Howling:The Whoniverse timeline is not linear and fixed, which creates problems here.

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On here, the Whoniverse timeline has all stories down in the same, linear timeline. The problem is, that is not how it works in the Whoniverse. Good examples are how Dalek (no Daleks recorded in history in 2010, not even on the Internet) took place prior to The Stolen Earth/Journey's End in the series episodes, but then Amy of Ghosts/Doomsday and The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, and even Daleks in Manhatten/Evolution of the Daleks and Victory of the Daleks came along and put a huge 'DALEKS' stamp in Earth history. For goddness knows, The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang will likely feature the new Daleks in 2010.

We have Daleks spanning from 1930 to 2008 or 2009, canceling out the events of Dalek. Every action the Doctor makes in his personal timeline will change the timeline he exists in. His actions leaod to the Daleks invasions in the 21st century more-or-less (if he hadn't of caused the creation of Torchwood, the Daleks wouldn't have been summoned, and therefore Dalek Caan wouldn't have resurrected Davros, which caused the latest Earth invasion and canceled out the events of Dalek).

Doctor Who is a constant battle of time, really. Some things are meant to happen, others can be negated. We knew Torchwood had existed prior to the Tenth Doctor causing its creation because his future self already casued its creation. As seen, originally, there had been no Medusa Cascade incident, only the Torchwood incident. Other examples occur with The Mysterious Planet: originally, Earth would be moved and rennamed. The Time War, fought across time, changed the timeline inside and out, as Steven Moffat (the very same man who mentioned that Doctor Who doesn't have a true continuity, only changing time) has said in the past. One of these changes was Earth's ultimate fate. With the Time Lords gone, time is now more prone to being changed than ever before. If an event isn't fixed, it doesn't need to happen.

But the big problem here is the attitude regarding the timeline: it's all linear and everything does happen in this one linear timelinne. That completely ignores what both the show, the writers, and the Doctor say: in Doctor Who, there isn't a true and fixed continuity, and the Doctor's time traveling changes history all the time. Time is in flux, it can change.

Why do so many here ignore all of that? Are some of you so stubborn, you can't bare the thought of Doctor Who not being in a linear, resricted timeline where everything is simply fated to happen? Delton Menace 14:18, June 5, 2010 (UTC)

One word - Cracks! They probably removed the events or they were so small and kept under wraps (Daleks in Manhattan, Victory of the Daleks) that no one knew outside of a few people who were probably told to keep quiet about it. The Torchwood incident will probably have another crack which would cause a major change in the timeline - Rose would probably be back in the normal universe. I don't know how Moffat will work this though. Although, Amy may not have seen the Daleks due to them being in Scotland at the time and the Daleks were only in London for a short period of time before they were sucked into the Void. User:Solar Dragon/Signature 14:23, June 5, 2010 (UTC)

Vincent and the Doctor further pushed the issue regarding the attitude toward the timeline on this wiki. What're we going to say, "2010: the Doctor and Amy saw a monster in one of Van Gogh's paintings and then went back in time" and then say, "but this never happened now, as time was re-written so that the monster was never paintined." There are a lot of issues here, but the timeline is one of the biggest ones due to treating it like everything happens, ignoring the fact that various stories have been erased from it, time is rewritten, ect... Delton Menace 20:23, June 5, 2010 (UTC)

I was just wondering if little things can be changed then why not go and rescue adric. In the old series I always thought that you couldn't change any history but in the new series he creates new timelines alot. I accept that fixed points can't be chnaged thats fine but if some events are in a flux surely adric would not be a fixed point the doc could just teleport in there and get him out the frieghter would still crash. The doc has brought down harriet jones government, and surely the daleks attacking earth wasn't meant to happen as they killed harriet jones. So I accept that say if his companion gets killed in like a major battle he cant go back and change it, and I accept that some powerful beings can change history but still things like adrics death should be able to change. I always thought that it was meant to be in doctor who if you change fixed important points of time to much then the universe will begin to unravel. Maybe that is what the cracks are, think so many fixed points have been changed over the last few years, Doctor saved adeilade, Caan rescued Davros from the nightmare child the Daleks attacked earth all these invasions like canry wharf must have changed at least some fixed point in earths history after, think if the aliens tried to invade in 1970 and they didn't destroy the earth, they didn't even destroy a city but they were flying everywhere then peoples attitudes would change so much that history would go completely different, people would be scared of aliens ET would never get made so many fixed points would just change. Maybe because so many fixed points [not the ones in a flux] have been changed all of history is unravelling and fading away events are vanishing and eventually everything is gonna go and the doctor is gonna have to find some way to stabilise it perhaps thats what the pandorica is and when he does that all the things that have been erased will come back Daleks Cybermen etc. I do love the idea that it was the doctor that caused these dalek invasions by creating torchwood. The adric thing is the only thing that bothers me the rest makes sense, though alot of people say he hasn't gona back to save adric because he is so unpopular. User:Winehousefan: 22:10, June 5 2010, [UTC]

You have to remember the Web of Time. Before you go off and speculate about the parts that are left clear, this is one thing the episodes (and novels) have made clear:

If the Time Lords had never existed, a universe with time travel would mean no consistent history, no sensible causality, just a big steaming mess of paradox. They imposed a meta-structure on history that makes it reasonable. And they were constantly acting to maintain it.

