Hey there
I'm emailing you something you might find useful
But, very long story short... The Doctor is 900+ years old. He's a Time Lord - they were a race of very powerful people who could control Time, though mostly they held themselves aloof from the rest of the universe. They wouldn't interfere even when their interference could save planets and species - which, in a nutshell, is mostly the reason the Doctor fell out with the rest of his people and stayed away from his planet for most of his life. He
did - and does - interfere. Now, he tells Rose that he travels in order to see things, but he's also a bit like Clark in that he wants -
needs - to help.
The Time War: we've never been told the full story about that, but what we do know can be summarised pretty much like this: a long-time enemy of the Time Lords, the Daleks, were all set to take over the universe. Daleks are motivated by hate: anything that's not Dalek they destroy. The Time Lords were trying to defeat them, and it came to a final battle and a desperate solution: there was only one way to save the universe, and that way was to destroy the Doctor's planet (Gallifrey) and wipe it out of time. And he's the one who did it. He expected to die, but he survived. The Ninth Doctor is clearly still traumatised: we're meant to assume that the war was in the very recent past. He's the last of his kind, and he's the one who killed his people.
Any more specific questions? Just watch the episodes, really - that'll tell you most of what you need to know, and there are plenty of us here to tell you more when you've done that.
Wendy
