FEATURE BY JOHN J JOHNSTON
The Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) and the Vicar (Peter Halliday) lay the Hand of Omega to rest in Remembrance of the Daleks (1988).
The Master (Peter Pratt) approaches Gallifrey’s Eye of Harmony in The Deadly Assassin (1976).
The stellar engineer Omega, one of the key figures in Time Lord history, meets the Doctors (Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee) in The Three Doctors (1972-73).
The Moment, the most powerful weapon ever created by the Time Lords, in The Day of the Doctor (2013).
For many millions of years, the Time Lords of Gallifrey have held a preeminent position in the universe as a race of tremendous scientific knowledge and technological ability. Their relationship with technology is, however, highly complex…
Gallifrey’s technological zenith appears to have been in its ancient past, when the planet’s scientific ascendancy was ensured by the solar researches of the pioneering engineer Omega. Creating a supernova by means of a remote stellar manipulator (ostentatiously, though perhaps unsurprisingly, named the Hand of Omega), he provided his people with an enormous power source and made their proposed time experiments a reality.
In Remembrance of the Daleks (1988) it’s revealed that the Doctor has hidden the Hand of Omega in 1963 London. The device is a large, tarnished, metallic sarcophagus structure, with a low degree of sentience but capable of autonomous movement and able to respond to the Doctor’s verbal instructions. In addition to destroying Skaro’s sun, the Hand is capable of bestowing, through undisclosed means, increased strength and hitherto unrealised destructive properties upon an unremarkable baseball bat.
Following the apparent demise of Omega in the conflagration resulting from the Hand’s original detonation, the earliest Time Lords misused their burgeoning technological powers disgracefully. Their Time Scoop was capable of gathering groups and individuals from across time and space and depositing them in Gallifrey’s ‘Death Zone’. In this damp and inhospitable terrain, enclosed within a largely impenetrable force field, ‘lesser species’ were forced to engage in gladiatorial combat for the amusement of the nascent Time Lord culture.
This obscene practise was apparently ended by Rassilon. Though primarily an engineer and an architect, his influence on political and social matters encouraged later Time Lords to view him as the true founder of their society. Rassilon refined and perfected Omega’s initial scientific developments by stabilising all the elements of a black hole and setting them in an eternally dynamic equation against the mass of the planet – thus creating the Eye of Harmony, from which all the power of the Time Lords, from time travel to regeneration, would derive.
During this period the Time Lords sought to protect themselves by designing ever greater weapons of enormous destructive power. The living, sentient metal validium, originated by Omega and finessed by Rassilon, could be fashioned into any form and accidentally arrived on Earth in 17th-century Windsor. Although the Doctor succeeded in launching the material back into space (in a continuous 25-year orbit around the Earth), its baleful influence nevertheless had a catastrophic effect on Earth events. Though largely passive, the validium, fashioned into a statue of Jacobean sorceress Lady Peinforte and given the name Nemesis, was capable of full conversational interaction, including the disclosure of secrets from Gallifrey’s ancient past.