Howling:If the doctor never existed...: Difference between revisions

Regarding the Doctor existing in different timelines-you may have missed the occasional reference to this, but time can be rewritten. This is a long-established fact in the Doctor Who universe. The earliest episode that I can think of where this occured was ''The Space Museum'', but there were probably references to that earlier as well. This is also relevant in ''A Christmas Carol'', whose relevance to this conversation I still don't see. It might be worth starting a seperate conversation about that. Anyway, there are two relatively simple theories that I can think of that make ''A Christmas Carol'' make sense. One is that, as soon as Kazran said "but I do remember" or "I did happen," or whatever the line was, the changes had caught up to him, and all the events with Abigail and the sharks and the fish were in his memory. At that point, it was basically the same story as Dickens' version ''A Christmas Carol'', except the Doctor was reminding Kazran of his past by showing him videos and photos instead of by taking him back in time. The second theory, goes with how the Doctor explained time being rewritten to Martha in ''The Shakespeare Code''. He basically said that it works the same as in ''Back to the Future.'' In ''Back to the Future'' the changes often weren't instantaneous. Marty's family didn't change as soon as Marty travelled back in the De'lorean. He travelled back to the 50s, and after he prevented his parents from meeting, the photograph he had of his family began to change. Oddly, there seems to have been a timeline where his brother didn't have a head, but the future changed as he was changing events in the past. Then, after he got his parents to kiss, the photograph changed back. The same thing was basically happenning in ''A Christmas Carol'', except that we saw it from the other end. Kazran's past was changing as the Doctor made the changes, even though they weren't actually happenning simultaneously but were happenning several decades apart. Kazran, like many characters in Doctor Who, was just able to remember both timelines, probably because the Doctor had actually told him he was changing the past. The machine at the end not working for him is simple enough no matter how you look at it anyway. In that timeline, the machine had never worked for him. His father wasn't going to let a nice person use his machine, so he never programmed the isomorphic controls to work for him. The machine was still sitting there though, even though nobody was capable of using it. Since Kazran was still recovering from his entire life being changed, he didn't remember that the machine didn't work for him in that timeline. As for the changes from the cracks-first of all, if Donna was never half Time Lord, she would have turned into the Master anyway, and the rest of the story would be exactly the same. She didn't exactly do anything important. Second of all, as has been proven, and stated in this forum countless times, the cracks remove things from history, but they don't change the effect that they had on the world. Amy is able to live without having had parents, and Harriet Jones is able to be dead without the Daleks, because that's how the cracks work. It's as simple as that. You might as well ask why people don't ever remember the Silence, or why (most) people suddenly become evil as soon as they are turned into a Cybermen.[[User:Icecreamdif|Icecreamdif]] ^{[[User talk:Icecreamdif|talk to me]]} 05:39, December 16, 2011 (UTC)

I was just using the Cybermen as an example, but the new ones are just as likely to "delete" people, and the real Cybermen probably killed people more often than they cyber-converted them. Anyway, let's try to avoid getting too far off topic. The Doctor disliked guns since long-before ''Dalek''. The Third Doctor, especially, loved to argue about guns with Lethbridge-Stewart. Anyway, as a Time Lord, the Doctor is obviously immune to time being rewritten no matter what theory the show goes with. He, at the very least, would still remember ''Dalek'', and it is likely that Rose and Adam would as well. Anyway, I don't think that Doctor Who really goes with one single theory about how time travel and time being rewritten works. In the very first episode, I think that Susan said that there were only four or five dimensions. Anyway, Doctor Who goes with whatever theory works best with the particular story. I doubt that the idea of some events being fixed while others are in flux is based around any real life theory, but it is a good way to explain why the Doctor insists that history must not be changed in episodes like ''The Time Meddler'' and ''The Aztecs'', but is able to change time freely in pretty much any episode where he stops some kind of alien invasion. With almost 50 years of incsonsistencies between episodes, I doubt that it is really possible to make sense of the nature of time.[[User:Icecreamdif|Icecreamdif]] ^{[[User talk:Icecreamdif|talk to me]]} 06:47, December 16, 2011 (UTC)