A Big Damn Essay About Time Wars (Oh Boy)
This War Will Never Let Us Go; An Essay on Time Wars in Heaven and Criticism Thereof
"You think it’ll last forever. People and cars and concrete. But it won’t. One day it’s all gone. Even the sky. My planet’s gone. It’s dead. It burned like the Earth. It’s just rocks and dust. Before its time."
"What happened?"
"There was a war and we lost."
Russell T Davies, The End of The World (2005)
Like it or not, the Time War is now an "era," of Doctor Who.
The same as that of The Sixth Doctor's era, or the Eleventh Doctor's era, in 2005, the Time War as a concept became an intrinsic part of Doctor Who history. Introduced as an idea in Rose, we learn what the Time War was from Christopher Eccleston in The End of The World, and it serves as a critical emotional impact in the Doctor's character arc. An offseen trauma. This angle was meant to be probed, to be explored from a critical lens, but never necessarily explored physically. Russell T Davies almost confirms this with the extract "Doctor Who and The Time War," a short story released during the 2020 lockdown that may have been the climax of the war. It's a fragment of a text, filled with the same thing that the End of The World and future stories that reference the Time War would utilize. Some lovely poetic language, and a lot of smoke and mirrors. But to quote a bit of Star Wars, Russell T Davies is the creator of the Time War from a certain point of view.
The truth is that Time War stories were written quite a bit before that. The War in Heaven was a concept introduced by Lawrence Miles in his 1997 novel, Alien Bodies. In this essay, I'm not here to debate your face off with canon about whether or not this is the same War (in my mind it is, and also in my mind The Daleks and The Enemy are quite different, but that is academic) because the idea, regardless, is seeded.
What happens in a war when technology advances so much that everybody is Time Travelling the heck all over the place? A thing that is pretty hard to tell in a linear format, for one. So, technically, the Time War can't be explored. But with the introduction of The War Doctor, a monolithic figure in Doctor Who lore that pretty much everyone and their aunt knows about now, it's hard not to explore the Time War. For one, John Hurt is as much a Doctor as any other, and for another, it's too darn intriguing.
Time War stories are gonna be written no matter what.
So how exactly are you gonna do that well?
There have been some damn great Time War stories over the years that it's been explored - be it in the Eleventh Doctor's Titan Comics, Short stories in things like the Target Storybook, Novels like Engines of War and The Eighth Doctor Novels, audio plays Starring The Eighth and War Doctor's, Faction Paradox, or the three or four spinoffs (Gallifrey, War Master, and Susan's War, with more likely on the way.) That's a lot of way's this thing has been explored. Some of these stories do it really fricking well.
There have also been, as in most things, some pretty bad ones. I'm not going to cite them. I think that would be cruel, as I am but a struggling writer myself. I'm just going to point out the patterns. In this essay, I'm going to describe what makes a good Time War story - usually citing examples of quality tales and the pitfalls and things that work respectively within them. Why am I putting so much work into this when I could be doing literally any of my countless other writing projects? Is this a school thing?? No. I'm just psychotic.
Maybe take this all with a grain of salt.
Terry Nation's influence on Doctor Who is utterly indescribable. The Daleks (1963) was a replacement script for another script known as The Masters of Luxor. This is quite important. The Daleks both as a story and as a race of aliens, are absolutely indelible on the fabric of Doctor Who's lore. It is hard to believe that there would be a Doctor Who known to this day without the Daleks - I find it doubtful that the show would have had the success of Masters-of-Luxor-mania the same way Dalekmania swept Britain, and later, the world.
It is interesting then, that over time, the Daleks became synonymous with the same sort of stories, that they were molded into what we know them as today. The Doctor Who fan is used to the Daleks not necessarily guaranteeing brilliant perfect drama - rarely do we get stories as clever as that, after all, perfect is a personal term more than anything - and even more rarely is it done with the Daleks. There are many fricking Dalek stories. More and more of them come out each year. Not necessarily on television, but never stopping, never ceasing. Unlike the days of Classic Who, where previously aired stories were next to unobtainable, every TARDIS team in Doctor Who has a number of tales under their belt, many with newer and newer releases coming out. The release model has fundamentally changed. As time goes on, even classics like Genesis and Power do indeed have their imitators. My point is, that as Terry Nation became intrinsically connected to Doctor Who, so too did the stereotypical Classic Who story of a quarry somewhere, and two sides of the conflict, and the characters being kidnapped by one side of the conflict, escaping and being captured by the other side of the conflict.
