The White Guardian
The scene in Chapter Two when the White Guardian appears inside the Tardis was a unique moment which set up the course of both
Eve of the Eternal and the story arc encompassing the whole series of
The Perennials. Much of what goes on in this scene reflects everything I feel that
Doctor Who overlooked, and much of what I think should be said concerning the Time Lords, the Time War, and what happens next. Much of the discussion here began as conversations I had with my brothers and my mother after we saw the last few episodes of Series 4. I think I've mentioned before that I wasn't very happy with the conclusion of Series 4, the reasons for which I may discuss in a later post.
The White Guardian was a character who first appeared in
The Ribos Operation, a Fourth Doctor episode which aired in 1978. In that episode, the Guardian sent the Doctor on a long and dangerous mission to retrieve the segments of the legendary Key to Time; the Doctor was of course successful, but in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of the evil Black Guardian, he disassembled the Key and scattered its remnants. The nature of the Guardians of Time isn't ever fully explained in
Doctor Who, nor have they appeared in the new series, but they are connected to the Eternals, and wield an almost god-like power. It is implied that the Time Lords, or at least the Doctor, had heard of the Guardians before the Doctor encountered the White Guardian, but aside from the different roles of different such Guardians, their role in the Universe was never made completely clear, except that they will remain in those roles until the Universe no longer needs them.
In
The Perennials, the White Guardian appears to herald the coming of a new era in the history of the Universe, a post-Gallifrey era, which he cryptically calls the "Age of the Perennials." Here the Guardian also links his first meeting with the Doctor to his survival of the Time War, and that for a reason yet unexplained, he has again chosen the Doctor for a special mission, a bigger one than the previous quest for the Key of Time: a designated protector and champion of the Universe in this new age. The Doctor's role as a protector was always unofficial and hit-and-miss before; now there's something bigger going on which the Guardian doesn't clarify. All the Guardian tells the Doctor is that he will not be alone in this mission: there will be two others with the same role, who the Doctor has already met.
The identities of these other protectors are not disclosed in the chapter, but are heavily implied. One is stranded on Earth for the time being, the other is trapped outside space-time. It's obvious enough.
I also thought the scene was important because of the Guardian's words concerning the Time War, especially his remark that there was only one significant difference between humans and Time Lords: that humans understand that they are mortal. It is a sharp rebuke to the Time Lords as a whole, including the Doctor, for their previous arrogance and presumptions concerning time itself and their role with regards to time. The Time War was the fault of the Time Lords; but another important point is the revelation that the Doctor was not actually the only survivor. This is elaborated on in a later story, but nonetheless, even if more Time Lords survived, the civilization they built is destroyed and will never rise again. They have lost their powers and their privileges.
When I began the revision of
Eve of the Eternal, I considered cutting this scene; but in the end I decided against it because there was too much of import.
Rose in Captivity
"Bloody, self-repairing ships!"
-- The Doctor, Eve of the Eternal
Imagine waking up to learn that you've been living in a dreamscape for literally thousands of years; and that you were in that state because a computer had hijacked your mind and was using your own subconscious to subdue you. Still better, that computer's purpose is to run the operations of a ship that is drifting outside of space-time. And finally, said computer, in an effort to keep you alive and permanently enslaved in this manner, had rewritten your DNA to make sure you would never age.
This is Rose Tyler, also and henceforth known as Amaranthine. This is what the Doctor, Donna, Martha, and Jack find in the Void Ship Eternal.
As explained in the previous post, Rose shouldn't have survived her fall into the Void at all, and everyone rightly thought she didn't. Even she knows she should have died, and it was only through a fluke that she survived. In fact, were it not for the timely actions of her rescuers, Rose wouldn't have survived. The lack of oxygen in the Void in of itself was fatal, but what ultimately destroyed her wasn't suffocation, but the effect of both concrete and abstract nothingness upon her conscious mind. Her rescuers immediately put her on life support in an effort to repair her, both in body and in mind. And that's how this all started.
