Howling:What crashed the Byzantium?

The Howling → What crashed the Byzantium?

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Angel Bob, of course. Well, he did. But there never was an Angel Bob anymore, yet the Byantium remained crashed. As someone here pointed out, when things are remove dform time, time rewrites itself around the remove person or event. As noted in Flesh and Stone, time is unwritten, and then rewritten. We know the Weeping Angels along with a bunch of Clerics were unwritten, but we don't know how time wrote around thair lack of existence so that the consequences remain the same or similar.

As theoriesed, with Rory having never existed, time would have rewrote around Amelia's childhood The Eleventh Hour, The Vampires of Venice, Amy's Choice (which may be gone completely, as it was only a dream involving Rory, not a real, major event), The Hungry Earth, and Cold Blood. For example, the Atraxi would have been stopped differently, and so would have all other enemies in stories featuring Rory. It is like when the Doctor tried to changed a fixed point in time in The Waters of Mars - he changed the event, but time rewrote around it so that the consequences remained the same - Adelaide's granddaughter still goes into space and all of that.

It should be noted that, even with The Stolen Earth/Journey's End out of history, all evnets that happened after it (including stories set after it in the spin-offs) will still have happened the same, or very similar, as the consequences are barely affected. The only difference would be small, such as in Planet of the Dead, all Dalek invasion references would be gone. The Waters of Mars (oh dear, a fixed point in time is retconed again!) would have been rewrote, too. Adelaide would no longer have met the Dalek or lost her parents (or so we think), but time would make it so that she stills goes to Mars and all of that business, but the events leading her there would be changed, with the same sort of consequences.

Do you understand what I'm saying? Time is unwritten (people of events, or both), but then is rewritten so that not much is changed. My big question, however, is what has time done concernignt eh crash of the Byzantium? What has crashed it in the absense of the Weeping Angels who fell into the crack? Delton Menace 22:14, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

What we also need to consider is that the cracks erasing people are not the same as changing the future by manipulating the past. If the Doctor time travels to the past and stops Hitler from being born, the future changes, though someone may take Hitler's place in order to maintain a fixed point in time. The cracks however, erase people completely. Whether this is the same as changing the past is not known. That's something we need to take into consideration as well. The Thirteenth Doctor 22:20, June 3, 2010 (UTC)

The simply fact is that the past is changed, whether we like it or not. Amelia never had a childhood friend called Rory, meaning, as the Doctor confirmed, her own history has been changed. That means, when she would look back at stories that had Rory in, things would have happened differently. The cracks unwrite time, and then the timeline itself seems to have an instinct to rewrite around what has been removed. Delton Menace 00:11, June 4, 2010 (UTC)

I always assumed the peoples actions still occurred, but no one remembered them. Even though Rory was sucked into the crack, his act of preventing the Doctor from being shot still happened, otherwise the Doctor'd be dead.82.23.86.207 16:49, June 6, 2010 (UTC)Ghadius

Remember, there's not just one simple, linear timeline. For the Doctor's, all those events with Rory still happened in his personal past, even though Rory has been erased from the past of all non-time-travelers. For, say, the Northovers, history may look contradictory and paradoxical, but they don't really know enough to be sure that's true. And for most other time travelers, there's no way they could possibly discover the paradox in the first place. And that's probably "good enough" to keep the big ball of timey-wimey from collapsing and destroying all history and causality.

And when you look at the Byzantium, it's the same. Who knows that the Byzantium crashed? The Doctor, Amy, and River still remember the Angels, and the Clerics, so the story is perfectly consistent for them. The original Angel made the Byzantium crash, before it was removed from history. For the people coming to take River away, her story won't make any sense, because that Angel never existed. But they don't have enough information to see that there's anything paradoxical. And for the rest of the non-time-travelers of the 51st century, that's even more true.

As for Adelaide, I don't think that was time rewriting itself around the Doctor's meddling. If time just naturally fixed itself, nobody would have to do that. Let the Daleks beat the Nazis for Churchill in 1941, or let the War Chief win WWII for the Nazis, and who cares? The reason the Doctor had to fix those things is that time _doesn't_ naturally sort itself. In this case, just take what Adelaide said at face value--she knew that what he was doing was wrong (even if she didn't understand completely _why_ it was wrong), so she was trying to undo it, of her own free will, and succeeded. --Falcotron 03:00, June 7, 2010 (UTC)

Two Levels

I think you should look at the cracks on two levels:

First (for 'normal' viewers) they are simple enough for normal people to understand so they erase events but the consiquences are minor so erasing the Angels is not a big deal they are gone and local time is affected but stuff they did in the more distant past still 'stands'. Somethings else caused the crash but it isn't important. The Doctor was still summoned by River as she remembers the 'original' events.

On the second level (for the big fans) the cracks really do completly erase events/people except from the memories of time travellers. This means that the Angels never existed at all and the erasure changes every event they have been involved in. None of these events ever happened. The universe has substantially changed. The remaining clerics came to investigate a crash but this was not caused by the Angel; the retconned universe has adapted and only allowed the least possible change for the conclusions of the versions to both be the same. All of the specialist team (that died) did no come at all; only a crash investigation team. The lives of most of them continue as they were somewhere else. Those that actually got erased may now be 'unerased' as they would not have visited the site to be erased. Alternativly they came with the normal team and in events we did not witness get erased anyway (and do did not come to the site and get erased!). That is, there are erasure conflicts and the final erasure of the Angels may overwrite the erasure of the clerics. This allows revisions of revisions (good news for Rory fans?).

The consiquence of the second level is that there are conflicting versions of events and the events we see are only 'true' to us as we share the POV of the time travellers. We are time travelling observers just as the Doctor is so we match up with him. This does not mean that we, or him, are right. The conflict between versions may be resolved in the end and what we have seen may not be the 'final' reality. Jack Chilli 08:44, June 9, 2010 (UTC)

But we never see history right itself this way on the show (except in terms of further erasures, like Amy in Template:VG if you don't build the chronon blocker). The Doctor or someone else has to either stop the change before it happens (Template:DW), undo the change through further time travel (Template:DW, Template:VG), or introduce a later change that undoes the most dramatic effects of the change in history (Template:DW,

). Why bother with all of this if history could just fix itself?

Similarly, why did the Time Lords have to create and maintain the Web of Time? It's stated pretty clearly that without this, history would be fragmented and inconsistent and causality would not hold.

I don't think history in the Whoniverse rewrites itself to stay consistent; I think it just becomes inconsistent for non-time-travelers. If nobody could ever discover the inconsistency, maybe this is OK (as far as the Doctor is concerned; the other Time Lords might disagree if they were still around), but if it's a major hole in history, it has to be fixed manually, or else. --Falcotron 09:34, June 9, 2010 (UTC)