Okay, my apologies to anyone who’s a) not seriously into Doctor Who, and b) not absolutely mega-geeky. But this is an idea I’ve had for a long time now, and I wanted to get it out on metaphorical paper. So for those of you not into hardcore fan theorizing…sorry, but shit just got real.
Doctor Who is a series that’s been around for almost fifty years now, with dozens of creative masterminds running the series and literally hundreds of writers working on it in its various media. (Aside: I wonder how many fictional characters have been adapted to as many media as the Doctor? Novels, comics, TV, movies, radio plays, stage plays, short stories…Sherlock Holmes and Superman come to mind, but not many others.) Despite all these writers and all these showrunners, though, each of which has a different take on time travel…and for that matter, a different emphasis on it…there does seem to be a consistent underlying principle to time travel in Doctor Who.
That’s a statement that seems pretty absurd on the face of it, to be honest. There have been times when the Doctor has said that “history cannot be rewritten, not even one line!” and times when he’s said that history changes constantly, every single time he steps out of the TARDIS. There have been times when people meeting themselves has caused vast discharges of temporal energy, and times when the Doctor has rubbed shoulders with himself. Anyone saying that there’s a consistent underlying principle has their work cut out for them.
And yet, if you sort of squint, it all does hang together. (This is the traditional approach to Doctor Who continuity in general, actually.) The first thing to do is to assume that when the Doctor talks about the Laws of Time and the things you “can’t” do when time traveling, he’s not speaking literally. The Laws of Time are not like the Laws of Physics, they’re more like the Laws of Traffic. Someone might tell you that you “can’t” drive your car at 120 miles per hour the wrong way down a one-way street, but that doesn’t mean your car won’t actually perform the action. It just means you’re going to die very quickly unless you’re an unbelievable sodding genius.
With this in mind, a lot of the rules of time travel make more sense. The Doctor is aware that very little is actually impossible, but much of what people are doing (or trying to do) is incredibly dangerous. The Time Lords, for much of the series, used their time travel knowledge and abilities to make sure that the technology didn’t get into the hands of the careless or the unskilled, but frequently they didn’t need to because most unskilled or careless time travelers broke the only real law of time travel in Doctor Who. They messed around with their own past history.
This is the common, underlying principle of time travel in Doctor Who: The people who have been exposed to time travel (perhaps those who have been imbued with artron energy, like Rose in ‘Dalek’ or Melody Pond during her gestation) become immune to the gross processes of cause and effect, and become “time-active.” These people can move through history without necessarily being subject to it (the Doctor describes himself and Romana in ‘City of Death’ as having “a special relationship to time…perpetual outsiders.”) But on the other hand, they seem to be subject to a sort of ‘higher time’ that moves in synch with other time-active entities, what you might call “uber-time”. This explains why Rose is 400,000 years or so earlier than the Ninth Doctor, and yet events seem to be proceeding at the same rate for her as for the Doctor. (Another example, for those who have read the books, occurs with the New Adventures ‘Birthright’ and ‘Iceberg’. These are claimed to be taking place “simultaneously”, but that has no meaning in terms of regular, four-dimensional time. Only among time-active powers can you discuss things happening “at the same time” in different eras.)
The implication, then, is that we are watching the series from the progression of “uber-time”. The show might jump around in time and space plenty, but it (more or less) follows the Doctor’s lifespan in a straight line. And more importantly, messing with one’s own personal past is always a one-way ticket to disaster. Stories like ‘Festival of Death’, ‘The Shadow of Weng-Chiang’, ‘Father’s Day’, and ‘The Wedding of River Song’ all show varied and complicated, but universally disastrous consequences for doing things that mess with your own past. (The novel ‘Head Games’ suggests that this extends to “known history”; once the Doctor learns of the sinking of the Titanic, he can’t avert it because his awareness of it is part of his past and thus inexorable. Which is why the Doctor never carries a history book, to answer Rory’s recently-asked question. The less he knows about history, the more he can do with it.)
“Fixed” points in time, presumably, are ones that major time-active powers have as part of their history; once the Doctor witnesses his own death, it becomes temporally fixed and for him to mess with it has disastrous consequences. Interacting with one’s own past in general is extremely dangerous (as apparently a person named “Blinovitch” theorized at some point), and generally to be avoided even by time-actives because of the inherent risks of paradox and ensuing disaster…
…and yet the Doctor does it on at least a half-dozen occasions. Why? What makes him so special? The key is, I think, that he is a Time Lord. It has been suggested that there is something special in their genetic makeup, something encoded by Rassilon back at the point where they stopped being mere Gallifreyans (or possibly a legacy he refined; some of the stories that focus on ancient Gallifrey suggest that they’ve always had an inherent sensitivity to time, like the Tharils of ‘Warrior’s Gate’) that gives them resistance to paradox effects above and beyond even other time-travelers. It’s this biological element that sets them above the Sontarans, above the Daleks (for a long while, at least…perhaps Davros instigated the Time Wars by giving the Daleks the final biological key that put them on a par with the Time Lords and allowed them to fight on their level?) This resistance to paradox is why the Doctor can meet himself without explosion, why he can leave notes for himself and perform clever tricks with predestination, and why, in the height of unbridled recklessness, he believes that he can alter a fixed point in time…albeit one that doesn’t seem to involve his personal past.