The reason for her enslavement is similar to the plot of The Girl in the Fireplace. The Void Ship she is trapped on was severely damaged when the Daleks trapped in the Void attacked it in a desperate effort to escape the nothingness of their prison. When the mainframe's primary memory base was destroyed in the attack, only four operations remained intact: the self-defense, which successfully destroyed the Dalek invaders, though nearly was itself destroyed in the process; the life-support systems, which enabled the ship to maintain a livable environment despite the damage; the backup data; and finally the self-repair systems. These four operations survived because they were independent systems of the mainframe. When the Dalek threat was eliminated, the self-repair system came on, but just as was the case in The Girl in the Fireplace, it had to find some replacement of the primary memory base, so it could restore the backup, and they found it: the damaged but reparable brain of Rose Tyler.
The difference between this and the scenario in The Girl in the Fireplace is that, with regard the latter, the self-repair did not need to physically remove her brain from her body (thank heavens). Her captivity is of a cybernetic nature, but she is not a bionic zombie like a Cyberman; her situation is more like her possession by Cassandra O'Brien in New Earth. The mainframe of the Eternal took over Rose's mind, and Rose herself, her consciousness, was tucked away into her subconscious, where she'd remain asleep and unaware of what had happened to her.
The irony of this is that her cybernetic imprisonment originated as a life-support system, coupled with a neural repair system similar in nature to nanogenes. In the above picture, the implants you see on Rose's face and neck weren't originally instruments to force her into a dream state; they were designed to keep her alive after her fall into the Void.
Dreamscape
The mainframe, designated Eve, subdues Rose by keeping her in her subconscious mind, an easy feat, since her subconscious was the only part of her mind that survived exposure to the Void undamaged. Eve has no control over Rose's subconscious, which is completely subject to her rules, her mode of thinking. But Rose's consciousness, already in a very inert, comatose state because of those few seconds in the Void, is easily transferred to her subconscious without her being aware of there ever being a transfer. Thus, as Eve slowly repairs her neurons, and Rose's consciousness begins to build up again, it is like she was reborn in a dreamscape, and she knows nothing else; she doesn't even consciously remember who she is. But while her conscious memory was severely damaged along with the rest of her conscious mind, as she lives in the dreamscape, her old memories buried in her subconscious start bleeding through in different dream constructions; familiar images to her, starting with the most fundamental, those she has known the longest, that formed who she was, such images as her mother and father and Mickey, or the Powell Estate; then over time they start building up to more recent images just as significant, like the Doctor and the Tardis. Some images are more subtle, like the wolf. Others are more overt, like Cybermen or Daleks. But the point is, though her memories aren't conscious, they aren't nonexistent.
In the captivity of her subconscious, Rose can't quite connect the happenings of time, and so she is only vaguely aware of time passing. She lives in a haze, with the subconscious sometimes reminding her of reality, but her conscious mind, for a very long time, was too heavily damaged to think beyond that. But Eve, in the process of repairing Rose's neurons, slowly rebuilds the possibility of a conscious mind, and over time Rose begins to remember who she is; but just as in the film Inception, the dreams feel real to her while she's living in the dreamscape, even though some elements of those dreams don't quite follow the rules of the real world. For the first stage of her captivity, Eve doesn't even need to attempt to control Rose's subconscious; her subconscious mind, with the lack of a conscious mind, has already subdued her.
Ethrae
When Rose begins to become aware again, Eve constructs the world of Ethrae, which Rose finds herself in during intervals in which she slips from the dreamscape. Ethrae, heavily based on a real alien world, is meant to fill Rose with a feeling of quiet and comfort. Rose is still mostly in a state of sleep throughout all this, and she remains asleep for a very long time, but when she starts to awaken, she finds herself in Ethrae, and over time she starts to accept this as the real world, but don't forget that she's still only half conscious during these intervals.
