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the-worms-in-your-bones · 5 months ago

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The last of the Gallifrey short trips notes: Erasure

There are earthquakes on gallifrey (i mean idk why there wouldn’t be, planets are going to planet after all, but still feels like something to note)

Heartshaven has a wine cellar → there’s gallifreyan wine, wonder if it’s any different to human wine since human alcohol doesn’t really affect time lords, or is it just for the taste

Also why were they at heartshaven

The house is not well reinforced → commonality among houses, or just heartshaven

Narvin: says something heartfelt, narvin immediately after: i never said that

‘The rise of the killer cats of ginseng … the cia didn’t handle that one at all well, but luckily we made sure no record exists today’ → ??? please tell me more about this

‘A rare moment of a time lord cover up that actually benefited all gallifrey’ → i do wonder what the extent of what they had to cover up was, like did this involve just deleting some records, or deleting some memories (or maybe even people, let's be real here, though i guess they wouldn’t exactly remember if that happened since they would have never existed) and how did it benefit gallifrey, save them from embarrassment? Prevent it from destabilizing their society and/or government? What are we talking here

Loyalty meant everything → the blind trust of gallifrey and its institutions (this is somewhat just part of how narvin is, but also we see this with some other time lords in the invasion of time, so i wonder how common of a trait the whole blind loyalty thing is among time lords)

‘I don’t know how many years it goes back, i was younger then’ → i’m begging the writers to stop being allergic to telling me narvin’s age, please anything but he’s at least two hundred (my personal headcanon is anywhere from 600-900 by the start of the series, which isn’t exactly a small range, but it’s fine, i can deal with that) (← lies)

‘The high council had been monitoring a world’ → i wonder how much the monitoring of potential threats (and/or whatever is of interest) falls to the high council and what falls to the cia, when does it become enough of a thing for the high council to get involved vs when is it just something for the cia to deal with

There’s an apc net prediction, so maybe that’s when the high council gets involved, otherwise it’s just the cia monitoring things for themselves

‘Universes, all of them’ → the time lords have some amount of power and control over other universes, or at least have access to them, this would make sense as we see the everything with the axis

‘One of my seniors’ → narvin isn’t yet at the point of being only a step or two below vansell yet, but as is mentioned later, he’s above the status of junior agent (trying to figure out how the various agencies and organizations on gallifrey work one step at a time, this would be a lot easier if the writers weren’t constantly disagreeing on things, but alas, what else is to be expected)

‘Matrix keepers rarely got involved with the day to day running of the capitol, preferring to spend their days observing and seeking the ability to read truthful timelines from the cloister wraiths. For the head of their little clique to emerge from the catacombs was a sign, and not a good one’ → so yes the matrix houses all of time lord knowledge and can to an extent predict the future, but it seems that these things are very jumbled, the matrix keepers keep to themselves, presumably spending that time trying to interpret the matrix, because it seems that unless you have control over the matrix (like say the president would) it’s hard to navigate or get accurate information from (which would make sense given what we see of it in the show, it’s just a jumble of random things, bits of memories smashed together), also the ‘truthful timelines’ bit, does the matrix predict events along multiple timelines, can they see all the possible futures? I wonder what learning to differentiate between a possible future and a probable one is like, like what makes a future more likely to happen then another and how does one learn to discern that (also kind of love the whole ‘well if they thought it was important enough to actually tell us about we’re a bit fucked aren’t we’ like sure they might just use technology to communicate their findings/predictions, but it is a little funny to me to imagine that they stay down there until they encounter something possibly apocalyptic)

‘This was the sort of job for which you’d normally summon a junior grade time lord’ → i need to make a chart of time lord ranks or something (also the ‘give them a time ring’ part, junior time lords don’t have tardises? (i actually think i’d heard that somewhere before, but idk where it was) if this is the case, i think it makes it a bit funnier that vansell gives narvin the time ring here)

‘Be back in a nanosecond’ → again, don’t actually know where it comes from (if it comes from anywhere at all and isn’t just popular headcanon) but isn’t there something about time lords sticking to the passage of time on gallifrey even if they don’t other places, so like if gallifrey experiences a week of time they also do, unsurprising that the cia would be breaking this rule if it exists (also just like stick to the fucking bit and call things spans)

‘Gallifrey disappearing, indeed the entire rassilonian time era being lost’ → interesting the implication that if the rassilonian time era didn’t happen that gallifrey would just be gone (at least that’s what i’m taking this as, it could very well be that that era didn’t happen because gallifrey disappeared) (also when is the rassilonian era (the past???) i should maybe figure out the gallifreyan timeline, or like at least some of it)

‘It is narvin’s destiny’ → guy just wants to do his job, keeps getting sucked into prophecies and shit, this is so funny to me

‘Vansell was strange at the best of times’ → not really lore relevant at all, but i do love that they take pretty much any opportunity to insult vansell, designated guy that no one likes

‘He produced a time ring and slid it on my wrist’ → time rings bracelet sized then (or can they come in different sizes)

‘Very rudimentary time travel’ → like sure there are levels to all types of technology, but i’d love to learn about the differences between advanced vs rudimentary time travel, would i understand any of it, no i’m not a physics guy, but i still think it’d be interesting

And there it is, the whole ‘no one else can have this power but us’ thing, like oh these other people are using time traveling abilities to change history, they’re erasing people from existence, possibly even planets, can’t have them doing that, only we’re allowed to do that

‘Any measures’

Yeah if we can’t stop them from using time travel to erase people from existence we’re going to show up and use time travel to erase them from existence → it’s moments like these where i wonder if they even hear what they’re saying, or if they’ve just accepted that this is perfectly okay for them to do because they figured it out before everyone else and know how to use time travel responsibly (probably a mix of both honestly)

