He can’t cross back over his timelines except when he does! I feel like there are entire episodes where they do this or are essentially played backwards Memento style.
Really the Timelord’s entire existence is one big paradox. Just going about his day at any point in the history of the universe where he chooses to spend his day indiscriminately righting whatever wrong he chooses to right ( never killing Hitler though) should create some butterfly effect that alters the course of history.
At least they handwave it away as a “big ball of timey wimey…stuff”.
They did the opposite of this in an episode of Futureman. They main characters timelooped themselves 1000s of times so they could use themselves as cannon fodder to try and swarm down a security corridor past some sentry guns (like one of those tower defense games). The survivors scattered across multiple timelines and parallel universes causing all sorts of paradoxes and other chaos. Ironically none of them over thought to go back in time and try and kill Hitler.
Even ST:TOS. They had five time travel episodes with four different methods and five different “rules” of time travel and its effects. Throw in TAS “Yesteryear” and you have no new method but a sixth set of rules.
TNG had eight (more or less) which were all over the place.
Eh, not really? Doctor Who is interesting in that, for a show about a time traveler, there’s really not much time travel in the show. Oh, sure, a lot of the episodes start with the Doctor time travelling somewhere, but once he arrives, he’s pretty locked in to that time line until the story resolves. There’s really very little time travel shenanigans, where he’s using time travel to violate causality, or redo/avoid hazards, and the like. And a lot of the stories are, “We’re in the far future and also on an alien planet,” which could be done pretty easily as just a “We’re on an alien planet” plot, so the time travel there is even more attenuated.
Technically, it’s just “a planet”. The non-time travelling local inhabitants don’t think they’re aliens from the future.
Which again begs the question, how does the Doctor decide which atrocity to prevent (aside from where his or his companion’s life is in danger)? Maybe the Daleks were meant to exterminate that planet just as the Japanese were meant to bomb Pearl Harbor so we could bomb Hiroshima? Who is the Doctor to say what’s historically correct?
I was thinking about certain episodes like where River Song meets with him at various points in her life, only backwards or the “Blink” episode where he’s giving Carey Mulligan instructions from the future on avoiding those Angel statues that “kill” you by sending you back in time (where The Doctor can’t pick you up in the TARDIS for some reason or another).
But yeah, you’re right. Most episodes usually have some plot contrivance where the TARDIS is out of commission or unreachable until the monster of the week is dealt with.
Of course, the original purpose of the show was the BBC wanted something semi-educational where they could stick in a bunch of historical costumes and sets and stuff.
The in-universe justification is that there are “fixed points in time” that can’t be changed without some sort of dire consequence to the whole time line. The Doctor can tell when a point is fixed or not, presumably because of some sort of Time Lord “Fixed Point-sense.” Out-of-universe, the “fixed point” thing is 100% just a justification for explaining why the Doctor doesn’t prevent various real-world atrocities from happening. Other planets presumably have just as many “fixed points” as Earth, but it doesn’t come up as much in the show, because the show doesn’t need to explain to the audience why the Doctor isn’t preventing atrocities that the audience has never heard of.
Nitpick, but in “Blink,” he’s sending messages from the past, not the future. And he doesn’t use the TARDIS to rescue the victims of the Angels, because literally every person we see the Angels do their time-displacement trick on, the “victim” ends up better off in the past than they were in the present.
Which really undercuts the “horror” factor of the Weeping Angels, which is probably why the next time they show up, they’re tearing out people’s nervous systems instead of just teleporting them back to the '60s.
It’s nothing that complicated. In The Genesis of the Daleks, The Doctor balks at destroying all the Daleks because he is not into solving problems with genocide. Later he seems to overcome his doubts, but is unable to complete his mission.
Of course, one might wonder why there would only be one shot at it, as it were, but it’s not that kind of show.
Also to note for Doctor Who, the TARDIS has had its time circuits previously damaged, and is also sentient with its own independent motives, so the Doctor seldom has precise command of time and location to travel to, there is often a huge error bar to constrain the plot. A nifty writer’s crutch to be used at any convenient plot necessity.
I believe that story arc pre-dated the “fixed points in time” concept. Certainly, if he can’t prevent WWII because it’s a “fixed point,” the creation of the Daleks should also be a fixed point.
You mean, why didn’t he go back later and try again? He can’t - he was already there, and he knows another him never showed up.
Or… he can go back there again, and he knows he can do it safely because he won’t encounter himself - for the same reason. Of course, this scenario puts serious constraints on his free will…
As long as we’re discussing Doctor Who, a question.
The Doctor was originally limited to twelve regenerations, which meant a total of thirteen lives. (This was changed in 1976 and the Doctor now has unlimited regenerations.)
In the thirteen year period from 1963 to 1976, the Doctor experienced three regenerations and four lives.
Did the Doctor ever say anything like “Another regeneration? Fuck, I just had one of those a couple of years ago. I’ve gone for hundreds of years between regenerations and now this shithole planet has killed me again. You know I’ve only got twelve of these things and if I keep burning through them at this rate, I’ll be dead for real in like thirty years. Well, I am not going to be the first Time Lord whose companions outlive him. Fuck Earth, I am out of here. I’m going to live some place safer.”
Well, in The Trial of a Time Lord, it transpires that the Doctor, running out of regenerations, will break bad and return as the “Valeyard” (and unsuccessfully(?) try to steal his past self’s remaining regenerations!?) But, will he? Shall he? Is the future set in stone? Is there even a difference between anyone’s future and past when time travel is accounted for? [Also, in any case, as you point out, the Doctor is not so gormless he couldn’t figure out one way or another to finagle extra regenerations…]
He reacts different emotionally every time he’s about to regenerate.
Also keep in mind the show isn’t in real time. What may be 13 broadcast years can be a lot longer in story years. I think Tom Baker (Doctor #4) is the oldest living actor to play the Doctor at 91. Various incarnations of the Doctor have stated his age ranging from 450 to a few thousand years old. His actual age, based on various story elements, being trapped in various time prisons and whatnot for billions of years may actually be “infinite”.
Shifting gears slightly. There are really only a couple of reasons to time travel at all in fiction:
Go to another time and place and experience the adventure and/or witness the “fish out of water” hilarity of someone trying to adjust to a different time (or impart their old timey wisdom to a culture that has lost some skill. Like talking to a woman you want to woo in a cultured in sophisticated manner or dogfighting space pirates without having to rely on your compromised flight computer). This is usually easier as you can just tell the story and have the characters go back to their own time, usually with just a few superficial changes (usually positive) to the timeline or revelation (like your dad saved the world or some shit).
Prevent some sort of future catastrophe or correct past events. This is a bit harder as you have to establish the “rules” of time travel (usually without a PhD in Theoretical Physics), which include avoiding paradoxes (like killing your grandfather), deciding whether to allow bootstrap paradoxes (like going back and being your own grandfather)., or whether the future can really be changed at all. You need to create some artificial sense of urgency (because you have a time machine) like such and such event HAS to happen and this exact time or all is lost. You have the “Casandra” problem where we and maybe a few other characters know a character is right about their predictions but authorities and anyone who actually matters very reasonably believes them to be insane.
And finally you need to decide if that catastrophic even can even be prevented or if the protagonist inadvertently caused it by his very presence
Because it’s fun! In which case play with the rules all you like!
