#will remove upon request

Apocrypha on the Killer Cats

THE GIANT CATS     -16,000,000

The first intelligent mammalians on Gallifrey evolved from its version of the sabre-toothed Tiger. These giant cats developed a rudimentary form of empathic communication, which allowed them to influence the actions of their prey.

Over an extended period of time, the cats developed a finer telepathic ability, allowing them to actually control other species. This became a necessity as feline culture grew, as their physiological form prevented the use of tools to build or write with. Thus, in spite of their intelligence, the cats could not establish a true civilisation without anthropoid assistance.

FELINOID CIVILISATION     -14,000,000

Early Gallifreyan hominids soon became the tools of feline culture. The first buildings on the planet were built by hominids but designed by cats, taking the form of vast stone arenas, in which the cats would use lesser species for sport - hunting and killing for pleasure rather than survival.

HOMINIDS     -14,000,000/-13,980,000

Forced to live alongside saurian and feline predators, Gallifrey's first hominid tribes evolved as creatures of guile and stealth. Communities were established using primitive communications. These hominids were the cave-people, the tree-people, and the river-people.

THE FALL OF THE GIANT CATS     -13,980,000

The hominid tribes had at first been easy prey for the cats, easily manipulated as a supply of muscle and food. Ultimately, however, the development of feline culture accelerated the development of hominid culture. Being made to use their hands and having the telepathic parts of their minds manipulated awakened a new sense of purpose within them. Seeing the cats as their slavers, they rebelled, exposing the cats to a coup so bloody that the species was all but wiped from the face of the planet.

THE LEGEND OF THE VANISHING CATS     -13,800,000

It is rumoured that, after their defeat by the hominids, the giant cats fled to the mountains, where they hoped to restore their numbers (perhaps in an effort to restore their power over the hominids). Often hunting parties would venture into these mountains, bringing back the occasional cat. It seemed that the mental strength of the hominids had come to match their feline contemporaries.

Other psychic powers were attributed to the cats, including the power of teleportation. In Gallifrey's southern hemisphere, atop one of its highest mountains, there stands a crudely erected stone circle. Gallifreyan archaeologists determined that this was built by the cats themselves. Legend states that the giant cats emigrated by mass teleportation to another worlds. Few giant cats were seen from this time on, and those that did appear bore no telepathic powers. However, smaller domestic cats, or Kitlings, retained this ability.

WHY LINK THE KITLINGS FROM 'SURVIVAL' WITH THE KILLER CATS OF GALLIFREY?

The 'cat' theme is one that has been expanded on greatly in recent years. Colin Baker's cat motif and 'I am the cat that walks alone' slogan, followed by Eric Saward's novelisation of 'Slipback', set a pace followed by 'Survival' and the 'Cat's Cradle' trilogy.

Upon learning about 'The Killer Cats of Ginseng' by David Weir, everything seemed to fit into place. Cats can't exist everywhere in the universe, they have to come from somewhere - we have Earth cats, and Gallifrey has telepathic or empathic cats, just like the Kitlings.

Commentary

Since the 90s, a few stories have referenced the killer cats idea. Gary Russell’s VMA Invasion of the Cat-People mentions “mercenaries of Gin-Seng” alongside the Cheetah People in a list of felinoid species (hence the “canonical” spelling); there’s a similar offhand mention in Big Finish’s Erasure. But there’s only been one actual appearance of one of the cats: Daniel O’Mahony’s Faction Paradox short story “The Return of the King” (pdf).

“The Return of the King” is a prelude to the author’s 2008 novel Newtons Sleep. In that book there’s a glimpse of “the nocturnal delegations of the wild things, whose sharp bright teeth and claws gleamed in the dark of their robes.” The prelude elaborates,

[Time Lord Thessalia’s] oracle stays at the window, seething playfully below his hood. He has fiercely intelligent eyes, neither as sharp nor as bright as his scar. His mouth is a succulent white smile in a lightless face. His people have nothing but contempt for the rituals of the Great Houses. She’s little better than prey to him, a bloodless snack for his long teeth and hungry mind. He breathes, honeyed air purring out of the cavities of his body.

A killer cat kept as a Time Lord’s personal oracle … as @rassilon-imprimatur​ once noted, a funny recontextualization of The Mark of the Rani’s reference to the Lord President’s “pet cat”!

