Great Old One

The terms of "Great Old Ones", (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) Great Ones, (PROSE: White Darkness) "Old Ones", (PROSE: White Darkness, The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) elder gods, (PROSE: Millennial Rites) Elder Gods, (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders, Black and White) or elder races, (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir) were used for unimaginably ancient creatures of immense power, generally seen as harbingers of evil and destruction. (AUDIO: The Roof of the World)

Nature
The Great Old Ones' nature was the subject of many contradictory accounts and beliefs.

Some accounts suggested that they were survivors of another universe which existed before the Doctor's, (PROSE: Millennial Rites) or possibly survivors of the Dark Times and the early universe, (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet, Mr Saldaamir) accounting, in either case, for their god-like ability to break the ordinary laws of physics. (PROSE: Millennial Rites, Christmas on a Rational Planet, etc.) Yet other accounts presented them as a specific race who had held sway millions of years before humanity, but, though they had once held dominion over the Galaxy, were not necessarily universe-endingly powerful; (PROSE: White Darkness, Tomb of Valdemar) in such depictions they may have been invaders from the outer planes (PROSE: White Darkness) or simply a powerful species from the normal universe. (PROSE: Tomb of Valdemar) Yet other accounts used the terms of "Old One) or "elder races" for entire species from the early universe. (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir, The Knight, The Fool and The Dead)

According to a handful of accounts, various beings the Doctor battled throughout their lives, including the Great Intelligence, the Animus, Fenric, and the Nestene Consciousness, were in actuality Great Old Ones, or the offspring thereof. (PROSE: Millennial Rites, All-Consuming Fire) It was also sometimes speculated that the Guardians of the Universe, including the Black Guardian and White Guardian, were "the upper echelons of the Great Old Ones". (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)

Prehistoric, interdimensional conquerors
According to one account, by the 20th century on many planets in the universe, including Earth, fifteen-million-year-old carvings which baffled archaeologists could be found. These planets also had "legends of ancient beings who ruled everywhere, before dying out"; the legends "also [said] that someday they may return". The Necronomicon was an Earth repository of such lore. (PROSE: White Darkness) This tallied with an account which depicted the "Great Old Ones" as having ruled the Galaxy, eventually only being left in the memory of "half a dozen worlds". (PROSE: The Nameless City) They were known throughout the universe as terrible creatures that sought to destroy others or incorporate them into their being. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)

The Seventh Doctor stated that the Time Lords knew little of these "Great Old Ones" or "Old Ones", but he seemed to have some knowledge of their nature, explaining: "They can't be killed in this universe. They originally came from some other universe, other dimension – one of the outer planes, most likely – and part of their being still resides there. Another part exists in their physical form, but that can't do anything without the third ingredient, (…) their consciousness, [which] can travel on its own, riding the Time Winds, even. But it's reliant on the natural forces of the universe to open gateways for it… When the stars are right."

- Seventh Doctor (PROSE: White Darkness)

In fact, according to this account, the "Great Ones" were one of the groups which claimed mastery over the Earth in prehistoric times, having come there from a distant galaxy. They coexisted with the "Star People" and the "reptile men" in a shared, advanced civilisation. However, over time, the reptile men "departed from the face of the world" (along with their augmented apes) and the Star People fled back whence they came after their genetically-engineered slave caste of servitors turned on them. Eventually, only the Great Ones were left. They were then besieged by "the unarmed predators who hunted with one huge fang and the touch of decay", and decided to hide their physical forms underground while shunting their consciousness into the Time Vortex, creating the state of affairs the Doctor had described.

One such Old One buried its body beneath the island of Hispaniola. Its body's natural telepathic instincts became active for several days in 1915, seeking to control humans into performing rituals that would summon his full consciousness back into his physical form; however, he was thwarted by the Seventh Doctor. (PROSE: White Darkness) A later account identified this Old One as Cthulhu. (PROSE: All-Consuming Fire)

As beings from the destroyed pre-universe
The Second Doctor believed the Animus of Vortis to have been one of the "Old Ones", an immensely powerful race from a previous universe. (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)

"The Animus is one of an incredibly ancient race sometimes called the "Old Ones". They are beings of great mental power, who regard all other life forms as inferior to themselves and suitable only to serve them or to be incorporated into their own substance as they grow and spread their influence."

