Being The Doctor is a deceptively cool job. Travelling anywhere you fancy throughout time and space, hanging out with cool young people, being essentially immortal there's a lot of perks, and not a lot of downsides. On paper, anyway. The Gallifreyans don't have quite as ideal a life as the premier Time Lord makes out, however, based on the slow teasing of information about them we've received over the years. For one thing, it looks like the ultimate future bureaucracy, worse even than the likes of Brazil, with a bunch of old dudes controlling everything and not letting anybody have any fun with their TARDISES. Then there's the fact that the unique physiology of the Time Lords is actually not that great. For one thing, nobody else in the universe is capable of dealing with the fact that they've got two hearts and various other weird twists on basic humanoid guts. For another, the process of regeneration doesn't look like a whole lot of fun, and the finite number you get is a little off-putting. Immortality isn't all its cracked up to be, either, especially when you consider that the eternal life is mainly put to use in the aforementioned tedious bureaucracy. The Doctor stands out from the rest of the Time Lords because he shirks the average responsibility of the job. They're super boring and terrible so you can see why he half-inched a TARDIS and went off on adventures. Because being a Time Lord is literally like working as a civil servant, except you can never die, and so you have to work in a crappy job for the rest of eternity. Here comes tomorrow, huh.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
