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TARDIS Guide
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Overview

Released

Thursday, April 4, 1985

Written by

Gary Russell

Artist(s)

Garry Leach

Publisher

Marvel Comics

Pages

6

Time Travel

Past

Tropes (Potential Spoilers!)

Black Hole

Location (Potential Spoilers!)

Gallifrey

Synopsis

A History of the Timelords.

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How to read The Legacy of Gallifrey:

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The Doctor Who Magazine 100

Reviews

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2 reviews

The best sort of faux-historical document, one where the writer states the most out-of-left-field idea as fact and you just have to accept that that means it's mostly canon now. Time Lords invented cats specifically to have a species that tells you the square root of negative three is impossible, sure!

greenLetterT

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Review last edited on 15-06-25

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This review contains spoilers!

Well that was huge fun. A silly little exercise in tying together what we knew of the Time Lords up until Season 22 courtesy of fanwanker extraordinaire, Gary Russell. Alongside the references to The Three Doctors and Arc of Infinity, Russell also manages to wrangle The Two Doctors, Image of the Fendahl, The Deadly Assassin, The Invasion of Time, the Black and White Guardians and the Key to Time, Terror of the Autons, The Mark of the Rani, The Web of Feat, The War Games AND Shada!

There are some lovely bits of tying things together and then there's Rassilon creating the Black and White Guardians (seems fandom collectively forgot/ignored that little gem)! There's some fun additions too such as more details about why Morbius was executed and the revelation that Thalia and Zorac, High Council members in Arc of Infinity, got sent to investigate the Death Zone ahead of the events of The Five Doctors and ended up getting killed by some of those zappy lightning bolts which nearly did for the Master.

This is very much the approach to 'lore' that Russell, and others like Craig Hinton, would apply to their novels when the Missing and Past Doctor Adventures arrived on the scene - abundant references to any and every story and character that takes their fancy and fits, however tortuously, into the narrative (it's quite something to have one paragraph start with the events of The Two Doctors and end with a reference to Image of the Fendahl).

One can only imagine the fun Russell would have had tying in Hell Bent, The Timeless Children, The Power of the Doctor and The Reality War into his narrative machinations.

deltaandthebannermen

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Review last edited on 17-06-25

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Thankfully, however, there were some Gallifreyans who had the foresight to stay home and build a future for their planet.

These included people like the solar engineers who, having discovered that the square root of minus three was impossible to calculate, had their biological engineers develop a new species of animal which had that knowledge bred into it. Thus, when any planet on which this animal was placed tried to find the square root of minus three, the animal would turn round and say “Ah, but that’s impossible”.

— The Legacy of Gallifrey

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