Whosday: The Identity of the Valeyard

You know how you may ask "who is the Valeyard" and somebody says "he's the Doctor dumbass!" and you feel annoyed? Yeah, I know that feeling.  Though to be frank, the answer is to be half-expected, because you worded the question wrong.  You shouldn't have asked "who is the Valeyard?" but rather, "what is the Valeyard?"  And that is something that as thus far, nobody actually knows.

Well, we do know that the Valeyard was created by two Doctor Who writers, Robert Holmes and Eric Saward as a villain scheming to take the Doctor's remaining regenerations and overthrow Time Lord society, but that only explains his story function; what is he in-Universe?

A lot of people may not realize this, but the Master's description of the Valeyard at 1:15 is far more vague than you might think:

For one thing, thanks to the Moff, "Twelfth and Final" is "anything goes from Tennant and onwards goes" now, since the Doctor has a new regenerative cycle.  Also, is he a physical incarnation who just has all of the Doctor's negative personality traits, or is he really some psychic manifestation of the Doctor's evil? And is he a fully-fledged incarnation, or is he a splinter incarnation, like a rogue Watcher? It seemed for a while that there would never be answers...

...However, I think I found a very likely (but not definite) answer from a combination of the Target Novelization of The Ultimate Foe and the simple notion of the Grandfather Paradox, so we may actually get a good hold on what the Valeyard is...or at least a narrowing down of the correct answers.

First of all, it's true that the Big Finish audio dramas have implied several times that the Valeyard's a splinter incarnation, created from all of the Doctor’s darker moments throughout his incarnations as a weapon, but the audio dramas also show the Valeyard as being a compulsive liar, so we can't be that sure.  If rule #1 is that the Doctor lies, rule #2 should be "The Valeyard never tells the truth."  This is a little different than "The Doctor Lies" because it implies that he doesn't lie all the time but he lies sometimes.  The Valeyard never telling the truth, on the other hand...well, it speaks for itself.

So now that that's out of the way, what is the Valeyard really? Well, the novelization of The Ultimate Foe actually gives a better definition than the Master did on the show: The Valeyard was described as the penultimate incarnation between the twelfth and thirteenth regeneraions , and the novel and original script drafts only served to confirm this further rather than deny it, which confuses most fans a lot, but I think I understand it perfectly.  Regenerations and incarnations are not the same thing.  A Time Lord has thirteen incarnations, and regeneration is the transition between incarnations, meaning a Time Lord has twelve regenerations and thirteen incarnations in a normal regenerative cycle.  That would mean that if he came after the twelfth regeneration and before the thirteenth, the Valeyard would be the Thirteenth incarnation.  However, that should be his last incarnation, right? He shouldn't have a thirteenth regeneration, right?

Wrong.  A regenerative cycle can be renewed, often by resurrecting a dead Time Lord, and also, if Rassilon as depicted in The Five Doctors is anything to go by, it's entirely possible to turn a Time Lord into an immortal, god-like being, not that most Time Lords have ever had the privilege (typically, no matter how many times the regenerative cycle is renewed, a Time Lord is expected to die and stay dead sooner or later).  Presumably, the Valeyard wanted to not only renew his regenerative cycle, but become immortal. 

So Steven Moffat, who suspects that the Valeyard was just the Matrix Keeper impersonating the Doctor to have an excuse to steal his lives, is wrong, the Valeyard's quite literally the Doctor after all.

In fact, that was precisely what Robert Holmes and Eric Saward, the creators of the Valeyard, were going for, but John Nathan-Turner thought it would give the Doctor too clear of an ending (Michael Grade kept trying to cancel Doctor Who and replace it with a soap opera, Eastenders - no joke - so JNT had to avoid anything that looked like a definite ending to keep Grade from stopping the show), so he tried to make the Valeyard's nature more foggy in the scripts.  But for all intents and purposes, as depicted in that earlier draft, the Valeyard is not only from the Doctor, he literally is the Doctor.  He really is a physical, tangible, and frighteningly quite "real", incarnation, who just happens to have every single bad trait the Doctor ever had or will have.

But we already had a thirteenth(-ish) incarnation who frankly turned out pretty damned well and almost as un-Valeyard as they come, right? And now we have a Thirteenth Doctor who is even further removed from the Valeyard, and a woman no less!

That's where the talk of alternate realities comes in.

