Professor Chronotis, formerly known as Salyavin, the Great Mind Outlaw, was an infamous renegade Time Lord criminal-turned-professor. His fellow Gallifreyans condemned him to Shada for supposedly unethical use of his uniquely powerful mind-control abilities. Upon escaping, Salyavin returned to Gallifrey under the new identity of Professor Chronotis and worked as an academic. Ultimately he retired to Earth, taking with him The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. Despite his raucous past, Chronotis gave everyone who met him the strange feeling that "he seemed like such a nice old man".
Biography[]
Early life[]
Salyavin was born over ten thousand years before the Doctor's time. (PROSE: Shada) Like all Time Lords, he was taken from his family at the age of eight for the selection process in the Drylands. According to one historian's account, when Salyavin stared into the Untempered Schism as part of a Time Lord initiation rite, he was driven mad by what he saw. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)
Salyavin had great mental powers, being able to move his mind into another being's. (WC: Shada) According to the life story he would later relay to the Fourth Doctor, he had no malicious intent and simply wished to become a respected academic, but the High Council was suspicious of him and his powers, fearing he might try to use them to take over Gallifrey. These fears were supported by a few harmless "pranks" he played on high-ranking Time Lords in his younger days using his power. (PROSE: Shada)
Imprisoned in Shada[]
As he continued to climb through the ranks of Gallifreyan hierarchy, the Council decided to trick him, sending him to Shada as an official and planning to trap him inside forever. The Council then began a smear campaign on Salyavin, telling of him as a crazed villain, soon nicknamed the "Great Mind Outlaw". (PROSE: Shada)
According to another account, the Master, in his first incarnation, gained the trust of Salyavin, one of his Professors at the Time Lord Academy, in an effort to gain access to the restricted libraries of Gallifrey and find a very dangerous book. The Master never found the book, but the affair left Salyavin implicated. Condemned to imprisonment on a certain prison planet, and bitter at the false accusation, he decided to actually steal the book, just to spite the High Council, and took it away with him as he was carried away to the prison planet, though with every intention of escaping. (PROSE: The Legacy of Gallifrey)
Escape from Shada[]
Salyavin instead took control of his guardians, planting into their mind the idea that they had already locked him up before sending them on their way. Although he had arrived to Shada in his guardians' TARDIS, he had brought his own, disguised by its chameleon circuits as a bookmark, allowing him to escape the prison planet. Fearful that his escape might be noticed, Salyavin committed what he later described as the least moral use of his powers he had ever dared, linking himself to his own TARDIS's telepathic circuits to be able to broadcast his mind all over Gallifrey. (PROSE: Shada) From this position of unparalleled psychic power, he was able to erase all memory of Shada from the Time Lords, thus ensuring no one would ever return there and witness that Salyavin's cell was empty. (WC: Shada) The physical stress of this feat nearly killed Salyavin, forcing him to regenerate into a new body.
Taking advantage of the transformation, he returned to Gallifrey with the brand-new alias of "Professor Chronotis", a harmless archivist — a persona he retconned into all relevant officials' memories with one more use of his mind powers. As curator of the Panopticon Library, he kept a close eye on the book The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey, one of the Artefacts of Rassilon and nothing less than the key to Shada, and thus the ruse according to which Salyavian was gone, and Chronotis was innocent, was complete. (PROSE: Shada)
Retirement at Cambridge[]
Chronotis and the First Doctor. (PROSE: Cambridge Previsited)
Chronotis lived a quiet life, acting as a librarian for nearly twelve-thousand years. Eventually, in recognition of his years of service, the Time Lords allowed him to retire to another planet. After taking The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey from the archives and leaving a harmless decoy in its place, he elected to move to St Cedd's College in Cambridge around the 17th century. (PROSE: Shada) Despite Time Lord law against officially retired Time Lords owning or possessing TARDISes, Chronotis rescued one from a scrap heap to use as his living quarters at the College. (WC: Shada) He had already lived at the college for some time by 1889. (COMIC: The Time Machination)
Chronotis met the the Fourth Doctor in 1955 while he was travelling with Sarah Jane Smith. Two years later, the First Doctor met Chronotis for the first time. (PROSE: Cambridge Previsited) The Doctor grew to know him as a good friend, though he did not know Chronotis' past as Salyavin. (WC: Shada)
Chronotis converses with the Eighth Doctor. (WC: Shada)
When Chronotis began approaching his thirteenth incarnation, and thus the end of his cycle of regenerations, he sent a message to the Fourth Doctor to come and see him so he could return The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey, which he had stolen. (PROSE: Shada) According to one account, the Doctor forgot the meeting after being dragged into a time eddy and did not arrive until his eighth incarnation. (WC: Shada) According to another account, the Fourth Doctor arrived right away. (PROSE: Shada)
At the same time, Skagra was looking for a way into Shada and access to Salyavin. Combining a mind stealing sphere and Salyavin's ability to implant his mind, Skagra planned to merge minds with everyone in the universe. Salyavin died when Skagra's sphere attacked him, searching for information about The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey. Skagra didn't know that Chronotis was Salyavin. Due to a serendipitous mistake made by Clare Keightley with Salyavin's TARDIS, he was brought back into existence. Skagra eventually made it to Shada, where he found out that Salyavin wasn't there. Unfortunately, Chris Parsons worked out who Salyavin was while he was in the room, allowing Skagra to take over his mind. After the Doctor defeated Skagra, Salyavin returned to Cambridge to live as Professor Chronotis. (WC: Shada)
The Fourth Doctor briefly returned to visit Chronotis to borrow The Worshipful and Ancient Law of Gallifrey to once more visit Shada, in order to destroy the Krikkitmen stored there. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen)
References[]
In 1889, the Tenth Doctor asked Jonathan Smith if he knew Professor Chronotis from Cambridge. (COMIC: The Time Machination)
Behind the scenes[]
Professor "Reg" Chronotis in The Interconnectedness of All Kings and The Salmon of Doubt.
- After the BBC failed to complete Shada, writer Douglas Adams reused Professor Chronotis in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. He was given the name and title "Professor Urban Chronotis, the Regius Professor of Chronology", from which he derived his nickname "Reg". To avoid using elements copyrighted by the BBC, while Chronotis remained a centuries-old, absent-minded professor of St Cedds, the book never called him a Time Lord; Chronotis knew he retired to Cambridge, but he could not remember what he retired from, besides that it was "something pretty good". Andrew Sachs, who played Skagra in the Big Finish audio version of Shada, later played this version of Chronotis in the 2007 radio adaptation of Dirk Gently
- Professor "Reg" Chronotis appears in the IDW Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency comic series. In The Interconnectedness of All Kings he resembles Denis Carey from Shada, while in The Salmon of Doubt he has an inexplicably different appearance.
- In John Leekley's ultimately-unproduced version of Shada, Chronotis would have been introduced as Romana's uncle. (REF: The Nth Doctor)
External links[]
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