Eighth One Bound

Sylvester McCoy / Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd

Bonus Sylv in Vision On and doing Harry Houdini's straightjacket escape

Shouldn't we do something, Professor?

'Tis done.

Heroically rescues the virgin sacrifice with style and charm:

Also rescues the sacrifice, but gives the sacrifice a thorough scolding about managing to get into this frightful pickle in the process:

Sneaks in disguised as the cult leader, throws back their hood, and gleefully sics the eldritch spirit that was summoned on the cult, before also rescuing the sacrifice. All persons involved think they're way scarier than the thing that appeared in the circle:

Still have marks from being chained to that marble slab:

Ace: I think he's still with us.

Doctor: You did well.

Ace: Sure. He's right though.

Doctor: What do you mean?

Ace: No colored signs in 1963, Pakis out and petrol bombs in my time, now it's the future and it's ethnic cleansing. Nothing changes, does it?

Doctor: Forty years ago, Harper wouldn't have even been out of the ordinary. It does change, you know? Never completely, never all at once, but it does.

Ace: But when?

Doctor: Are you looking for the butterfly?

Ace: What, the one who beats its wings and tips the balance so the hurricane forms? There isn't one, is there?

Doctor: Not often. We just tell the butterflies that to keep them happy.

Ace: Should've known.

Doctor: No, mostly they break the butterfly on the wheel of time. But over the decades and millions of butterflies, the weather still changes somehow. That's time. A million, multicolored pieces of time.

The Actual Text, Posted Online for the First Time

A generous friend has shared with me the full text of “Gallifrey: Notes on the Planet’s Background” – Andrew Cartmel, Ben Aaronovitch, and Marc Platt’s original outline of their masterplan for the Doctor’s origins – as printed in Virgin Books’ 1996 Doctor Who: A History of the Universe. Please see also Lance Parkin’s explanatory footnote and my commentary beneath!

The planet Gallifrey, world of the Time Lords in the constellation of Kasterborous, is one of the oldest and most powerful oligarchies in the universe. Its political and scientific influence is prevalent throughout the cosmos. But it is a world apart. Its power is substantially used for observation rather than involvement. Over the millennia, its self-imposed isolation has made it a staid and decaying society, obsessed with its own self-importance and tradition. It was not always so…