Talk:Infinity Doctor's reality

Rename

This article is more than just conjecture — to me, this is a downright violation of T:NO RW. This is like calling parallel universe (Inferno) the "Inferno universe"! This is the precise reason why we have dab terms. This should definitely be renamed Parallel or Alternate universe (The Infinity Doctors).
--SOTO ☎ 09:43, August 27, 2013 (UTC)

Or alternate timeline (The Infinity Doctors).

I think it should be this or Parallel universe (The Infinity Doctors) as those are the two terms that we use to describe 'otherness' of alternates and is how the universe is described in the intro to the article. --Tangerineduel / talk 13:23, August 27, 2013 (UTC)

Removing {{rename}}. This name was agreed after long, long discussion at Forum:Is The Infinity Doctors canon?. The page was created by Josiah Rowe who was a careful participant to that discussion and therefore it does reflect the sense of that discussion. Tangerineduel, you agreed to this name on 24 May 2012 with the words:

"That sounds fine. Simple and easy. I have no objections. So, can we go ahead and do this or do we need to wait?"

Now, in fairness, that discussion did allow for later changes, and I'm not opposed to looking for something slightly more in-universe. But we definitely didn't break T:NO RW, as SOTO alleges, because we had a big ol' specific discussion about the name, in which we knowingly exempted ourselves from T:NO RW in this case. Also, his example of Inferno Earth makes his point poorly, since that is based on an in-universe concept: the Inferno Project. Therefore, SOTO's specific challenge fails, and the {{delete}} tag must be removed. It can be replaced, but only with an entirely different suggestion.

As an aside, we probably don't want nomenclature like parallel universe (The Infinity Doctors) because pipe tricks leave us with a non-specific term. Any name which leaves us wondering which parallel universe we're talking about after a pipe trick isn't a good name.
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍  20:31: Tue 17 Dec 2013

Parallel universe or alternate timeline?

The 2012 forum debate Is The Infinity Doctors canon? ended in the decision that the book should be covered as valid but separate from the events of the main Doctor's life. At the time, the default way to do this was by assigning its events to a "parallel universe". However, since then, the wiki has developed a rigorous distinction between the concepts of "parallel universe" and "alternate timeline":

• A parallel universe is a reality that has no intersections with the main universe. A good example is Pete's World: a separate universe with no clear "point of divergence" from the main universe.
• An alternate timeline, in contrast, is a reality which diverges or splits from the main timeline. There's a clear point of divergence here: for instance, in Alternate timeline (Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS), the split revolved around when the Doctor realised to press the Big Friendly Button.

I believe that the correct term for the setting of The Infinity Doctors (henceforth TID) is the latter, not the former. This is due to several in- and out-of-universe indications that events mentioned in the past of TID, such as Time Lord history and the Doctor's parentage, are also true in the main universe. I'll list just a few illustrative examples:

1. Basic facts about Gallifreyan culture and history established in TID, like the number of Chapters, the significance of the Flower of Remembrance, and the original purpose of the Citadel, are repeated in The Taking of Planet 5 and The Ancestor Cell. Ancient Time Lord history is the same in the main timeline as in TID.
2. The story of Savar's loss of his eyes and the creation of the Needle in TID is consistent with Seeing I. Time Lord history of the Doctor's parents' generation is the same in the main timeline as in The Infinity Doctors.
3. Depictions of the Doctor's parents and their friendship with Saldaamir in TID are consistent with the descriptions in Unnatural History and The Gallifrey Chronicles (as I detailed at Talk:Daniel Joyce). The Doctor's childhood is the same in both timelines.
4. Patience's presence in Omega's universe in TID is a direct continuation of her role in Cold Fusion, which was set in the main timeline during the Seventh Doctor's lifetime.
5. The Doctor remembers traveling with Bernice Summerfield, Sam Jones, and Izzy Sinclair, all things which the Eighth Doctor did in the main timeline.
6. TID's depiction of the Needle and the greyness in the far future is deliberately consistent with Unnatural History and Parkin's later book Father Time. Even the far-future is the same in both timelines.

These connections between books make it quite clear that for the most part, the timeline in The Infinity Doctors is perfectly consistent with the main timeline. These timelines did not diverge until late in the Doctor's life, after his adventures with the Eighth Doctor's companions.

Even beyond all this in-universe evidence, Lance Parkin has proved his authorial intent that there was a clear point of divergence between the two timelines: namely, as TheChampionOfTime summarized on this Theory page, Parkin's charity story Fishy Business clearly suggests that the specific point of divergence between the two timelines was Last Contact and the beginning of the Eighth Doctor's relationship with Benny. This was Parkin's intention while writing The Infinity Doctors; later, when it became clear that Enemy of the Daleks would not be published, he presented an alternate point of divergence: Larna's trip from the Infinity Doctors timeline back in time to the Doctor's parents in The Gallifrey Chronicles, with the intention of helping the Advanced Research Project change history. While these narratives rely on out-of-universe or invalid evidence, they nonetheless inform us on the intention of the author regarding The Infinity Doctors: at no point was it a parallel universe; it was always an alternate timeline.

