An Unearthly Child could be disrupted?
Firegazer
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What if a future Doctor did something in say 1962 that forbid his meeting with Barbara & Ian, or caused an explosion that meant he couldn't have met someone at that certain place.
How has this never happened? How has the Doctor never changed the course of history the slightest bit which forced a chain reaction of events leading to a change in his own timeline? Surely it's possible?
How has this never happened? How has the Doctor never changed the course of history the slightest bit which forced a chain reaction of events leading to a change in his own timeline? Surely it's possible?
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Series 5?
That blather could be "fixed points" or a self-repairing timeline - or pre-determination - or a Timelord's innate sense of temporal order - or Clara-clones - or whatever else someone other than us gets paid to write.
Well, you don't have to cross your own timeline to cause a blip that will cross it.
Then again, I am no rocket scientist ;-)
Yes and no.
"Crossing your own timeline" does not mean "travelling into the past" - clearly you can still do that. What you can't do is change an event that will prevent you from changing that event.
For example - you can't invent a time machine then travel back in time to prevent yourself from inventing that time machine.
In theory, you could accidentally change something without realising that it would trash your own timeline - but within DW that sort of thing is explained away as Timelords having a natural "feel" for time.
In practice, it's just a variation of the "Grandfather paradox" and comes with the same potential solutions - such as "time" simply not allowing you to complete the task that would be paradoxical. Doctor Who has to find ways around such things and they came up with "crossing your own time line" for the same reason they came up with "fixed points" - as a way to allow "lesser" breaches to appear unimportant.
For the point of the OP I guess he could go into the past and someone and someone could get killed who turned out to be Ian or Barbara ancestor meaning they were never born.
Or even who owned the scrap yard meaning it never was a scrap yard so he would have picked somewhere else to park and maybe because of that Susan went to a different school.
On the contrary, you're more likely to create the blip that has crossed it.
These threads are always stupid. The original poster is asking, in effect: if there were a device that didn't obey our concept of cause and effect, wouldn't that violate our expectations of cause and effect?
It's one of the problems with time-travel in sci-fi/fantasy - it really is a very silly idea if you think about it for more than three seconds. Every patch you apply to negate one problems creates another. All credit to the DW mob for trying to cover some of it with concepts like "fixed points" and "crossed timelines" but they're never going to win cos the holes are too large.
What you're suggesting - killing an ancestor - is another variation of the "grandfather paradox" - and there's a number of suggested "solutions" to it including...
1> You'll try to kill that person but you'll fail. You must fail because that person's timeline already included your failure. That sounds neat and tidy but it relies on predetermination - which is pretty much the fun killer for time travel fiction.
2> You'll kill the ancestors or send Susan to school in Manchester instead but it won't actually make a difference to anything that matters. So you'll meet Ivan and Brenda instead - but everything else will be exactly the same. In that version, it's not which teachers you meet that matters. it's that you and Susan travel in a Tardis - the rest is about as important as what you had for breakfast yesterday in determining the important elements of your timestream.
3> You'll kill the "grandfather" but it will turn out that Ian's dad was actually the milkman's kid anyway - so nothing changes. (I believe that was first suggested by a French woman who said something like "Who really knows who their grandfather is"). It's cool but it's ultimately a variation on number 1.
4> You'll try to kill the grandparents but you'll fail cos the writers will make sure that the Doctor stops you. That's the only "right" solution in DW terms - it says that you could destroy the future but you won't be allowed to in this show.
Some of that comes across as a old Twilight Zone episode
A woman went back in time to kill Hitler as a baby but couldn't bring herself to kill a baby even if it was Hitler but in the end knew she had to to save many more lives inc other babies so she jumps into a river with him thereby killing herself to so she has not got to live with what she did.
The servants of The Hitler's don't want to tell their masters what happened and see a homeless person with a baby boy and buy it off them hoping they won't notice and that's who grew up to be the Hitler we know of.
A perfect example and nicely illustrates the difference between "history" as a record of events and "history" as ANY past event. "History" says Hitler became chancellor even if he didn't. Hitler's "history" and "the historical records of Hitler" don't match but they didn't need to.
And of course, there's the fantastic twist that the real Hitler may have grown up to become a doctor and find the cure for cancer so what she's actually done in killing him is protect a reality in which he was replaced with a psycho.
That sounds much like 12 Monkeys.