- Second Doctor (PROSE: Twilight of the Gods)

The Sixth Doctor believed that Yog-Sothoth, who was the Great Intelligence's true identity, was originally a member of a race from a universe which was destroyed by the Big Bang which created the Doctor's universe. This race had been equivalent to the Time Lords of his own universe, and, indeed, called themselves Time Lords as well, although "they were lords of a very strange version of time and space". These "elder gods" developed the "dark science" of quantum mnemonics, which could rewrite the fabric of reality even more powerfully than Block Transfer Computation.

As the Doctor recounted: "As their universe reached the point of collapse, a group of these "Time Lords" shunted themselves into a parallel dimension which collapsed seconds after ours. Moments later, they erupted into our universe, and soon discovered that they were in possession of undreamt-of powers. (…) And (…) they decided that since they now had god-like powers, they should behave like gods."

- Sixth Doctor (PROSE: Millennial Rites)

Besides Yog-Sothoth, others of this "earlier race of Time Lords", reborn in monstrous bodies with these powers, included Lloigor, whom the Doctor identified as (PROSE: Millennial Rites) the Animus of Vortis, (TV: The Web Planet) and Shub-Niggurath, whom the Doctor identified as the mother of the Nestene Consciousness on the planet of Polymos. (PROSE: Millennial Rites)

The Sixth Doctor once stated that the Great Old Ones "exist[ed] between the dimensions, creating universes, planes… whatever… to suit [them]selves"; having permanent physical forms was inimical to their nature. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties) The Great Intelligence's "body", such as it was, could only be processed by the Doctor's TARDIS as a phantom energy signature "equivalent to the detonation of over eighteen billion thermonuclear warheads". (PROSE: Millennial Rites)

The Seventh Doctor later described the history of a group of gods he termed "the Great Old Ones" in broadly comparable terms, though he spoke of them as a group who had discovered how to survive the end of the universe together, but not necessarily all of a single species. According to him, they made up "a pantheon whose worship sprung up on various planets across the universe at more or less the same time", having been worshipped on Earth by the Silurians and Sea Devils, and on Gallifrey by a cult of Shobogans. "In the dying days of the universe before this current one, which is forever separated from us by a point where time and space do not exist, a group of beings discovered how to preserve themselves past that point where their universe ceased. They shuttled themselves sideways, into a parallel universe which, for various reasons that I will not even attempt to explain now, ceased a split-second after our one. (…) Just before that universe ceased, they jumped back to our one, which had just started expanding afresh after a moment of nothingness. The trouble is, the universe before ours was set up differently. Fundamental physical laws such as the speed of light and the charge on the electron were different, which means that the Great Old Ones have powers undreamed of by anybody in this universe. Powers that make them look like gods, to naive races."

- Seventh Doctor (PROSE: All-Consuming Fire)

In addition to Yog-Sothoth as the Great Intelligence, Lloigor as the creature from Vortis, and Cthulhu as the Old One from Haiti, the Seventh Doctor also identified his foes the Gods of Ragnarok and Fenric as being among these Great Old Ones, with "Fenric" actually being Hastur the Unspeakable. Other Great Old Ones included Dagon, who was worshipped by the Sea Devils; Nyarlathotep, whom the Doctor "sincerely hoped[d] never to meet"; and Azathoth, (PROSE: All-Consuming Fire) or Azazoth, (AUDIO: All-Consuming Fire) said to have been the weakest of the Great Old Ones. The Seventh Doctor described Azathoth as "an amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity, coexistent with all Time and conterminous with all Space". (PROSE: All-Consuming Fire)

A subsequent account depicted a young First Doctor's discovery, during his days in the Deca, of a forbidden fragment of the Record of Rassilon. It described Rassilon's study of the two Guardians of the Universe he knew about, the Black Guardian and the White Guardian. As well as speculating that there existed four other Guardians, Rassilon made a study of the beings he termed "Sub-Guardians" or "Great Old Ones", the "many creatures" that had "come unto [his] universe as it was born" and "as theirs expired".