This is the beginning of the problem with the Time War. The main preconception of which allows us to falter. The best stories do not treat the War as a battlefield. You can write a Terry Nation inspired story, and you can write a Time War story, but they should probably be quite different things - or else you risk bringing the big time ball into it and dullening the cool mystery that the Time War has. Perhaps, if you need to have your story take place during the Time War for reasons that you cannot change, introduce Time Weapons that have destabilized the landscape and resulted in a unique concept. Do not take the Time War as a reason to stop working on the worldbuilding of your environment, use it to further it.
Using seperate time periods to accentuate the character work of what is occurring during the battlefield is an effective strategy. Avoiding showing the Time War can help - while we see glimpses of the War in Day of The Doctor, and it is, indeed, Terry Nation-y, the majority of the story works despite this due to quality writing. Using multiple settings, whether it's done with time travel, as in Day, or perhaps Flashback, as used in John Dorney's Eighth Doctor Audio, One Life (2017), can indeed work wonders. The boxset Warbringer (2021) focuses on the War Doctor's character dynamic with Case and Veklin, two strongly characterized figures, and the moral dilemma that arises from their interaction. Even if a story isn't particularly Timey, it can still be effective - it's just much harder to do.
The stories that work on the forefront of the War and are, you know, good, are slimmer pickings than stories taking place elsewhere, which leads us largely to our next lesson.
The Esoteric - On Prose and Distance
"The War, and it remains at this stage, The War, not having enough of it's mass in a single region or era to be given a more specific title, has been in progress for more than fifty years...These have to be considered as definitive years, although there's certainly a span of millions of local years between the war's first intersection with the spiral politic and it's last. The Dead number in their billions, the Retro-Dead will never be counted, the surviving participants are best not described as wounded but as changed."
- The Book of The War by Lawrence Miles (Live in fear, NuWho only fans)
Perhaps it could be considered easier to view the Time War from a more objective viewpoint. It would be hard to follow, even incomprehensible if you can't trust anything you see around you. Few stories really try to show the Time War up close, because how could you - it's a rare and difficult task, few attempt, and even the mind-bending brilliance of something like The Starship of Theseus (2017), doesn't even take place in the heart of the war.
It is no surprise then, that we turn to prose - a form of media which will proceed at whichever speed it goddamn intends - and it is a glorious medium. Engines of War (2014) is an enduringly wonderful novel. It uses the fact that it is prose to it's advantage in telling it's Time War tale. The Eighth Doctor Adventures from BBC Books are a gargantuan series that boggles the mind in scope - and is, I'm assured, mostly, quite good.
When I told a friend I was writing this essay, they responded that it should be about "How to Write Faction Paradox," and they make quite a good point. Faction Paradox is a series that views the totality of what is written of the Time War in parts, and is also equally predisposed to the small things. As such,
Faction Paradox inherently avoids most of the pitfalls that we are discussing by the very nature of the thing that it’s doing.
I will not proclaim myself to be an expert in Faction Paradox, but I do think it has to be considered when examining how to do the Time War right. The Time War is in the distance, but it is omnipresent, and almost every little character and concept is derived in some way from the War in Heaven. While we never see ""The Enemy,"" there are so many little ideas that are the reason so many authors have latched onto the silly little subseries. While it's not much of a novel, as an Encylopedia, if you can manage to get into it (and oh boy, that is an if), things like The Book of The War are brimming with phenomenal ideas. And yes, I do deserve a little bit of ridicule for being such a nerd that I have to bring up The Book of the War. But seriously, Ideas. Lord Byron never died and joined Faction Paradox! The dates lost in a calendar change can be a land to explore! Using ennui as a temporal weapon!!
This may all be a little esoteric, and could be a LOT when dealing with the more simple stories, but no matter what, it's still worth considering.
Ideas are at the heart of the Time War, the War in Heaven, whatever you'd care to call it. That is the most important thing - it is a playground, and it should be treated as such.
The advantages of prose in dealing with the Time War are not limited to the physical page. Rewind (2022) is a War Doctor audio beyond comparison. It's an incredibly good and strong story which features an in-universe narrative device of a woman, Ignis, narrating her day-to-day life into a speaker as she is trapped within a time loop. While the story has a good concept, it wouldn't work without the same poetic language that both Russell T Davies, Lawrence Miles, and many other authors use to describe the unknowable. The unknowable is probably THE most important aspect of what has made the Time War work, and using this artificial concept of distance is what makes a lot of these stories work.
