OK, but how many times have we heard something like: “I’m not human.” “What are you?” “I’m a Time Lord.”?
I’m sorry to sound cranky, but that equivalence has predominated throughout NewWho at least.
Unless he meant in the sense of “he’ll never get into the academy and he doesn’t want to join the army - what a loser, he’ll never be a man at this rate.” Or “he’ll never be a responsible adult”.
“I’m an engineer”
“I’m a Doctor”
None of these things preclude me from being human as well -
Based on my previous comment -
“All Time Lords are Gallifreyan, but not all Gallifreyan are Time Lords”
Saying he’s a “Time Lord” immediately qualifies him as a Gallifreyan to anyone that knows, and is not needed for anyone that doesn’t.
In both old Who and nu Who they constantly use Time Lord as synonymous with Gallifreyan. I think it’s because, other than one Tom Baker episode, they never had an episode with non Time Lord Gallifreyans, or even mentioned them.
I suspect that it’s assumed that all Gallifreyan’s will/should become a Time Lord. But, technically speaking there is always the chance that some of them don’t. I think that the ones who don’t become Time Lords, fail the test of looking into the Void, and subsequently go mad or commit suicide or something. So, of any Gallifreyans that are adult, (mostly) rational, and active in the world, they’re all Time Lords. Non-Time Lords are either children or dead to the world if not plain off dead.
Going strictly by TV episodes Gallifreyans are split between Time Lords and Outsiders. Edit, or I guess going by this episode there are also non Time Lord soldiers.
Going by other sources (which I’ve never hear nor read), it gets more complicated. I’m not sure though if audio productions and proses are considered cannon or not.
There isn’t really an official cannon for Who in the sense modern fans usually use the term. Certainly everything on TV is considered cannon, however contradictory, but the BBC has never declared anything cannon and the TV writers/showrunners have freely borrowed from the extended universe novels and audio productions when it suits them. That ranges from entire plots (“Human Nature”/“Family of Blood”) to characters to references to them in minisodes (“The Night of the Doctor” where Eight rattles off the names of several companions from the audio stories, which arguably brings them into cannon. If you consider BBC-produced minisodes on the web to be cannon. Not everyone does.)
The TV movie with the regeneration from Seven to Eight has long been called cannon by the BBC although there is definitely a segment of fandom that wishes it wasn’t.
Then there’s a bunch of early stuff where the TV episodes are lost that are considered cannon but are unobtainable now and reside only in the memories of people over the age of 50. The audio from those episodes exists, as do stills, scripts, and other artifacts, but it’s cannon material that doesn’t even exist anymore in it’s originally intended form.
In other words, the answer to "what is cannon in Doctor Who?" is so fuzzy as to be near meaningless.
CANON = collection of documents considered official
CANNON = big metal tube that goes BOOM
WAG: Orson is [spoiler]not descended from Clara nor the Doctor. He’s descended from Jenny, the Doctor’s daughter.
Or Capt. Jack had a dalliance with Danny’s (grand?)mother; the man does want to nail anything that moves.[/spoiler]
I like to think that, somewhere below the High Council, are a subclass of Time Lords who perform manual labor to keep the place running. Although they’re technically Time Lords, they bristle at being referred to as such and prefer to be addressed by their occupation. Similar to a Sergeant in the Army being addressed as “Sir”.
Like the two guys in the TARDIS repair shop at the beginning of “Name of the Doctor”.
Somehow, I doubt the couple in the barn are the Doctor’s parents. They did seem like a married couple, but didn’t give off all that parental a vibe (although the woman, at least, did sound compassionate). The phrase “the other boys” seems to suggest a pre-Academy boys’ school (which isn’t all that far off British culture; I always saw Time Lords as being uber-Brits).
So my guess is that they’re the school’s headmaster and headmistress. Or, if the Doctor was an orphan, the owners of the orphanage.
Somehow, though, I don’t think the Doc was an orphan by that point. Maybe he was thinking, “If only the term were over and I were home with Mum and Dad, they’d make it okay…”
I’m also rather intrigued by the exchange, “Why does he have to run away crying all the time?” “You know why.”
Exactly! Forgot about them.
Because he’s scared of the dark and doesn’t want the other kids to know.
Hey, it beats wetting the bed.
Well, that was incoherent drivel.
Clara was the one who said he was scared of the dark and didn’t want the other kids to know. That was in the friggin’ episode, how can that be incoherent?
As for wetting the bed, that’s an alternative explanation why he would not want to share a room with other boys in a home or school.
I think he meant the episode, not your post.
I did!