How can saving Rose's dad cause end of the world but saving the boy in blitz is ok?
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Hi all
So re watching the CE series (where I admit I first started Dr Who having not watched it as a 'sensitive' child.
Can any explain why saving Rose Dad caused a time wound but saving the little boy who had died in the bombing in the blitz (to become the masked child) was ok?
So re watching the CE series (where I admit I first started Dr Who having not watched it as a 'sensitive' child.
Can any explain why saving Rose Dad caused a time wound but saving the little boy who had died in the bombing in the blitz (to become the masked child) was ok?
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Honestly, you shouldn't take things too literally. Just enjoy the stories and forget about continuity.
Rose's dad needed to die at that point, because he always had and that led to Rose eventually going with the Doctor, in which she went to visit her dad in the past and saving his life. Had he not died, there would be no reason to go back in time to save him - causing a huge paradox.
Saving the boy in the blitz clearly had no such repercussions. He was never going to be in a paradox of that nature by being saved, and for all we know, history had always shown he was alive after the war.
The reason the Reapers appeared in Fathers Day is because it was a weak point in time.
The reason it was a weak point in time was because the Doctor and Rose were there twice (the first time she can't go and hold her Father while he's dying and the 2nd time where she saves him.)
If Rose had run out and saved her Father the first time her History would have changed but the World would have carried on as normal.
The Doctor didn't go back in time (from what I remember) to save the little boy. He essentially cured him in the "present". So the child still always became a masked child but was then saved afterwards.
Whereas in Father's Day, Rose went back and stopped her dad from getting hit by the car altogether. When he should have.
The Waters of Mars touches on this, The Doctor knew the fate and outcome of the crew but deliberately changed this and it all went a bit wrong.
Reading this got me thinking...
Not only does the Doctor not have a home anymore but he doesn't really have a time. There must be no such thing as 'present day' to the Doctor if he is constantly going back and forth in time. Kinda sad.
Also Rose's dad was potentially very key even if you don't include how he connects to Rose and how she's influenced time. in Pete's world he massively influenced it and potentially might have done the same had he lived in Rose's world. More than a little kid.
Which makes it confusing as to how he calculates his age.
There are two things to consider - history outside the time traveller, and the history of the time traveller itself.
It appears that usually history can flex and twist to accommodate small changes, or even some big ones - like a rock thrown into a river, the water flows around it and carries on. Fixed points in history are things that either can't be changed, because the consequences are too huge, or because there are too few possible ways to work around it. Sort of like the stream being too narrow, or the rock being too big.
Paradoxes (often called 'crossing your own timestream') is something different, and the reason that the Doctor can't go back to change things he's been involved in.
In Rose's case, she only travelled back to that day because her dad died. Because she saved her dad, the younger her would have grown up with a father, so she would never have travelled back in time to save her dad, so he would die, so she wouldn't have a dad, and would go back to save him, and so on. The same thing would happen if the Doctor went back and changed something he did - if he didn't do that thing, he wouldn't be in a position to change it.
Basically, there's no way for history to make sense. The Doctor can save the Empty Child and history takes a slightly new path, but for Rose, there's no path it can take that makes any sense.
The other thing to consider is that perhaps saving the Empty Child didn't change time, that history always involved the Doctor jumping in and fixing things.
I liked Moffat's analogy (or at least the quote I read apparently originated from him). Changing established events is like performing surgery on a patient. Minor changes you could probably get away with with relatively little hassle. Too frequent a complex operation would lead to complications.
Actually I saw an episode of Qi once with Brian Cox, where they explained that there was no such concept of linear time across the universe. They explained it well and it made sense when I saw it but I don't remember it well enough to repeat
Yeah, this. It's because it's basically a paradox on top of a paradox (with yet another paradox later when Rose touched the baby version of herself, which resulted in the Reapers becoming more powerful).
In the real world, if time travel is possible, short stories like "By His Bootstraps" and "All You Zombies" by Robert A Heinlein explain it neatly.
Regardless of whether the time traveller knows what is to come (because they are past events) or that those events are in her or his persoanl future, whatever he or she does in the past is not changed. It was always part of those events.
Pretty much this.
It's a 50 year old television show which has generally been about as scientific as horoscopes. Stop worrying about continuity and just enjoy the stories.
Because thats how the new series writers wrote it.
Its not meant to make sense.
Well, it's meant to make some kind internal sense.
Stopwatch in the TARDIS. Easy!
Right a clock in the TARDIS is his relative time. He figures out his age by the time spent in the TARDIS and when he’s out by stop watch. He doesn’t add the time spent in parallel universes or events that become parallel like the year that never happened, also events in his life he feels isn’t relevant to his current time steam. He doesn’t add up the amount of memories he has because he does delete some of them or they get lost or he considers them not relevant to his current time steam. He also keeps some of them in the TARDIS. So he could be far older which could be why his age is always changing contradicting through the shows. We have a straight time line his all jumpy and sometimes crisscrosses.
Just enjoy the show. As long as the same character is used every week and they don't change them like eastenders it is all ok.