General Baldy, or perhaps just the General, is the head of the Time Lord War Council and the chief military officer of the Time War. He is, it has been pointed out, Gallifrey’s equivalent of the Brigadier – rational, reasonable, long-suffering, and competent. For ease of identification, I’m going to call him General Baldy, mostly because the actor(s) who plays him is bald, and because otherwise I keep thinking he’s the supercomputer from the Prisoner, with whom he has really nothing in common. When will Gallifrey learn – disambiguation is important!
The General is far and away the most practical, reasonable and competent individual Time Lord society has every produced (with the possible exception of Castellan Spandrell) – so much so that there was a theory going that he was an older and wiser Commander Maxil, except that he has no plumes in his helmet. In fact, he has no helmet at all. This General wears neither a silly hat nor a ridiculous oversized collar, but rather magnficent, gender-neutral, and overwhelmingly practical armor, with a sweeping cape its only concession to Gallifreyan pomp. You know, as is appropriate if you happen to be fighting a war. No tights, no plumes, no gilt by association – it’s the kind of armor that Sam Vimes would grudgingly approve of. Costume is important, particularly to Time Lords (who are traditionally Color Coded For Your Convenience and don’t put much stock in faces anyhow), and the General’s costume says worlds about him, as well as firmly placing him on the Military rather than Academy side of things.
Gallifrey is a highly caste-based world, with a strict divide between nobility – “Time Lords” – and army (chancellery guards and such). Almost all of what we’ve seen up till this point has dealt with the machinations of the former. But General Baldy seems to be the other sort, though he moves in the uppermost circles. He stands in deliberate contrast to the High Council and the Lord President, with their infinite capacity for pretension. He’s introduced as contrasting them. While they are caught up in their mad grab for Godhead, General Baldy is caught up in defending Gallifrey. Practically his first line is to dismiss their schemes out of hand and turn his attention to the real issue, which he has correctly identified as the Doctor breaking in and stealing stuff. Practical, perspicacious, appropriate – are we sure this is Gallifrey? It’s a nice reminder that a planet of several billion people is probably home to some rational sorts as well, and not just, ya know, dicks.
The General is eminently reasonable. He’s probably the most positive portrayal of a military commander we’ve seen since the 70s. And uniquely among Time Lords, he seems to not only genuinely respect the Doctor, but, what’s more, has the good sense to take him seriously. This doesn’t translate to necessarily approving of him, which, by and large he doesn’t, but he sees him as he is, neither underestimating him nor devolving into blind hero worship. He corrects his sidekick Androgar when he calls the Doctor a fool; the Doctor is no fool (although he plays one on TV) – he’s a madman. A madman with a box that can and will destroy Gallifrey. And he recognizes, while Androgar does not, that it takes a madman to do what the Doctor is currently attempting. It’s not an indictment or a dismissal, but rather a warning that the Doctor, and the threat he represents, needs to be taken seriously. And it’s the same message he preaches when the Doctor returns. “Who does he think he is?” “The man who won the Time War.” He gets the Doctor, gets that he’s most dangerous when he’s unarmed, gets that force is not going to work against him (and gets the soldiers under his command well enough to understand why), and gets that “it hasn’t got a stun setting” is actually a reasonable way to deter the Doctor from shooting you, and gets why even reasonable tactics might not work against a man who just spent 4.5 billion years punching a wall rather than walk out an open door. He sees reality as it is, while the Lord President, and later the Doctor, continues to stubbornly try to bend reality to his own will.
I really like that the General is willing to call out the Lord President, even knowing that this is a President known for up and murdering people who disagree with him. Their dynamic is really cool, because the General is loyal, but neither blind nor stupid. The Lord President is a madman and a fool, as well as just plain being a dick, but he’s still the President. General Baldy won’t oppose him directly, but when his plans are terrible he says so, and when possible politely but insistently advises significantly less terrible plans. And does the same thing to the Doctor (who does up and murder him for it). He does nothing rashly, but does what he needs to do, and accepts the consequences of his actions. He’s a good follower and a good leader – obeying orders but never without question, unwilling to waste the lives of those under his command, speaking truth to power and accepting what he can’t change.
