Howling:Web of Time falling apart?
(Copied by from User:Agonaga's post in Forum:The Whoniverse timeline is not linear and fixed, which creates problems here. --Falcotron 04:01, June 7, 2010 (UTC))
I've been looking for a place to post this, and I guess this is good enough. The Web of Time was created by the Time Lords and required the Eye of Harmony as part of its structure. Since his 9th life, the Doctor has grown more and more cavalier about his attitude towards preserving original continuity. Also... and I simply CANNOT be the only person who's noticed this ...the time vortex in the opening credits has gotten more and more stormy since the 9th D's relaunch.
Original relaunch credit sequence: The Tardis goes one way in a peaceful blue vortex (blue being both a peaceful color, and the doppler color of things moving away from you) and then suddenly the Tardis reverses course into a red vortex (both a violent color, and the doppler color of things moving towards you).
New credit relaunch sequence: The time vortex is beating the crap out of the Tardis, and finally dumps the ship into a temporal fire.
The Web of Time is very likely falling apart now that its anchor is gone, and the Doctor (and possibly other time travelers) aren't helping things by screwing around with the fixed points which, I'd imagine, are the only things helping the universe keep its current shape.
In a behind-the-scenes way, this is me (and maybe Moffat) rolling out an explanation for how he can un-write the malarky bullcrap that Davies pawned off on us viewers.
In-universe, it's an awfully good reason for the Doctor to break the Laws of Time and either resurrect Gallifrey, or (if you consider novels to be canon) to go back in time, call himself "The Other," and try to forge some improvements during Rassilon's early presidency as the time sleds made way for the first generation Tardises.
I think what we're seeing is that, in the old Whoniverse, things were chaotic and inconsistent because continuity was not really an issue to the writers. They just didn't have any reason to care unless it served their stories. In the new Whoniverse, we live in an Internet age where we can collect discontinuity data and the pressure is on the writers to satisfy that. I think they're starting a transition where, in situations where an 80s Who writer would have just written-in an in-joke about nobody knowing for sure what's what... to a situation where that tendency to mess up continuity, is actually part of the plot.
Fans should probably be forgiven, even in an effort to write an encyclopedia, for failing to grok something that the production team themselves weren't even thinking about for the majority of DW's production history. Agonaga 03:43, June 7, 2010 (UTC)
