So over on io9 they’ve posted an article about the central problem with Stephen Moffatt’s Doctor Who, and while I agree with some of their points, I think that the central problem with it — with almost any incarnation of Doctor Who, though particularly with this one — is that it makes absolutely no sense.
I’m not talking about things that are scientifically impossible or implausible, which to my mind are no more legitimate criticisms of Doctor Who are than saying the the monsters look phony and the sets are made of cardboard. What I mean is that the central premise of the show makes no sense from a logical perspective.
It’s particularly obvious in recent years because the show has returned to doing a lot of show set in Earth’s past, but always with some fantastic element (I’m informed, via The AV Club, that “Black Orchid” was the last historical Who story with no SF element other than the Doctor in it, and it was the first one since “The Aztecs” about twenty years earlier.) Often these fantastic elements would have earth-shaking or even earth-destroying consequences (an Ice Warrior triggering a nuclear war in the 1980s, for example) if the Doctor didn’t stop them. But the Doctor has been to our time, which has not shaken or blown up by any of these events, “before” (in his timeline) going to many of these times and places. So how did these events happen “before” the Doctor got involved? Why wasn’t modern-day London a smoking, radioactive ruin until the Doctor went back and stopped that Russian sub’s missiles from launching?
Now maybe this has been answered somewhere — I’ll admit to not having an encyclopedic knowledge of all Whoiana, especially of the Colin Baker-Sylvester McCoy years — but to my mind there are a couple of possible answers. The first is that these things didn’t happen because the Doctor “always” went there — essentially, when he visited our present (or future) he was experiencing the effects of things he would do in our past, his future. This makes the most logical sense but is also the most dramatically unsatisfying, because it basically means that everything he does is already set down by fate.
The only other option, considering that multiple timelines have been declared a no-no in Who canon (and are similarly undramatic, since they undercut the significance of anything you do when you travel in time) is that the times and places the Doctor goes are in some way temporally indeterminate: essentially, if they’re left alone they’ll happen the way they did in our history, but they can be changed by outside intervention. The problem with that interpretation is that it suggests that everything would be fine if the Doctor just stayed home, and that he’s risking all life on Earth to satisfy his wanderlust. Unless, that is, we suppose that each indeterminate point can only be changed once, in which case the Doctor is being brought to them so that he can seal them up before some other time traveler does.
Why are these points in time and space indeterminate? Why are so many on Earth? Why are they crawling with extraterrestrial and interdimensional visitors? Why do they so often seem to create points where history could be changed significantly? And why is it the Doctor’s job to seal — or perhaps we should say stitch them up? I don’t know. But they are pretty interesting questions…
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Point of order: the last historical before “Black Orchid” was “The Highlanders” with Patrick Troughton.
That’s a point of fact.
They covered that in a 1975 serial, Pyramids of Mars. Once the Doctor stumbles across a threat in the planet’s past, he either stays around and fixes it, repairing the timeline, or he leaves and the threat changes history. It was addressed in a really good essay by Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles in their About Time series, sensibly in Vol. 1, alongside “The Aztecs,” the first time in the series anybody has the potential to change established history.
But remember that Doctor Who has had dozens of people in charge over the years. The original premise, overseen at the story level by David Whitaker, would never have seen the Doctor do more than observe events in the past. It was only later on that the difference between “preordained” and “preferred” history became part of the series’ bag of tricks as different writers and script editors had their say.
To use your example of “Cold War,” I would suggest that the TARDIS brought the Doctor to that submarine specifically because something had happened to the timeline and World War Three broke out in 1983, and the TARDIS decided that the Doctor could fix things.
I’m reminded of idiocracy: “how does this time travel work?”
I mean on the one hand there is quite a lot of stuff that is pretty much nearly canonical in the show (I hedge on this because canonical and the Doctor diverge) that asserts that traditional concepts of paradox and time travel related shenanigans are all wrong. So this would fall under that.
But since we are here, and you have asserted there are only two possible explanations I suppose I should come up with another one rather than falling back on the easy enough explanation of humans don’t know or understand as much as they think they do which is implicit in a show about a time traveling alien near immortal super-genius.
So an explanation or explanations that fits in with the show’s timey-wimeyness:
As has already been argued on this site among others and is also the argument of angels in manhattan when you don’t know how the time line is supposed to go then you can change it, just as this applies to the Doctor so it applies to any other Time Lord.
It also applies to anyone else with Time Travel abilities, or who has time Traveled.
