The Time War

The **Last Great Time War** was the war between the Time Lords and the Daleks"for the sake of all creation". In a linear sense, it lasted for at least 400 years. Fought throughout countless time periods, however, it more accurately lasted an eternity as both sides fought across space and time, opening up new fronts as the Daleks seeded themselves in different epochs.

At the heart of the war, millions were killed and brought back to life every second on account of both sides' manipulations. The Dalek forces numbered in the billions and fielded a fleet of ten million flying saucers. The Time Lords used over a million Battle TARDISes.

## HGttG Entry

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the Time War:

By far the most overly complicated, devastating and horrific events to never will have happened. The ability to write anything definitive about the conflict is made extremely difficult as virtually every theatre of the conflict has had hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of battles fought, re-fought, unfought and replaced with battles that one side believed would go better for them than the other did (although given the sheer scale of destruction this virtually never was the case). The fact that the timeframe of the war cannot accurately be described as the combatants existed at different points along the continuum of space and time makes a discussion of the conflict even more confusing and, overall, pointless. Many an ambitious would-be galactic historian has sought to do a thesis on the overall history of the Time War. These individuals inevitably through up their hands in defeat and instead choose to do their research on the myriad of ways President Skroob was objectively the worst planetary leader in the galaxy within recorded memory. The only entities that have demonstrated the capability to comprehend the nature of the Time War overall are the near-omniscient and rather irritating extradimensional intelligences of the Q Continuum, the quiet observers commonly known dully as the Watchers, select elements of the Culture’s Special Circumstances organization and the occasional unfortunate soul who drinks so many Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters he is given the opportunity to directly commune with the Star Maker about some element of the universe out of pity for his likely imminent demise as the survival rate following such an occasion is as low as the chances of a Vogon being pleasant to interact with. As it happens, it was this latter method that was used to write this entry.

### **Prophecies**

The Time Lords became aware of their future involvement in the Time War a long time before it began, and many prophecies, stories and legends were generated around the idea. One concerned the Hybrid, which some took to believe would be a creature, half-Time-Lord and half-something else that would had a hand in ending the War. The Time Lords foresaw the War during the life of the Eighth Doctor, as Straxus told the Doctor they saw "something terrible in the time tracks." Shortly before the war began, the Matrix prophesied that Gallifrey would be destroyed in a war, though there were other predictions that showed Gallifrey's destruction in other ways,

Truthfully, the Time War began with two rather arrogant species. The Daleks. The Daleks had their origin on the planet Skaro. A race called the Halldons uplifted humans onto the planet, resulting in two races called the Kaled and the Thals. A Thousand year war broke out and the Thal scientist Davros created metallic suits to allow his people to survive the resulting radiation. The other species was the Gallifreyans (who called themselves ‘Time Lords’ for their discovery of time travel, as further proof of how much better they believed themselves to be than the rest of the universe, which they generally preferred not to bother with).

### **Origins**

Sent by the Time Lords Ferain and Valyes, who was from the Time War era, The Fourth Doctor was given a mission on Skaro during the Thousand Year War with certain objectives:

* If possible, to avert the creation of the Daleks
* Otherwise to alter their development and make them less aggressive
* To find some intrinsic flaw or weakness to exploit in the Daleks

The Doctor didn't avert their creation, but he believed he might have set back Dalek history for a thousand years, but a serious side effect of this was that the Daleks were alerted to the concept of life on other worlds and time travel early, and that they now knew that aliens from the future had tried to avert their creation.

The Daleks quickly began trying to master time travel after they developed space travel, with the goal of controlling the Time Vortex and destroying the Time Lords. The Tenth Doctor once "slipped a time track" to a relatively early era of Dalek history and became a prisoner of Dalek X and the Temporal Research Team. They learned from the Doctor of the Daleks' future defeat at the end of the Last Great Time War and tried to harness the Arkheon Threshold to change history, but were stopped and destroyed by the Doctor before they could share information to any other Daleks.

The Daleks attempted to chase the First Doctor through time but were defeated due to their primitive time machines. They attempted several times to create duplicates of the Doctor, hoping they would be found and brought back to Gallifrey or kill the true Doctor. This came with several faults. the Doctor changed traveling companions and appearances, making the duplicates quickly outdated.

The Doctor's frequent time travels made it difficult to properly confront him. When the third Doctor was exiled to Earth, stranding him there, the Time Lords intentionally altered the perception of the two eras of the 1970s and 1980s, leaving the Daleks uncertain of when to invade. this also impacted some of the people involved such as Sarah Jane Smith and Unit, who noticed the discrepancies in the timeline. As revenge for the Time Lords' earlier plot to destroy them, the Daleks attempted to create a duplicate of the Fifth Doctor to send to Gallifrey and assassinate the High Council of the Time Lords, but this failed.

