’t so much to do with their privilege but simply with their tendency towards Skybases and ivory towers? It may not be as radical as the apparent message behind Dicks’s last few novelisations, but it is still a critique and one which builds on Doctor Who and the Carnival of Monsters, that the aristocracy will just go round in circles, smothering all progress, if left to their own devices: the ruling classes are actively engaged in the isolation from wider society that makes them such a pernicious force.