Fixed Point in Time Clarification
[Deleted User]
Posts: 204
Forum Member
✭
I'm a bit confused as to how the Doctor's death, a FIXED point in time was able to be avoided by using a duplicate Doctor.
The man himself is still alive, he just killed a copy. Time should still be happening all at once because the Doctor isn't dead.
Also, what does that mean for other fixed point events? Did the Doctor need to hum and haw about saving the lives of the Mars pioneers? What about the Time War and Gallifrey? Could he change those events?
The man himself is still alive, he just killed a copy. Time should still be happening all at once because the Doctor isn't dead.
Also, what does that mean for other fixed point events? Did the Doctor need to hum and haw about saving the lives of the Mars pioneers? What about the Time War and Gallifrey? Could he change those events?
0
Comments
If it wasn't for that, I would have assumed that it was made to look like a fixed point, in order to fool everybody. If that is the case, then they were some amazing SFX
A similar thing happened back in The Doctor Dances (Series 1). Captain Jack disposed of the missile that was falling on the bombsite, but The Doctor programmed the Nanogene Ambulance to explode so that an explosion would still happen at the same time, in the same place.
The idea is basically that any event can be faked in place of a real one, so long as the proper order of the Universe is oblivious to the details. The only people who know the truth are time travellers, who see the Universe differently anyway.
EDIT: Maybe that would make for an intriguing plotline one day... things we take for granted are actually not true at all. Chernobyl? Alien spaceship crash. Hitler? Not really dead after all. I imagine such a plot would make Steven 'Timey Wimey' Moffat to tap his fingers together with sinister glee.
Why didn't he just take a photo of himself and burn that instead? It would have saved time and effort.
Ohhhh, that makes sense. Plus the Moff wrote that episode too!
So basically it was always going to be the Tesselecta Doctor that got shot and everyone just got it wrong
The Doctor didn't have to die - the events we saw in The Impossible Astronaut had to occur, which they did.
It was always the Tesselector that was shot. That was the fixed point.
The Doctor now just wants people to think that he's dead so that he can get about more easily.
Our flesh and blood Time Lord Doctor didn't die at any point so didn't fool time. It was always the Teselecta that was killed and time got stuck when River didn't kill the Teselecta as she thought it was her doctor. So by whispering in her ear that he was inside the Teselecta she could go ahead with the original order of events knowing her doctor was fine and wasn't killing the man she loved.
^ Yes exactly. The explanation is sound... we were all fooled into thinking that it was the Doctor's death that was the fixed point in time, but it never was at all.
Time isn't an allseeing living entity, so its perfectly permittable to put a fake death in place of a real one so long as time itself isn't altered. The parallel timeline was closed off, and the Universe is now going according to plan with everyone under the impression that The Doctor is dead. His future is in flux, so he is fully capable of continuing to live his life now
In fact, if the Doctor had gone there himself to die, he'd be breaking the fixed point in time. It was always meant to be the Tesselector.
As I wrote elsewhere - if "Jesus doesn't die", there is no Christianity so the Roman empire doesn't fall, Britain isn't invaded by Vikings, Saxons and Norman etc - the entire history of the planet changes because that one event doesn't happen. However, if everyone believed it did happen - Christianity would then exist and we'd have history as we know it. In purely historicalterms - he doesn't have to die - people just need to think that he did. He could go off and run a boarding-house in Corfu - the time-line would still be intact - as long as people "know" the event happened.
The reason that "time" - the measuring of passing moments - was messed up by the Doctor not dying is that his death affects both past and future "History" because he is a time-traveller. If a change was made to your timeline, history branches-off from that point onwards - nothing prior to that event is changed. It's different for the Doctor - because he not only travels in time - he's part of history.
Example...
In his future, he was not around to save some chaps life in a past that also applies to the Doctor - saving him meant that he will save him - and that man will later save Julius Caeser and without him there, Caeser dies ten years before invading Britain. That not only changes the future - it places us all in a timeline that never existed - but does. That timeline that now doesn't exist includes someone like River who had to save the Doctor's life earlier in his lifeline for him to be able to go back and save that man - yet River does exist because she is here. The man is both dead and alive at the same time. It's the ultimate grandfather paradox - in which we all cease to exist once all of the ripples of the event are cancelled out.
but... to continue your theme... does that mean the doctor can no longer do proper miracles, like walking on water, and will be reduced to, i dunno, appearing as an image in someone's toast .... :eek:
He never did those things.
He knew his death was coming, so he was going a bit wild before his end. He explained that to Dorium right before he found out the Brig was dead.
Absolute nonsense I'm afraid. The Teselecta 'people' would have been party to those 'historical' details, and they were perfectly clear (see LKH) that it's The Doctor who dies at Lake Silencio.
The explanation is bunkum. The Doctor's death WAS the fixed point. The Teselecta people knew it already before LKH. We all knew it because we were told it, definitively. The Doctor knew it. The ending was a cop-out, the whole series has been a cop-out in terms of arc.
yeah well jesus never went and ran a boarding house in corfu... its a metaphor... YOUR metaphor...
the doctor obviously does 'special' things, otherwise he wouldn't be famous across space and time.
he can't do any more of those things otherwise all of space and time would know that he didn't die...
I have to agree with you here.
The Teselecta would know that it was not the Doctor who died and would have to alter their records accordingly. And if they are on the side of Truth and Justice etc would they let River go to prison (even if she is on nights off) for killing someone she didn't kill?
yup, that's true, but the Doctor's body was burnt, so it wasn't like they could do a DNA test or something? It was recorded that a person who looked like the Doctor, whom Doctor's friends called the Doctor - that person died on the beach by lake Silencio. So why wouldn't those miniaturized cross people assume it, in fact, was the Doctor?! Knowing how officials work after that his files would have been Read-only (that's why no 12th Doc on the records) and any future big events like saving London on Christmas for yet another time would be added to those 200 years before "Closing time" - who knows, what exactly he was doing?:eek:
1) because the body WASN'T burned (to paraphrase from my poor memory, but it was nothing more than this I'm certain - 'I barely got warm when they 'burnt' 'the body'). Any onlooker would have seen that, and the Silence, certainly, would never have missed it.
2) The 'minituarized cross people' wouldn't have assumed it because they have access to all of history (or at least the part the Doctor is involved in now, as established in LKH). They had the date and time of his certain death. Not their machine's (which, without further explanation in the show, they would have known already, anyway). His.
I didn't use a metaphor - I used an example.