Did prior Doctors' adventures "actually happen"

[Gotham Central]

In terms of the continuity of Doctor Who, I wondering how many of the earlier Doctor's adventures are still a valid part of Doctor Who's admittedly tangled timeline.

I was watching "Enemy of the World" recently and it occurred to me that the story is supposed to be set in 2018. Given that that is only 4 years away and the fact that both Amy and Clara's world look remarkably like ours, we can conclude that Salamander and everything associated with that story were wiped from existence. In fact Amy and Rory should have gotten closest to 2018 given that in the Power of Three it was explicity stated that they sat at home for several years.

It does beg the question of how much of those older adventures can we still consider a valid part of the timeline. Indeed, its not entirely clear that a good chunk of the series since the restart in 2005 is still valid. Aliens have made public appearances and been on the news several times in the relative present since the show began. Yet each time, their arrival is treated as a shock. The only time is was not shocking was in Voyage of the Dammed where folks in London left town precisely because the city always seemed to be attacked every Christmas.

things make even less sense when you factor in Torchwood. Miracle Day seemed to suggest that NONE of the alien encounters actually happened...or at the very least the CIA was unaware of them (which is impossible given that they were on the news).

 

[Emperor-Tiberius]

They did happen. Moffat's run periodically references OldWho periods, moreso than RTD (though not by much). NuWho explicitly follows on from OldWho.

 

[Captaindemotion]

My explanation for things like this is that the adventures and stories all happened within the Doctor's own past but human history is being re-written because of various time-travelling interventions.

 

[inflatabledalek]

Dimensions in Time is the one and only story that definitely happened in every timeline.

 

[Doctorwhovian]

Doctor Who's continuity/'canon' is sort of fluid; it's best not to think about it too much.

 

[Christopher]

Doctor Who always played fast and loose with continuity, paying little attention to its past. There were three separate, contradictory explanations for the fall of Atlantis. The first Dalek serial (when the Daleks were still confined to their city on Skaro) was originally set in the distant future according to "The Edge of Destruction," but then later stories retconned their origins into the distant past. And so on. After all, back then, nobody expected old episodes would ever be seen again; they didn't even keep all the tapes. So there wasn't a lot of incentive to maintain continuity.

The new series has established definitively that history can be and has been rewritten; the "cracks in time" in the first Matt Smith season were implied to have erased the events of "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End" and "The Next Doctor" from recorded history. The modern interpretation seems to be that history can be changed and only the Doctor and those who travel with him, those who exist outside of time, can remember the pre-change version of events. Which means that previous adventures may have been erased from history but are still real from the perspective of the Doctor's own memory and those of the companions who were involved in them.

 

[AgentCoop]

My explanation for things like this is that the adventures and stories all happened within the Doctor's own past but human history is being re-written because of various time-travelling interventions.

This makes complete sense to me. The Doctor has visited various time periods that have been overwritten by events in the show, but he remembers everything the way we saw it because of timey-wimey Time Lord magic.

 

[diankra]

I would go with the details may have chanegd approach; in Enemy of the World, for instance, the backplot should have started by now (as the shelterers went underground five years earlier, so in 2013, at a time when nuclear war seemed imminent), and the World Zones Organisation probably existed - or came into existence - around that time, given that Kent was Bruce's predecessor as WZO Security Chief before Salamander engineered his disgrace, and was Salamander's co-conspirator back then.
So obviously some of the power politicing is not happening in the same way. But is there still a power-mad Ramon Salamander out there, working his way up the United Nations or NATO or the EU, who's thwarted by his double the second Doctor? Maybe yes...


Day of the Daleks played with this idea, with the Daleks saying that the Doctor had 'delayed' their conquest of Earth, as if Day was their plan B for Dalek Invasion of Earth, altering the timeline to have another go at the same strategy using different tactics. In that case it was deliberate, but maybe the later Doctors' involvmenet with Torchwood, etc, altered the geopolitics (UNIT's overthrow of the UK government in Children of Earth is a fairly obvious possible forking point - a massive demonstration of UN power in the Who-universe, or alternatively a reason for its constituent nations to decide the UN is too big for its boots and reform it into the WZO).

