Apparently, ‘Doctor Who’ threads are all the rage in CS this week. So, I’ll throw this topic out for speculation.
The new series continually alludes to “the Time Wars”, an monumental event that will likely remain cloudy & not completely explained (thus restoring an element of mystery & pathos that the Doctor originally had, but lost as time went on.) But I have imagined that the Time Wars were an event much like DC’s “Crisis On Infinite Earths” - a disruption in the timeline on such a massive scale that all of previously established history was significantly altered as a result. While the more general elements of the series remain intact, a lot of the specifics probably did not occur quite the way they were originally depicted.
Of course the original series was rife with contradictions & inaccuracies: “Genesis of the Daleks” doesn’t quite jibe with “Forbidden Planet”, there are at least three contradictory explanations of how human life began (“Death to the Daleks”, “Image of the Fendahl” and “City of Death”), there ought to be a fully-manned station on the moon by now (“the Moonbase”) and a station in Antarctica capable of tramsmat (teleport) technology (“the Tenth Planet”), the cold war standoff between eastern & western superpowers is still in place (“Warriors of the Deep”), and let’s not even get started on trying to pinpoint dates of UNIT stories. Not all the fanwanking in the world can account for all the inconsistent dates mentioned there.
Even the new series shows evidence that history is signifcantly different: the Cybermen come from a parrallel timeline Earth rather than from a planet on the far side of the sun from Earth.
So, in your opinion, ought to be streamlined, altered, or just plain jettisoned from the original series? If it were up to you, what would you say got removed?
The Time War is “Time Locked” so it didn’t affect anything else.
I never thought of the Time War affecting events in history, I always kind of thought it was a war that was raged “out of time.” It wasn’t fought in trenches between two armies, it was fought in the 4th dimension. Of course Galifrey burned from it, but there you go.
That being said, I really don’t think too much should be just thrown away because maybe the Whoniverse is awfully big and a little convoluted. Yes, stretching back into the past 20 or 30 years people said we were going to have a moonbase in the 2000’s. Saying that a story never existed is as anoying to me as saying that the history has to be slimmed down.
The Daleks keep coming back but Gallifrey on the other hand is lost forever and in all time (the Doctor can’t ever return to it even though he has a Time Machine, baby). Sounds like it got the short end of the stick.
The original Cyberman origin still applies to some degree. In the first season, when the Dr. and Rose end up in the underground bunker run by the super-rich guy, who has a captive Dalek, the Dr. finds the head of a Cyberman, and reminisces briefly about one of his old enemies. So, apparently there were Cybermen from our timeline, who were wiped out before the new series started.
My take on the Time War is that both sides kept jumping further and further back in time, trying to reverse earlier (or later, depending on how you look at it) defeats, until they wound up at the beginning of time, where they finally eliminated each other. Technically, this means that neither the Daleks nor the Time Lords ever actually existed, but there are still fragments of the original time line lying around, which is how there are still a few powers in the galaxy who remember them.