One of those things he realizes he can’t change is the Doctor shooting him. (Authority is…bad for Time Lords). But that scene is just such a wonderful little character sketch. The General could have stood aside and let the Doctor go – but he’s sworn to uphold the laws of time can’t allow what the Doctor is attempting. So he tries to talk him down, but when that fails he accepts how the rest of the scene is going to play out and…there’s no ill will on either side. “Good luck to you” / “You too sir.” Even about to be murdered he’s sympathetic to what the Doctor is trying to do, but is steadfast in his defiance. Which is right and proper – what the Doctor is doing is wrong and every single other person in the episode tells him so. And it’s possible he thinks that shooting him is fair, on account of the Murder Castle. I really really like that he feels genuinely bad about the Murder Castle, but apart from from an expression of “you could have left whenever! we didn’t expect you to punch a wall 1.3 trillion times!” he makes no attempt to soften or dismiss it, nor to really even apologize because how do you apologize to a man who just punched a wall 1.3 trillion times? You don’t, is how – you just give him space and acknowledge that he does not, at this point, owe you anything. And so, after getting a little murdered, she gets up, dusts herself off, and continues trying to stop the Doctor from wrecking the web of time – but otherwise seems not to bear any kind of a grudge for either the lying or the murdering.
Let’s talk about regeneration! I love to talk about regeneration. The General’s regeneration is only the (generously) sixth on-screen regeneration of someone other than the Doctor in the entire lifetime of the show. And it illustrates, once again, that the Doctor is just really phenomenally bad at it. The first noteworthy thing is that for the first time since 1996, the General regenerates on the floor, as is right and proper for someone who’s just been killed. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: when you get killed you should really stop moving and fall over). Secondly, there are no gold sparkles, which supports the theory that that particular special effect is the direct result of the Elixir of Unending Boredom Eternal Life. The General’s regeneration effect is closest to, of all people’s, Colin Baker’s. Which is to say, a brightness and a blurring, not, you know, Sylvester McCoy in a wig. Thirdly, it seems pretty painless, by contrast to the Doctor’s regenerations (when he’s conscious), but analogous to, say, River’s and Romana’s. I mean, the Staser is an instakill sort of a weapon, which has gotta help, but it is more evidence that the Doctor is just plain doing it wrong. Fourthly, she seems to have some amount of regenerative control, which has been true of every regeneration we’ve seen other than the Doctor’s. She regenerates with full makeup! Although, to be fair, so does Colin Baker. And you surely can’t exert a whole lot of regenerative control when you’re dead, unconscious, and getting through the whole thing in a matter of moments, but she does go back to her proper gender, which is probably not an accident. Nor, I suspect, is the fact that she’s still bald. I love that so much. And lastly, she experiences precisely no post-regenerative brain-crazies. She just gets up again and goes right back to work, as is appropriate to the aforementioned practicality of the character. Everything about the General’s regeneration is practical and efficient – no nonsense. A vainer person might have spent more time on customization (as with the Master, River, and Romana), but the General has a job to do, so she just fixes the basics and gets on with it.
This regeneration has a lot of continuity implications beyond the well-known one that the Doctor is atypical in this. First off is the fact that she regenerates at all. I’ve been playing fast and loose with the term Time Lord, as the show itself does, but many, including much of the expanded universe, draw a strict line between Time Lords proper and other, non-academy-trained Gallifreyans. It’s never been clear which facts about Time Lords apply at the species level and which at the rank level, but my impression (as someone who’s never delved too deeply into the Expanded Universe) has up to this point that, insomuch as there’s a distinction, regeneration was something that Time Lords did, and not your other assorted Gallifreyans. The question becomes, then, is the General a Time Lord or not? If we take seriously the dichotomy between Army and Academy*, it’s tempting to say no – which would mean that regeneration is a property of Gallifreyans generally, not a learned (or awarded) property. On the other hand, the General might be a Time Lord proper, or Time Lady rather, serving in the military under the logic of nobility = officers, and the Time War being something of a special case. If so, what did she do before the War? And is she someone we know? And why, then, is she so much more down-to-eart…er, gallifrey than any other Time Lord we have ever met?