Rassilon mused that "mayhaps they were Time Lords from that other universe, far more advanced, far further evolved" and gave them their names to give future generations of Time Lords power over them. These included Hastur, Yog-Sothoth, Shub-Niggurath, Cthulhu, Melefescent, Tor-Gasukk, Gog and Magog, Lloigor, Nyarlathotep, Dagon, and finally "the three Chaos-Bringers", Raag, Nah and Rok, who Rassilon believed to have been responsible for the destruction of the prior universes. When he met with the two Guardians, they humbled him and refused to confirm whether they were similar beings or truly primordial entities, before ejecting him back to normal-space without answers.

The Sixth Doctor, for his part, was depicted in this account as believing that the Guardians of the Universe were not distinct from the Great Old Ones but rather "the upper echelons of the Great Old Ones. In effect, a pantheon within a pantheon". He repeated this to the Toymaker, who claimed that he was one of the missing four Guardians, the Guardian of Dreams, but was also described elsewhere in this account as himself a Great Old One.

The Toymaker, in this same account, spoke of the Eternals, even the Menti Celesti, as distinct from and lesser than his kind, describing them as "pitiful creatures" barely superior to the ephemerals. (PROSE: Divided Loyalties)

Yet more, linked accounts dealing with the Seventh Doctor spoke of the "Elder Gods" as a group originating in another universe, and depicted them as maintaining contact between themselves via the Board, on which they played games with the whole of normal-space as the battleground and mortals for pawns. (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders, Black and White) They couldn't die, as the energies their bodies were composed of were not meant to exist in the normal universe, and were they to decay, the released energy would rip apart space and time. They could only safely die in their own universe, or on the Board. (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders)

These "Elder Gods" as documented in those accounts included the Animus, the Great Intelligence, the Mi'en Kalarash, Derleth, the Karnas'koi, the Celestial Toymaker, Kai'lizakia (AUDIO: Black and White) Fenric, Weyland, (AUDIO: Gods and Monsters) Moloch, "Albert Marsden" and "Peggy Marsden" (AUDIO: Protect and Survive) Ragnarok, To'Koth, and Ginny Greenteeth. (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders)

As beings from the early universe
According to some sources, the Time Lords' belief that the reality which the Great Old Ones had called home was a true "pre-universe" (PROSE: Millennial Rites) was a misconception; instead, it represented the earliest era of the universe, before the Great Houses of the Time Lords performed the anchoring of the thread to bind the universe to the laws of rationality and linear time. (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet, The Book of the War, etc.)

"Ohh, yes, there were those of the old time who escaped. A handful of baby godlings and 'great intelligences'… but they were such weak, unimaginative creatures. Too ready to obey the Watchmakers' order."

- Carnival Queen (PROSE: Christmas on a Rational Planet)

One account claimed that the Old Ones were not so mythic as the legends made them seem, simply being an ancient species who had a fascination for higher dimensions. They conquered various planets, including the early Earth, in order to experiment on species (such as Earth's ape) whose brain had some propensity for accessing higher dimensions. Eventually, they were destroyed by one of their old experiments, leaving behind Valdemar. (PROSE: Tomb of Valdemar)

Another account suggested that "the Old Ones" was simply a catch-all term used by the Time Lords for powerful species from the Dark Times; thus the Eternals, the Exxilons, the Racnoss and the Jagaroth were all considered "Old Ones". (PROSE: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead) The Archons were considered "the last of the Old Ones" according to the records in the Doctor's TARDIS. (PROSE: The Nameless City)

Yet another account described the "elder races" as having been native to the original palimpsest universe — that was, the "golden age" of perfectly linear time before time travel introduced rampant contradiction and uncertainty. (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir) "The elder races tended to do four things: one, go mad. Two, leave. Three, get killed. Four, regress. Some did all four, some only managed one of the above. It was one of those times where people tried new ideas. One chap dressed as a Chinese mandarin and became obsessed with toys and games. Some went into hiding, or left the universe altogether. A couple of groups decided to swarm across the universe destroying all life. Because suddenly, everything went and everything was up for grabs."