### **Beginning of the War**

For some reason I feel a desire to explain the War in Earth Years, since the most prevalent figure in the War, the Doctor, made frequent visits to Earth. The War technically occurred between 1996 and 2005 despite lasting 400 years. To the Timelords it was business as usual. The Daleks had, in their own timeline, ruthlessly destroyed the last of the Thals, after being momentarily held back by the First Doctor, this encounter being his first in his personal chronology. They had expanded and engaged in a war with the Mechonoids, a robot race created by Humanity that was one of the few real threats the Daleks faced as they expanded. They even reached Earth in the 22nd Century but were defeated by the First Doctor in what was his Chronological second encounter with them.

The next Dalek attempt to attack the Time Lords involved the Hand of Omega, which Davros attempted to use to make the Daleks have mastery over time like the Time Lords. The Seventh Doctor tricked Davros into using the Hand of Omega to destroy Skaro. Davros seemingly perished in this attack but he would later be revealed to have survived. The Timelords used a "Time Lock" on the event to prevent it fro being travelled to but one Dalek was able to rescue Davros at the cost of his sanity, though this also brought Davros into the future after the war. By one account, the Daleks' next step after this was to start a war with the Time Lords.

Following Skaro's apparent destruction and the seeming death of Davros, the newly-elected Lord President Romana made negotiations with the Daleks who were now leaderless and fought amongst themselves, resulting I several positions such self proclaimed councils and Emperors being formed. A peace treaty was opened under the Act of Master Restitution. Romana pinned the destruction of Skaro on the renegade Time Lord the Master, who was captured and executed. Surprisingly, the Daleks returned the Masters's ashes to the Doctor. The Daleks naturally had no intention of keeping the peace between the races.

Still in the early days of her presidency, Romana made a ceremonial visit to Etra Prime when it was removed from time and space by the Dalek Empire. 20 years later, the Daleks returned Etra Prime to attack the Archetryx Convention and gain access to the Monan Host time vessel to complete their synthesis of the Apocalypse Element from its core. Romana was allowed to escape to inform the Sixth Doctor and Vansell of the Daleks' apparent plans, leading to the interim Lord President retreating to Gallifrey. The Daleks followed disguised as the Monan Host, invading Gallifrey to access to the Eye of Harmony to control the explosion they had set off in the Seriphia Galaxy. The Dalek squad died in the process of containing it and the invasion was defeated. Romana said that the Time Lords wouldn't tolerate a Dalek Empire on their doorstep in the new Seriphia Galaxy and borders were drawn.

The Daleks created the Dogma Virus, which could corrupt Time Lord DNA and eventually wipe out the Time Lords. They sent the virus to Gallifrey through an organisation known as Free Time, who were working for them and through which they hoped to attack without facing repercussions themselves.

The Daleks had discovered through their invasion of 22nd century Earth, the existence of a Virtual reality called the Matrix. Their encounters with Time Lords led them to discover that the Time Lords also used a "Matrix", an advanced supercomputer to control time or at least manage all their time travel. They believed this was a backdoor to invading Gallifrey and began experimenting with the Matrix. The Dalek Supreme led an invasion force into the Matrix, plugging in, with the intention of leading them out into Gallifrey itself. The plan was stopped by Romana II and her third incarnation, who created enough defences inside the Matrix to allow it to be shut down. Romana II trapped them in a time loop to ensure that a temporal war with the Daleks would be avoided.

While this would have been enough, this effort was ironically rendered mute by another group of Time Lords who believed Romana II's plan would fail. Acting through his own authority and unaware that Romana had succeeded in defeating the Daleks the Time Lord Narvin sent Valyes to Skaro to give the Fourth Doctor a mission to avert the creation of the Daleks, accidentally causing the Time War. Later, once the War had begun, Rassilon commended Narvin for his decisive thinking. Narvin admitted that he had been hasty in his choice of agent for the job.

150 years into Romana's Presidency, the Time Lords fought " the War in Heaven". During the War, Chris Cwej negotiated an alliance between the Daleks and the Time Lords, freeing them from the Time Loop, which resulted in the Daleks agreeing to act as the Enemy in several microscopic models of the War in Heaven with far less scope and intensity, ala Proxy Wars. The only Gallifreyian to survive one of these Time Wars did so by abandoning the old practice of looms(a time Lord form of breeding essentially cloning but creating an entire unique individual similar to normal birth. The last survivor of Gallifrey returned to organic models of birth, allowing it to enact the victimhood ritual of an entrenched last stand by crying out to future, "Won't someone think of the children!". The Timelords thus became a new race which breeded naturally. A similar survival occurred on the last day of the Last Great Time War.

