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Eye of Harmony

The Eye of Harmony, in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who, is the name given by the Time Lords to the artificially created black hole that provides nearly inexhaustible amounts of energy to their home planet of Gallifrey and providing the power needed for time travel.

History

First appearances

The Eye was originally mentioned in the Fourth Doctor serial The Deadly Assassin (1976), where it was revealed as the source of power that sustained Gallifrey. According to the ancient records, the Eye was the nucleus of a black hole, which the legendary Time Lord figure Rassilon captured and placed beneath the citadel of the Time Lords on Gallifrey (known as the Panopticon). He placed it in a perfectly "balanced" condition, so that as long as the Eye existed, the power of the Time Lords would "neither flux nor wither". However, it remained there for so long that it passed into legend. Until the Fourth Doctor and the renegade Time Lord known as the Master rediscovered it in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords had forgotten its location, some even believing it to be mythical or no longer in existence.

As seen in The Deadly Assassin, the Eye was linked to two other Gallifreyan artefacts, the Sash of Rassilon and the Great Key of Rassilon. The Sash was needed to control the Eye safely without being sucked into it, and the Great Key was an ebonite rod that could be used to drain energy from the Eye. The Great Key was later renamed the Rod of Rassilon in The Invasion of Time (1978) to distinguish it from the other Great Key, a component of the De-mat gun.

In The Deadly Assassin and the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, the Master tried to use the Eye to give himself a new set of regenerations.

Omega and Rassilon

Prior to this, in the 1973 story The Three Doctors, another figure from Time Lord history was introduced. Omega was a solar engineer who, in trying to provide an energy source for the Time Lords' time travel experiments, harnessed the power of a supernova. However, this apparently killed Omega and created a black hole. Unknown to anybody for millennia, Omega was not dead, but merely trapped beyond the event horizon of the black hole in an antimatter universe.

The first connection between Omega and Rassilon was made by Alan Moore in his 1980 Doctor Who Monthly comic strip story Star Death (DWM #47). Although the canonicity of the non-televised media is open to interpretation, Star Death showed the proto-Time Lords trying to collapse the star Qqaba into a black hole and harness its "energy stream". Omega and Rassilon were both members of this project, and when sabotage sent Omega hurtling into the newly created black hole, he was presumed lost. Rassilon then took control of the project, and the power of the black hole. It was not made explicit, however, that this black hole was the same one that provided the Eye of Harmony. (Qqaba would also be mentioned in the 1998 novel The Infinity Doctors by Lance Parkin.)

This connection appeared next in the 1988 serial Remembrance of the Daleks, where Omega's stellar manipulation device was dubbed the Hand of Omega and became the object of a struggle between two competing factions of Daleks. Although the televised story made no mention of Rassilon, the 1991 novelisation of the serial (though again of unclear canonicity) by the story's writer Ben Aaronovitch, drawing on elements of the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan", made the connection between the two Time Lords explicit. The story of Omega's supernova becoming the black hole that provided Rassilon with the Eye of Harmony became part of the fan-accepted mythology and was incorporated into the Virgin New Adventures novels.

The television movie

The 1996 television movie revealed a new function for the Eye. No longer just a power source for Gallifrey, in the movie an artefact referred to as the Eye of Harmony was part of the TARDIS and, for the first time, was stated to be the TARDIS's primary power source. It was also shown that leaving the TARDIS's Eye open for too long would result in spacetime distortion as the space around the Eye was exposed to the gravitational effects of the singularity.

However, having the Eye of Harmony on board the TARDIS contradicted the idea that the Eye itself was on Gallifrey. To reconcile this, fan speculation held that this was not the real Eye, but merely a name applied to a remote link to the actual Eye that powered the craft (possibly in the same way the Time Lords transmitted energy from Gallifrey to the TARDIS in The Three Doctors), or alternately, the Eye had been somehow transferred to the TARDIS. The former conjecture became established fanon, and was taken up in the spin-off media and was eventually confirmed by the official BBC website.

The Past Doctor Adventures novel The Quantum Archangel by Craig Hinton offered another explanation by claiming that all TARDISes built after a certain point, including the Type 40 the Doctor uses, have a mathematically modelled duplicate of the Eye with all its attendant features.

Current status

In the 2005 series, the Ninth Doctor revealed that Gallifrey and the Time Lords had been destroyed in a Time War. It is unclear if this means that the Eye of Harmony was also destroyed.

In the episodes "Boom Town" and "Utopia", the TARDIS needed to "refuel" by absorbing energy from a "scar" left by a closed spacetime rift, implying that it is not powered entirely by the Eye at this time. The former episode also revealed that the TARDIS console concealed the "Heart of the TARDIS", a mysterious glowing energy source that the Doctor associated (in "The Parting of the Ways") with the energies of the time vortex.

The Tenth Doctor makes an oblique reference to the Eye's creation in the episode "The Satan Pit" when he quotes: "My people practically invented black holes. Well... in fact they did."