 Because of this, holding a trial is a "very rare" event for the Time Lords.Exceptions to this policy are made only in extreme circumstances when they feel they have to, such as where the Doctor calls them for help in the serial.<ref name="war games ten"></ref>

At the start of the 2005 television series, Gallifrey was thought to have been destroyed and the Time Lords functionally extinct as a result of a mutually destructive Time War with the Dalek race; the Ninth Doctor describes his planet as "just rocks and dust" in "The End of the World" (2005),<ref name="the end of the world"></ref> and mentions in "Dalek" (2005) that the Time Lords "burnt" with the Daleks at the end of the "Last Great Time War",<ref name="dalek"></ref> and the Tenth Doctor tells the Master in "The Sound of Drums" (2007) that the Time Lords are "dead" and "[a]ll [they've] got is each other.