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Okay, so are we all agreed that the Dalek invasion of Earth and the subsequent Battle of the Medusa Cascade are still erased from time by the Time Cracks? 195.188.243.175talk to me 14:45, February 16, 2012 (UTC)
Well, since no episode after The Big Bang has really discussed the issue, and The Big Bang itsself left it rather ambiguous, I don't think that we can make an assumption one way or the other. We can't even be 100% sure that the invasion was actually erased. Maybe Amy stayed in her house throughout the invasion, and any Daleks that came into her house fell into the crack in her wall, causing her to forget them. I'm not saying that that is particularly likely, but it is a possibility. We also can't really use the fact that characters in Torchwood and Sarah Jane still don't believe in aliens, because I don't think that anybody would be too surprised by that even if it hadn't been for the cracks. I'm sure that UNIT or Torchwood or somebody came up with some lame coverstory that most people believed within hours the Earth being returned to its original location. Even in The End of Time, which featured a major event that would be at least as hard to ignore as the Dalek invasion was, Mr. Smith was able to come up with some BS coverstory, and most people would rather believe that the WiFi malfunctioned than that an alien took over all of their bodies and a planet materialized in the sky. Icecreamdif talk to me 15:51, February 16, 2012 (UTC)
Could it have been something to do with the Men in Black, as seen in DW Dreamland and SJA The Vault of Secrets? We know they possess the ability to wipe people's memories of aliens, as Mister Dread does to Gita at the end of the latter story. I'd prefer this explanation over the Time Crack one, but the Crack is the more popular explanation among fans. I once dared to suggest alternative reasons for the forgetting of the Daleks over at Gallifrey Base, and it did go down well with most people. 82.2.136.93talk to me 18:19, February 16, 2012 (UTC)
In the Sarah Jane episode, didn't they say that the MIBs' operation had been shut down for decades, and now all they did was protect the Vault? I could be wrong, because I've only seen that episode once. Anyway, if I'm wrong then it could have been the reason that everyone's forgotten, but I don't think that there's anything wrong with the reason that the show's been using for decades to explain humans forgetting several millenia worth of alien invasions. In the Doctor Who universe, people are willing to overlook almost anything out of the ordinary if they have a more convenient explanation for it. Throughout the years there have been armies of plastic dummies, Loch Ness Monsters in London, Cybermen knocking out everyone on the planet, ghosts becoming a normal phenomenon, the Master broadcasting a message about the destruction of the universe, the US president being murdered by a floating metal sphere on TV, the list is endless. People have always simply refused to believe in obvious proof of aliens, even before the cracks were around. According to Children of Earth, most people still weren't convinced that aliens existed even after Journey's End.Icecreamdif talk to me 18:36, February 16, 2012 (UTC)
Even if you only saw The Vault of Secrets once, you remembered correctly. Mr. Smith said the Alliance of Shades had been disbanded in 1972 and Mr. Dread said that all the MIB had been doing since was guarding the vault. Sarah Jane noted that the most recent of the press cuttings also dated from 1972. There might have been a few other little pointers to the same date that I've missed but those will do. Both Sarah Jane (to Rose, in School Reunion) and the Doctor (to Ace, in Remembrance of the Daleks) referred to the Loch Ness Monster -- singular, please note -- and the Doctor was specifically talking about the human capacity to overlook such things. --89.242.67.155talk to me 21:18, February 16, 2012 (UTC)
Well I personally reckon that thousands of Daleks swarming all over the planet devastating civilisation is a lot harder to just ignore than a lot of the stuff that's happened in and around the London area in past DW stories. I can't see people deliberately ignoring such a massive thing, which is why some other agency would have to have restructured the memories of the population so they remember the past somewhat differently, a kind of mental conditioning. But who would be able to do such a thing, and why? 82.2.136.93talk to me 22:27, February 16, 2012 (UTC)
