Considering the Doctor spent much of the 60s and 70s stuck in London battling various alien invasions with UNIT and that Torchwood had been charged with protecting the British Empire from aliens, grabbing alien technology, and, specifically, protecting the Empire from the Doctor, why didn’t we hear about Torchwood until the past few years and why did they not do their duty and bring the Doctor to justice forty years ago?
Yeah, I’m the first to complain about people who overthink SF and TV, but I’d like to know the twists Whovians use to explain this apparent contradiction.
Torchwood was caused to exist by the Tenth Doctor’s meddling with history in “Tooth and Claw” - thus, it didn’t exist until Ten did. Had he not shown up, the monster of the week would presumably have been defeated by other means and Queen Victoria wouldn’t have been inspired to charter the institute.
But that implies that every episode we see is changing History, when in reality it’s trying to suggest it’s the way History really is and always has been. Except in a few specific cases.
I don’t have an answer. I think there’s a distnct separation between old Who and new Who that the fans are accepting as a rebirth, even though it is trying to maintain continuity. And they seem to be okay with that kind of internal inconsistency. Something about its return and its quality level leap gives it a free ticket for some jiggery pokery here and there.
After all, I doubt the original run was very carefully canonically maintained.
You’re paradoxing yourself. If there’s one timeline, then anything that came into existence because of something the Doctor did in the 19th century will exist throughout the intervening years. It doesn’t matter if the incarnation of the Doctor that has only existed for about three years was responsible for that something…if he did it in 1879, then it has effects from 1879 to the present. Torchwood didn’t just suddenly appear in 2006, even if the Doctor didn’t leave for 1879 until 2006 (yes, I know…he actually left for 1979…but that’s not where he ended up, is it?).
Fanwank theory. Torchwood was founded in 1879 as a secret agency by the Queen. As such, Torchwood did not publically or officialy exist. During the 1960s and 70s due to some very visible events the United Nations formed UNIT to detail with scientific crisises. Torchwood was very happy to have UNIT work openly to handle events while Torchwood worked behind the scenes and kept an eye on them. They did not move against Doctor three because doing so would blow the cover.
As Ten explains, some points in history are “fixed” and some are “in flux”. 1879 was a flux point, but the experiences the Doctor had with UNIT are fixed, since a Time Lord can’t change his own past. Even though Ten’s actions caused Torchwood to exist during the period when Three, Four, etc. were mucking around with UNIT, it wouldn’t be possible for Torchwood to have had any meaningful interactions with them.
…um…because they weren’t written into the story until a few years ago?
Applying my own fanwankery, I suspect that time in Doctor Who’s universe is both fixed and changable. Otherwise what would be the point of a TARDIS if it essentially just ran back and forth on a fixed track in time?
Events would have a certain inertia to them. For example, you wouldn’t stop WWII by killing young Hitler because the conditions that led to the rise of Hitler would probably produce another Hitler. On the other hand, a seemingly mundane decision like Donna turning right instead of left can have profound consequences (and yet always seen to right themselves). And it appears that paradoxes can be created (the so-called Paradox Machine at the end of last season).
In any event, I’m pretty comfortable with allowing some continuity gaps in a show about time travel, parallel universes and alternate planes of existance.
My fanwank is that, by the time the 1960s came around, Torchwood had learned enough about the Doctor to realize that he was not a threat. So, they were content to stay in the shadows and let the Doctor and UNIT do their thing.
Another fanwank. When Torchwood was founded they were instructed to be on the lookout for a man calling himself the Doctor who looks like David Tennet. When decades later, people showed up looking like Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee, Torchwood thought they couldn’t be our guy. (Torchwood did not know about regenerations.)
Torchwood was a super secret organization – not even the Prime Minister (Harriet Jones) was supposed to know about it. It was almost as secret as O2STK.*
As such, it would stay in the background, gathering alien technology, while UNIT did all the fighting and dirty work. As for their charge from Queen Victoria, it was not unlikely that they were willing to change that as time went on. They might have noted that the Doctor was helping the Empire and would take a wait and see attitude. Taking action would have blown their cover.
Once Harriet Jones used Torchwood with the Doctor watching, they may have decided that they could reveal themselves to him.
They had to wait for the point in The Doctors own timeline when he had caused their formation. If they had arrested Doctor#3, then Doctor#10 would never have travelled to Victorian Scotland, Victoria would have been killed by the werewolf, and Torchwood would never have been formed.
Captain Jack actually says in Utopia that he had spent the last 100 years avoiding contact with The Doctor’s earlier incarnations. He had to wait for a Doctor that had already met him
