Grandfather Paradox

Grandfather Paradox was the nominal leader of Faction Paradox.

Biography
The speaker's chair in the Eleven-Day Empire was left vacant to be taken by the Grandfather upon his appearance to the Faction Paradox. (EDA: Interference - Book One) The Faction Paradox held the Grandfather Paradox up as one of the ultimate forms of temporal paradox.

According to Faction Paradox legend, the Grandfather Paradox had one arm. He had removed this arm to remove the Time Lord branding/tattoo of a prisoner, and he would have committed the ultimate paradox.

Resulting from a corrupted timeline, from Faction Paradox corrupted biodata, a future version of the Eighth Doctor modelled himself as the Grandfather Paradox. (EDA: The Ancestor Cell). Other accounts suggest that Grandfather Paradox appears as a twisted, morally bankrupt and broken version of whoever is looking at him or "the ghost of Christmas cancelled" as the Doctor snidely put it. (EDA: The Gallifrey Chronicles) However, if the Doctor was indeed the true Grandfather Paradox, then this version had indeed committed the ultimate paradox; he cut off his arm not to remove the Time Lord branding/tattoo, but because he knew it was the arm which the Doctor would use to destroy Gallifrey. (EDA: The Ancestor Cell)

According to one account, Grandfather Paradox was a renegade Time Lord who willfully defied the Great Houses, lost his rights as the Head of a House and remade the House into a Faction. Later he created beliefs and rituals for the Faction, including the symbolism of magic, paradoxes and "base physicality" (hence the blood masks and the "family members" ranking policy) to torment the Great Houses and to play on their disgusts and fears. Everything he did was to offend the staid and hide-bound Time Lords. He later wrote himself out of history as a final insult to the Time Lords, leaving Faction Paradox as his legacy and a constant thorn in the side of the Great Houses of Gallifrey. (FP: The Book of the War)

During the Second War in Heaven, Cousin Justine possessed the shadow of the Grandfather, which made her accountable for all the crimes of the Grandafther to the Time Lords. (BBV: The Eleven Day Empire)

Behind the scenes

 * The name Grandfather Paradox punningly refers to the familiar time travel concept from theoretical science and science fiction.


 * Isaac Asimov explained it in an episode of the PBS science series Cosmos as such: "If I go back in time and kill my grandfather as a young man, he will never marry, never have my parent, which means I will never be born. However, if I am never born, I will not be able to go back in time to kill him, so he will not die, so he will marry and have my parent, so I WILL be born. So I can go back and kill him, but then I will never be born, and so on."