# The General (Doctor Who)

The General is a recurring fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, and its associated spin-off works. They are an alien Time Lord and one of the key members during the Time War.
Two actors have played the General since the character's introduction in 2013. Within the show's narrative, the change in actors and subsequent change of the character's appearance is a sonsequence of regeneration, which is a biological attribute that allows Time Lords to survive fatal injuries or old age. Ken Bones was originally portrayed the General during the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors' era, and he was succeeded by T'Nia Miller for one episode, the series 9 finale "Hell Bent" (2015).

## Character biography
### Early life - the first ten incarnations

The General was, for their first ten incarnations, a woman. Like all Time Lords, she was taken from her family at the age of eight for the selection process in the Drylands. Staring into the Untempered Schism as part of a Time Lord initiation rite, she was inspired by what she saw in the Schism. At the Time Lord Academy, Kenossium was mentored by Bellator, whose lessons taught her how to survive "sixteen transwarp campaigns and a Time War." She was a Prydonian and was top of her class for temporal stratagem despite being "an unruly young woman" at the time. They became the Time Lords' military commander, adopting "the General" not only as their rank, but as their primary name. The General was present on Gallifrey when the First Doctor stole a TARDIS and witnessed the commotion caused by the event. Sometime later, The General regenerated into a male incarnation.

### Eleventh incarnation
#### The Time War
##### Start of the war

Feeling that his people were unprepared to fight in such a brutal conflict, the General complied a compendium of the Doctor's own experiences against the Daleks for the infantry to consult, even using the Matrix to extrapolate encounters between the Doctor and the Daleks following the Time War. The General annotated each entry with a tactical analysis on how the Time Lords might make use of the Dalek weaknesses that the Doctor's victories had revealed, but also noted that the post-Time War encounters should only be taken as theoretical. When the war began, the General requested that his niece, Cresta Vanossia, be permitted to serve as his aide so that he could protect her. As a Commander in the first year of the Last Great Time War, the General led a strike force of Battle TARDISes in search of Dalek activity. In the Scaveline system they encountered the War Doctor who the Commander agreed to accompany as he followed a distress signal to the Gates of Elysium. There he saved Doctor from the Nightmare Child shortly before Davros was killed.

##### Fighting in the Time War

By the time of Rassilon coming to power, the General had been sent away from Gallifrey to the front. The General once found the Master in the Siege of the Chronotide, screaming for mercy as the Multiform closed in, and encountered the War Doctor again at the Hellion Blaze. After reading Cardinal Ollistra's report on the Uzmal incident, the General placed the Twelve in stasis in the Omega Arsenal, telling her about the Dreadshade on the way. After the Valeyard erased the Daleks from the universe, the General was left leading the decommissioning of the war effort despite the Time Lords being unable to recall who their enemy had been. When the Eighth Doctor arrived in the Capitol, the General reluctantly worked with him and together they went to the Omega Arsenal to consult the Twelve, discovering she had escaped by manipulating the Dreadshade and had unleashed all of the sentient creatures in the Arsenal. They realised the Twelve was targeting the High Council and arrived in the Panopticon in time to confront her. He remembered the Daleks after the Twelve brought them up, which caused her to be lost in the Dreadshade's attacks, and believed Gallifrey would return to non-interference, however the Daleks subsequently returned to the universe and the Time War recommenced.

