The Toclafane: The Gallifreyan Bogeyman
In the penultimate episode of the third series of the Doctor Who revival, The Sound of Drums, references are made to Gallifrey's answer to the bogeyman, the Toclafane. We only have essentially that one reference to its place in Gallifreyan culture as solid information, however with some educated guesswork and drawing from multiple sources, I believe I've come up with a reasonable interpretation of what the original mythical Toclafane creature was.
My first and greatest point of reference for the Toclafane is the species of cyborgs that bare the creature's name in the series three stories: these are black, football-sized spheres with knives on their undersides and wizened heads locked inside them.
These are cyborgs from the end of the universe, created by the Master to both impersonate an alien species and act as his security forces.
So why are they little metal footballs with lasers, and not massive war machines, or advanced simulated lifeforms?
Well the Master did NAME his species after the legendary Toclafane, so perhaps the appearance drew from the stuff of nightmares too?
The cyborgs that take their name from the Gallifreyan bogeyman are:
Just larger than a humanoid (or Gallifreyan) skull
Childish in their speech patterns
Shells containing the real lifeform
The last one might seem odd to include, but it does bare mentioning: in the episode immediately preceding the debut of the cyborg Toclafane, we are told that humankind had spent part of their evolution as downloads, as digital lifeforms that download themselves into whatever body they chose.
This, combined with the fact that having the actual original human brain inside the ball is objectively an unnecessary liability, I would hazard that all of these features draw on the mythic Toclafane.
Something else I see as relevant is that the Master deliberately designed the Toclafane to traumatise and enrage the Doctor. While this is largely seen in reference to their human ancestry, it could also be why he chose to base them on their shared bogeyman; more than just in name, but to literally turn humanity into monsters that likely scared little baby Hartnell all those aeons ago. While a strange reference, I would consider it similar to human corpses possibly being turned into goblins in the horror film Phantasm (which, coincidentally, also features killer spheres)
In the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Interference, as well as some audio stories from the early 2000s, we learn that ancient Gallifrey had a very strong religious component to its culture and society; vast churches and monasteries, entire pantheons of gods known as the Menti Celesti, and religious leaders that were provided the same privileges that Time Lords were, such as TARDISes and the ability to regenerate.
Eventually, however, Rassilon abolished religion in its entirety, dismantling the churches and monasteries and banning worship and religious practices in favour of purely scientific pursuits, or pursuits that kind of involved deifying him instead.
I would hazard that this could be seen as similar to the effects Christianisation had on ancient religions, notably Norse and Celtic. In order to allow an easy changeover from whatever the native religion was to Christianity, missionaries would provide "explanations" for the existing religions and their pantheons, usually making their gods angels, magical entities, powerful humans and oftentimes demons. Most notably you see this in Satyrs, which were completely recontextualised as demons even to this day, even affecting Doctor Who with Azal and the Dæmon race.
What does this have to do with Rassilon, the dissolution of the church and the Toclafane?
Well, many "fairy" creatures from folklore are believed to have been religious entities that were "downgraded" when a more solid (and usually Christian) religion assimilated the area. And I believe we can assume that the Toclafane creature originated from early Shobogan religions and, after the dissolution, was kept "alive" as a fairy story and eventually drifted into folklore.
So what was the religious figure the Shobogans wanted to keep alive through oral tradition?
The comic stories Old Girl and The Good Companion revealed that Prehistoric Gallifrey was home not only to the Shobogans, but also manifestations of the Lovecraftian Time Sentinel; androgynous block-colour humanoids with spherical heads.
However, some of these "manifestations" of the Time Sentinel went rogue and distanced themselves from the collective "Axis." One of these Rogue Agents was Aspect Black: a purely black sexless humanoid with a large featureless sphere for a head.
Many, many aeons later, after the "death" of the Time Sentinel and presumably all of its incarnations, the minds of dead Time Lords inside the Matrix developed a new species to look out for their interests in the wider universe and act as Gallifrey's "first line of defence" against truly dangerous threats.
These creatures were known as Casts, androgynous humanoids with blank spherical heads that were all black as the Eye of Harmony (on a good day.) The Book of the War tells us that the original generation of Casts were little more than mindless automatons, however a more advanced and sapient "Mark Two" species known as Babels was eventually created, of which only one was used by the Matrix Lords: used to essentially spy on the Doctor through his travels, its power levels utterly determined by their will.
So to conclude this ridiculous hypothesis where I suggested one tiny bit of evidence then rambled about the EDAs and Christianisation and comics for a paragraph or ten, what do I believe the original Toclafane creature was seen as in Gallifrey folklore?
I believe it was a black sphere, slightly larger than a head. But instead of the metallic design of the cyborgs, I believe it was supposed to be made from skin. Blackened skin, perhaps necrotic and putrefacting.
This too could even be born from Gallifreyan culture, specifically religious culture, as we learn in Heaven Sent that Time Lords "take ages to die" even when past the point of regeneration: considering we know regeneration wasn't natural to the species, I believe that this imagery of a living entity inside a shell of putrefaction and decay was dreamt up by the religious leaders who actually DISAGREED with the perversion of their biology by the addition of regeneration: religious extremists all over Earth are known to demonise, in some cases quite literally, modern medicine and scientific advances, so we can intuit that the Shobogans did too.
And yes, you read that correctly: "a shell of putrefaction." I believe that's it's "shell." The mythical Toclafane is like a hermit crab, there is an entity inside that sphere of decayed flesh that made the sphere as a home and as a defence.
But of course, it has to get the skin from somewhere, doesn't it?
That's where the bogeyman angle comes in, and why the Master made his cyborgs sound so childish.
In true classical fairytale fashion, the Toclafane would mimic the voices of children to lure Time Tots into secluded areas like the Pied Piper....where they could be skinned; the fresh young skin added to the Toclafane's shell in place of the old and rotting skin in a perpetual cycle.
Again, linked to Gallifreyan culture:
The stigma around the effects regeneration had on the death processes
The seemingly unending and perpetual cycle of regeneration constantly repairing a dying body
Gallifreyan children living a "life of duty" in Time Lord society as opposed to a childhood as we humans see it
The ban of religious beliefs and practices, likely after they began to speak up against points 1-3 on spiritual grounds, that completely scattered Shobogan culture and forced their doctrines into mythology
But what were those "Doctrines?" What religious beliefs were corrupted into the mythological Toclafane? Aspect Black of course.
Much like how the Beast became Satan and Sutekh became Set, the Rogue Time Sentinel from the earliest of early days of Shobogan society was remembered and re-remembered and reinterpreted in the later Shobogan religions as an antagonistic and spectral presence, as a ghostly black sphere with or without a body that neglected the Time Sensitive Shobogans. And as religion became myth and beliefs became corrupt, this Satyr of Shobogan culture evolved, or devolved, into the child-snatching demon of Time Lord folklore.
Indeed it would seem the Cast species were designed with the same ethos as the Master's cyborgs: intimidation and psychological exploitation. The Matrix Lords wanted clandestine agents that would serve them, and especially one that would tail the Doctor? It would make perfect sense to base the design on something that used to terrify him, used to terrify all Time Lords. To base the design on the long-lost religious interpretation of Aspect Black, or on the urban legend it became.
And that's basically it, my utterly madcap hypothesis on the mythological creature that inspired the Master's drones. I'd love for anyone with more EDA, Faction Paradox or Comic knowledge than me to tell me I'm 110% wrong about how this and that, right now I feel everything here is pretty solid.