For these reasons I have placed a rename tag on this page to Alternate timeline (The Infinity Doctors). This does fall afoul of CzechOut's pipe trick preference expressed above, but since 2013, [[Alternate timeline (Story Title)]] has emerged as the standard format for alternate timeline pages. This new page name would better represent The Infinity Doctors' relationship with the rest of the Doctor Who universe. – n8 (☎) 02:58, 1 February 2021 (UTC)

Hmm… Actually, I think you're overlooking possibly the most important out-of-universe grounds for calling this an alternate timeline rather than a parallel world. This has been nagging at me for a while, ever since I became aware of the decade-old decision — and this argument helped me put my finger on it despite not quite getting there.

I don't know if the distinction between "alternate timeline" and "parallel world" is that alternate timelines have a single point of departure while parallel worlds do not. For example, if memory serves, one of the Eighth Doctor's parallel counterparts in The Glorious Dead had a rather clear point of divergence: this was a Doctor who'd decided to stay with Grace at the end of the TV Movie.

Rather, if we are going to run with broad "default" definitions (even if you'll always get a valid story that uses the terms differently, DWU writers being what they are), then I think it is clearly this:

• Alternate timelines happen to the normal universe; they are abnormal offshoots, which often need to be undone, but equally, may leave traces even after Time has snapped back into the "correct course". Typically characters cannot jump from one alternate timeline to another; to access a "different version" of a given point in time, they need to alter the course of history back again.
• Parallel worlds usually exist 'unbidden', separately from the normal universe; although they are sometimes brought into existence by something a character does, they just as often exist "on their own", irrespective of what relationship they may or may not bear to N-Space. You can physically travel from one to the other, if you can traverse the Void.

So we need to ask ourselves which scenario we have going on in PROSE: The Infinity Doctors. Let's go back to the original Lance Parkin quotes based on which the decision to redeem TID from invalidity to parallel-universe status was made:

The original plan was to do a two book thing, with Kate Orman and Jon Blum writing the other half. Their book, þMentor', was about an old Time Lord who'd gone mad. We knew that there was this sort of observer effect in the Who universe – this idea of þobserved history', with the Time Lords as the observers. So we had the idea þwhat if one of the observers went mad?' – he'd see stuff, and by observing it, he'd make it real, but he was loopy, so that meant the universe ended up as mad as he was.

And with that in mind I wrote a PDA in which the Fourth Doctor and the Mary Tamm Romana fight a monster called Centro (which I've since learned is the name of the bus company in Birmingham!), and he could bend time and space. And he bent it so that the Doctor never left Gallifrey, and was stuck in this dreadful place, dreaming of exploring the universe. It waså unconsciously, I hasten to addå a complete rip off of the Alan Moore Superman story For the Man Who Has Everything.

Steve Cole, the editor at the time, liked that chapter and hated everything else about it, so I reworked it. But as soon as I did that, I realised this was a unique chance to do a story that could be outside the normal þcontinuity' å about continuity. Which I found quite a fun idea. And I also realised that most of the readers would be expecting the bit where the universe goes all wobbly and turns back into the þreal' Doctor Who universe, and once I decided not to do that, it was very liberating.Lance Parkin, 2004

Well, I believe that's quite clear-cut, don't you? Per authorial intent, The Infinity Doctors depicts the result of the Doctor's timeline "going loopy", of Time being "bent" so that the Doctor somehow never left Gallifrey even though he's already up to his eighth incarnation. And Infinity Doctors is no more set in a "parallel universe" than Interference is.

Hence, the "Infinity Doctor" isn't like Theta Stigma or other such "counterparts of the Doctor in parallel universes"; rather, he is the result of our Doctor getting his timeline screwed with. He's the Doctor's answer to, say, Amy Pond (The Girl Who Waited). He should keep his own page for the same reason Old Amy does, but they're not parallel counterparts of each other; one is an abnormal temporal outgrowth of the other.

Of course, none of this is in the book. But The Infinity Doctors being a "parallel universe" wasn't in the book either. The decision taken a decade ago was to suspend our usual rules about authorial intent in this specific instance, and allow ourselves to be guided by the Part-2-that-never-was in how we interpret TID. Well, if that's what we're doing, let's do it right.

I'll effect the rename now, but there's going to be a lot of clean-up work amending language on the various pages where this is relevant. Scrooge MacDuck ☎ 05:41, 1 February 2021 (UTC)