So, to sum up: Those who travel in time and actually gain exposure to the Time Vortex become linked not to the regular four-dimensional time we experience, but to uber-time. This carries attendant gifts, but means that the risks of paradox are greater and the consequences worse. Time Lords, being more resistant to paradox and more skilled in time travel, use their abilities to police time travel to prevent people from doing terrible and dangerous things, but resistance does not equal immunity and they were finally “time-locked” by a foe as time-sensitive as themselves.
If you actually made it through all this, feel free to add examples and counter-examples in the comments!
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This is of course why the Doctor can’t just travel back to six months before the Brigadier’s death and have that night out with him in “The Wedding of River Song”. When he calls the nursing home, the phone is connecting to the next viable point of connection between the Doctor and the Brigadier’s shared timeline; to go back in time and interfere would be to violate that timeline.
Your “uber-time” was actually named in “The End of Time Part 1” where the Doctor tells Wilf that he can’t just jump back a couple days to prevent the Master from being revived because they have to stay in sync with the “causal nexus.”
It also makes the Brigadier’s death more tragic, in that the Doctor could have seen the Brigadier one last time if he’d just kept track of his friend a little better, and had known if the Brigadier was in poor health. Obviously it’s a scene meant as a tribute to Nicolas Courtney more than anything else, but it’s a tribute that worked so well in the context of that scene’s overall mood.
This is exactly my theory about time in Doctor Who, except better articulated. (Also I call it “meta-time.”) It explains why the Doctor always meets other Time Lords in the right order in the classic series. It also works in a kind of pseudoscientific way: traveling in time (the 4th dimension) as we travel space requires a 5th dimension to act as time does for us.
Isn’t this the unspoken premise of every time-travel franchise ever made? Doc and Marty never change because they rode in the DeLorean. Even when Marty erases his birth from history, it takes like a week and a half for him to fade away.
Next Week on MGK: John Seavey’s theory on how Joel Robinson eats and breathes on board the Satellite of Love.
A.K.A. “It’s always later on Gallifrey”, back when there was a Gallifrey.
This state of affairs may be due to the Doctor’s possession of the Key to Time; when he ordered it to remain as it was, this arguably meant to keep time working the way he understood or even hoped it worked.
Ok I’m kinda a little bit in love with you now
In the story “The Three Doctors” the Time Lords do bring three of the incarnations of the Doctor together, but talk about having to burn a hell of a lot of their energy reserves to do it without the normally resultant explosion.
You know, there was one bit of time trickery that never quite made sense to me. In the episode where the Doctor gets put into the Pandorica, he pops back from the future to give Rory his sonic screwdriver to let him out. But how was he out in the future to bring it back to the past? Even with all the Doctors fabulous abilities, I was never able to reconcile this bit of shenanigans.
From a non-linear, non subjective viewpoint time is actually a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.
So we’re just seeing the Doctor’s subjective viewpoint. Mostly. Which is nice.
Mike Smith: “John Seavey’s theory on how Joel Robinson eats and breathes on board the Satellite of Love.”
I’d read it, though I’ll be disappointed if it isn’t relaxing. Given the state of the real world and the myriad theories, reasons, and explanations thereof, it’s nice to pretend some worlds can make sense.
I like it, except that it doesn’t factor in how the Doctor and River are constantly out of sync. Shouldn’t they be running more or less parallel?
Jeff- I agree. Self-fulfilling prophecies are not what I like to see the entire existence of a show depend on (although it can be fun, like in Bill & Ted 😉 ). Stephen Moffat was REALLY pushing it that time, I thought.
But the rest of that episode was quite good, like River Song vs. the Dalek
“You are an associate of the Doc-tor’s! You will show mer-cy!”
“My name is River Song. Check again.”
…
“Mer-cy!”
I hope I got that all right 😀
I just remembered something the Doctor said in The Last Voyage audiobook: “Let’s just say my relationship with time is a lot less linear than yours.”
Didn’t the Doctor tell Martha time was subjective at one point?
Re: the Bill & Ted style games with the Pandorica – it wasn’t really something that bothered me much but the difference in my mind (other than the fact that the Theta Sigma fronted “Wyld Tymelords” did not win the Gallifrey Battle of the Bands…) was that B&T were proactively changing their present by committing to a specific action in the future.
The Doctor, however, had no choice but to figure out on-the-fly how to keep his timeline intact because once he was released it was fixed in a causality loop that he did not knowingly create (yet) but that now needed to be preserved.