While it's possible that the Valeyard could be the Thirteenth incarnation of a later regeneration cycle, perhaps the one the Doctor is on, this can't be so in the mainstream reality because of the Grandfather Paradox.  This is the Grandfather Paradox: If you kill your grandfather before he diddles your grandmother for the first time, any chances of your parent and therefore your existence are erased, thus you'd either erase your existence at that point, but also causing your granddad to be alive again, meaning that you are born, but you live on to die in the past from erasing yourself, or you'd simply be permanently stranded in an alternate reality in which you technically now aren't supposed to exist in...yeah, timey-wimey.

Murdering yourself would be at least as bad - in fact, it might actually be even worse.  If you went back in time to murder an earlier self, God only knows what nightmares that would cause! The problem is, that's precisely the Valeyard's scheme! To drain an earlier self of his life-force and have more life in his body.  How the Hell is his supposed to succeed and survive that?

Remember, Time Lords have tremendously long lives and regenerate into different forms.  Also, remember, reality is like a river, it can branch from the same point based off of choices.  So what if the Valeyard were to create another reality in which his earlier self went in a different direction in life, and he could drain his alternate self's life? If the Valeyard could somehow reality-jump, killing an alternate him and surviving, it might actually work, so long as the Valeyard was careful that he started to start the process of murder sometime after the realities began to branch and not at the source that he'd share with the Doctor.

Here's an example: Let's say that the Sixth Doctor's life was the point in which the reality of the mainstream Doctor and the Valeyard began to diverge into two realities.  That would mean the Valeyard can't kill the First Doctor, the Second Doctor, etc., but he can kill the Sixth Doctor, the Seventh Doctor, the Eighth Doctor, etc. because he wouldn't be attacking a point in that reality's time that would count as his own past.

So how would he control this?

Now here is something important: The Trial of a Time Lord takes place in a space station outside of space and time.  Nobody knows what would happen if you went to a place outside of space and time, but presumably, if the Valeyard were to go to such a space station, and then pluck an earlier incarnation from space and time and bring him to the same location, then a possibly likely result would be that the earlier self's timeline would start to diverge from his own, and yet he'd survive the paradox because again, he's outside of time (though it might mean that by doing so he'd either make the Doctor's reality inaccessible, or his reality inaccessible).  As the Valeyard is a master planner, so it was probably all designed precisely like this, so that he could cannibalize the remaining life-force of his past self, who was now an alternate past self, and have a chance at surviving without a Grandfather Paradox.  And then he'd crush all of the Time Lords who he so hated.

[url=http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv16/dilemma.html]Here is a website link[/url] with a description and a graph to help you understand this better.

Now one more thing: What about the "Valeyard" of Trenzalore?

That was supposed to be an alternate fate for the Eleventh Doctor, so I guess that was just the Eleventh calling himself the "Valeyard" because "Valeyards are cool!" Remember, it's a Gallifreyan word for "prosecutor", so it's just a title.

So we narrowed it down; the Valeyard is probably either an alternate future Doctor or a splinter incarnation from an alternate future Doctor.  Whatever the case, it's highly unlikely he's from the reality that the new series is part of, because we know too much about where he (probably) fits in the regenerative cycle and it's also highly unlikely he'd survive the subsequent Grandfather Paradox if this wasn't the case.  If the Valeyard didn't create the events of The Trial of a Time Lord, the Sixth Doctor would have kept on regenerating and living his lives in darker hues all the time, incarnation after incarnation, until he became the Valeyard.  But because he deliberately tried to make a separate reality, starting at the Sixth Doctor's timeline, and then failing, now post-Trial Six and all Doctors afterwards are living their lives in a different pattern than the one that created the Valeyard, meaning that the mainstream Doctor won't turn into the Valeyard...

...or more accurately, the mainstream Doctor won't turn into the same Valeyard we know.

Nobody said anything about the Doctor we know eventually becoming a new version of the Valeyard! Perhaps the Valeyard's still to come after all!

Even so, that does not address the simple problem that in the end of The Ultimate Foe, the Valeyard took the position as the Matrix Keeper and likely still lived in a way, probably the same reality as the mainstream Doctor's...

You know what that means, don't you?

The Valeyard’s still out there! (Unless you count The Last Adventure as canon, in which case not only can the Doctor not become the Valeyard, but the original Valeyard is also not going to come ever)