the Time War

as  Myrddin is a Gallifreyan cat, i thought i should try to flesh out some of the details of the Time War.

this is not easy, as it was never actually shown or scripted - there are merely references to it and the  odd little scenes now and then in the End of Time.

what we know is the Daleks went to war against the TimeLords (or vice versa) and were on the brink of victory when the Doctor initiated some sort of super weapon that wiped out the dalek fleet and Gallifrey - after which he sealed the whole war in a sort of time bubble.

this was just after the daleks took what is referred to as the Cruciform - what that is exactly we dont know, but the Master was supposed to be protecting it, but ran away when the Daleks over ran it.

How did it begin?  the daleks had a plan to  eradicate the timelords using the doctor as far back as resurrection of the daleks.  this is odd, as they were seriously weakened by this point, and couldnt even  withstand a war against earth, let alone gallifrey.  presumably they felt that a stealth attack on gallifrey would give them access to advanced technology.  that was in 4590

by 4663 not only were they decimated by the movellan war, but they were also involved in a civil war, and in a desperate attempt to gain mastery over time (other than their crude time corridor technology) they attempted to obtain the remote stella manipulator - the hand of omega.  it is unclear how they knew about it, but that was all part of the doctors plan to trick them into using it, and thus destroying Skaro.  there were so few survivors that the doctor was able to convince the black dalek that he was the last.  in fact, davros escaped - but even the doctor did not know that.

the Daleks executed the Master on Skaro in an unknown time period - it could have been before the destruction of Skaro - or it may have been on new skaro.

somewhere around the year 5000 the Daleks had regained strenth and were on the point of beating the humans - then they vanished.  that is when they were recalled and all went to fight the time war.

why?  why that point and not earlier?   the war must have taken place much further ahead in the future, because the doctor would have known about it otherwise.  he says he was too far into the future 10,000,000 years in the  future so it maybe that the war takes place in this period.   there are no dalek stories after 5000 in the original series, so one can preesume they all left for the war.  they re-emerge  in 200,000 but this is after they have travelled back in time and hung around waiting for a few hundred years.

It is debatable as to whether Gallifurs (furry timelords) are canon or not.  It is mentioned in Mark of the Rani that the President had a cat.  The Shoboggans in The Invasion of Time were created as a low budget alternative to Cat People.  A story had been commisioned in which a race of Cat people warriors on Gallifrey feature greatly, but it was deemed far too expensive and grandios at the time, so parts of the story were recycled as the Invasion of Time.  Could they have been in some way connected with the Cheetah People of Survival?  We never knew how the Master came to be on that planet, or why he was without a TARDIS.

Cat people feature a great deal in the New Series too.  Several of the Doctor's previous incarnations were very fond of cats - particularly the Sixth.  It is odd that the Master was unable to resist the Cheetah World's influence.  It is quite possible that on Gallifrey, humanoids (Timelords) evolved from cats rather than apes.