The War in Heaven resulted in the Time Lords being nearly wiped from history save for a few survivors and even Romana II was killed. While during this War the Daleks were seen as far less dangerous than "the Enemy" in the post-War universe, with the Time Lords were no longer present to quell advanced time travel development in the lesser species, the Daleks began greatly growing in universal prominence. The Time Lords were eventually restored.

### The Brink of Time War

In a later period of the Eighth Doctor's life, the Time Lords began foreseeing the future Time War as tensions rose between them and the Daleks. The Daleks began fighting the Time War before it was formally declared by the Time Lords.

Motivated by glimpses of his peoples' future, Kotris partnered with the Dalek Time Controller to erase Time Lords from history by infecting the Eighth Doctor's companion Molly O'Sullivan with retro-genitor particles that would latch onto the Doctor's Gallifreyan DNA and undo its past. This attack was erased from history when Straxus' past self was killed, but it began a sequence of events leading to the creation of the Eminence.

Concurrently, the Master was resurrected by Narvin to fight against the Daleks in the potentially nearing Time War with the belief that he would be the perfect warrior due to his savagery. He was instead instructed to use the Eminence, which now posed a greater threat, to fight the Daleks. The Master betrayed the Time Lords, first by allying with the Eminence then the Dalek Time Controller. Both partnerships were brought down by the Eighth Doctor, Liv Chenka, and Molly O'Sullivan, and both the Eminence and the Time Controller were eliminated. The Dalek Time Strategist was created in the aftermath and went on to be a major player in the Time War.

It became clear that the Matrix was "always predicting doom and gloom". Padrac founded the Doom Coalition to prevent Gallifrey's future destruction by destroying the rest of the universe using the Crucible of Souls. Rasmus, Daria Visteron, and Brallix manned the *Deeptime Frontier* to mine dark chronons as a power source for Battle TARDISes if the Eye of Harmony were lost. Visteron experimented with time windows and was terrified by seeing a future where Time Lords at war used fleets of destructive TARDISes; to terrify the Time Lords back, she used *Deeptime Frontier* to release the Ravenous from their prison dimension.

The Master manipulated the society of Callous to obtain large quantities of Swenyo for Time Lord battleships. In return, he was given a Chameleon Arch by Narvin.

Preparing for the Time War, the Dalek Emperor created the Cult of Skaro to explore new methods of Dalek warfare.

The extermination or near-extermination of such allied Temporal Powers as the Monans, the Sunari, the Nekkistani and the Phaidonians led to Gallifrey formally declaring war against the Daleks. From the perspective of humanity, the Daleks suddenly disappeared "thousands of years" prior to the battle of the Game Station in 200,100. As recalled by Jack Harkness, a former Time Agent from the 51st century, the Daleks vanished from time and space at a point when they were the "greatest threat in the universe."

**Later**

As it happens, the Daleks, once they discovered the means the Gallifreyans used to traverse time, recognized it would be useful to fulfilling their goal of exterminating as much life as possible. Thus, the Daleks would launch attacks on several worlds—some of which, such as the planet Krypton, would be wiped out while others such as the planet Tatooine were simply reduced to wastelands. The Gallifreyans’ initial tendency to ignore these problems in the hopes they would go away was dealt with by the Daleks deciding to attack them next. At this point, the Time War was on. Initially, the Gallifreyans were able to quickly gain the upper hand, as several of them (Time Ladies by the names of Ms. Whatsit, Ms. Who and Mrs. Which) had helped seed the galaxy with Gallifreyan DNA in the early years of the universe. The various species that evolved from these DNA sources such as the Vulcans, Saiyans, Altarians and Manicoids thus were rather amenable to the notion of assisting the Gallifreyans in battling the Daleks, a fact which was furthered by the tendency of the Daleks to kill anything that wasn’t themselves. This initial advantage led to Dalek forces taking severe losses in the early stages of the Time War and many on Gallifrey hoped that the situation would be resolved quickly and amiably. However, this was not to be the case.

