Barbelith Underground > Film, TV & Theatre > Doctor Who Season 3 UK (No Spoilers)

I do think that you could do something with Time Lords that was actually genuinely interesting in terms of understanding them or going into greater detail with them. My brilliant scheme was that Gallifreyans were basically normal human type people or perhaps normal human type people who could regenerate and had mastered time. The side effect of such proximity and a role at the heart of the universe would be that at any given moment a proportion of them would occupy more iconic, archetypical role. So a child might grown up Gallifreyan but then discover in their early twenties that they were becoming something more - a Time Lord. Such a person would take on or manifest their archetypical title, which would come to mean more to them than their original name, especially as they started to regenerate, sort of like the Phoenix did in GM's X-men run.

The role would be archetypical and carry with it some cosmic sense of the role - ie. that the doctor is there to fix things that are broken, to heal and inspire. When one doctor worked through his regenerations the next would be called from the Gallifreyan people and the mantle would be passed in some way.

The names / titles thing would be quite simply explained away by saying that Time Lords often continued to use their Gallifreyan names as well as their archetypical ones, particularly if they spent a lot of time on Gallifrey in the company of the people they grew up with. The ones that name themselves with the iconic names could be generally considered to be older, to have outlived their peers, to have progressed through more regenerations or to have a more progressed archetypical role in some way. You could go further and say that female Gallifreyans tended to keep their names going longer than the men - find some social reason for some of it.

The titles themselves interest me particular in terms of which ones sound right. As I've thought about it, the titles that sound right are the ones that you would either be able to use instead of a name or are a title that would be spoken. It's infrequent (although not unheard of) for a role to be a simple occupation - ie. there is no Soldier, Stationer, Engineer or Potter because you wouldn't refer to someone as 'Soldier', 'Stationer', 'Engineer' or 'Potter'- but you can imagine The Judge, The Magistrate, The Detective, The Heirophant, The Castellain, The Chancellor, The Minister, The Bishop.