Wolves Run Free wrote:I would have adored an episode about the Doctor as a child and his general life beforehand.
Where did he like to play? How were time lords born, and did they grow as children or just regenerate as time went on? Did the Doctor have any best friends? Who was his wife, brothers and sisters, children?
So many questions, haha. x3
A few of those have been answered at least in part. :3 As a child he liked to play outside in the fields, watch the stars with his father, and go exploring up the mountain he lived on (Mount Perdition, I think) and talk with an old hermit who lived up there, and he'd often play with his best friend Koschei, whose father had a large estate on Mount Perdition. The Doctor's childhood name was Theta Sigma of the House of Lungbarrow (and Koschei, aka the Master, was of the House of Oakdown). He and Koschei were both bullied as children, and Koschei was almost killed by bullies when he was seven but was saved by Theta, who accidentally killed the boy who was attacking them and ended up giving Koschei up to Death to save himself. This was implied to be why the Doctor is so obsessive about trying to save the Master, as he blames himself for Koschei becoming corrupted by Death's influence.
Once he was in the Academy, he and Koschei formed a group/gang with eight other young Time Lords of the Prydonian Chapter and called themselves the Deca. I can't remember all their names offhand, but there was Ushas (became the Rani), Millennia (who died), Rallon (became the Toymaker's host and died), Mortimus (became the Meddling Monk), Drax, and the one who became the War Lord (seen in the episode 'War Games'). Most of the Deca who survived to adulthood became renegades - Drax and the other two I can't remember were the only ones who became productive members of Time Lord society.
The Doctor had at least one brother, Braxiatel, who was almost certainly who the Doctor was referring to in 'Smith and Jones' when Martha asked if he had a brother ("No, not anymore"). Apart from that... Time Lord families are a very confused issue - they're either born and raised completely like humans, or they're all the product of a cloning device called a Loom that creates them full-grown from a DNA soup and puts them in groups of 'Cousins', with the Doctor being a reincarnation of the Other and getting called 'Wormhole' because he's the only Time Lord with a navel. Err, yeah. Apparently this version of Time Lord reproduction came around because it was thought the Doctor was no longer special enough compared to the other Time Lords, so they came up with... that. >.> However, most of the stories and the TV episodes strongly establish that they have regular families, are born from their parents, and grow up as children, and the whole Looming debacle is never mentioned. The Doctor's mother may have been a human at one time, as in the movie he said he was 'half human on his mother's side' and apparently had a few minor quirks of human biology - the Time Lords could change humans into Time Lords and seemed to have no problem with marrying humans, so it's entirely possible the Doctor's mother started out human and was later changed.
Regeneration seems to be an innate process (as Jenny and River were able to regenerate without training), but in the Academy the Time Lords were taught how to control it and consciously shape their appearance. The Doctor is very bad at it and has essentially no control over how he looks after regeneration, while others like Romana, the Master and the Rani can choose exactly how they want to look - Romana in particular changed her appearance drastically several times in a row before becoming an exact replica of someone else because she liked the look ("I thought it looked very nice on the princess. The arms are a bit long but I could always take them in."). And why did she regenerate? She felt like it. That's... basically all there was to it - she was bored of being Romana I and wanted a change. Complete opposite of Ten there. X3 Different Time Lords seem to have taken very different approaches to the whole regeneration issue, with the Doctor being unusually clingy to his incarnations.