In the Show that would be:
The Family of Blood – and perhaps whatever race they came from.
Daleks – since they fought the Time war with the Time Lords.
Some of the races that were present in The Pandorica opens might have Time travel apart from the Daleks, or they might just have hitched a ride of some sort?
Not to say that Daleks are time travelling all the time or that other races are, but it seems to be a possibility.
River Song can time travel with a vortex generator separate from the Doctor, obviously others who have these rare and dangerous tools can also.
Captain Jack can or did.
The spaceship with miniature people can time travel and go around messing with things.
Anomalous reality wide disturbances can happen such as the cracks in time caused by the Tardis exploding. Since these happen everywhen at once this changes the time, causing weird vampire fish people to come to Venice.
The Angels can send you back in time to feed off your squandered time energy.
We’ve seen them do it only with very little movement in space (relatively to moving to other planets but who knows maybe some angels sending you long distances like that as well, at any rate they can alter the timelines)
Donna had that bug on her shoulder that sent her back to change her behavior, making everything go wrong. I guess similar things can happen to other people, aliens whatever.
I could go on in the same vein as this for a while, let us just assume that I do and instead allow me to get on to other points.
If the Doctor goes somewhere historical, or someone else goes somewhere historical that can then cause repercussions that affect the future of that historical place.
We’ve also seen how, time travel being what it is, doing things in the future can have repercussions in the past because it caused someone to go to the past to escape, do something else etc.
Also not every place the doctor goes that is not specifically historical is necessarily the future. Unless a year is specified or humans are present – which they are most of the time of course – it could very well be the past on some alien world, meaning that repercussions there can send someone to historical earth. Butterfly wings flapping on Holfolax 4 can cause an alien invasion of Liverpool.
This is of course all similar to your temporally indeterminate point, it just points out that not every time traveler is the Doctor.
In fact there seems to be quite a lot of them. He’s just the best, and best equipped.
good point on the Waters of Mars, so that’s another explanation – which also goes along with the Doctor’s wife episode where the Tardis says she didn’t always take him where he wanted to go, but she always took him where he needed to go.
I will note that this is a problem that can be obviated by playing for different stakes.
Cold War, for example, could simply have been about whether or not the Doctor saves the lives of a bunch of very frightened sailors, far away from home and in peril they’re not equipped to deal with. If he fails, London doesn’t turn into a smoking crater; a lot of families just never see their husbands and sons again. If anything that’s more poignant, not less.
At the meta level… we’re dealing with time travel here. It’s somewhat difficult to construct coherent rules for it that don’t fall into one of two traps; either “everything is already pre-ordained” or “time is completely mutable and the first person to travel to the past and remake the universe in their own image wins.”
I’d like to see something where the Doctor and his companion(s) crash in the past, and there are no aliens or whatever mucking with events. There was a nice story in one of the IDW runs featuring the Eleven/Amy/Rory team.
You seem to have started from an incorrect premise, which is that there is a Doctor Who canon.
http://teatimebrutality.blogspot.com/2009/07/canon-and-sheep-shit-why-we-fight.html
Assuming a canon where there is none creates a lot of problems and binds up your perspective on the show in self-imposed knots.
“…this is a problem that can be obviated by playing for different stakes.”
Hmmm, kinda, but doesn’t “Time LORD” sound just a little more butch than that?!
More seriously, Murc seems to be suggesting that these smaller(?) changes would be therefore undetectable. I am not sure that follows; many things are chaotically interconnected in the modern world. I find it very hard to believe that there is not even the slightest relationship between significance/”poignancy” and detectablility. I can believe they are a good bit different, but mutually orthogonal? No way. (Thank goodness newspapers are dead, or changed headlines would make it obvious this dog won’t hunt.)
Who says there aren’t multiple timelines? Isn’t that what parallel universes are all about?
In Doomsday, Pete Tyler says: “Every single decision we make creates a parallel existence.”
Though I never got the impression there was a parallel Doctor, so maybe he exists outside all that somehow.
I think all this was addressed by the original series back with Doctors 3 & 4, more or less.
There’s no predestination, but the Time Lords and Gallifrey seem to stand outside of history themselves. Somehow they are able to examine the “natural” course of history, looking back from the end to see how things “ought” to have happened (despite not being at the end of time themselves), and when someone or something causes the course of history to be altered. Then they send an agent to put things “right” again.