##### Working from the War Room

When the Time Lord ship Cassandia came under attack by Daleks seeking its TARDISes, the General and the Matrix projection of Ollistra quickly dispatched the dreadnought Gorgan to totally destroy the vessel, killing its Time Lord crew. When the Dalek Emperor led a Dalek flying saucer armed with null space technology to Gallifrey, Rassilon ordered the General be contacted for reinforcements. Not long afterwards, the General was in the War Room when Leela was forcibly recruited by Rassilon.
The General was sent on a mission with Leela and Veklin to destroy Freme and its people to prevent a future alliance with the Daleks, and tried to persuade Leela to work with them. When Leela and Veklin became separated from him, he deliberately allowed himself to be found by the Fremians and brought to their evacuation fleet where he was reunited with them. He was impressed by Leela's trickery to convince the Fremians they had chosen to destroy their world to save it from Daleks in the future, preventing the alliance and laying groundwork for an alliance with the Time Lords instead. He and Ollistra subsequently reported the mission's outcome to Rassilon. The General oversaw Leela's training following this mission, giving her the callsign "Epsilon 3".
When a survivor of the Cassandia, Cato Kelgoth, reached Gallifrey in an experimental Dalek ship they'd captured at Zygor before the attack, the General had Leela bring him in and gently interrogated him. Convinced the man knew only of the Dalek attack, he and Ollistra prepared to make him a hero, meeting sceptism from Cardinal Rasmus. The General was outraged when Cato tricked Lady Vibax into detonating a bomb he'd planted on t Dalek ship, killing a thousand Time Lords, and infuriated by Cato's subsequent reveals that it had been revenge for Cassandia. When Rasmus revealed he'd suspected Cato's motivations after hearing the General's transmissions about Zygor, the General conceded his and Ollistra's actions had been wrong and in haste. He advocated exiling Cato as a human which Ollistra and Rasmus agreed to, though Veklin secretly killed him after the transformation. The General and Leela were dispatched to investigate the Daleks' restoration of Phaidon to intercept an ancient Time Lord artefact. Whilst Leela searched for the relic, he worked with the surviving Warpwrights to hold off the Daleks, defying orders from Ollistra who ordered him to leave after denying his request for reinforcements, and even supplied them with weapons from his Battle TARDIS. After the Daleks' were destroyed in a storm, Leela informed him it was because the artefact had rejected them and told him to wait for her at the TARDIS. The General secretly followed her instead and interrupted her discussion with Narvin. He revealed he'd deduced she and Narvin had actually found the artefact and given it to the Warpwrights, but didn't intend to tell anyone. Back on Gallifrey, he interrupted proceedings in the War Room to publicly commend Leela for her service.
The General was dispatched to Orrison with Leela to negotiate an alliance for half of the planet’s sacred bolt. He believed Leela was intentionally undermining their discussions with Prince Ferdi, so called Veklin to prepare the contingency plan to seize the bolt by force. After Ferdi unexpectantly agreed to the alliance, the General apologised to Leela and tried to call the contingency off, however Veklin refused and landed TARDISes in force. The General retreated with the Time Lord forces when Ferdi lowered Orrison’s defences to unleash the Time Winds and was furious that Leela had inspired him to do this.
After a distress signal was received from Alpha Cognosco, the station where Cresta was based, the General volunteered to investigate. Rasmus suspected he had a personal angle and discreetly showed him an enhanced version of the signal proving it came from Cresta asking for his help. Accompanied by Veklin, the pair travelled to the station and found it had been massacred by a Berserker Dalek with only two survivors, Cresta and Teblin. The General helped rescue them, though was furious that Teblin put himself as risk by disobeying orders and detonating the station’s engines. Afterwards Rasmus decided to appoint Cresta as his aide, which he used as leverage so the General would support him on the Council which the General reluctantly agreed to. Shortly afterwards, the General left Gallifrey to deal with a situation in the Hordux Cluster.
The General supported Rasmus taking charge of the War Room after discovering Ollistra’s plans for a disastrous assault on Dalek-occupied Orrison. He helped devise a new plan in which Leela and Rasmus would disable the temporal barrier around the planet at a precise moment for TARDISes to invade, and led the TARDIS assault himself. He contacted Leela and Rasmus after they lowered the shield too late, resulting in the TARDISes being destroyed and wiping out Orrison. He survived and returned to the War Room, where Ollistra revealed she’d manipulated events to produce this outcome and used their responsibility for the catastrophe to assert her leadership.

##### Working with the Doctor

When a message came in from Davros, the General ordered the Doctor, in the midst of a retro-regeneration crisis, time scooped to Space Station Zenobia. Assinging Veklin as protection, the General sent the two to Falkus to retrieve Davros. When they returned with the Kaled, Davros spoke to the General in private, offering to create the Hybrid to win the Time War. Reluctantly the General agreed only for a Dalek force to attack the station. While non-combatants evacuated, the General led the defence only to be taken prisoner by the Daleks due to his strategic value. Taken to Falkus, the General allowed a Dalek to activate the Hostile Action Displacement System of the Doctor's TARDIS, causing the ship to materialize around him. Though the General attempted to escape in it, he struggled with the antiquated controls, eventually becoming caught in the moon's transduction barrier. When Falkus was destroyed, the General picked up the Doctor and Veklin, taking them back to Gallifrey where the Doctor was returned to his timestream.
During the Barber-Surgeon's campaign, the General met the Doctor after he'd brought down one of the Barber-Surgeon's creations that was attacking Gallifrey, revealing he'd had to dispatch an entire Raston squad to finish it off. He took the Doctor before the "inner circle" of the War Council to receive his mission to assassinate the Barber-Surgeon and was tasked with seeing to the logistics. Before the Doctor left the General confided in him that he'd opposed his involvement as he believed the Doctor had become what the Time Lords had wanted, and he didn't like it. After contact with the Doctor was lost, the General led a taskforce to his last known location in hopes of it leading to the Barber-Surgeon and commanded the battle against Dalek forces who had already arrived. After the Barber-Surgeon and his factory was erased from existence, the General reunited the Doctor with his TARDIS. While the Council were angry to have lost the chance to seize the factory for Gallifrey's war effort, the General expressed his private happiness that the abominations would be forever lost.

##### The last day of the war

In the final days of the Time War, the General led the War Council and its efforts to defend Gallifrey from the Dalek onslaught. In the aftermath of the Fall of Arcadia, he was informed of the War Doctor's appearance there, leaving the message "NO MORE". He was then alerted to a security breach in the Time Vaults, where discovered that the War Doctor had taken the Moment from the Omega Arsenal and deduced he intended to use it.
The General was later contacted, much to his displeasure, by the War Doctor, the Tenth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor. They revealed to him their plan to save Gallifrey by freezing it before its destruction and shifting it to a pocket universe. The General was sceptical, shocked by the thought of being lost and forgotten in another universe and stated that the calculations would take centuries. The Doctors informed him that they have recruited all their incarnations to help and that while the Time Lords would be lost, they'd at least have hope which they didn't have at that point with the Daleks bombarding Gallifrey heavily. The Doctors also told the General that the alternative was burning and no one wanted that. As the General continued to hesitate, the Dalek Fleet realised something was wrong and increased their firepower. Realising he was out of options, the General ordered the Doctor to "just do it." The thirteen Doctors then succeeded in freezing Gallifrey and shifting it to a pocket universe, causing the Dalek fleet to destroy themselves while the Time Lords were saved. With the Twelfth Doctor, the General oversaw disaster relief from the war room.

