What’s so great to me about this line—I had to pause afterwards and hyperventilate for a few minutes, and about half of that wasn’t the fault of Paul McGann being on-screen—is that it references not only Looming, but the War Looms.
See, Time Lords aren’t really big on having physical forms, or, in fact, being involved in anything at all that has to do with leaving Gallifrey or interacting with lesser species in any capacity.
Deprived of organic evolution, deprived of the spur of mortality, the the last ten-million years of their existence the [Time Lords] have been locked in a form of cultural stasis. They see themselves as monumental, as the severe, stone-faced guardians on the walls of eternity. They have no interest in progress: they consider it beneath them. They have no interest in high culture: they consider it incomprehensible. Their own biological heritage bothers them… yet at the same time they lack the will to reshape (or even leave behind) their bodies, unless the War should demand it.
Well, the War did demand it, and so some more genetic variations were made. Looms were built purely for a new caste, one of warriors. They started the War in humanoid forms. They did not end it that way.
[There was a notion of military regeneration:] field-agents whose biologies were engineered so that with every re-birth their bodies would become stronger, faster, and better-equipped for whatever tasks may lie ahead. […] Although at first these [regenerations] merely left the soldiers with enhanced bodies, with built-in resistance to the more blatant forms of post-nuclear warfare (for the frontline troops), or special temporal lobes designed to enhance communications [with Gallifrey] (in the case of comms officers), the process was soon refined. It wasn’t long before soldiers were primed so that with every transformation they’d become less and less hominid, their bodies armoured against all known forms of enemy attack, with biological weapons systems “fitted as standard”…the ultimate regenerative forms of the soldiers would…be entirely non-hominid; no limbs, no visible head, each agent a self-contained and blast-proofed unit laced with sensitive tripwire nerve-endings.
Even before the utilisation of the War Looms, there were many parallels between the Time Lords and the Daleks: they’re both starkly xenophobic and change-resistant races which can’t quite be called “species”; they propagate themselves not by biological procreation but with highly-advanced machinery which places a living consciousness within a casing, whether that casing be metal or flesh; they both lack a real sense of individuality, with Daleks nameless clones and Gallifreyans a hivemind; even the Matrix and the Pathweb share many similarities!
Who can tell the difference anymore indeed? One of these is a Dalek mutant: the other is a Time Lord soldier. Can you tell which is which?
