The Doctor was born about a thousand years ago to a Prydonian family that lived on South Gallifrey, in a house perched half-way up a mountainside. At the peak of the mountain lived a hermit in a cave. On one occasion when the Doctor was feeling crushed by some unknown misfortune, he climbed the mountain to seek guidance from the hermit. The holy man merely pointed to a small weed, and the Doctor saw it through his eyes—as absolutely glowing with life. The young Doctor understood the meaning of the older man’s message—that life isn’t something to be endured, but something we are given that must be treasured as long as we possess it. Over the years, the Doctor learned much from this hermit, including how to seek within himself for the truth. The hermit—who possessed a streak of humor unusual for a Time Lord—also enjoyed telling the Doctor ghost stories. In later years, the hermit also left Gallifrey, and once again encountered the Doctor, this time on the Earth.

At school, the Doctor committed many of the boyhood mischiefs normal for a Time Lord, such as building time jammers out of bric-a-brac in order to ruin the temporal experiments of others.

The Doctor, being a member of the Prydonian Chapter, attended the Academy, where he studied under many famous tutors, including Borusa. Among his contemporaries there were the Master, the Rani, and Drax. Since all three of these also left Gallifrey, we may wonder if there was not some form of student protest against the Hierarchy in those days. The Doctor finally graduated on the second attempt with 51% in the class of ’92. This low mark was not due to any lack of intelligence or skill, but to the fact that he was so easily distracted at the time, presumably by political causes. (His own excuse was that he was a late developer.) He was already about 300 years old at this time. Given that Romana graduated at about the age of 125, it would seem that the Doctor had deliberately drawn out his time at the Academy.

The Doctor soon decided that he could tolerate Gallifrey no longer. "I was bored," he admitted honestly to Jamie and Zoe. His people had immense power, but virtually never used it. They were mostly content simply to observe other species. They developed a strict rule against interference, and only violated this edict on special occasions, usually in order to answer some pressing circumstances. They outlawed the Scope because it imprisoned sentient beings for the amusement of jaded appetites and manipulated their lives. They destroyed the planet between Mars and Jupiter in the Solar System to try to isolate the Fendahleen. Generally, however, they stayed aloof from other races, and had a strict edict against any Time Lord violating this decision.

Initially, the Doctor was acting simply out of boredom—or so he claimed. He stole a TARDIS that was in the bays for repairs, and he and his granddaughter, Susan, fled Gallifrey in it. The Doctor had never piloted one of the TT Capsules before, and was forced to rely heavily on his notebooks for the codes of operation. System malfunctions didn’t help, and one gigantic failure of the entire TARDIS left the Doctor and Susan stranded for several months on Earth in 1963. Though he managed to perform makeshift repairs, the TARDIS didn’t work properly, and the loss of his notes on the prehistoric Earth sealed his fate to wander.

This suited the Doctor perfectly, as he had no set aims or destinations anyway. It also made tracking his progress considerably more difficult for the Time Lords.

He had begun his travels because of boredom, but he soon developed a new motivation. He came into contact with the presence of evil, and his carefully maintained Time Lord veneer of aloofness and indifference began to thaw as the Doctor came to know, understand and finally both like and admire his human traveling companions. It became impossible for him to stand on the sidelines and merely observe, as he had been trained to do. He witnessed evil forces at work—forces like the Yeti, the Quarks, the Cybermen and the Daleks. He became a passionate champion of justice, and sloughed off all of his old indifference. He had become a different person from the one who had left Gallifrey to escape boredom. He had also broken all of the Time Lords’ most sacred laws.

Finally, in his quest, he stumbled across the plans of the War Lord and his minions. Alien conquerors, they had joined forces with a renegade of the Doctor’s own race, a being known as the War Chief, who had given them SIDRAT machines he had stolen from Gallifrey. The War Lord had used them to steal soldiers from some of the Earth’s bloodiest wars, and took them to the various zones of an alien world. There the War Lord, the War Chief and the Security Chief had staged the War Games, designed to refine the kidnapped humans into an unbeatable force, with which they would then take over the Galaxy.

The Doctor managed to defeat their plans, but he was left in a very difficult dilemma. The SIDRATs had very limited travel life, and all but two had worn out. There was simply no way that he could return the kidnapped humans to their own time periods. His only choice was to call in the Time Lords for help.

Though he had cut off most of the contacts he had had with his own race, he still carried with him the pieces of a psychic beacon. Assembling this using telepathy, he encoded it with all of the information that the Time Lords needed to stop the Games and return the humans home. Unfortunately, it also enabled the Time Lords to trace him, and to hold him for trial.

When forced to intervene, the Time Lords could be most effective. They placed the War Lord on trial for his crimes of gross inhumanity. When he proved that they were correct in their reading of his ruthlessness and lack of remorse, they dematerialized him, erasing his past, so that it was as if he and his forces had never existed. They then threw a barrier around his home world, sealing the alien race forever from leaving their home and infecting the rest of the Galaxy.

