Which story contains the best portrayal of the Time Lords?

The recent attempt at destruction of, well everything to do with Doctor Who in the new series got me thinking about this - Which portrayal of the Time Lords do you prefer?

The nearly omnipotent version of the Time Lords depicted in The War Games (which I would say was the view held until Deadly Assassin - Remember at the beginning of Genesis:  "Don't you realise how dangerous it is to intercept a transmat beam? Oh come, Doctor, not with our techniques. We Time Lords transcended such simple mechanical devices when the universe was less than half its present size."

Or the great but tired civilization past its prime (where the Time Lords have forgotten a lot of what they once knew back in the age of Rassilon - There was a black hole contained underneath their city and they didn't even know!) as depicted in Deadly Assassin, Invasion of Time, The Five Doctors, Trial, ...?

And there is perhaps a third variation: introduced in Remembrance (and also in Silver Nemesis and Fenric), where the Doctor is one of the founders of Time Lord society along with Omega and Rassilon: "The Hand of Omega is a mythical name for Omega's remote stellar manipulator, a device used to customise stars with. And didn't we have trouble with the prototype."

Strangely, while it is the first time we meet another Time Lord, I don't think the Monk in the Time Meddler does or says anything to favor either of these interpretations.

I'm not sure the third variation is real.

He immediately corrects himself after he says 'we'.

It's there as a juicy titbit and to make the audience think about the mystery behind the Doctor, but it's just an allusion and doesn't constitute any kind of proof that the Doctor was one of the founders.

Fendelman wrote:The nearly omnipotent version of the Time Lords depicted in The War Games.

I liked the early Time Lords, but I don't necessarily think they're a representation of the entirety of Time Lord society. In my perception, these Time Lords would be a sort of a elite.
That's entirely my own speculative take on it, of course.
But I never liked the way Deadly Assassin kind of dumbed down the Time Lord society down to human levels, with the Time Lord hierarchy being shown as doddering old fucks, and having reporters and shit. I suppose I just see the Time Lords as being above all that. Why would a race with such technologies as time travel and trans-dimensional physics or whatever, need to bother with telecasts of archaic pomp and circumstance? It's bollocks if you ask me.

I liked the way the Time Lords were portrayed in the original series, both all powerful and omnipotent, and then the warts and all portrayal in Deadly Assassin with its hints at corruption and the machinations of the CIA. I thought the two were compatible: Power tends to corrupt in human society, there is no reason to suppose it wouldn't on Gallifrey. Holmes just focused in on the warts more, thereby making it more interesting. Arc of Infinity and Five Doctors did much the same. I have to say that Eric was a genius for picking up on this.

Fendelman wrote:The recent attempt at destruction of, well everything to do with Doctor Who in the new series got me thinking about this - Which portrayal of the Time Lords do you prefer?

The nearly omnipotent version of the Time Lords depicted in The War Games (which I would say was the view held until Deadly Assassin - Remember at the beginning of Genesis:  "Don't you realise how dangerous it is to intercept a transmat beam? Oh come, Doctor, not with our techniques. We Time Lords transcended such simple mechanical devices when the universe was less than half its present size."

Or the great but tired civilization past its prime (where the Time Lords have forgotten a lot of what they once knew back in the age of Rassilon - There was a black hole contained underneath their city and they didn't even know!) as depicted in Deadly Assassin, Invasion of Time, The Five Doctors, Trial, ...?

And there is perhaps a third variation: introduced in Remembrance (and also in Silver Nemesis and Fenric), where the Doctor is one of the founders of Time Lord society along with Omega and Rassilon: "The Hand of Omega is a mythical name for Omega's remote stellar manipulator, a device used to customise stars with. And didn't we have trouble with the prototype."

Strangely, while it is the first time we meet another Time Lord, I don't think the Monk in the Time Meddler does or says anything to favor either of these interpretations.

I know this sort of McCoyian story telling is popular round here and i sincerely dont disrespect anyone else who likes this stuff. But for me, this is where Sylvester's tenure went all bollocky. First the Doctor is just a renegade from somewhere, then he is a renegade from an all powerfull race of lords of time. And then with Cartmel, he is a powerful almost supernatural force in the universe partly responsible for the creation of the Time Lords. And he knows it but it just hasn't come up in the previous 20 odd years. At least ChibFuckWit put a memory block in place so the Doctor didn't remember anything about the Naughty Child nonsense he (ChinTit) is trying to shoehorn into the Doctor's canon.

I just wish Cartmel had stuck to reading Thor and Spiderman comics in his bedroom and never gone near BBC TV Centre. Other choices could have been Chris Boucher, Johnny Byrne or David Fisher. Feelers could even have been put out to Terrance Dicks - i know he thought quite poorly of JNT's tenure as producer and might have relished the challenge of reviving the show if Turner had been moved aside.

I do prefer the pre-Cartmel versions (I'm actually not sure which though) with a smaller-time Doctor, but I don't really mind the version hinted at in Remembrance. Rassilon and Omega were never really meant to be god-like figures: they were just scientists from a really advanced civilization that figured out stuff about space and time that no one else did. The Doctor refers to Omega as a "Stellar Engineer." There would have to be some explanation as to why everyone forgot about this, but there is a precedent for that in the way Salyavin made everyone forget about Shada.

Now RTD is the one that went in the whole god-like Doctor direction and that I really didn't like at all. I don't know what Chinballs just did - turn the Doctor and the Time Lords into some nonsensical product of bad writing...

I take it as a combination of one and two. They were once a great and god like race but have fallen into decay by the time of the Sixth Doctor.

That may not seem like enough time but we have to remember that their race lives on a different time scale to us and even the Doctor.

State of Decay.

Sometimes I think hearing Time Lord myths at a distance gives them more grandeur and mysticism than seeing their society in detail.

The War Games.