The other obvious one is that we’ve now seen someone explicitly change both (apparent) sex and (apparent) race though regeneration. There’s been a steady build in this idea, starting with the Doctor regenerating into Joanna Lumley in “the Curse of Fatal Death” (admittedly a spoof), then the descriptions of the Corsair, then the Doctor being offered femininity as an option by Ohila, then having the Master actually turn up as a woman, and now actually seeing it happen. The BBC has straight-up told Steven Moffat that he is not allowed to have a female Doctor, and so he’s been doing everything but that he possibly can, which is, after all, how you shift paradigms. Race is just an extra bonus. And it makes sense. If you are getting an entirely new body, why should there be any constraints on that body beside the self-imposed? Romana nearly regenerated into a small blue thing; going from a bald white man to an almost equally bald black woman is honestly less of a stretch. But it’s nice to actually see it. Also, I can’t get over the fact that she’s still frickin bald. That must be really important to her. It’s like how when the Master regenerated into John Simm he automatically grew the beginnings of a beard (which he then shaved off again like an idiot). Beardiness is a fundamental part of being the Master; baldness is a fundamental part of being the General. Race and sex are apparently not. Then there’s the whole “back to normal” bit. The General is usually female – she straight up says that #10 (Ken Bones) was her only male body. (Which is a pity, because but for that line I was sure she was Maxil. Maybe she still is and Colin Baker was not quite as masculine as (s)he appeared. Wouldn’t that be something). If I may veer into the realm of wild speculation, the General arguably decided to go male specifically for the Time War. A female body has a number of associated inconveniences which she may have thought it worth avoiding for the duration of the war. She may also have thought that masculinity might be a tactical advantage for fighting a war. The Time Lords apparently thought resurrecting the Master would provide a tactical advantage – they were clearly grasping at straws. For what it’s worth, she seems to have decided the trade-offs weren’t worth it. Make of that what you will.
Since we’re here, I do not ascribe to the theory that Time Ladies have regenerative control and Time Lords proper do not. The Master has clearly been customizing along the way, and the Doctor, while famously bad at such things, seems to have regenerated into Peter Capaldi more or less on purpose (not to mention whatever it was that K’an-Po was doing). Anyway, for a race that now demonstratively does not have fixed sex or gender, such an important trait being encoded that way just seems silly. The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the regenerations we’ve seen have been impressively atypical and it is therefore difficult to draw any generalizations based on this vanishingly small data set. The General adds an important data point, and probably should be considered the most “normal” regeneration to date (or Romana’s, which has the advantage of not being a murder. You’re really not supposed to get murdered. Being murdered is not normal).
I like General Baldy an awful lot as a character, and another awful lot for what she does for the continuity. She is overwhelmingly practical, reasonable, and competent. And just…good. She’s wise enough not to dismiss or underestimate the Doctor, but neither does she put up with his crap. She’s honest and forthright, speaks truth to power, is loyal to her office and her superiors but most importantly to the world that is hers to protect, and she is frightfully good at her job. She is Gallifrey at its very best, using the awesome power of the Time Lords for Awesome instead of for Dickery. She’s by turns ally and antagonist, but, honestly, antagonizing the Doctor is usually a good idea. He’s a madman; she’s Lawful Good the hard way. Seriously the only Time Lord we’ve ever met who’s been neither a renegade nor a jerk. I didn’t know those existed! But she does exist and so long as she does, Gallifrey is in good hands.
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* addendum via @big-finish-sketches: “Big Finish’s Gallifrey range goes into a lot of detail about regeneration in the army ranks and is really worth checking out. (tl;dr Chancellary Guard and other army ranks are all Time Lords and graduated from the Academy.)”
