Week Two: The History of Faction Paradox

A few people have mentioned the four lieutenants, which are one of my favorite mysteries of the House Paradox period. We love to speculate about the Grandfather, but at least his earlier appearances told us that he was a member of House Lungbarrow. We know even less than that for the others! One performed a shadow dance before the Gregorian Compact, and there the answers end. Were there any other details I missed? Presumably they were the original Godparents of the Faction's four wings?

garyshots alluded to this briefly, but "womb" is the literal meaning of the world "matrix". When I first read The Book, after having seen NuWho, I simply interpreted the caldera as a rebranded Untempered Schism, but in reality it's actually earlier and much weirder. With the Matrix, some of the details clearly match: the caldera is a womb, and in "Toy Story" Lilith and her sister call the Matrix "Mother"; and both are what make the Great Houses "Lords of Time", although there's no mention of the caldera storing the minds of dead academicians. Very radical reinvention of the concept.

Speaking of initial misunderstandings, when I first heard about the 11DE I imagined a hard scifi setting where on day eleven, everyone packs up and teleports to the start of the loop, taking great care to avoid bumping into their hundreds of prior selves from past and future loops. I still think such a place might be a good setting for a story, but the Empire as actually described here is much different! And it makes sense, since there weren't 11 literal days to sell: the Faction bought the perception of missing time, which in the worried minds of Londoners grew to centuries in magnitude. It's a fun peek at the logic of a pre-anchoring universe – or, maybe, a post-Homeworld universe. Interesting stuff.

Not to clog up the thread with non-directly-BotW-related lore talk, but I disagree that the Woman with Long Blond Hair is necessarily Romana! The latest-known Post-War Romana in the EDAs isn't a blonde at all. The most obvious candidate for who Parkin intended the Woman to be is, I think, Larna. It's anyone's guess what House Larna is from, of course. (And the Emperor is of course Dr Who, who I don't think is part of House Dvora at all.)

The thing is, the Caldera isn't the Matrix. It isn't, you know. There's precious little that we learn about the Caldera in The Book of the War that corresponds with what we learn about the Matrix in Doctor Who on t'telly. If it weren't for the "womb" clue, and if we hadn't read Toy Story etc, we wouldn't even make the connection.

The Caldera is what the Faction Paradox universe has instead of the Matrix. It occupies the same space in the culture of the Great Houses that the Matrix does in the culture of the Time Lords. So why can't it be instead of the Matrix and the Eye of Harmony?

Or am I completely wrong?

Oh yes, I'm not saying it lines up perfectly — just more readily so than Matrix=Caldera! We do have to remember that in the Interference "flashback" quoted in Week One, we see the Yssgaroth collapsing stars into more black-suns through which more Great Vampires swarm into the universe. So Miles does think of "collapsing stars" and "portals to the Spiral Yssgaroth" as very much contiguous things…

The Eye of Harmony being a mere power-source is, of course, what many BBC people have claimed it was, but Miles has never let boring takes on Gallifrey lore stop him from taking more interesting routes. It's always been unsatisfying that the great secret of the Time Lords, something called the Eye of Harmony, would be anything as paltry as a power source… and the thing is, really, that Miles, and indeed the EDAs at large, were inspired by the TVM's Eye motif to make vision essential to the essence of the Time Lords, and this carries over into the depiction of the FP Great Houses. We are dealing with entities who maintain history via the Observer Effect; by looking at it. It would, IMO, border on the absurd if there was structure at the heart of their society called the Eye of Harmony, and it wasn't that through which they maintain the Web of Time. The Homeworld has a great Eye, and with it, see the universe into submission. It writes itself. 

Notably, in The TV Movie we do see the Master and Chang Lee using the Eye in Dr Who's TARDIS to look at past and current events. And the Eye as depicted there is much more the mysterious, mystical crater one would expect of the Caldera than the depictions seen elsewhere.


Mind, I don't think it's anything as straightforward as the Caldera being intended to “just” be the Eye. But I do think the Caldera primarily took on the role and purpose that the Eye had in the Milesian, EDAs understanding of Gallifrey. (As far as canon-welding goes, I've personally kicked around an idea that the Eye of Harmony is a dual structure, the blazing white pupil of the collapsed Qqaba balanced inside the black, circular sclera of the Caldera, their energies finely engineered to form a stable, harmonious equilibrium.)

Incidentally, it's anyone's guess how it relates to any of this, but mark in the Anchoring of the Thread entry of the Book (oh, that's right, we were talking about the Book):

This is pretty compelling, I must admit. Maybe I just need to get more comfortable with the FP Homeworld not looking exactly like the televised Gallifrey.

“Oriental” is also shorthand for “foreign” or “different” in that era. The dance could have been the Nutbush or the Macarena (which…. Given the Faction’s general mockery of (other people’s) rituals and statuses quo…. It most likely was).