To me that actually ups the stakes even more considering his Time Lord genetics (to tie this back to a part of John’s theory) make him more capable of making major changes to the timeline, intentionally or otherwise.
@Toby: My favorite line was from an anonymous Internet sort who said, “The Dalek was terrified of River because it knew who her dad was.” 🙂
> where the Doctor gets put into the Pandorica, he pops back from the future to give Rory his sonic screwdriver to let him out.
The same way the Doctor was able to visit the bathroom while his friends were at the diner grieving his death: you can set up stable time loops with yourself, but then you’re stuck in the loop. Once you become aware of an event in your own personal future, you have to make it happen or else it will happen “for you.” The Doctor, being a clever dick, has a remarkable memory for these things and will remember to look for a fez to wear if his future self was wearing one to make sure that the fez-donning experience is pleasant.
I’ve been thinking about time loops often since they are a plot point in Andrew Hussie’s “Homestuck.” There are a boy and a girl time-travellers among the protagonists of the story, where they /can/ mess with their own past but only if they remember their future selves doing so. Attempts to interfere with their personal recollection of the past usually winds up with one or more dead copies of themselves decorating the scenery. The time-traveller girl Aradia actually uses this penalty to her advantage at one point.
I just want more episodes of the Immortal Roman Robot kicking ass 🙁
In some ways, though, it seems like the entire universe (in all times and eras) is on Uber-Time with respect to the question “Is there an active civilization of Gallifreyan Time Lords policing the continuum (or “Has the time war yet happened.” It has in Renaissance Venice, but hasn’t in the UNIT 19×6 era)”. Which is difficult to explain in this theoretical setup.
Well, tachyons are a subatomic particle, so the arton is obviously an atom composed in whole or some part of tachyons. The upgrade to Gallifreyan genetic code, was the weaving in of arton-based molecules to it. The high level of arton radiation on the Tardis caused an incidental collision of a high-speed arton with embryonic Melody Pond, which was then captured and replicated throughout her DNA succesfully… because the arton was self-perpetuated by having previously collided with River Song.
Oh, and arton-based molecules have the (un)fortunate tendency to be fez-shaped.
“Has the Time War yet happened?”
A personal theory: it happened, whatever the climactic event was propagated backward in time as well as forward, and the universe fixed itself as best it could.
There is no Gallifrey. There has never been a Gallifrey. But there are people (beings) who remember being there, or remember actions taken by those from there, or who have artifacts that were created there, because the universe’s self-repair capacities aren’t perfect.
Basically, Gallifreyan events have no causes. They’re “initial conditions”- they just exist. Their causes have been wiped out by the most catastrophic form of environmental damage from warfare.
I like my theory because it permits me to actually watch the show. 🙂
With the Time War, there could be some kind of timey-wimey observer effect involved — back before we knew about the war, it hadn’t happened; now that we’ve heard about it, it always had.
The idea of The Doctor absent-mindedly missing out on his chance to say goodbye to the Brigadier is basically the tragic premise of “The Girl in the Fireplace.”
I hope I’m doing the reply-to correctly.
Okay this is actually a tricky but possible concept we will call “probabilistic feedback”. At time t-meta 0, the Doctor has a vanishingly unlikely chance to get out of the Pandorica in the future. Maybe some suicidal moron lets him out, maybe he breaks out via quantum tunneling. WHO CARES. Now. The first thing he does, immediately, is travel to the past to effectively let himself out. t-meta 1, a past universe where he didn’t get out receives probability of freeing him from a universe where he did. t-meta 1, the probability of being out in the future is a bit higher. The Doctor travels back in time to let himself out .. It’s an exponential process, so it’d probably only take until t-meta 40 or so for the Doctor getting out to dominate all universes. (t-meta == ubertime == causal nexus)
I have for some time now been – very slowly – writing an article tentatively titled “Doctor Who and the Two Dimensional Nature of Time.” It has diagrams and everything.
*sigh*
Oh well. There’s always that article about how the entire Star Trek canon is an AI boosted Buck Rogers MMORPG that got wildly out of control…
Not sure if it’s relevant (or even considered canon) but who remembers the Doctor Who RPG from FASA? It had the Gallifreyan CIA (Celestial Intervention Agency, no, really…) which was basically a bunch of “Renegade” Timelords like the Doctor who would occasionally get tapped by their “superiors” (handlers) back on Gallifrey to take make sure history happened as it should have. They also posited that Gallifrey and the Time Lord civilization was from a point billions of years in our subjective future and that all their Time Travel hijinks were taking place in their past – basically, they couldn’t travel into their personal, Gallifreyan, futures but would appear to us to be free and unbound in Time as their objective future was far in advance of ours. Not sure if I’m remembering that right, but it was a good 25 years or so ago now…