Time Lords in the new series

In the new series, the Doctor is the last of the Time Lords when we first meet him. The Time Lords and the Daleks went to war and destroyed each other totally. The Doctor refers to it as the Time War, we know that the final event was at Arkadia and that Davros flew into the Midnight Child and was destroyed.

The Daleks at various stages in the evolution attempted time travel, with varying degrees of success, and the Time Lords often tried to stop them from getting full time travel. We can only guess that the Daleks finally got there and this time they were too much for the Time Lords.

We know very little about the Time War, only hints. It nearly destroyed the time-space continuum and it’s been time-locked so that nothing can enter or escape it. Including Daleks and Time Lords…or so they thought. There are also hints that the Doctor played a key role in whatever finally happened to finish the Time War.

The Doctor we meet in Rose is newly regenerated (we think) and emotionally damaged by the Time War. The isolation of being the last of the Time Lords is a big theme throughout the series and affects a lot of his decisions, as does his hatred for the Daleks and the pain of whatever he had to do at the end of the War.

The loss of the Time Lords also means that a lot of the actions they took to police and repair time is no longer happening. The Doctor is picking up the slack where he can but even he cannot do everything – in Father’s Day we find out that events such as Rose changing history would normally have been cleaned up by the Time Lords and the Doctor can’t do everything.

In the Christmas/New Year 2009 special, attempts are made to undo the time lock and return the Time Lords. Despite the Doctor’s mourning for his race, he prevents this from happening. The Time Lords from the original series were not always white hats and the Doctor makes it clear that they did some dreadful things during the War, becoming corrupted by it so that they simply aren’t safe to have in the universe anymore.

There are two Time Lords seen in that episode that appear to have some kind of connection to the Doctor and be working against the Time Lords in their efforts to undo the time lock, but we don’t know who they are. Fan speculation is that one of them may be the Doctor’s mother.