Howling:Web of Time falling apart?

Template:Forum archives header (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)

I agree with a lot of what you have to say.

First, as you say, the Web of Time clearly isn't as stable as it used to be. The Time Lords had to constantly work to maintain it, and they're no longer around to do it.

As I said in the other thread, I suspect that the Doctor thought they were too rigid, paranoid, and anal-retentive about maintaining it absolutely unchanged, but that he still believed in the basic concept of having something to create stable history and causality and so on for the universe.

Now that the Time Lords are gone, the Eternals and various other transcendental beings have fled, etc., the Doctor is pretty much in charge of the whole thing, so he gets to do it his way. Plus, there's just no way he could do it the old way anyway--he just doesn't have the time, energy, and power to do everything they all used to do, even if he wanted to.

But I don't think that the Moff is planning to use this to undo the entire RTD era. For one thing, that would undo some of the best stories he himself ever wrote. For another, any new hardcore fans that joined during the RTD era would be angry, casual viewers would be confused, and even old-school fans who hated RTD probably wouldn't be particularly happy.

I think there are a few changes of the RTD era he might like to undo--alien invasions being commonplace and common knowledge in early 21st century Earth, and the Daleks getting completely wiped out annually and coming back anyway, always as some weird "not quite real Daleks".

But I don't think the absence of Gallifrey is one of them. We know that when RTD wrote his big finale, he asked the Moff whether he should leave things open so the Time Lords could come back, and the reply was, "Take them". (Unlike, say, Jenny, who the Moff wanted to be left available. Or maybe not; he's contradicted himself on that one.) --Falcotron 04:18, June 7, 2010 (UTC)