Thus Rose's captivity is set to a perfect system, so flawless that for a very long time Rose isn't consciously aware that she's even in captivity; then the disruption starts. Something external starts to occur within the Void that starts shaking Rose from her incredibly long sleep. The source of the disruption will be revealed in a later story, but it opens a second breach in the Void, one strong enough to pull a dysfunctional Void Ship into reality; this doesn't immediately happen, but it's a heavy enough disruption that even Eve cannot hide the real world any longer. For the first time in a very long time, Rose Tyler awakens. She comes into full consciousness, remembering who she is, where she is, and how she came to be there. Ethrae is revealed to be an elaborate illusion which was planted in Rose's head to distract her from reality. It is a consciousness Eve cannot tuck away anymore; it's embedded in both the conscious and subconscious mind. Rose, for the first time, is aware of her situation, and she knows how to fight back.
The Void Ship
Rose survived the Void because of a fluke: she was rescued seconds after her fall by a second Void Ship, a very different one from the sphere she and the Doctor encountered at Canary Wharf. The existence of the spherical Void Ship was a surprise to the Doctor, who had always thought Void travel to be purely theoretical, but somehow the Daleks had built one; yet it always puzzled me that the Daleks, devoid of imagination as a general rule, had managed to build something that the Time Lords hadn't thought possible. The explanation given in Eve of the Eternal isn't that the Cult of Skaro invented the technology; they stole it and used it to create a crude imitation of a masterpiece of space-time manipulation: an existential vessel.
Such ships are the invention of the Helials, an alien race/empire almost as ancient as the Time Lords and just as powerful; the Helials were never a problem for the Doctor before because they and the Time Lords were locked in a sort of cold war for many thousands of years, each avoiding the other because of their fear of the other. The only thing the Time Lords had, which the Helials did not, was an intrinsic connection with the Time Vortex; so while the Time Lords mastered time travel and time manipulation, Helial science took a totally different direction. The Helials became largely interdimensional by nature. They had a stronger connection with the Void than with the Time Vortex. This is why the Helials perfected a technology the Time Lords thought impossible.
The Doctor generally kept away from the Helials' empire, as did most Time Lords; but during the Time War they tried to forge an alliance with the Helials, only to find that they'd vanished. This disappearance was a great mystery to the TIme Lords; while they were not the only civilization to vanish during the Time War, the odd thing about the Helials' disappearance was that only the race and some of its technolgoy was gone; but their cities and colonies remained. The species vanished, not the civilization. Furthermore, the Time Lords never found out what happened exactly, not until the events of Eve of the Eternal. Without the knowledge of such a technology as Void travel, the Time Lords didn't realize that the Helials hadn't vanished from existence; they had vanished from the universe. They had hidden their entire race inside the Void, and they witnessed Rose's entry into the Void. They rescued her, not out of altruism, but to find out why a human, of all things, had been pulled into their hiding place.
There are a number of important differences between the Daleks' Void Ship and the Helials' Void Ship, the most obvious being its shape. The Daleks chose a simple spherical shape; the Helials a more complex polyhedric shape, the truncated icosahedron. A Helial Void Ship is bigger on the inside, like a Tardis; but the Daleks do not possess the intellect or imagination to build such a structure. The Dalek Void Ship had no navigation; but Helials have no difficulty controlling when or where they emerge from the Void. A Dalek Void Ship cannot enter the Void without breaching the walls of the universe; but a fully functional Helial Void Ship can easily slide through those walls without causing significant damage. And most strikingly, a Dalek Void Ship is just a ship; but a Helial Void Ship, because its inside is a different dimension from the outside, can externally transform into a singularity, a black hole, without causing damage to its inside. Of course, this ability ideally is used in outer space, because like all black holes, anything that crosses the event horizon will be pulled in and destroyed. If a Void Ship went into singularity mode on the surface of a planet, it would probably destroy or severely damage that planet.
Of course, the Helials hiding in the Void implies that they could come back out. But that's a story for later.
