Howling:On the other hand?
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New idea to consider... if Stolen Earth / Journeys End never happened, where is the Doctors cut-off hand from The Christmas Invasion? There wouldn't be a meta-crisis doctor left with Rose in Pete's World and, of course, the Daleks and Davros not genicidedly wiped out. The Doctor knows 'time can be rewritten' so Donna wouldn't have become Doctor Donna and had her memory wiped, etc, etc, etc. Has the hand somehow become River Song, or become someone else and that is the 'Doctor' she killed (presuming we are not being intentionally misdirected by Moffat on this being who she killed of course). Any thoughts ? 86.26.137.154 07:58, May 5, 2010 (UTC)
Don't think about it too hard, the best explanation is timey-wimey. Time can be rewritten, but time travelers are not affected by time being unwritten. It's like when a story is erased, the Doctor's timeline is never affected. This series is full of timey-wimey. Before you mention Amy Pond being a time traveler, she didn't travel until after the crack started miessing with the timeline. If it something is changed after you begin to time travel, you won't be affected and therefore remember the way things were, such as the Doctor. Delton Menace 17:27, May 5, 2010 (UTC)
- Actually, I think maybe you can think about it. While RTD loved the "timey-wimey" (non-)explanation, from Confidential and Moffat's interviews, I think he's actually tried to think through what it would mean for a universe to have time travel that allows history can be changed, and come up with a consistent framework he can work in. And I suspect it's not too far from my friend's "metatime" idea that I posted elsewhere (although probably more as a vague picture than an attempt to work out something scientific from general relativity...).
- If so: The Doctor's worldline still includes the past where all of those things happened, and so do Donna's and Rose's and so on. But all of the non-time-travelers on Earth (and not-yet-time-travelers, like Amy) live on worldlines where those events never took place. Both pasts exist in metatime. And there's nothing stopping characters with mutually-inconsistent pasts from interacting. It's just that if they do, Donna's past won't make any causal sense to the non-time-traveler. There's no way she could have become half-Time Lord, and yet, somehow she did.
- Fortunately, we see the world along the Doctor's worldline, and he was a time traveler before anything in the show happened. Actually, even better than that, we see the world from an omnipotent viewpoint outside of time; if there were things that were erased even from the Doctor's past, we'd still know about them. So, everything actually does make sense for us. (Or, if it doesn't, that's a continuity error.) --Falcotron 06:20, May 6, 2010 (UTC)
- Surely Delton Menace, the whole point of the Howling is to give us a place to think and speculate, that's why Moffat has set us the challenge of hiding / misdirecting us so well in his writing and interviews. IMHO Moffat is taking this 'time can be rewritten' somewhere, otherwise why is it mentioned twice during FaS by the Doctor, when he works it out prior to Octavian's death and then thinks through the implications with an 'Ah, Oh', and again towards the end of the episode with a big smile? Moffat doesn't waste words! 86.26.137.154 08:33, May 6, 2010 (UTC)