 

[Mr Awe]

My explanation for things like this is that the adventures and stories all happened within the Doctor's own past but human history is being re-written because of various time-travelling interventions.

This makes complete sense to me. The Doctor has visited various time periods that have been overwritten by events in the show, but he remembers everything the way we saw it because of timey-wimey Time Lord magic.

Makes sense to me as well. The TV stories are more of a record of the Doctor's adventures as he experienced them rather than how "current" history records it because that is in flux.

However, I don't like to think that too many of his adventures have been erased because that's kind of depressing to think that all the effort in those stories were for nothing!

Mr Awe

 

[diankra]

You could see it as being like an artist overpainting a canvas - the earlier version is still there, it's just not obvious to someone only studying the surface with the naked eye.

 

[Mr Awe]

^ That's a nice way to think about it!

 

[Doctorwhovian]

The Doctor's even changed the events he knew would happen. Eccleston's Doctor said Harriet Jones created a golden age or something to that fashion; however Tennant's Doctor forced her into retirement because he was mad over the Sycorax thing.

 

[JoeZhang]

These events happen to a past doctor because a future doctor hasn't changed history yet or it's still in that Doctor's future - an idea at the basis of The Time Travellers:

Spoiler: spoilers for this old book

The first Doctor arrives in 2006 which is a hellhole because he hasn't yet defeated WOTAN

 

[Mark_Nguyen]

Yup. The way I boil it down, it's basically summed up that every adventure that we know of, in every media including TV, books, comics, audio, and even the Cushing, has happened. They happened for the Doctor, the people he was traveling with, the people who were there, and the people who were watching at home. Generally in that order.

Mark

 

[Cutter John]

They sort of explained it back in The Keeper of Traken.

DOCTOR: Ha, ha. Interesting stuff, isn't it?

ADRIC: If I could understand it.

DOCTOR: What?

ADRIC: Well, look. I read about something that's just happened.

DOCTOR: And?

ADRIC: The next page says it didn't happen at all.

DOCTOR: So?

ADRIC: Over the page says it did happen, but many years ago.

DOCTOR: Ah, yes. Well, I suppose it is a bit above your head. Mind you, they did say I had a very sophisticated prose style.

I guess they're implying that the timelines are constantly shifting and changing in small ways.

 

[diankra]

These events happen to a past doctor because a future doctor hasn't changed history yet or it's still in that Doctor's future - an idea at the basis of The Time Travellers:

Spoiler: spoilers for this old book

The first Doctor arrives in 2006 which is a hellhole because he hasn't yet defeated WOTAN

You could even expand this into suggesting that when the Doctor arrives somewhere, but doesn't seem to know what's going on in the way you'd expect him to if he, for instance, landed in Europe in the early 1940s, it's because he can feel that this is a bit of history that hasn't yet become a fixed point, so he doesn't know which of the possible timelines he's landed in (He knows that Rasputin dies, but he doesn't know how...).
That could almost get round the Enemy of the World problem of no-one in other 21st Century stories noticing that the Doctor looks a lot like one of the most famous, and most famously vanished-without-trace, people of the 2010s...

 

[MacLeod]

To quote The Doctor "Time can be rewritten" or if you prefer "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff."

All previous adventures since the show started did occur in terms of The Doctor's own timeline, We've even seen clips of several adventures in the show so we can say that they did occur. Any differences in the timeline are down to actions the Doctor took or will take at some point in the future, like ripples in a pond when you drop a stone.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Yeah. Look at what the Doctor's personal "timeline" looks like in Name of the Doctor. A big "ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey... stuff".

 

[Candlelight]

The Tenth Planet had the space program, Mondas arriving and the Cybermen invasion. Naturally none of this happened but then again you could argue the Doctor has the Men in Black running around behind him erasing people's memories of these events.

 

[Doctorwhovian]

^Attack of the Cybermen did use that as a major plot point though.


The novel adaptation of the The Tenth Planet interestingly enough changes the date from 1986 to 2000 and has a lengthy reference to the James Bond film "The Man With the Golden Gun" which hadn't come out at the time of the original broadcast.