This was my first exposure to the killer cats, so I always took it for granted that they’d always had psychic or oracular abilities. But in fact, as best as I can tell, there was zero hint of this in the original serial. I tracked down every published description of the story, and they all amount to the same few repeated bits of information: Gallifrey, humanoid cats, and a gladiatorial arena. Richard Bignell ultimately told me, “No summary of Killers of the Dark exists. Even David Weir couldn’t recall anything about it when I spoke to him.”

So when “The Return of the King” features an oracular cat-man, it’s not just a reference to the unmade Classic serial. It’s a reference to fan interpretations like Middleton’s which canonweld that serial with the psychic Cheetah People.

And in some ways, it seems to be referencing Middleton’s version specifically! In “The Return of the King”, the above quoted memory is interrupted by commentary:

Your first oracle? ‘My last.’ You think? But his kind were vanishing from the world. ‘They were escaping the War. They could see it coming.’

Compare:

Legend states that the giant cats emigrated by mass teleportation to another worlds. Few giant cats were seen from this time on, and those that did appear bore no telepathic powers.

And so Middleton explains how the cats vanished in O’Mahony’s telling, and O’Mahony explains why they vanished.

Afterword

While we’re on the topic of why, why did O’Mahony choose to revive this specific idea in “The Return of the King”?

One of the places I checked for Killers of the Dark details was issue 336 of Doctor Who Magazine. Imagine how thrilled I was to find that the relevant “Accidental Tourist” piece, located one page after a Faction Paradox ad, was written by none other than O’Mahony himself!

Part of his reflection was particularly striking. He recaps the wild undefinedness of the Doctor’s backstory, a topic I’ve discussed before on this blog. But in his telling, the uncertainty extends past The War Games all the way to The Deadly Assassin.

After all, The War Games declared that “the Doctor’s people are the Time Lords”, but “who are the Time Lords?” was still left undefined. In the Time Lords’ many subsequent appearances, they were simply walking plot devices, and lore details were left to the wayside. Contradictions were rife. Who was Rassilon to Omega? Is their planet called “Gallifrey” or “Jewel”? Who or what on earth are the “First”, “Second”, and “Third Time Lord” who exiled the Doctor?

It was The Deadly Assassin which first dove into the details by featuring the Time Lords like they were any other of the show’s alien cultures. And for this, it was widely panned: “the fans had voted it the worst story of Season Fourteen and published reviews vociferously attacking its ‘betrayal’ of the Time Lords. The BBC practically disowned it, physically vandalising the master tape to placate Mary Whitehouse.” In other words, the stage was all set for a discarding of Holmes’ Time Lords.

O’Mahony writes in his conclusion,

The Deadly Assassin could have remained a one-off, its vision of the Doctor’s homeworld set at odds not just with the Gallifrey stories of the past but also those of the future. The Killer Cats of Geng Singh was the last chance to slip the leash. Williams loved the Time Lords but he had a raft of other ideas he could have put into play, not least the frustratingly deferred Guardians who were clearly intended as a new rung of the series cosmology above and beyond the Time Lords. The premise of Killer Cats was also to counterpoint the Time Lords with another Gallifreyan species – a race of humanoid cats that delighted in bloodthirsty gladiatorial contests alongside a highly refined culture. This wasn’t cribbing from The Deadly Assassin, this was building something new that would expand the newly-forged mythology of the series. In fact, with the cat-people on board and the Guardians waiting in the wings, the possibilities for Time Lord mythology were fluid. It might be possible to return to Gallifrey and find something new and exciting each time, different Gallifreys, with a mutable and ever-expanding history.

However, thanks to Killers of the Dark’s cancellation, Williams and Read were left with a slot to fill on short notice, and for The Invasion of Time they ultimately turned back to Holmes’ ideas. The Deadly Assassin wasn’t discarded or undermined, it was reentrenched.

This was the real moment that the Time Lords as we know them were crystallized: a real-world anchoring of the thread. This was when the whimsically-named planet “Gallifrey” definitively transformed into the rationalistic, stagnant, bureaucratic Homeworld that would feature in the Faction Paradox series.

Because in FP, by the time Grandfather Paradox enters the scene, the Great Houses are total strangers to whismy. It’s only through the course of the War that their understanding of the cosmos is broadened and stranger things begin to return to the Homeworld (with great vengeance).

By showing us a cat in the flesh, O’Mahony is finishing the housekeeping: just as the Intuitive Revelation banished the Pythia, the Eremites, and the Carnival Queen; just as the Grey Eminence unwrote Gallifrey’s first childbirth; and just as the Eternals “despaired of this reality, and fled their hallowed halls” at first hint of conflict – the Killer Cats have to leave to set the scene for the War to come.