- (PROSE: Mr Saldaamir)

Other information
The Pharaoh Amenhotep II discovered a form of the Great Old Ones at one time on Earth and attempted to harness their power for himself. The Fifth Doctor described this Great Old One as parasitic and theorised they'd interbred with other species. The Pharaoh came to realise that they were beyond his control and lured them into a white pyramid with a structure of infinite reflections where the creature's evil was to be trapped forever. This trap succeeded and kept the world safe from their evil. The Great Old One attempted to escape via the Pharaoh's daughter Erimem during her travels with the Doctor in 1917 Tibet, but was foiled by Peri Brown who froze their manifestations with liquid nitrogen. The Fifth Doctor subsequently used explosives to entomb their frozen forms. (AUDIO: The Roof of the World)

According to one account, in 1936 human writer H. P. Lovecraft wrote about the "Old One, a.k.a. Elder Things" in At the Mountains of Madness, which was "widely regarded as real by 25th century fringe archaeologists". Elder Things based on the book would go on to be brought to life by a fictional generator. Compassion joked with the Eighth Doctor about him being a Great Old One on his mother's side. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5)

By the 2020s, when To'Koth had reached the end of dying of old age over billions of years, the Seventh Doctor took him back to the Board to die, humbling and terrifying the other Elder Gods as he was the first God to die. As a way of ending hostilities, To'Koth called a truce between the Gods and the Doctor. (AUDIO: Signs and Wonders)

An unnamed Great Old One was said to be the power source of the Infinite. (TV: The Infinite Quest)

Behind the scenes
The terms of "Old Ones", "Great Old Ones", or "Elder Gods" for a group of ancient, eldritch entities is a hallmark of fiction associated with the, an anarchic shared universe which sprang primarily from the writings of H. P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft himself used the term of "Great Old Ones" only twice. While the second, which equated them with the Elder Things (as echoed in The Taking of Planet 5), is hard to reconcile with later usage, his first and most influential was in . There, they are described as a group or race of powerful interstellar beings, not made of conventional matter, who can rampage from planet to planet when the stars align, but are currently dormant on Earth in a buried city, awaiting the stellar alignment which will allow them to rise again; Cthulhu himself is the greatest of these Great Old Ones, interchangeably referred to as "Old Ones".

Over the years, however, the terms of "Great Old Ones" or "Old Ones" began to be used more broadly in the expanded Cthulhu mythos as a catch-all terms for the more distinctly otherworldly and omnipotent entities described in others of his works, such as Nyarlathotep, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, for whom Lovecraft favoured the term of "the Other Gods"; one passage of Lovecraft's Dunwich Horror relates Yog-Sothoth to "the Old Ones", though it does not seem likely that he thereby intended to make him one of them ("[Yog-Sothoth] knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again"). Later works within the expanded mythos instead tended to use the name of Outer Gods for this class of being, generally continuing to depict them as a rank of being superior to the mere "Old Ones" represented by Cthulhu. Meanwhile, the term of Elder Gods was introduced to the Mythos in 1932's c:lovecraft:The Lair of the Star-Spawn, cowritten by August Derleth and Mark Schorer. Therein, it was used interchangeably with "the Great Old Ones" and "the Old Ones". Later works by Derleth and others, however, would solidify a controversial view within the Mythos of the "Elder Gods" as a specific group of deities equal in power to, distinct from, and at war with, the "Outer Gods" and their "Great Old One" followers.

Though some detect earlier stylistic cross-pollination, the Cthulhu mythos's first true introduction into the Doctor Who universe was a running thread through the Doctor Who novels published by Virgin Books in the 1990s. Lovecraft's original Call of Cthulhu version of the Great Old Ones, as powerful aliens who had once ruled the Earth, was directly transplanted into the DWU by David A. McIntee in the 1993 Seventh Doctor novel White Darkness, which also referred to them as the Great One when describing them in their prime (as they were not, in fact, "old" yet).

A year later, in 1993, Andy Lane's Seventh Doctor novel All-Consuming Fire presented itself as a three-way crossover between Doctor Who, the Cthulhu mythos, and the Sherlock Holmes mythos. The Doctor was given a lengthy expository monologues concerning "the Great Old Ones", with the term being used for an assortment of beings roughly matching the Lovecraftian pantheons of "Other Gods". The book also identified past foes of the Doctor's as being of their number or related to them: the Great Intelligence was conflated with Yog-Sothoth, Lloigor with the Animus, and Fenric with Hastur. The novel also introduced the idea that in a DWU context, these deities were not only interlopers from another universe, but actually survivors of the universe before the Big Bang. However, despite their vastly contradictory understandings of what beings should be described by the epithet of "Great Old Ones", the book also referenced the events of White Darkness, explicitly identifying the Old One primarily seen in that story as Cthulhu himself. With Azathoth being identified in All-Consuming Fire as "the weakest of the Great Old Ones", this implied a cosmology wherein whih Cthulhu was not only on par with, but more powerful than, Azathoth, an interpretation wildly at odds with anything Lovecraft or most of his close followers might have intended.