While the Daleks’ superiority complex meant they were never ones for allies, their ability to survive literally everything that could be thrown at them enabled them to continue to make comebacks and target new planets and species for extermination. A bioweapon was created by Daleks that led to humanoid species transforming into sadists with a cross-shaped facial rash. Gallifreyans were successfully to undo the infection of several worlds with this bioweapon and ultimately reversed its development. Their support for wiping out almost all life led them into partnerships of convenience with cosmic entities known as Darkseid, Giygas and Nekron. The Daleks additionally were willing to make use of races with conducive mindsets for their ends—for instance seeking to spread Tyranids as far as possible in the hopes that they would devour all enemies of the Daleks before being exterminated. Additionally they had the help of the Great Old One Nyarlathotep who found their actions to be highly entertaining. Over the course of the continued conflict, the Daleks and Gallifreyans continued to escalate the means by which they fought. Gallifrey’s new president Rassilon began to tap into parallel timelines, as did the Daleks, leading to the Time War becoming interdimensional as well as cross-temporal. The paradoxes caused by the conflict led to the creation of the Nightmare Child who would devastate multiple worlds and both sides with his legions of beings that never had been and, thanks to the Time War, never would be. Multiple planets would be destroyed, rebuilt, re-destroyed and re-rebuilt numerous times as both sides dashed up and down the timeline in a desperate event to defeat each other. Entire races were wiped out or came into being or both throughout the conflict. Rewritings of history even changed at various points the names of certain worlds and species—the Gallifreyans for instance went from being called Time Lords to the Great Houses and the Daleks meanwhile would become the cybernetic Grox. This went back and forth for a long, unfathomable time and the longer it went on, the more strain the fabric of the universe was put under.

Ultimately, the Time War would come to an end with the timelocking of Gallifrey. Carried out by a renegade Time Lord known as the Doctor, the timelocking of Gallifrey trapped it and the bulk of the Daleks in time beyond the reach of most of the universe. While this did not undo all events of the Time War (Krypton for instance remained destroyed), the bulk of the strain put on history was averted and things for most of the universe went back to normal—or as normal as the universe, a rather unusual place, could get. While theoretically it would be possible to bring back Gallifrey and the Daleks, the likelihood of that occurring remains as low as its desirability. While the Daleks have managed to reconstitute thanks to enclaves not being present when Gallifrey was timelocked, the Time Lords have largely not done so due to the fact they at this moment number at precisely four individuals, all of whom disproportionately focus their activities on a planet so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that its entry in this very guide is two words in length.

**References-Time War**

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy-The titular guide from the series of the same name

Time War-Conflict from Doctor Who

President Skroob-The incompetent leader of the Spaceballs in the film of the same name

Q Continuum-The realm that Q is from in Star Trek

Watchers-The race Uatu belongs to in Marvel Comics

Culture’s Special Circumstances organization-The Culture are a post-scarcity civilization from the novels of the same name. Special Circumstances is their body for handling contact with other civilizations

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster-Highly powerful alcoholic drink from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Star Maker-The creator of the universe in Olaf Stapledon’s novel Star Maker

Vogon-Unpleasant alien race from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ugly, overly bureaucratic, stupid and produce the third-worst poetry in the universe

Daleks, Gallifreyans-Both of course are from Doctor Who and are the main combatants in the Time War

Krypton-The home planet of Superman in DC Comics. Krypton of course has been destroyed in almost every DC continuity whether comic book, cartoon, TV series or live-action film

Tatooine-Desert planet from Star Wars

Ms. Whatsit, Ms. Who and Mrs. Which-A trio of powerful alien entities from A Wrinkle in Time

Vulcans-Alien race from Star Trek

Saiyans-Alien race from Dragon Ball Z

Altarians-Alien race from Galactic Civilizations

Manicoids-Alien race from the TV series The Middleman

Bioweapon that turns humanoids sadistic-A reference to the Crossed from the comic of the same name

Darkseid, Nekron-Destruction-seeking entities from DC Comics

Giygas-The main villain of Earthbound

Tyranids-Ravenous alien race that consumes all in their path from Warhammer 40K

Nyarlathotep-The most malevolent Great Old One from the Cthulhu Mythos

Rassilon-Lord-President of Gallifrey in Doctor Who. Is mentioned in the original run but doesn’t show up in person until after the revival

Tap into parallel realities-An allusion to the novel The Big Time, where a network of realities where Rome survives clash with a similar network of Axis victory worlds

Great Houses-Name of the Time Lord-esque aliens depicted in the Faction Paradox novels

Grox-Malevolent alien race at the center of the galaxy from Spore

Timelocking of Gallifrey-The events depicted in The Day of the Doctor. Previously it had ben believed Gallifrey had been destroyed

Four individuals-Two are the Doctor and the Master (or Missy I suppose). The other two…well there’s plenty of potential Time Lords from outside of Doctor Who you could guess they are. Just check TV Tropes’ WMG page on Time Lords and pick your two favorites. Or you can go with some Classic Who Time Lords whose fates are never addressed.

Two words in length-Ford Prefect’s entry on Earth in the Guide canonically is ‘mostly harmless’