In the Dr. Who episode “The Girl in the Fireplace,” the life of Madame Pompadour is threatened by time-traveling spaceship repair-and-service droids (which, for some reasons, humans of the 51st Century have designed to resemble 18th-Century clockwork automata, in period costume). Our Heroes have access from a 51st-Century derelict spaceship to 18th-Century France via a limited number of time portals the robots have created on the ship. At one point one of the Doctor’s companions suggests they use the TARDIS to visit that time and place; the Doctor responds, “No, we can’t! We’re part of events now!”
WTF?! The Doctor is always “part of events”! Why should it make a difference whether he time-travels via the TARDIS or some other means?!
I dunno, but wildly guessing I might say that it doesn’t seem to be a good idea to have two of you in one place and time at once. Like Rose’s parents’ friend’s wedding, where she insisted on being there more than once and monsters showed up. Though really they appeared because she changed something significant, I guess. shrug
Remember the episode where Rose tried to save her father’s life, and screwed up the timeline so bad flying space monsters showed up and tried to eat the planet? They already had one unsteady time portal involved in the scenario. Introducing another one (the Tardis isn’t exactly a precision machine, after all) could lead to a paradox like the one Rose triggered, if they jump into a point in time where they’re already using the fireplace portal.
Also, the robots looked like that because the ship was designed with some sort of 18th century French theme. It was named the Madame Pompadour, after all. That’s why they were targetting that specific period of history.
The span of time between his penultimate visit to Madame de Pompadour’s time and his last visit was several years, so he could have fit one in between without running afoul of the Blinovitch Limitation Effect, couldn’t he?
The story still has a happy ending, since the people playing the good Doctor and Madame de Pompadour – David Tennant and Sophia Myles – decided to get snuggly on a regular basis.
Well, I’ve always had a problem with time travel shows worrying about “changing history”, whether it’s Doctor Who, Star Trek, Terminator or whatever. What is “history” if you can travel to any point in it?
I like the idea of the predestination paradox. You can change history, but not to the point of creating a paradox. Think of the Terminator films (T1, T2, and the last 5 minutes of T-3). They can alter events or delay things a bit, but ultimately the following sequence of events must occur:
Kyle Reece bangs Sarah Conner->John Conner is born->Judgement day->John Conner saves the world->Kyle Reece goes back in time
That doesn’t really work, though. Just by being there a time traveler instantly creates paradox. His presence in the atmosphere jostles some air, a gentle breeze blows a slightly different direction, and suddenly a different sperm reaches the egg first. Even if the chaotic effects of a time traveler are limited at first they would get broader and broader as time goes by (roughly half would be a different gender, for example, and then there’s ones who pick up a different set of recessives). Who cares about killing your grandfather when you’re killing half of your current generation and replacing them with similar but not necessarily the same people.
Time travel pretty much has to be an all or nothing deal. Either time is immutable and fixed and you can’t play with events at all or the paradoxes don’t really matter for whatever reason (splitting off the time line, jumping to parallel universes).
From a storytelling perspective, the show wouldn’t be very suspenseful if the Doctor were able to get out of a jam by travelling back to five minutes ago every time something went wrong.
Maybe, maybe not. You’re talking about the “butterfly effect” (not the Ashton Kutcher movie). Like if I go back in time and kill a bug, I come back to a very different present (like the Ray Bradberry book).
I don’t know if I buy that. Maybe events have a certain intertia to them that would limit our ability to affect them. Like if I went back in time to stop WWII. How would I do that? By killing Hitler as a child? Assuming I can find a particular small boy in 1900 Austria it might be very hard for me to kill him. Maybe I accidently kill some other hystorically anonymous boy by mistake? Maybe I’m stopped by outraged Austrian villagers who find this weird foreign stranger who keeps eyeballing young Adolph very suspicious? Maybe the experience actually CAUSES Hitler to be all messed up?
On the other hand, if I went back in time and simply sat in the park for an hour, that would probably not affect anything.
From a storytelling perspective (since it’s all conjecture anyway), I like the idea of the predestination paradox. It has kind of an elegance in that by attempting to change history, you actually get caught up in events or even cause what you were attempting to stop to happen. No multiple timelines or such.
So tying it back to Doctor Who, maybe once he enters a timeline and becomes aware about events, he knows he can’t go back and change the events he knows about? Or say the Blinovitch Limitation Effect (I looked it up) prevents it. It’s basically the Doctor Who plot device for saying “a Wizard did it”.
The ideas about time travel and what someone does to change history are varied. Some I’ve come across:
The changes don’t go into effect because you’re only changing your own personal timeline (Alfred Bester, “The Men Who Murdered Muhammed”)
The past is a part of collective assumption, so people only see it in current terms (George Alec Effinger, “The Bird of Time Bears Bitter Fruit”)
Time doesn’t like to be changed, so it will do what it can to get things back the way it wants (Fritz Leiber, “Try and Change the Past”)
Any small change can create massive changes over time (the aformentioned Ray Bradbury, “A Sound of Thunder”).
You can’t change major events, but you can change small things (a Twilight Zone episode, “Back There”)
The Doctor has always been unable to go back to fix things that went wrong (unlike Sam Beckett). Originally, this was because the Tardis jumped around randomly and he never really set a specific enough course. Later, it just was (the 5th Doctor refused to go back to rescue Adric, but just said, he couldn’t and didn’t give a reason).
That had never made sense to me until recently; why couldn’t it have turned out that they whisked Adric away at the last second, like Tegan suggested? But then I had an idea: being a Time Lord, the Doctor is sometimes subject to flashes of “might have been”- seeing the result of alternate timelines. Maybe he knew that if he had taken Adric off the doomed space ship, it would have somehow altered things enough that the spaceship DIDN"T cause the Cretaceous extinction, the Silurians would have remained the dominant species of the planet, and then there you go…
Come to think of it, now that decent CGI dinosaurs can be done cheaply, they really, really ought to do a show featuring the Silurians/ Sea Devils back in the Cretaceous. Show the Doctor’s dilemma that they have to be wiped out in order for his favorite species- humanity- to evolve.
I’m the first to admit that I am hardly an expert on such things, but it seems to me that if you’re trying to procreate in such a way that a breeze might disrupt your sperm flow, you’re doing it wrong.
But in “Genesis of the Daleks,” the TimeLords sent the Doctor on a mission for the specific purpose of changing history; suggesting it is known to be possible, but perhaps there is a TimeLord law against doing it without government authorization.
The way I have always interpreted it is that the Doctor can meddle around in the “generic” past but he can’t interfere in his own past. So, he can do anything he wants in a situation where he was never previously involved but he can’t muck about with the time stream once he becomes personally involved in events.
Of course, the writers have a perfect right to ignore this whenever necessary for the story. On the entertaining vs consistency scale, I’ve always considered Doctor Who to be firmly on the entertaining end of things. I repeat to myself “It’s just a show” and I just relax.
Fans of temporal causality paradoxes will find much to chew on in the latest (utterly superb) episode. I’m still trying to get my head round the timelines involved.