At any rate, in 1995, Craig Hinton's own Seventh Doctor novel Millennial Rites elaborated on McIntee's innovations, primarily the identification of Yog-Sothoth with the Great Intelligence, and introduced the idea thatShub-Niggurath was the mother of the Nestene Consciousness (which would later be elaborated upon in Hinton's Sixth Doctor novel Synthespians™). Instead of any variation of "Old Ones" or "Great Old Ones", however, Millennial Rites hewed somewhat closer to Cthulhu Mythos terminology, using the term of "elder gods" to refer to the ancient beings. Hinton also introduced the idea of the pre-universal beings who thus became the elder gods/Great Old Ones having been an "earlier race of Time Lords", whereas McIntee had not necessarily depicted all the members of the group as being of a single species.

The following year, 1996, saw the release of Virgin Books' Second Doctor novel Twilight of the Gods, a sequel to The Web Planet. Christopher Bulis acknowledged the retcons concerning the Animus, referring to it as an "Old One", giving a description of the race that tallied more with McIntee's Call of Cthulhu-inflected lore of an interdimensional race of conquerors with limited powers, than with McIntee and Hinton's ancient pantheon of disparate, non-corporeal gods as described in All-Consuming Fire and Millennial Rites.

In the afterword of his 1999 Sixth Doctor novel, Gary Russell reflected: "One of the best things to come out of the various Doctor Who novels over the years has been the explanation of the extra-powerful adversaries the universe has faced, known colloquially as the Great Old Ones. I‘m indebted, as we all are, to Andy Lane, Craig Hinton and DavidA. McIntee for establishing their credentials and, particularly, to Lance Parkin for penning the sadly-out-of-print-but-worth-finding-second-hand-if-you-can Doctor Who: A History of the Universe, in which all the references are brought together for easy consumption/exploitation/ripping-off by myself."

- Gary Russell

The book gave a list of Great Old Ones that included the ones referenced in the various Virgin novels, and added a few, including identifying the Seventh Doctors' foes the Gods of Ragnarok as Great Old Ones. It also introduced the notion that the Guardians were in some sense Great Old Ones themselves, though it dithered somewhat on the matter: at one point in the book Rassilon is seen coining the term of "Great Old Ones" for the inter-universal visitors lesser than the Guardians, while later, the Doctor refers to the Guardians as the Great Old Ones' "upper echeleons", and the Toymaker was identified as both a Guardian and a Great Old One (having been therein retconned by Russell into being one of these alter-universal entities as opposed to the original production intent that he was a member of the Doctor's kind).

2007 saw the only usage of the term "Great Old One" in a Doctor Who TV story, in The Infinite Quest, an animated Tenth Doctor serial written by Alan Barnes and directed by Gary Russell, where the power source at the heart of the Infinite was revealed by the Doctor to be the remains of the power of an unidentified Great Old One: "One of the Great Old Ones [lived here] once. It died out here, alone and lost, screaming its rage and fury into the solitude until its unique power dissipated. Just left a little fading echo, enough to give us a glimpse of our heart's desire…"

- Tenth Doctor (TV: The Infinite Quest)

In 2012, Big Finish Productions began a run of interlinked Seventh Doctor audio stories — Protect and Survive, Black and White and Gods and Monsters, and receiving a coda in the form of Signs and Wonders — which picked up the Virgin Books' basic notion of the Doctor having an ongoing conflict with "the Elder Gods", identifying Fenric as one of them once again (though the identification with Hastur was not repeated), as well as the Animus, Great Intelligence, and even Russell's additions of the Gods of Ragnarok and the Celestial Toymaker. More Lovecraft-specific terminology such as "the Great Old Ones" was, however, avoided, though the Cthulhu Mythos was alluded to in a metafictional way via the mention of an Elder God named Derleth (in allusion to Cthulhu Mythos writer August Derleth).