Two questions: Who is this Rassilon bloke, and whatever happened to Omega?
The Three Doctors had seemingly explained how the Time Lords came to have their mastery over time travel. Omega was a stellar engineer, who detonated a star. His people harnessed the resultant energy, but Omega had perished in the process - or so everyone had thought.
At no point was Omega ever said to be the leader of the Time Lords, but he was certainly a member of the High Council (as the Doctor tells him he could reclaim his seat).
The Deadly Assassin introduces us to Rassilon, who is very definitely the leader of the Time Lords in their ancient past, when they gained the power of time travel. Omega doesn't get a mention, and the Time Lord records seem to say that it was Rassilon who came up with both the idea and the execution of the event which provides them with their power.
This revolves around a Black Hole, with no mention of any star being detonated. The Three Doctors saw Omega dwelling in the alternative universe of anti-matter beyond a Black Hole. At no point is it ever said that this Black Hole had anything to do with the Time Lords' power source (until the end of the story when the Doctors make it so).
Rassilon flies into a Black Hole and captures its nucleus, which he then brings back to Gallifrey and sets it within a monolith, buried under the floor of the Panopticon - the great council chamber.
This is totally at odds with what we were told in The Three Doctors.
Omega / blown up stars is out, and Rassilon / Black Hole nucleus is in.
The Time Lords have records of these ancient events (the Rassilon one). One is a full version, and the other is an abridged version - the one which the Doctor listens to.
Bizarrely, no-one on Gallifrey seems to be aware of their own history. They have all these relics named after Rassilon - but don't know what any of them actually do, beyond some ceremonial value. They seem to be unaware of the Eye of Harmony - the very thing that gives them their power.
No-one seems to have wondered what that key-hole in the floor was for.
The Doctor listens to a couple of lines of the abridged record, and works everything out in a few minutes - yet the Time Lords have failed to work any of it out, despite millennia of thinking about it, or have somehow managed to forget something which is key to their existence.
The Master has deleted any mention of himself from the Time Lord files - but surely someone senior on Gallifrey would have actually remembered him. Borusa taught him, and he remembers both the Doctor and Runcible, but fails to recall that student who caused years of trouble for the Time Lords.
The Master has another ill-conceived plan. In order to gain the power of the Eye of Harmony, he has to destroy the planet - but he's standing on the planet. Won't he be killed trying to achieve his goal? He doesn't have his TARDIS sitting next to him as he uncouples the stabilisers on the Eye, ready for a swift getaway. (And if he has a TARDIS, why did he need Goth to bring him from Tersurus? And what was a high ranking Time Lord politician doing going off on his own to Tersurus in the first place?).
He also plans to destroy the Doctor's reputation by setting him up as a murderer - but there will be no-one around to think about his reputation once Gallifrey has been destroyed.
His scheme regarding the Doctor's guilt is already under way when he kills Runcible, whilst the Doctor has the alibi of standing right next to the chief of police at the time of the murder - a very stupid move on the Master's part.
Hasn't he worked out by now that the Doctor's involvement always leads to the ruination of his schemes? Here, he goes out of his way to bring the Doctor into events, when he could have just gone to Gallifrey and destroyed it behind the Doctor's back (as a future incarnation will eventually do).
Setting Goth up to be President seems to be key to his plan, as though that is the only way he could get his hands on the artefacts of Rassilon. He could have simply murdered and hypnotised his way to the same result, without getting involved in convoluted political shenanigans - as he eventually does anyway once Goth has been killed.
Some quick ones:
The Doctor fails to recognise Goth's voice when they are in the Matrix, when it is clear to us who it is.
In the big fight in the swamp, you can clearly see that it is Terry Walsh doubling for Baker, and Eddie Powell doubling for Horsfall.
Runcible suggests that there are more than three chapters of Time Lord, yet we only ever see the three - and why is the leader of the Prydonian Chapter wearing the colours of the Patrexes? Shouldn't Borusa be wearing orange colours - or scarlet if he's a Cardinal?
Hilred is pointing a gun straight at the Master, yet is still over-powered by him. Spandrell despairs of him, and you have to wonder how he ever got to be a commander.
How did the Doctor see Goth raise a small pistol during the ceremony, when he's way above and behind him (and he's wearing big robes with one of those massive collars)?
The Master stops the Matrix warning the Time Lords by intercepting the prediction of the assassination. Why did it not predict him intercepting the prediction? And if he intercepted the prediction of him intercepting the prediction, why did it not predict him intercepting the interception of the prediction...? And so on, ad infinitum.
Robert Holmes thought he knew all about the Time Lords, but one look at The Two Doctors shows that he was very much confused as to their history.
The War Games had shown the Time Lords to be an aloof, god-like race, who saw themselves as being above the concerns of minor species.
Holmes believed that the Time Lords didn't just start sending the Doctor on the odd mission after his exile. He thought that they had been sending him on missions right from the start - including the Hartnell and Troughton eras - which is why he made such a continuity mess of the Colin Baker / Patrick Troughton story.
In showing the Time Lords as, basically, a bunch of doddery old men, complaining of their aches and pains, certain sections of fandom disliked this presentation. Actually, "dislike" isn't strong enough an emotion. They positively loathed it - and the section of fandom we are talking about just happened to be the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, and in particular its president Jan Vincent-Rudzki. He took to the DWAS journal "Tardis" to express his complaints - like a maiden aunt from Tunbridge Wells who had just heard a swear word on Gardeners' Question Time writing to Radio Times. In green ink.
Not only had the previously established image of the Time Lords as omnipotent beings been ignored, but they were now seen to be politically devious, happy to rewrite the truth to make it more palatable to the public, and open to the use of torture to learn what they wanted to know. There was also mention of a group in their society who appeared to be vandals. In a nutshell, Holmes had rendered them human.
His response was that they were hypocrites (that mistake in their history mentioned above), and the fact that, if Gallifrey was so great, why had the Doctor abandoned it - and, more to the point, why had it produced so many super-villains?
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