“The more serious the stuff any politician talks about by day, the more serious the need to relax by night!”
- Baano, Gallifrey 1.2: Square One ->
Gallifrey has a pretty emotionally repressed culture. Time Lords are expected to be dignified and dispassionate. Plus, they have one of the most high-stakes jobs in the universe: preserving the course of history as we know it.
So I was thinking: there is this story about Japanese business men. Because they work long hours and must be disciplined and selfless and respectful, when the work week is done and they go out drinking at night, they cut loose and get drunk and act silly and sing karaoke and for one night they are allowed to shout all the things they can’t say to the boss when they’re in the office. Then, they sleep it off and they’re ready to go back to work and do it all over again.
I think the same principle applies to anyone working a high pressure job in a high stakes field. Nobody can be serious and disciplined and self-restrained all the time. The harder you work, the more you need to blow off steam, cut loose, and be ridiculous.
What if this applies to Time Lords? Time Lords are one of the most uptight, straight laced, buttoned up cultures ever. I imagine “Time Lord on a Night Off” must falls somewhere on a continuum between “Tokyo Salaryman Drink-Up” and “Vulcan During Pon Farr”
New Theory:
Once a centi-cycle (every 23 days), the President’s office closes up shop for the night, and Romana takes her entire senior staff to Low Town outside the Capitol where there are establishments with private function halls for Time Lords to party behind closed doors. Typical Time Lord partying includes tone-deaf karaoke, ridiculous hats, consumption of physiologically appropriate intoxicants, wearing of historically anachronistic costuming, comedy roasting, amateur strip tease, scandalous canoodling, taking the Lord Rassilon’s name in vain, embarrassing dance moves, and staser tag.
The following Monday, everyone goes back to work, and since time is relative, the night of partying is declared to fall outside the standard time continuum, and therefore never happened.
(Really I just want an elaborate excuse to write “drunken Time Lords in a dance club” fic. Am I that transparent?)
“Ain’t no party like a Time Lord party, because a Time Lord party is not bound by typical temporal parameters, and thus, DON’T STOP!”
- Summerfic paraphrasing @theta_sigma