#### After the War

Within the pocket universe, the Time Lords detected a crack in a nearby universe. Gambling that this was the way home, the General's voice was recorded to ask the Question to be broadcast out to the universe, calling out to the Eleventh Doctor to see if it was safe for Gallifrey to return. However, the Time Lords' actions only resulted in the centuries long Siege of Trenzalore. At the end of the conflict, Clara Oswald spoke directly to the Time Lords, confirming to them that they'd found the right universe to enter into. Electing for a quieter return, the Time Lords returned Gallifrey to its original spatial coordinates but putting the planet at the end of the universe, "give or take a star system" to stay safe. The General sent Missy on a mission with Yayani to stop Kalub from developing his experiments further, as they would expose Gallifrey if successful. He was present at the location where Missy sent Yayani's shrunken dead body back to Gallifrey.

#### Regeneration

When the Twelfth Doctor returned to Gallifrey, the General discussed the event with Rassilon and the High Council. He told Rassilon that the Doctor had the respect of his men as he was the one who won the Time War and had served with many of them. When Rassilon ordered the firing squad to kill the Doctor, the General protested but made no move to stop them. The squad purposefully missed and sided with the Doctor. When military ships arrived, Rassilon assumed the General had summoned them. However, the Doctor told Rassilon he'd called the ships, all of which chose to provide the Doctor with backup. As Rassilon prepared to kill the Doctor with his gauntlet, the General stopped him, telling Rassilon, "Lord President, with respect, get off his planet." The General then dropped his gun and stood at the Doctor's side against Rassilon. Rassilon was exiled from Gallifrey and the General informed the Doctor that Gallifrey was at "the end of the universe, give or take a star system", and as such, Rassilon could have nowhere to go. The General knew that, one day, Rassilon would return and seek revenge.
When the General continued to call Rassilon the President, the Doctor corrected him that he was the President now. The Doctor agreed to assist the High Council in learning the true identity of the Hybrid. To do this, he claimed that Clara Oswald had vital information and insisted that she be extracted from the point of her death and brought to him on Gallifrey. The General facilitated this but quickly discovered that the Doctor had merely lied in an extraordinary attempt to save Clara. The General insisted that any attempt to prevent Clara's death as an established historical event would have grave consequences for the timeline. Attempting to prevent the Doctor from escaping with Clara, the General was threatened by the Doctor who stole his gun. The General and Clara attempted to talk sense to the Doctor with the General reminding the Doctor that the gun had no stun setting. Finally, the Doctor asked which regeneration the General was on. The General realised what the Doctor intended and stated that he was on his tenth regeneration and thus his eleventh incarnation. After the Doctor and the General wished each other luck, the Doctor shot the General which caused him to immediately regenerate, giving the Doctor time to flee with Clara.

### Twelfth incarnation
#### Post-regeneration

The General quickly recovered after regenerating, this time having the form of a dark-skinned woman with a shaven head. She observed that she was "back to normal" and rhetorically asked how men continually dealt with "all that ego". With assistance from Ohila, the General continued to pursue the Doctor into the Cloisters. She exchanged words with Clara, but, unfortunately for the General, Clara had been buying enough time for the Doctor to escape and steal another TARDIS, and the pair fled from Gallifrey.

#### Fighting the Clockwise Men

She was present when Bellator chose his final incarnation's form and witnessed his death as he died in her arms when his regeneration went wrong. She was then informed by a Time Lord soldier that the same thing had happened to six other Time Lords the same day. Shortly after this, she was contacted by the Twelfth Doctor to help him in his attempts to solve the mystery of the Clockwise Men. Following his orders, she travelled to 1882 America and recruited Bass Reeves and Totika. They eventually travelled to 2018 London and acted as the Doctor's "cavalry", rescuing him from the hands of Alexander Truscott and the Clockwise Men, having been somewhat held up by the busy traffic of the city.
Joining the Doctor in entering the Dreamspace that Shayde had created around Fey Truscott-Sade, she led the Obsidian Fleet to fight the Clockwise Men. Although this was against the Doctor's wishes, she stated that with the fate of her planet on the line, "we're not going down without a fight". When Fey's spell broke after realising the Absence was never real and that the attacks were her doing, the General and her fleet was returned to normal space. After recognising Fey's efforts, she promised to return Reeves and Totika to their own time.

### Later life

Many years after the Fall of Gallifrey, the General was interviewed for A Brief History of Time Lords, refusing to confirm to the author whether or not the totality of the Doctor's first regeneration cycle had been present to save the planet.