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)

The Original Ansem Twist

Ever wondered what Tetsuya Nomura was thinking when during the production of Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories and Kingdom Hearts II, and why he made the twist to the character of Ansem, making it so that he was just an imposter? Ever wondered what he originally intended?

Well, wonder no more, because I think I have the answer!

We knew the main villain from Kingdom Hearts was Ansem, the Head of State and the director of various scientific research programs of Hollow Bastion.  He became concerned about and curious about the Darkness, and in the process, he accidentally created the Heartless, and when he studied them and the Darkness, this Darkness began to influence his mind to the point in which he was driven to sacrifice his body in order to learn more.

As a matter of fact, back in those days, I think the only real areas for debate for him was what his plan was, and whether or not he actually properly turned himself into a Heartless in the process of losing his body.  He was surely, soundly defeated by Sora, but fans were surprised to learn that he was coming back when CoM and KHII were announced, and fans welcomed his return.

...And the fans were surprised that "Ansem" was, basically, not.  That it wasn't his real name, that the Ansem we fought was some imposter named Xehanort all along!

But was this what Tetsuya Normura originally intended while developing KH: CoM? Yes, it was definitely not the intention of the very first Kingdom Hearts game, but just how last minute was this decision?

My research has led me to conclude that this was a far later decision than almost anybody could have ever guessed, and that Tetsuya Nomura intended something simpler and different for Ansem as late as CoM, and that this was only changed at the very last minute for KHII.

To understand what Nomura most probably intended, it must first be understood that Tetsuya Nomura has confessed to making twists for the sake of making twists, so while it's obvious that Ansem wasn't always meant to be Xehanort, he probably had a story intended that few could have imagined, and might have made the change even closer to the eleventh hour than we could have guessed.

For those of you not in the loop, in Kingdom Hearts cosmology, when somebody gives up their heart
to Darkness, sometimes, if the Heart and/or will is strong enough, a Nobody is created as well.

Now it must be remembered that the first KH established that being turned into a Heartless is a very reversible state, not only for Sora, but quite possibly for other characters as well.  It seems very likely that all of the residents of Destiny Islands besides Sora, Riku, and Kairi turned into Heartless, but at the end of the game credits, Tidus, Wakka, and Sephie are playing on the beach happily, completely non-Heartless.  Perhaps in the canon of the first game before later games retconned it, when you first strike down a Heartless with a Keyblade, and then open and close the Door to Darkness (essentially pushing the reset button), Heartless that have been struck down by the Keyblade are also "reset", turning back into normal people (the surviging Heartless of KHII were not reset by shutting the Door to Darkness because they were not struck down by the Keyblade, and as for Nobodies, all you need is for a person to lose a heart to Darkness to make a Nobody, turning back to normal doesn't make the Nobody go away, one thinks of Roxas).

Now Ansem was not exactly struck down by the Keyblade, but he was exposed to pure light from Kingdom Hearts, which is essentially perishing in the same way, as Keyblades are composed of Light.  So assuming he was a Heartless even without the subsequent retcons, then surely the same rules must apply to him, that being "killed" by Light and then having the Door to Darkness that leads to Kingdom hearts "reset" wouls surely "reset" Ansem as it does to other Heartless who have faced similar circumstances.

Some of the readers have probably already figured out where I'm going with this by now, but I might as well explain the rest, to further verify my hypothesis.

Now we go to Chain of Memories, and of course, the mysterious DiZ, who was introduced in Riku's storyline there.  I noticed an interesting pattern in how DiZ looked in the sprites.

I kept flipping through the image and saw that they had the exact same head shape, the same eye color, and  the same similar skin color.  Even in KHII, their appearances align very well, meaning that their character models might have been made before the twist was made.

This is hard to gauge now, because many of his features were changed to match those of the other Xehanort incarnations in the HD ReMixes.  As a result, ironically, it seems that now DiZ more closely resembles the original Ansem model than Ansem does now as a result of changing Ansem to look like the other Xehanort incarnations. Anyway, you can see the similarities between the original Ansem model, and DiZ. Aside from the same head-shape, and dark skin and orange eyes, as I have I pointed out before, they have the same eye-shape, like sideways diamonds.

It seems like what what Nomura intended after the events of KH, Ansem turned into a complete person again, and realizing that all of what he believed was disproved by failing against a kid with a Keyblade, and that therefore what he did was wrong, Ansem decided to atone for his sins by trying to undermine Organization XIII, which was being led by his own Nobody, under a new name, DiZ, disguising his features.

Then KHII came out and Tetsuya Nomura further retconned things, changing this simpler story into a more complicated one, making things so that not only was DiZ the real Ansem, but that the Heartless and Nobody never belonged to the real Ansem as he must have originally intended, but now belonged to a completely separate guy named Xehanort, and the real Ansem didn't look like the Heartless and Nobody at all.

That’s my theory, and those are my thoughts!

Now my question now is, let’s say that Tetsuya Nomura stuck this plot twist before he changed it: DiZ is the complete Ansem, and the Seeker of Darkness was his Heartless, and Xemnas was his Nobody.  So if this particular plot twist was kept, how then, would that have changed post-KHII games like Birth by Sleep and Dream Drop Distance?

Tell me your thoughts in the comments below!