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GallifreyGallifrey is a fictional planet in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. The planet is home to both the Doctor, and others of his race, the Time Lords. It is supposed to be located in the constellation of Kasterborous, at "galactic coordinates ten-zero-eleven-zero-zero by zero-two from galactic zero centre", some 250 million light years away from Earth. During the first decade of the television series, the Doctor's home planet was not identified by name. The name was first used in the 1973 serial The Time Warrior. It is never definitively stated "when" the events of the Doctor's appearances of Gallifrey are set. As the planet is often reached by means of time travel it could conceivably exist anywhere in the past or future relative to our present. From space, Gallifrey is seen as a yellow-orange planet. The Doctor's granddaughter Susan described it as having an orange sky. It is surrounded by an impenetrable force field called the transduction barrier. This prevents all outsiders (with hostile intent, or otherwise) from approaching the planet and allows the Time Lords to maintain their status of absolute neutrality, letting them observe the actions of the rest of the Universe without actually taking part in its affairs. The barrier was breached once during the course of the series by the Sontarans, using an inside agent. Gallifrey is also the name of its major city, the Citadel which holds the Capitol of the Time Lords. The Capitol is also known as the Panopticon, under which the Eye of Harmony, the nucleus of a black hole, is kept. The Eye provides the power required for time travel, and all Time Lord TARDIS time machines draw their power from it. Also situated in the Capitol is the Matrix, the vast extradimensional computer network which acts as the repository of all Time Lord knowledge as well as containing the memories of dead Time Lords. Outside the city lie wastelands where the Shobogons, Gallifreyans who do not belong to the Time Lord elite, live in less technological tribal communities. The wastes of Gallifrey include the Death Zone, an area that was used as a gladiatorial arena by the first Time Lords, pitting various species kidnapped from their respective time zones against each other. Inside the Death Zone stands the Tomb of Rassilon, the founder of Time Lord society. Various spin-off novels and audio plays have expanded on the history and nature of Gallifrey, although many fans do not consider the information in them to be canon. For more on Time Lord history, see that article. In the BBC Books novel The Ancestor Cell, Gallifrey is destroyed as a result of the Eighth Doctor's desire to prevent the voodoo cult Faction Paradox from starting a war against the unnamed Enemy. This also retroactively wiped the Time Lords from history. It is unclear what the attitude of the new Doctor Who television series will be toward the information in the novels and audio plays, the latter produced by Big Finish Productions. However, a number of writers of the novels and audio plays are also writing for the new television series. Gallifrey is also the umbrella title of a series of audio plays set in the Doctor Who universe, also produced by Big Finish, featuring Louise Jameson as Leela and Lalla Ward as Romana. In the 2005 season episode The End of the World, the Ninth Doctor says that his home planet - presumably Gallifrey - was destroyed in a war and that he is the last of the Time Lords. External links
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