The Enemy The enemy was the opponent of the Time Lord s during the War . ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " ) It was not a species or a political faction as much as a process . It had a name , but the Great Houses were reluctant to use it . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Identity . Pre - War speculation . Before the War , multiple parties speculated about the enemy ' s identity . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Rassilon foresaw that the Time Lord s were imperfect despite their knowledge , and after realising who the enemy really was , he charged the Watch with killing four Time Lords when the time was right . ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " ) Chatelaine Thessalia incorrectly predicted in " The Little Book of Absolute Power " that the enemy would be mainly motivated by survival or keeping its history intact . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Greyjan the Sane hypothesized that the Enemy were ancestor cell s which had been irradiated by temporal interference and energised by a leaking bottle universe . ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) The Rivera Manuscript described a renegade ' s praxis - induced vision of the enemy devastation of the Homeworld . In that vision , enemy soldiers appeared to closely resemble posthuman Ashla shock - troop s , though " The Book of the War " noted that this was impossible . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) During his first encounter with the War , the Eighth Doctor travelled to Mictlan with Kathleen Bregman and saw an alien agent of the Celestis who wore a parody of ceremonial Time Lord robe s . He later told Bregman that the robed alien was one of the enemy , saying , " Try to forget you ever saw it . I know " I " will . " ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " ) He went on to erase the enemy ' s identity from his memory . ( PROSE : " Toy Story " ) At another time he joked that the enemy was " Yartek , leader of the alien Voord , carrying a big stick . " ( PROSE : " The Taking of Planet 5 " ) Helios said that the Doctor had seen the enemy , and that going into Omega ' s anti - matter universe would lock that future into place . ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " ) The Matrix predicted that the enemy destined to destroy Gallifrey would be unknown until Last Contact . The president and members of the Supreme Council knew this prophecy , but they kept it hidden , fearing that Gallifrey would fall into chaos if it was widely known . ( PROSE : " The Gallifrey Chronicles " ) The Supreme Council was split on whether to tell the Matrix to look for threats matching the description , since such action might inevitably lead to contact and conflict with the enemy . Deliberation on the topic took several millennia . ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " ) At date index 309456 / 4756 . 7RE / 1213GRT / 100447TL , the Matrix projected that the Vore were a potential candidate for Last Contact , so the council mandated that no Time Lord was to engage the Vore or come within one parsec or one century of any of their moons . ( PROSE : " The Gallifrey Chronicles " ) " The Book of the War " speculated that increasing paranoia on the Homeworld may have itself caused the War , saying the idea " makes a certain sense , given the nature of the enemy . " ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Secrecy during the War . In her speech to the Fifth Wave on the thirtieth anniversary of the Cataclysm , House Military strategist Entarodora said the ruling Houses kept secret the identity of the enemy and its leadership because , if the Houses believed the true enemy was simply a rogue House or a species of time - active upstarts , they would " simply shrug and go back to sleep . " Instead , the secrecy made the enemy into monsters , and the subsequent fear would keep the fight alive . " The Book of the War " posited that the name was kept secret because the " why " of the enemy was more important than the " what " . It also speculated that the enemy might come from beyond the Great Houses ' noosphere , not because it came from another universe but because it operated on principles that the Houses weren ' t built to understand ; it said that , unlike the Yssgaroth , the enemy was " civilised , cultured , and intelligent enough to have an agenda beyond pure destruction . " Possible identities . Some legends indicated that the Enemy was descended from a Type 101 timeship who was so indistinguishable from a human that it lived and died as one . ( PROSE : " Of the City of the Saved . . . " ) Every Time Lord knew the enemy ' s home planet was Earth , ( PROSE : " The Ancestor Cell " ) leading the Time Lords to try to destroy the planet in the 20th century . ( PROSE : " Interference - Book Two " ) According to Carmen Yeh ' s heavily - fictionalised memoir " Fantastical Travels in an Infinite Universe " , Compassion believed that the enemy was a meaningless distraction and the real threat to the Homeworld would come from within , specifically " House Lucia " or " family " . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) The Egyptian god Horus described Lolita as a " process " and " a new kind of history " . ( AUDIO : " The Judgment of Sutekh " ) " The Book of the War " similarly described the enemy as a process and the War as " a struggle between one kind of history and another . " ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) In a parallel universe where the Second Doctor was pardoned instead of being exiled to Earth , the Sixth Doctor was Lord President Admiral of Gallifrey during the War . There , the Enemy had always had access to rudimentary time corridor s and travel machine s , but they gained temporal manipulation powers after the Master defected to their side . The Doctor described them as an old foe with calculating tin minds and jet - black saucers . ( PROSE : " The Quantum Archangel " ) " The Book of the Enemy " described " xenophobic mutants traveling in their own personal war machines " as one of the several groups that some considered the Enemy but were in reality just powers trying to take advantage of the War for their own ends . ( PROSE : " The Book of the Enemy " ) When asked who could fight a war against a race of gods , Abschrift quickly replied , " Who indeed . " ( PROSE : " Warlords of Utopia " ) The Doctor said he wasn ' t working for the High Council and was only one of the enemy " depend [ ing on ] where you ' re standing . " ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " ) He was one of the Four Names that Rassilon instructed the Watch to assassinate after he realised the true enemy . ( PROSE : " The Infinity Doctors " ) Powers . The enemy was seemingly bound by the same Protocols of Linearity as the Houses : it was unable to attack vulnerable points in the Homeworld ' s history , instead encountering the Houses in the same order that it was encountered by the Houses . This was supported by the initial battle on Dronid , in which the enemy ' s forces were as ill - prepared as the Houses ' First Wave . Many Great House academicians posited that the enemy was farther along in their ability to use high chaotic limiter settings . " The Book of the War " said the enemy " tries not to " violate the laws of physics . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Qixotl noted that the enemy could wipe out information just as fast as they could destroy matter . ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " ) In its entry for the enemy , " The Book of the War " referenced its articles on the Churchill Index , Immaculata Formosii , the Gods of the Ainu , " Miss Hiroshima " , Mohandassa , Sixth Wave Defections , S ' tanim , and Violent Unknown Event s ; however , none of these entries existed in the book , implying that the enemy had tampered with the text . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) Representatives . House Military soldiers used the colloquialism " Rep " , an abbreviation of " representative " , to refer to the enemy ' s agents . ( PROSE : " The Taking of Planet 5 " ) Tonton Macoute once cooked the corpse of an enemy soldier . ( PROSE : " Tonton Macoute " ) The enemy had a small automated outpost on Simia KK98 ; there , a Gabrielidean soldier working for the Time Lords was wounded by a combat satellite . As died , the Doctor visited him ; later , the soldier was rescued and turned into a Shift by people dressed in flowing robes with high collars , designed as parodies of the costumes of the High Council . These agents sent him , now calling himself Mr Shift , to represent the enemy at Qixotl ' s auction for the Relic . ( PROSE : " Alien Bodies " ) In the Mount Usu duel during the filming of " " , Chris Cwej and Michael Brookhaven encountered an enemy agent which apparently summarised its own mystique : " The Scourge . Harvey . Hermes . The coolest character is the one whose face we never get to see . " It was represented by the total absence of anything on the recovered film , appearing not as blackness but instead as emptiness and background filmstock . ( PROSE : " The Book of the War " ) On Roma CLII , Marcus Americanius Scriptor killed a creature that was hunting a renegade who had escaped the War by jumping into a parallel universe . The monster was implied to be working for the enemy . ( PROSE : " Warlords of Utopia " )