"The Day of the Doctor" and Your Character (Spoilers!)

[The Doctor]

In the wake of watching The Day of the Doctor, I've discovered that at least one of my characters will need to have his history revised. And, I'm certain, I'm not the only one. Hence, this thread. Here we will brainstorm ways to fit the revelations from that episode into existing character histories without actually rewriting the character.

If you have ideas, post them. If you just want help reconciling your character, post that too. As always, any answers aren't so much "board canon" as "board canon as long as it's interesting". And while you'll see a lot of my writing here to start with, this is a brainstorming thread. If you've got a different take, throw it up anyway.

There will be spoilers here.

[The Doctor]

So, here's my basic thoughts on the subject. Nobody really has to change their character's history, because everyone thought that Gallifrey was destroyed. If your character died in the Time War, she still died. If you survived the War, you still survived and still thought Gallifrey was lost.

Reconciling The Day of the Doctor with The End of Time is a little tricky, but not impossible. Assume that the scenes of Rassilon vowing to burn the universe to transform the Time Lords into beings of pure thought happened. The "War Council" in The Day of the Doctor mentions that communications with the High Council had been lost. So, while Rassilon schemes to blow up the universe, the War Council focuses its efforts on making a final and hopeless stand.

Rassilon never got that communication from the Doctors. He doesn't know what the Doctor really did. He still sees the endless final instants of the War, and believes the Doctor damned them all.

[Rob "the Meddler" Goodfellow]

The Meddler, of course, is a textbook example of how The Day of the Doctor can make a character's history tricky. For the following reasons:

• The Meddler is on record, in multiple threads, as having been the architect of the Moment. (Which, as we now know from the series, was actually constructed by the ancient Time Lords.)
• The Meddler cracked open the Time War and returned with two people, the Specialist and the Could've-Been King.
• Meddler threads have described a singularity in Kastaborous, detectable only by advanced time-active civilizations, that contains the entirety of the Time War.

Note that this utterly ignores some things that are "headcanon" for me about how the last day of the War went down, and how it looked. Things like the Daleks throwing Gallifrey's two moons at the planet and blowing both their suns up are window dressing.

So, as an illustration of how this can be worked out, here are my thoughts:

1. The Meddler clearly isn't the architect of the Moment. But, he did still work out a way to time lock the entire history of a target (person, world, whatever). And it was part of Eleven's plan.

How? Well, you know how all 13 Doctors actually implemented hiding Gallifrey, right? Well, the first Doctor happened to mention something like "is it possible to time lock a world?" to the obsessive first Meddler. This happened long ago, back before either of them happened to leave Gallifrey. And that idea was ticking over in the Meddler's head ever since. Then, when the War Doctor and Ten and Eleven were getting ready to save Gallifrey, they made use of the Meddler's weapon.

(There was more to the Doctor's actions than just that, of course. But, why not make use of the obsessive self-proclaimed "greatest temporal engineer since the days of Rassilon" for some of the heavy lifting?)

Then, after the Meddler barely escaped, he was haunted by the "knowledge" that he'd built the weapon that murdered his people.

2 and 3. There's nothing stopping the Meddler from having entered the locked Time War. "Going home" isn't just a simple matter of going to Kastaborous and ending the lock. As Ten pointed out in The End of Time, there's more in there than just Gallifrey. The Daleks are there. And the Star of Degradation. The Nightmare Child. The Could've-Been King (uhm... oops). The Skaro Degradations. And a host of horrors primed to rip the universe to shreds.

So, two people? Dangerous, but not a huge deal. Everyone? Lunacy, even by the Meddler's standards.

[Deleted]

In lieu of these, I know you said you wanted Meddler to be Omega cloned and Loomed, so making Omega responsible for The Moment would make some sense. So while Meds could say he architected the Moment, he wouldn't be TOO far from the truth. PLus creates more character development on my part as the vaults are said to be the Omega Vaults.

Everybody else is fine, though. Zagreus escaped right when Rassilon was put in power, Cilla died around then as well, and the others weren't even involved.

[Rob "the Meddler" Goodfellow]

Getting my pedantic on for a moment, they were in the Omega Arsenal.

But, yeah. I'd overlooked that part. Which is sad, since the Master even mentioned it when we PMed earlier on the subject. ("I did say since the days of Rassilon..!")

[Valeyard]

The Valeyard, of course, knew the ending all along... ;] He just kept mum very nicely because breaking his timeline hurts.

And he will continue to keep mum until we know what's going down with the whole regeneration of Smith to Capaldi, and the future of Gallifrey. Then he might drop a few little hints...but probably not - he likes to be smug and infuriatingly vague, I think.

Presumably, he thinks (or knows) that the Matrix died before Arcadia fell.

So it affects my canon in a /big/ way, but nothing that can't be handled. Just please don't anyone I'm threading with retroactively comment on things he's said or thought about it before all this, because that's just bad manners!

The thing that's going to cause hiccups for my canon, actually, is "Trial of the Valeyard", which will be released very soon...and may be relegated to the shelf of "alternate timeline" if it doesn't quite fit with what's already established by the books and "He Jests at Scars"...


Same problem with my other muse, Vansell, actually. He doesn't know a thing about what happened to Gallifrey, so "Day of the Doctor" is no issue for him, but "Trial of the Valeyard" may alter things for that era of his canon...we shall see, I suppose!

[Deleted]

I don't think The Day of The Doctor hurts Phoenix's board canon all that much. Since she is Rassilon's daughter, her mission to vow revenge on The Doctor pretty much stands. Since it looked like Gallifrey got annihilated, then that's what she would think as well.

Her vendetta is getting more washed out though, which I really did intend to do anyway. She still has personal issues with The Doctor due to what he did with her father, even though dare she say it she really isn't too much fond of her father all that much anymore.

Unless someone informs her later on that Gallifrey really isn't "no more", and she's still going to be a tad bit moody about what happened. I suspect that the few Time Lords that survive would be. But Phoenix would probably be jump on the bandwagon to go search for Gallifrey and would probably join up *cringes* with a certain Doctor to do so.