The Time Lords are essentially meddlers, deciding how things “ought” to unfold and forcing the Doctor, who is their reluctant agent, to travel around making sure that things happen as the Time Lords have decided they “should”. Sometimes the Doctor agrees with their determination of what “ought” to be (eg, Genesis of the Daleks), other times he’s a much more reluctant agent (can’t think of an example right now).
As for why everything seems to revolve around Earth, I’ve always assumed it’s the same reason as why everyone Dante met in Hell was Italian — we’re only shown/told about the stories that we can identify with because they involve humans in one way or another.
Fixed points in time, yo. They use that excuse about once every three or four episodes.
OK, admittedly it’s pointless to really get into this, because the series has offered something like fifteen directly contradictory explanations at one point or another (from stories like ‘The Time Travellers’, which explicitly states that every time the Doctor lands he changes established history, to stories like ‘Inferno’, which suggest that alternate universes are common and plentiful) but here’s the rough idea.
Time in the Doctor Who universe is, structurally, a bit like thick toffee. It has some fluidity, but it’s very stiff and difficult to move. Crucially, it’s not of a uniform density–there are points that are “crystallized”, or “fixed”, and there are points that are fairly soft.
When a time traveller lands at a point in space/time, their very presence “softens” the toffee a bit, making changes possible. Minor changes are generally absorbed (if the Doctor saves one life, the timestream just rewrites itself a little to accommodate that life.) Major changes can either result in paradoxes if they can be resolved without ultimately changing the timestream (think of them like bubbles in the toffee–Rose’s dad didn’t die when he was supposed to, but he did die, so there’s just a little bubble of paradox in that particular place and time) or they result in alternate universes (like Pete’s World, or ‘Inferno’.) It has been suggested strongly that chronovores eat alternate universes and excrete the energy back into “our” space-time continuum, so as to preserve the law of conservation of energy.
The key, of course, is that only Time Lords have the wisdom (and possibly the sensory perception) necessary to know which points are which. This is why the Doctor sometimes blithely wanders in and interferes, and other times says, “You cannot rewrite history! Not one line!”
That’s the rough version. I’m sure someone will point to something that contradicts it (like ‘The Time Travellers’, which is really quite awfully hard to reconcile with anything else in Doctor Who) but it holds up well enough to keep me from staying up at nights wondering about it all.
Oh yes, and this is what the Doctor means when he says “wibbly wobbly timey wimey”. It’s not “I don’t have to offer an explanation because who cares, it’s time travel”, it’s “cause and effect are not as interdependent as most people believe them to be, because time is like a big blob of toffee and not a Jenga tower. You can pull something out of time and it leaves a bubble, it doesn’t collapse the whole stack.”
(Although yes, I will admit that writers after Moffat have used it as “I don’t have to offer an explanation because who cares, it’s time travel.”)
You’re thinking about it more than anyone who has ever written for it.
To quote Mark Gatiss:-
‘Without being pejorative about it, there is a huge difference between loving anything – any programme, any concept, any show – and knowing it in such exhaustive detail you suffocate it.
‘To me, the most wonderful joyous thing about Dr Who, right from the beginning is that the idea is so great.
‘Even though there are continuity things that people are really ‘keen on’, let’s say – if it gets in the way of the story, fuck it.’
To illustrate the point, he goes on to point out that Doctor Who has seen Atlantis destroyed in three different ways.
I do think time travel is a tool in Dr who. Its an excuse to get our characters to a particular story in a place and time. Its usually best off left that way, because the paradoxes and stuff usually make for bad story telling. There are exceptions: Blink for example works as a fun puzzle box of a story, but when time travel is used to solve things (which it obviously easily could be) it can feel like a let down.
But what if we’re not talking about the doctor stopping a threat that traveled back in time. Like in the Cold War, I might be wrong but to me it seemed to me like Skaldak wasn’t from the future, he’d just ended up on earth somehow and got frozen. So it’s not like established history was altered, Skaldak was always there. Which should mean that in normal history he succeeded in launching a nuke and possibly started WWIII, and then the Doctor goes back in time and alters history. Unless we’re dealing with fatalism, which seems like the only solution to me.
“Like in the Cold War, I might be wrong but to me it seemed to me like Skaldak wasn’t from the future, he’d just ended up on earth somehow and got frozen. ”
Yes, he was always there. I happen to know exactly how he came to be there. In the year 1013 he was on a routine patrol when I traveled back in time from 2057 in a futon refrigerator, knocked him for a loop and caused him to crash into the North Pole.
of course the reason why I traveled back in that futon refrigerator was that the Doctor had shown up in 2056 to bankrupt my Alephian controlled place of employment, a year later after spending the last of my money on drugs I decided to make a go of it in the past.