Then it was the turn of the Doctor to stand trial for his actions. He didn’t merely defend himself; he attacked the Time Lords’ policy of strict non-interference. "While you have been content to observe the evil in the Galaxy, I have been fighting against it," he told them. He accused them of failing to use their great powers wisely.

"You have raised difficult issues," he was told. "We require time to think about them." In the end, the period of discussion was short. With certain reservations, the court agreed with the Doctor. There was evil in the Universe, and it should be fought against, not merely observed. The Doctor clearly had a role to play in this fight, and was definitely interested in continuing the war on evil he had begun. Accordingly, the Time Lords sentenced him to exile for his actions. They removed his knowledge of time travel, and confined his TARDIS to Earth in a small portion of the late twentieth century. They also imposed a regeneration upon him.

From time to time, they then called upon his help in certain missions. They began with small items, getting the Doctor to play little more than the role of messenger boy for them. Finally, after the Doctor saved the entire world of Gallifrey and the civilization of the Time Lords from destruction at the hands of Omega, they relented and restored his knowledge and freedom to travel in time and space. This was partly as a reward and partly because it had become obvious to them that the Doctor was much more useful to their policies when he was working as a free agent.

The Doctor has twice been appointed to the Presidency of the Time Lords. The first instance was during the affair of The Deadly Assassin when the Doctor presented himself as a candidate for the Presidency as a ploy to prevent his own execution. There was only one other candidate for the post, Goth, whose election was widely expected to be a mere formality. Instead, it was revealed that Goth was no more than a pawn being use by the Master, and Goth was casually slain when the Master’s plans went awry. Though the Master was defeated, the Doctor was thus left as the President elect by default.

Since the Doctor left Gallifrey almost immediately, he was never actually sworn in at the time as the President. In his place, Borusa became the Acting Chancellor, and ruled Gallifrey with the aid of the High Council. When the Doctor discovered the plans of the Vardans to invade Gallifrey after breaching the Matrix, he formulated a plan to defeat them that entailed his taking office as President. He was inducted into the post, and used it to defeat the Vardans and their masters, the Sontarans. Then he once again fled Gallifrey, leaving the task of ruling the planet in the hands of Borusa.

Borusa ultimately proved to be corrupt, and was removed from power by the direct intervention of the legendary Rassilon himself. The High Council then promptly appointed the Doctor once again to the Presidency in Borusa’s place. Rather than face the task of ruling Gallifrey, the Doctor appointed Lady Flavia to temporary power in his place, and went on the run once again.

This time, though, the Doctor was legally stricken from the office of the Presidency, since it was quite clear that he never aimed to take on the post. He was replaced by an unknown figure who proved to be probably the most corrupt President that the Time Lords have ever known. Both the President and the High Council were overthrown in a popular revolution. The Inquisitor asked the Doctor to stand for the Presidency once again, but the Doctor refused.

SPECULATION

The Doctor had managed to remain hidden from the Time Lords during his first and second incarnations. How he had managed this is unclear, since both the Elders and the Daleks had managed to track him down. Not only that, but another Time Lord, the Monk, also tracked the Doctor’s TARDIS through the Vortex. However, the Doctor eluded his fellow Time Lords until he was forced to summon their help. Once he had been found, the Time Lords could then use their current knowledge of the Doctor to trace his past adventures. They could then use this information to gain a time fix on both of the earlier incarnations of the Doctor.

By their own laws, they should not have interfered with the Doctor’s past life. The emergency with Omega, however, prevented them from abiding too closely by their own rules. They were forced to act retroactively upon the Doctor, and thus began their long process of altering the Doctor’s own history. It was now no longer possible for the Doctor simply to be another Time Lord. His own past had been changed, and he was in the process of being metamorphosed into something very different…

His previous incarnations now had a firm knowledge of their own future selves, and this was one that they retained in their contemporary lives. In The Five Doctors, for example, the second Doctor recalled the events that had happened in The Three Doctors—which were (theoretically) still in his own future. And in The Two Doctors, the second Doctor is sent on a mission for the Time Lords—who had never managed to actually trace him during his real lifetime. The final result of the Time Lords’ meddling in the Doctor’s lives was to manifest itself in the creation of the Valeyard.

The Doctor is no longer quite the Time Lord that he once was. He is, as it were, somewhat dislocated in time because of the actions of his own race. In the Trial of a Time Lord, the Doctor examines his own future and relates an adventure that will someday take place involving a companion, Mel. But by the end of his trial, Mel—with a full knowledge of what is supposed to be still future events for the Doctor—joins the Doctor as a companion. So not only the Doctor’s past has been changed, but also his own future.