Now that they're gone (and yes, that "now" is an issue...), the Web is in danger. But the Doctor is clever. He knows which strands he can safely yank on and which he can't. This is presumably what those events where "history is in flux" vs. "fixed points in time" are about, although he never quite ties them together.

I'd speculate that the Time Lords had a very narrow nothing of what was safe to change, and that's one of the things the Doctor rebelled against, but that part is just speculation.

In City of the Daleks, he makes it pretty clear that changing a fixed point in time is both technologically very difficult, and dangerous to the very structure of the time-space continuum.

So, there are three possible reasons he couldn't save Adric:

1. The Time Lords were still around and wouldn't let him tamper than dramatically with the Web.
2. This might have been one of those changes that wouldn't just alter the Web of Time (which he might have no problem with), but potentially unravel it completely or even tear apart the cosmos or something (which, as an environmentalist, he's against). Why would Adric be so important? Well, we don't know, but we can guess that it's because his timeline was intimately tied in with the Doctor's own. Adric's death was ultimately the cause of Tegan leaving, the cause of the Doctor thinking twice in a few cases where he might have been more cavalier, etc.
3. He may not have had the power to alter history that dramatically without access to Time Lord artifacts.

Anyway, these supposed paradoxes in the Doctor's timelines are only paradoxes when viewed by someone living in "normal" time. The first time he was in 2010 the monster was still in the painting, that's why he went back, and the second time he was in 2010 the monster wasn't in the painting. So, the monster in the painting is what caused him to go back in time. No paradox, no problem. Remember, he's a time traveler--he can remember the original timeline even after it's been changed. Of course in, say, Dr. Black's timeline, there never was a monster, so the Doctor's causal history makes no sense, but who cares (especially since there's likely no way for Dr. Black to ever discover the paradox)? Likewise, Dalek still happened for the Doctor; for non-time-travelers those events may have never happened (or may not have happened that way), but again, so what? The paradox only exists if you assume that there must be one, single, linear timeline, which is a ridiculous idea in the first place. --Falcotron 02:19, June 6, 2010 (UTC)

Okay that makes sense I actually never thought of the doctors history as important believe it or not but is obviously. What you said Falcotron is true if the doctor rescues any companion then he could be changing history in ways he cannot comprehend. For instance if he saved sara kingdom [which he could he could land back there and tell sara to go to the tardis and help his older self get there perfectly fine] he could end up destroying the universe as sara being alive now she could say sav the first doctor and with him alive he might not being older be able to take down sutekh or the war in the meduesa cascade the same way. This could be true for any doctor, the third doctor might not be able to beat sutekh because his style is different to the fourth. The companions could change important events in the doctors life in other ways too. So he cant take that risk ever. Winehousefan, 09:43, June 6 2010, [UTC]

Well, I wouldn't say "ever", just "usually". He has done _some_ things that affect his own personal past before, and I'm sure it'll happen again. (If the "finale Doctor" speculation is correct, he'll be doing it again in a few weeks.) He just doesn't do it very often.

Out-of-universe, occasionally it makes for a great story to have him go back and fix his past. But if he could do it all the time, it would take away all the drama and pathos. A companion dies? The bad guys win? Who cares; just undo it. That works for a computer game, but it would be dull as a TV show. Similarly, part of what was funny about The Curse of Fatal Death is that the Doctor and the Master don't actually do anything much on-screen, they just announce that they went back in time to set things up. If the whole show were like that, it would be ridiculous. So they can't have him do it too often.

In-universe, the distinction is probably that he can see that some cases are where his own personal history is in flux and others are fixed points, just as he can with history in general. And, since the Doctor is so important to the history of the universe, he's probably chock full of fixed points.

The only problem for him is that it's very hard to explain the difference to 20th/21st-century humans, which is a big part of what makes traveling with the Doctor so infuriating and/or frightening for some companions (Steven, Victoria, Tegan). Of course other companions recognize this but just accept it, because they have an ingrained respect for authority (Barbara and Ian), or because they're just having so much fun even if they don't understand half of it (Sarah Jane, Rose, Donna). But it's something that all of them (except Susan, Romana, and maybe Nyssa, Jack, and River) have to come to terms with. --Falcotron 01:59, June 7, 2010 (UTC)

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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) PS: I have no idea how I managed to break the layout of the text on this page so badly, but I'm sorry :(

That's a bug with the fancy Rich Text Editor that randomly happens sometimes. I fixed it for you (by copying the wikitext into emacs, fixing it with a few handy search-and-replaces, and pasting it back here). I'd suggest trying to edit in wikicode instead of in rich text. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it's usually a lot easier--and it doesn't cause stupid annoying bugs like this.

Meanwhile, I think this probably should have been posted as a separate thread. Since I don't want to undo someone else's edit in the forums, I'll leave it here, but create a new thread Forum:Web of Time falling apart? as well, copying your post over, and reply there. --Falcotron 04:01, June 7, 2010 (UTC)