Faction Paradox possesses that distance through the way it is constructed, but the distance can also be far more physical than that. If you aren't an "ideas" person, and are more interested in dramatic angles, then there's plenty of material out there that is just as effective.
The Nature of War
"Why You? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"
"Yes." Billy in fact had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded within it.
"Well, here we are then, Mr. Pilgrim. Trapped in the amber of the moment. There is no why."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
In a transitionary matter, most of the best stories set in the Time War use multiple of these techniques I've mentioned. There are several stories in The War Master's audio series - perhaps most memorably in Jay Harley's The Good Master (2017) and James Goss's The Sky Man (same release) which feature characters looking up at the sky, seeing the war, out there, in the distance. Once in a while, a star will go out. The matter of beautiful language and distance is effective, sure. The War Master has a little monologue about that, where he talks about how the war is a terrible thing, even for someone like him, and you really do get the sense he would do anything to stop it.
Before this, I've mostly been discussing the operative part of "Time" War. Now we discuss the "War" part. This is the bit that a lot of stories get wrong.
Thankfully, at least our protagonists are pretty much always done right in this regard. These are War stories, and war is hell, and so our protagonists are appropriately just a bit jaded. There are no Captain Americas in the Time War, our heroes are jaded, and most stories do a good job of not portraying militantism as a good thing.
The Doctor, The Master, Romana, Leela, Narvin, whoever your protagonist is, they are all pretty well written. They tend to indeed be jaded, but not too jaded. Working through tragedy but not without optimism. Occasionally having to do horrible things. The Master is exceptionally good at that last one.
Of course, going all out War drama is for one, more suited for something like Torchwood than Doctor Who, and two, lots of lots of people have done it, and you probably aren't going to do it as well as something like 1917 or Saving Private Ryan or even fricking Stripes. While the worst Time War stories, as I have said, focus exclusively on the war part exclusively, there isn't anything wrong with war stories on paper. However, maybe the character drama that can arise as an impact of war is maybe more worth exploring than the War itself.
The important part is to not be too derivative. The Conscript (2017) is the one story I feel comfortable citing as a negative example in this regard as I feel I've complemented Matt Fitton enough elsewhere on this site, and he's a talented enough man to take a bit of criticism. The Conscript has neither an interesting Time War subject matter, nor does it use it's character drama to differentiate itself from classic anti-war tales about soldiers in the barracks and how they are treated. This story, by getting down in the "dirt" of the conflict and having next to no sci-fi elements or characters that behave any different due to the setting makes a grave mistake. The Conscript is not the worst Time War story I've experienced, far from it - Jacqueline Pearce and Paul McGann can still salvage a bit from it. But it is the easiest example to use to show the problems of stories that many others have.
So. Unlike most essays, this one doesn't have a conclusion. The Time War ended in Day of the Doctor, but as books continue to be published, and we get more and more stories in collections, Big Finish tales, and collections of books about people like Cwej, The City of the Saved and Auteur. It also becomes increasingly likely that in anniversary specials and the like, the Time War may yet be further explored on television. It's impossible to know where we go from here.
But the Time War is a monstrous, gigantic thing, an enormous aspect of the history of Doctor Who. Hell, it's kinda what the entire Russell T Davies era is about. Even when Steven Moffat tried to resolve it, he only sort of added to it's importance with the creation of the War Doctor. Chris Chibnall didn't discuss the Time War, but he also lent credence to it's ideas via the destruction of Gallifrey.
There's one thing that every good story that involves the Time War does involve though, that perhaps makes it a better fuel for spin-off novels rather than the stuff the kids watch - Maturity. Whether it's due to darker concepts or wild sci-fi concepts, the best Time War stuff is never really for the 3 - 10 audience. Doctor Who still must remain a family show, and so it becomes more obvious that while we get occasional quite mature stories, such as Turn Left (2008) or Heaven Sent (2015), perhaps the show itself could be inherently unsuited.
And that's fine, of course. But you do have to remember, that that is the world that these authors created. The Time War was made as something that's more than a bit hard to explore, and it's a bit of a wonder that we have half as many decent tales popping out of it than we do.
This swirling spindle of creativity that can thread together a beautiful narrative or prick your finger off is a marvelous thing. It's a unique thing that's been forged by so many people.
And while I am apprehensive about the Time War, there is something special and untapped about it. It feels like a whole new world to explore in the same way the wildnerness novels and audios did in the 90s and early 2000s, and, as I imagine, The Fugitive's Doctor's world may feel in time.
More stories are usually quite a good thing, I'd venture.
But that's just my two cents.
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