Of course he wouldn’t have had to bankrupt my place of employment if he hadn’t destroyed that planet of time parasites with a reverse black hole explosion in the early years of the universe. The resultant cascade of temporal anomalies caused the Alephians to discover Earth 40 years too early.
Also it seems that it sent a bunch of other species off their normal histories and they ended up on Earth and Mars and generally interfered A LOT!!
But lucky he managed to go through and take out most of them. There are a few he still hasn’t fixed, for example there was Fkiktur the Smed who came to the earth in Victorian London and had to survive of the psychological terrors of murdered prostitutes until at last it could nest.
I hope these examples clarify why saying there has been no temporal interference in any point of reality in the Who universe, whether that point seems to be what one would see in ours or an ‘alien’ one is something that is rather hard to do.
Trivia point: The Gunfighters has the Doctor trying to avert the OK Corral shootout without any concern for preserving the timeline. But then, it’s a pretty silly story (and a pretty bad one).
Kudos to Funkula for that blog – every now and then I go back to have another read of it. Where is that guy? He was brilliant.
First of all, more often than not, the Doctor’s presence or early acts trigger or escalate whatever problem he encounters. Secondly, it’s been implied that holding timeline-collapsing paradox at bay was what the Time Lords did (and hence, with them gone, the weird bird thing from Fathers Day, as well as the various “and now the timeline is ruined” plots of NewWho). Thirdly, and this is sort of implied by The Name of the Doctor, I sort of like the idea that everything the Doctor does is a package — this is a variant on the “he was there because he was always there”, but allows for a bit more free choice.
Hah! This triggered me to watch some Who, and next in my queue was Pyramids of Mars, where they demonstrate that having seen the future doesn’t mean it’s not going to get ruined.
I had a very extensive argument planned out in order to refute the premise that multiple timelines “are similarly undramatic, since they undercut the significance of anything you do when you travel in time”, but I think the Cliff Notes version will do as well. Basically, if a Many Worlds Interpretation is right, and there is good evidence for it, our reality operates under multiple timelines already, so if something can be dramatic at all, it would have to be dramatic with multiple timelines.
The issue then becomes one of establishing what we all mean by “dramatic” and “significance”. I would recommend everyone try a hard to imagine a reality that is composed of the sum of many, many existences that also lets them be proud or ashamed of their choices. Because you may very well be living in that reality. The key is realizing that once you have figured out what “you” are, “you” can only live in one of them. Yes, this means that everyone has their own canon!
Bonus Round: Dr. Who under timeless physics.
There are a couple of elements involved:
A) The Doctor is not supposed to cross his own timeline. It’s a big no-no (that of course gets ignored from time to time, especially in the case of multiple Doctors showing up).
B) A lot of the time, he doesn’t actually choose where to go (the TARDIS is sentient, and takes him where he ‘needs’ to be). So, sort of like with River, the TARDIS likely knows what moments in time the Doctor “needs” to go to so that everything works out as it should. While the Doctor “must” save the day, and that sort of hurts things from a narrative stand point, but “the protagonist is going to win” is usually a given. In the case of the free will issue, not knowing your predestiny sort of means you are acting as if you had free will anyway.
C) They often talk about fixed points in time, and I think critical or tipping points. Fixed points always happen the way they are ‘supposed’ to. Trying to stop them isn’t just “not allowed” by Time Lords and such, it just can’t happen. [In comic terms, it’s like Booster trying to stop Joker from shooting Barbera]. The critical/tipping points though, are situations that can go either way, and can actually change history. So, it’s likely the case that the Doctor was always supposed to end up there, but what exactly he does when he gets there isn’t set in stone, so he could end up changing history if things didn’t turn out well. Because of those “could go either way” points, the Time Lords would normally try to avoid messing with time because, while it was possible to alter history, they shouldn’t do it. Of course, they are jerks that are fine with breaking their own rules, so they tried to kill the Daleks before they were born, and helped to escalate a vendetta against one Time Lord into a full blown Time War.
The older series had the fall back of just saying that Time Lords won’t “allow” history to be altered, and will probably go off and try to fix whatever the Doctor (or the Master, or the Monk, or the Daleks) messed up, but the new series doesn’t really have people enforcing the rules.