P.S.

Relevant entries from Apocrypha

THE INVASIONS     -12,188,000/-12,150,250 (112,000/149,750 Q)

After thousands of years separated from the rest of the galaxy, the Time Lords found that, for each culture that died, more new ones would arise. With the expansion of so many civilisations, Time Lord secrecy could not be enforced. A string of increasingly dangerous attacks upon Gallifrey were launched by successive cultures, all of whom knew of the legend of the Time Lords.

BLACK MOUNTAIN     -12,150,250 (149,750 Q)

As invasions against Gallifrey became more frequent and, potentially, more dangerous, a young Arcalian Cardinal named Tegorak rose to prominence.

Tegorak (whose name meant “Black Mountain”) called for a positive means of defending Gallifrey. In the midst of a particularly nasty invasion by a race known as the Sybarils, the old President was killed, naming Tegorak as his successor. Thus, at 330, Tegorak became the youngest President ever. Taking up a sword and donning the battle armour of an ancient Gallifreyan Warlord, he was forced to carry the battle to the steps of the Citadel itself. The last of the Sybaril invaders [pictured below – ed.] fell as an emergency meeting of the High Council was called.

THE GREAT CRUSADE     -12,150,204 (149,796 Q)

President Tegorak decreed that the preservation of Gallifreyan society could only be achieved by setting up a line of defence surrounding Kasterborus. To do this, all planets within the constellation would need to be controlled by the Time Lords. Recruiting a small army from the normal Gallifreyan populace, he took his fleet to the worlds neighbouring Gallifrey. There he recruited a vast mercenary army, establishing a number of defensive outposts.

Resentful of the new President’s policies, some worlds in Kasterborus moved against the Time Lords, having to be dealt with in what was described as a ‘necessarily bloody manner’.

THE BETRAYAL     -12,150,200 (149,800 Q)

While Tegorak was away the Matrix Lords made contact with Chancellor Garlan, ruler of Gallifrey in the President’s absence. Projecting images of a bloody future in which Time Lord society would be supplanted by the mercenary followers of Tegorak (who would go on to form a vast cosmic empire), the Matrix Lords convinced him that Tegorak would have to die.

Garlan dispatched an assassin to kill the President. The attempt failed, and Tegorak returned to discuss the attempt on his life with his fellow Time Lords. In the mean time, Garlan had convinced the remainder of the High Council of the threat that Tegorak now posed. So, when the President arrived to address the Panopticon, he was shot down by his fellow Time Lords.

THE ESCAPE     -12,150,200 (149,800 Q)

Avoiding death by use of the Presidential Time Ring, Tegorak returned to his TARDIS where he was forced to regenerate. Fearing his bloody revenge (he was easily capable of destroying Gallifrey), Garlan turned to the Matrix Lords for guidance. Rassilon himself intervened, and laid a trap for Tegorak, preventing him from taking any action against Gallifrey.

WHERE DO ‘BLACK MOUNTAIN’ AND ‘THE GREAT CRUSADE’ COME FROM?

Essentially, these are creations of my own, taken from a storyline that I have. Basically, Rassilon cannot, in Gallifrey’s 12 Million year history, be the only hero of Time Lord society. Black Mountain is the Gallifreyan equivalent of Alexander the Great, carving out a space empire to guarantee the safety of his own people. He is Julius Caesar, Charlemagne and King Arthur, an allegorical character who did nothing but good for his people, and who was repaid with betrayal by his closest friends.

Commentary

With the exception of my editorial comment (marked in brackets with “– ed.”), the quotes above come from Apocrypha issue 2 pages 4, 5, and 29. Regarding the dates next to each event, I’ll share Middleton’s original explanation in a future post, but the short version is that “-12,150,200” means 12,150,200 BC, and “Q” refers to years after Rassilon’s founding of Time Lord society.

Besides the namedrop of Tegorak in The Infinity Doctors, I don’t think the “Black Mountain” has been mentioned in any other official Doctor Who sources – although please tell me if I’m missing something!

But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t had any impact. Just one page before Apocrypha introduces Tegorak, it summarizes the story of another outsider Lord President who was exiled and then gathered a mercenary army to attack Gallifrey: Morbius, from the Classic serial The Brain of Morbius. It’s hard not to notice the parallels – and I think there are clear signs that the Tegorak story influenced later depictions of the Morbius Presidency.