Howling:Cracks Causing Paradoxes

The Howling → Cracks Causing Paradoxes

There be spoilers about un-released stories here.
Run back to the forums if you're scared.

So everyone seems to think that the cracks erasing events cause paradoxes (such as the common "if Rory died saving the Doctor but then was erased, who saved the Doctor?" or the "If Rory was absorbed because he was dead, how can be be dead if he never existed?"). But they don't. People are bringing up the "if you change the past it affects the future" argument, but that's only for interfering with events, not removing them completely. The cracks erasing someone do not alter the physical or mental status of the present, unless that event or person was directly part of their past, even then, only affecting their mental status, not their physical one, as shown in Cold Blood. Thoughts? The Thirteenth Doctor 20:34, June 2, 2010 (UTC)

The past rewrites itself around the missing person. Past events still happen but they happen differently. For example, instead of Rory bringing Amy to the school in VoV maybe it was the Doctor that did it instead (but only from Amy's point of view, not the Doctor's). This seems to be the hardest thing for people to understand. A paradox would only have happened if someone went back in time to erase someone by preventing conception. The cracks do not work this way. You can almost say that they are intelligent in the way they rewrite events to avoid the paradoxes (changing one person's view of the past and not someone else's). V00D00M0NKY 23:24, June 2, 2010 (UTC)

We don't actually know that the cracks don't work this way. All we know for sure is what we've been told--the Clerics, the Angels, and Rory (and probably the CyberKing and the Journey's End Daleks, although the Doctor may be just guessing there) have ceased to exist. "If the time energy catches up with you, you'll never have been born. It will erase every moment of your existence."

But, either way, as I've said elsewhere, the cracks don't add anything new that Doctor Who hasn't already dealt with before. The Doctor and other time travelers rewrite history all the time (in the novels even more so than on TV), and that has exactly the same potential for creating paradoxes as when the cracks do it. However you (or the writers) choose to deal with all those other paradoxes, it works just as well for any crack-related paradoxes.

Speaking of which, the first Adventure Game gives us new information on how the paradoxes are avoided. Amy should no longer exist--the Doctor explicitly says that he existence is a paradox. But first the TARDIS and then a special "chronon blocker" are used to (temporarily) shield her from the chronons that would remove her from the present. Presumably the time field that seeps from the cracks is chock full of chronons, so Rory is erased from the present at the same time he's erased from the past. But the ring is shielded by being inside the TARDIS, so the chronons can't get to it, meaning it still exists in the present even though its past is paradoxical. (The fact that TARDISes can do this ties in pretty well with the fact that the Master was able to turn the Doctor's TARDIS into a paradox machine--basically, all he had to do was channel all of its energy into shielding local space from the chronon flux.) --Falcotron 13:20, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Ok, that all makes sense but wouldn't that mean that the TARDIS would shield Amy from forgetting Rory? V00D00M0NKY 15:39, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

Well, now we're getting even more speculative. But I don't think so.

You could argue that Amy is straddling two time tracks, one where she's forgotten Rory and one where she hasn't. Chronons have nothing to do with it anymore; it's just a matter of where she puts her metaphorical foot forward when the two paths diverge.

Why? Well, that's the question.

• It's also possible that the writers are just thinking that memory isn't a physical thing like an engagement ring or an Amy (which is kind of silly philosophically--if a person is just a physical entity, how are her memories not just physical entities?--but that doesn't mean it couldn't be the writers' intention...).
• A third possibility is that the TARDIS can only do so much shielding (which they pretty much say in CotD--that's why you have to build the chronon blocker), and an engagement ring is just a much simpler and/or smaller thing than a whole mess of memories. Protecting Amy's memories was just barely within the TARDIS's capabilities, but it needed help from Amy (remember, it can empathically link with its travelers, so this isn't too unreasonable), and it just didn't get quite enough. --Falcotron 15:53, June 3, 2010 (UTC

• I think that there are different versions of events and these are in conflict. This is not quite the same as a paradox; the two (or more) versions coexist until the resolution. These versions can be resolved in a few ways:
• They all can be let stand – does it really matter that there are two versions anyway?

The versions we see can stand.

The versions everybody else see can stand.

A combination of all of these things allowing selective events to be removed from reality can stand (a nice retcon).

I think that the resolution depends on Amy’s memory of events, particularly the Doctor. Imagine that the TARDIS actually exploded when the engines were failing in the eleventh hour. It has already happened the Doctor is erased by the space time rip caused. His past is being erased by the cracks (they are all the same one coming to get him and take away everything he has done). What we are seeing in this series is this removal process.

Memory and observation are ‘special’. The removal of the Doctor is not final until he is forgotten and he (an alternate, or future Doctor) is trying to ensure that this does not happen. It all rests on the few minutes he was with Amy before the explosion. She was not another special person until the doctors made her so. She is the only observer of the doctor between the regeneration (the initial cause of the explosion) and the explosion itself.

The Big Bang is not the TARDIS exploding it is the actual Big Bang. This too will fall into a crack that it attempting to remove the Doctor (the only way left is to remove him is to remove everything). There are no conflicting versions, no paradoxes. Silence will fall …