"Daniel Joyce" was a renegade Time Lord who became a professor on Earth.
Biography 
Edit
"Joyce" told Sam Jones that, though he'd had dealings with Time Lords in the past, he was not one; he said he never understood Time Lord teachings about the sanctity of the Web of Time, instead preferred to be unbound by history or the big picture. However, he noted that his perspective had put him in trouble in the past, leading to the tattoo on his forearm. The Doctor once spent a week "cleaning up" after Joyce's visit to Youkali. Joyce also referenced Patience.
Sometime in the 1980s, he worked as a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, working for the Advanced Research Project. However, he was fired for building a small atomic bomb as a demonstration that any lunatic could build one. Twenty years later, he started working at Berkeley again as "Daniel Joyce", a physics professor from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
After the millennium Joyce gave Professor Wagg a new beryllium chip to make up for the one that was stolen from him. In 2002, Joyce assisted the Eighth Doctor (whom he called "son") in defeating Griffin and in closing a dimensional scar. Joyce told the Doctor that he had begun experimenting with his biodata at this time, but refused to tell him why.
Joyce was married to Anne. They had a daughter in her thirties.
The Eighth Doctor commented to Joyce that his pseudonym "fit him"; (PROSE: Unnatural History) the novel Ulysses had been written by James Joyce. (COMIC: The Final Chapter) Joyce's assistant on the Project, Larna, (PROSE: Unnatural History) had previously worked with a renegade Time Lord named Ulysses, who secretly had a hybrid son with his human wife Penelope Gate. (PROSE: The Gallifrey Chronicles) The Eighth Doctor claimed to be half-human on his mother's side, (TV: Doctor Who, et al.) and Daniel Joyce often referred to him as "son". (PROSE: Unnatural History)
Appearance Edit
On Earth, Joyce had a tattoo on his forearm that he had tried to remove. He had a short white beard and a Scottish accent. (PROSE: Unnatural History)
References Edit
The Doctor knew his father was a professor at Berkeley. At the time, he specifically thought that his name wasn't Ulysses. (PROSE: The Infinity Doctors) The boy mentioned a version of the Doctor's past where his father had his name erased from time. (PROSE: Unnatural History)
Behind the scenes Edit
- The character of Daniel Joyce was based on the character of the Doctor's father in Robert deLaurentis' 1994 Eighth Doctor movie script The Time of My Life. Like Joyce, this character "John Smith" was a renegade Time Lord with anti-nuclear views who taught at Berkeley College before being fired by building an atomic bomb as part of a protest. Also like Joyce, Smith was married to a woman named Anne with whom he had a daughter. DeLaurentis was thanked in Unnatural History. In another 1990s Doctor Who revival script, written by Philip Segal, the Doctor's father was given the name Ulysses; this is hinted at in the name "Joyce", as in the real world James Joyce wrote the novel Ulysses. The name Ulysses, and the "professor at Berkeley" origin, were also alluded to The Infinity Doctors.
- Kate Orman, co-author of Unnatural History, said it was "absolutely clear" in her mind that Daniel Joyce "seduced and carried away" the 18th century human Penelope Gate (from Orman's earlier novel The Room With No Doors), then abandoned her to raise their son on Earth. This was meant to explain the Fifth Doctor's statement in Black Orchid that, as a boy, he had always wanted to drive a steam train.[1] In later novel The Gallifrey Chronicles, Penelope and her husband, the renegade Time Lord Ulysses, appeared alongside their hybrid son and Joyce's research assistant Larna.
- Joyce was to feature, under yet another pseudonym, in author Jon Blum's planned Eighth Doctor novel The Why Knot, but it was never published.[2][3] The Doctor's father would also have appeared as a professor from Berkeley in Lance Parkin's unproduced Eighth Doctor novel Enemy of the Daleks.
- Joyce and his wife Anna appeared in Jonathan Dennis' The Killing of a Flash Boy, published in the charity anthology Missing Pieces, where the Eighth Doctor entrusted them with raising a boy with psychic powers being hunted by UNIT. Larna is mentioned.