‘Time tots, no children, just children’ → okay yes, narvin not knowing what children are for a second is funny, but this does have some interesting implications, it could go one of two ways a) time tots are exclusive to time lords, so other species kids aren’t called that, which is likely for the obvious reasons of why would anyone else call their kids time tots, but then if this is true, it also feels like narvin would probably be less quick to correct himself (though maybe not because he’s cia and it’s his job to know about things, os it’s very plausible he would know this), or b) time tots and children are distinct things on gallifrey, time tots is used to talk about only those who are going to become time lords, and likely this comes with different treatment, time tots are meant to learn things for when they go to the academy, children however, well given how obsessed time lord society is with status, i doubt much care would be given to those who are predetermined to not become time lords

Time lords can identify species by telepathy (well, i’m assuming given the condition that they actually know the species in the first place)

Narvin also seems to be able to tell that the doctor is the doctor → time lords identify each other telepathically rather than by appearance (would make sense given regeneration) and given the doctor’s status as a renegade and ex president, it would make sense that a cia agent would know his psychic signature (yep, next line supports this, the doctor’s famous now, though i guess that happens when you air out your divorce across the citadel and then get the planet invaded after becoming president and then leave an alien there)

‘Arresting him, and taking him home, was very high on all cia priority lists’ → idk, the fact that i know narvin just isn’t going to even make much of an attempt at arresting the doctor is really funny to me, guy who simultaneously is good at his job and also sucks at it

Narvin just tries to tell him he’s under arrest ‘in the name of the high council’ → kind of interesting, just the assumption that most time lords would just obey something like this (at least that’s what it seems) and the bafflement when that doesn’t work (something something, your average time lord is very bad at thinking for themselves)

This is narvin’s first off gallifrey mission, yet he seemingly has passed the rank of junior time lord (wonder how one does that)

Time ring translates much like a tardis would (something something time lord technology very heavily built on the fact that they are a psychic species

Narvin briefly confused by the fact that the doctor is wearing colors that don’t align with his chapter → the institutions of time lord society are so baked in that he just doesn’t consider anything else could be true for a moment (this does make me curious about casual everyday clothes though, are they all in chapter colors? Also like what is narvin wearing, i truly just imagine this man in his cia robes 24/7)

Narvin’s never been off world before → i mean he did say this was his first off world mission so that makes sense, but idk it was technically a possibility

Also he just doesn’t know if colors exist on other planets → they aren’t told things about other worlds, they say that they sit and observe, but they don’t even do that do they, most time lords don’t learn much about worlds outside of gallifrey, why would they, that could make them want to leave

‘Who knew what similarities to time lord culture there were across the stars’ → similar to my above point, if they learn about other cultures and see that there are similarities it makes it harder for them to keep their status as gods over time, because they start to see that those people that they looked down on are actually people and not just lower beings

Has to cite legal clauses and all that, even if they mean nothing to the people he’s saying them to → something something it’s all about ceremony and tradition among the time lords

‘How much damage he had done to the reputation of the time lords and gallifrey’ → i’ve said this many times before, and i’ll say it again, but everything with the time lords is about perception, the actual reality of a situation does not matter as long as they can make the people they want perceive it how they want them to perceive it, and that’s the real reason that renegades are dangerous, not because they’re out there interfering with timelines and other species, the time lords already do enough of that (despite what they say), they’re dangerous because they are interfering in a way that isn’t approved of by the time lords, that doesn’t fit within the neat image that they have built for themselves

‘The only people responsible enough to utilize time travel’

‘Only time lords can sense them’ → something something being exposed to that much time energy changes the dna of a species and the time lords have spent so much more time around time than the other temporal powers that they are more adapted to it than pretty much any other species

‘Sub coordinator narvin’ → i forget what i was going to say here, something something rank, something something narvin’s timeline (?) (actually how does the doctor know narvin’s rank, i don’t think i remember him saying it, is there some sort of difference in the uniform, or does the doctor just know who narvin is (something in narvin’s psychic signature?))

Time rings can remotely access the matrix

Time lords can spot time breaches/scabs in time → though it does seem to need training to actually be able to do as narvin refers to have been trained to do it for the cia

Time lords can psychically translate things without technological assistance, but do seem to need to concentrate

‘Legendary time lord’ → they’re seen as kind of mythical creatures

‘As a member of the cia i’m not particularly trained in negotiation’ → you know narvin, i would love to know what you are trained in (actually it seems to be a lot of seeing through illusions and using psychic abilities to see and know things others might not, as well as intelligence gathering, timeline reading, and how to interfere in the timelines, but it is a lot more fun to make fun of them for being bad at everything for an organization that is supposedly very powerful)

‘What i am reasonably well trained in is being straightforward, blunt, and using the fastest solution’

‘President of the high council of the time lords’ → look i’m not going to write it down everytime they say the president’s full title (probably) but i would like to know just what being the president of gallifrey entails when it comes to who you rule over

‘Just pride at a job well done’ → time lords trained both to suppress emotion/empathy and see other species as lesser, so that they care less when they are responsible for their destruction

‘Over these past few years’ → how long of a period of time does the gallifrey series take place over, because that’s a hell of a lot of stuff to happen in just a few years

‘A better time lord, a better gallifreyan’ → little gallifreyans and time lords being different moment

#now its time for the full length audios #should be fun #totally won't take me a really long time #i think just those five short trips got me like 23-24 pages of notes #doctor who #gallifrey #erasure #narvin #lore project

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