It's not like those past invasions were just tiny things that nobody would notice. A whole bunch of people died in the first and third Auton invasions (and a few people died in the second one), the Cybermen knocked out pretty much the entire world in The Invasion, ghosts were a normal worldwide phenomenon in Army of Ghosts, the relatively common ghosts throughout the world proceeded to turn into giant metal robots, the moon nearly hit the planet, every single child started speaking in unison shortly before the government instituted a new policy of kidnapping children, a good chunk of the human population (including the royal family) preparing to jump off of tall buildings, and London had to be completely evacuated due to dinosaurs. And those are just the examples I can think of off the top of my head. If people can overlook a major city being evacuated due to dinosaurs, it's not too much of a stretch to say that they will overlook a small thing like the entire planet being moved across the universe. We already know that Mr. Smith came up with an excuse for the entire population of the planet turning into a creepy, laughing blond-haired man and another planet materializing in the sky, and that somebody came up with an explanation for a giant battle between 2 different types of robots in the middle of London, despite the fact that there was even a list of casualties at the event, and they convinced people that another alien ship was a hoax, despite the fact that it destroyed Big Ben. Keep in mind, that there was definetly video evidence of the "ghosts" and Masters. That's not even getting into the fact that Torchwood can erase people's memories, though likely not on a global scale. If humans were dumb enough to believe all of that, I'm sure that they believed the government when they were told that they saw 27 planets in the sky due to a freaky group hallucination, which coincidentally happenned at the exact same time as terrorists were dressing up as the robots from everyone's last drug-induced hallucination, and exterminating people at random. Anyone dumb enough to believe those other cover stories would be willing to believe anything to explain that the world wasn't moved across the universe. The fact that people didn't believe in the Daleks was confirmed in Children of Earth, and the fact that Sarah Jane still felt it necessary to cover up alien invasions that she had nothing to do with in End of Time also proves that aliens aren't common knowledge.Icecreamdif talk to me 03:51, February 17, 2012 (UTC)
I believe on another discussion I came up with a variety of possible reasons as to why nobody remembered the invasions, and here they are:
- Torchwood or UNIT somehow retconned everyone.
- Other aliens came along and erased the memories of the invasions, leaving Earth unprepared for future attacks.
- The Silence memory erasure may have had a weird effect and caused people to forget about other aliens, not just the Silence.
- Intergalactic police did a memory wipe.
- The Trickster's Brigade may have thwarted them as part of a bigger plan, as they did with other invasions when erasing Sarah Jane.
- After the reboot where everyone remembered everything again, perhaps they subconciously wanted to forget the invasion and that's why they did, with the exception of a few who thought the invasion was a good thing. 87.102.94.183talk to me 19:32, February 17, 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, folks, but as much as I'd like to believe these alternate explanations, it just feels like grasping at straws to me. I think at the end of the day, we just have to accept that there literally NEVER WERE ANY DALEKS. Yes, it leaves us with awkward paradoxes such as Mickey still living on his own Earth again, Harriet Jones' death, and Donna being half-Time Lord...but them's the breaks, as they say. 82.2.136.93talk to me 17:49, March 10, 2012 (UTC)
If the Battle of the Medusa Cascade never happened, then surely the Ironsides couldn't be around for Amy to not remember? Surely they would have been swallowed by the cracks in time too, and never have located the Progenitor? I quite like the idea of Daleks coming into Amy's bedroom and being swallowed by the crack during the invasion, unlikely though it seems. Toothless100 - Talk to me 07:35, March 30, 2012 (UTC)
I always assumed that the Ironsides were from Parting of the Ways, and not Journey's End since the Ironsides ere exterminated for being impure. The Daleks in The Stolen Earth were made from Davros' Kaled cells, and the Doctor made a point of explaining that these were the first large group of "real" Daleks that had been encountered in the new series. The Daleks in Bad Wolf, however, were made from human cells, and the Doctor made a point of explaining that these Daleks were impure and hated themselves. Victory of the Daleks never made it clear which invasion the Daleks came from. Anyway, even if they did come from the Medusa Cascade battle, and the events were erased, there are plenty of conversations in these forums trying to figure out how the cracks work, and those Daleks may have been able to exist even if the invasion didn't. It still seems a bit ridiculous to assume that an entire invasion was erased though, when all we know is that Amy had never heard of Daleks.Icecreamdif talk to me 01:20, March 31, 2012 (UTC)