Time field

The Time Field is a mysterious crack in the fabric of time and space caused by an unidentified explosion, and is the focus of the main story arc for Series 5. The crack releases energy of "pure time" that can wipe individuals out of time itself and remove events from history, though time-travelers such as the Doctor still have the ability to remember them. The crack can also close itself and subsequently travel to another time. The closed crack can be opened by a Sonic Screwdriver. The crack seemingly erased events such as the CyberKing walking over London in the Victorian era (DW: The Next Doctor) and the Dalek invasion of 2009, one of Earth's biggest invasions. (DW: The Stolen Earth/Journey's End).

One in Amy Pond's bedroom connected it to an Atraxi prison in Easter of 1996. (DW: The Eleventh Hour) Later appearances of the crack were on the Starship UK in the 33rd century (DW: The Beast Below) and the Cabinet War Room in 1941. (DW: Victory of the Daleks) The crack later opened to an incredibly large size aboard the Byzantium spaceship in the 51st century. It erased Christian, Marco, Pedro, Phillip and the Weeping Angels from existence and subsequently closed. The Weeping Angels themselves had feared it, and attempted to escape. (DW: Flesh and Stone)

For an unknown reason, unbeknown to Amy until her encounter with the Weeping Angels, the crack has been following her everywhere she went with the Eleventh Doctor, appearing wherever she went after she arrived.

The Doctor stated that the only other way to close the crack is for it to consume a complicated space-time event: him or the Weeping Angels (due to all of them being equal to himself). River Song volunteered to let herself be consumed, but the Doctor laughed at her idea and said she isn't even as complicated as one Angel. Events overtook them, as the ship's gravity switched off and the Angels fell into the crack, sealing it. At the end of the episode, he traced the origin of the temporal explosion behind the crack to the day of Amy's wedding: 26th June, 2010.

The crack was mentioned again in Venice, when Rosanna Calvierri claimed that she and the other vampires were forced to flee their planet which was being consumed by a crack, claiming that all they saw through the crack was "silence." The crack also appeared breifly in the sky when the dark cloud was fading but the crack faded before the Doctor noticed it. Also silence fell over Venice just as the Doctor left. (DW: The Vampires of Venice)

Time Field Gallery

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  Amelia's crack. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)

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  A Crack shape seen on the TARDIS's television. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)

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  The Starship UK Crack. (DW: The Beast Below)

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  The World War II Crack. (DW: Victory of the Daleks).

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  The Byzantium Crack. (DW: Flesh and Stone).

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  The Venice Crack (DW: The Vampires of Venice)

Behind the Scenes

• The Time Crack was inspired by a crack Steven Moffatt saw in his son's bedroom.

• Moffat has confirmed that the Crack will appear in most episodes.

• The Cracks arc is, like the previous series (excluding the Bad Wolf meme), foreshadowed in a previous series, in this case in "The Next Doctor" (though, perhaps unintentionally).