Filling in plot holes

[RoJoHen]

Of all the scifi shows I've ever watched, Doctor Who is the one that is the most riddled with plot holes, and for the most part, I forgive them because they're not that important.

There are some, though, that I simply CANNOT forgive. Some that I need to find a way to explain because otherwise they just don't make any damn sense.

On the top of my list: Amy and Rory trapped in New York's past, and the Doctor can never see them again.

Most explanations I've read have been along the lines of "The Doctor is a Time Lord, so he can sense these things." Which would be all fine and good except for one line of dialogue at the end of the episode.

River: "This book I'm going to write. I presume I take it to Amy to get it published?"



So the Doctor, master of Time and Space with a super powerful time machine, can't travel back to New York to rescue Amy and Rory, but somehow River Song manages to do it in order to give Amy a copy of her book?!

FILL IN THAT PLOT HOLE!

And also, what are some plot holes from the show that bother you? Which plot holes are you willing to forgive?

 

[Ithekro]

Easy, the books basically tells the Doctor that Amy doesn't see him again, while basically stating that River needs to see Amy again because of the book. Fixed points are weird like that. Some things must happen or else the universe implodes.

The Fixed Point is Amy not seeing the 11th Doctor again. At least up to the point she wrote the novel, and she and Rory died of old age, meaning the Doctor might not want to risk taking them on more adventured were they might get killed earlier and ruin time-space. (The TARDIS plays by the rules most of the time while River's Vortex Manipulator is less picky)

River seeing Amy is not a Fixed Point as it is not specified in the book (That the book mentions Amy not seeing the Doctor is what is making it history, which not one line can be changed...according to the First Doctor). River can go see Amy and Rory. She just can't take them on adventures that might get them killed, as she's still subject to the Doctor's rules (also we don't know how long after this event it is until River goes to the Library).

I still want to see what happens when the 12th Doctor encounters River again. She was dead set on the 11th not going dying. Either she only knew the timeline where the Doctor dies on Trenzalor, or she doesn't care for the 12th Doctor all that much, and wanted her 11th Doctor around. (Be fun to see how the sparks fly between River and Missy).

 

[RoJoHen]

Easy, the books basically tells the Doctor that Amy doesn't see him again, while basically stating that River needs to see Amy again because of the book. Fixed points are weird like that. Some things must happen or else the universe implodes.

The Fixed Point is Amy not seeing the 11th Doctor again. At least up to the point she wrote the novel, and she and Rory died of old age, meaning the Doctor might not want to risk taking them on more adventured were they might get killed earlier and ruin time-space.

River seeing Amy is not a Fixed Point as it is not specified in the book (That the book mentions Amy not seeing the Doctor is what is making it history, which not one line can be changed...according to the First Doctor). River can go see Amy and Rory. She just can't take them on adventures that might get them killed, as she's still subject to the Doctor's rules (also we don't know how long after this event it is until River goes to the Library).

Fair enough. I guess it's a similar situation to when the Doctor calls up the Brigadier in "The Wedding of River Song." When he calls, the Brigadier is already dead, and he died without seeing the Doctor again, so it's now established that the Doctor can't ever see him again (weird reincarnated Cybermen notwithstanding).

 

[Ithekro]

Might have been way the Doctor (tenth) was overjoyed to see Sarah Jane again after so many regenerations. He'd (to our knowledge) not found out what happened to her at that point. Later, when the 11th shows up, he tell Jo that he did go check up on everyone of his companions when the 10th was dying. Yet he still managed to encounter Jo and Sarah at least one more time. He might find out how they end, but he didn't find out if they ever saw him again.

With the Brig and Amy, he know they didn't see him again, thus making it a Fixed Point. However, the 12th or later Doctors could technically visit Amy and Rory, as Amy was refering to her Raggity Doctor (The 11th).

 

[YellowSubmarine]

Once the Doctor activated siege mode on the Master's TARDIS and they both got stuck inside, because of Santa had left his bag of presents inside and overpowered the dimensional dam and the chameleon circuit. The Master then tricked the Doctor by pulling a plot hole out of his time stream, placing it on the interior wall and escaping the TARDIS through it. When asked how a plot hole can get you out of a TARDIS, he said "I'll explain later."

 

[MacLeod]

Isn't also to do with not crossing his own timeline? Had the Doctor not been there he would have been able to go back in time but as he was going back would mean interferring in his own timeline.

 

[intrinsical]

The way I see it, The Doctor has no interest spending decades in New York. He wants to pop in and out quickly. He is prevented from doing this because of the temporal anomalies the Weeping Angels created.

River Song on the other hand, is more than willing to spend a decade or two with her parents. So she can time travel to a time before the Weeping Angels arrived, establish herself as a book publisher while waiting a couple of years for Amy and Rory to get stuck in New York. She then spend a couple years while Amy writes the book and gets it published. By that time the weeping angels are gone, the temporal anomalies are in the past and she can then time travel again. As for why Amy and Rory didn't tag along, I don't know. Maybe they fell in love with New York. Maybe they adopted a son and decided to stay with him.

 

[Ithekro]

I keep thinking an older Amy took in a newly regenerated Mels in New York in 1970 and got to raise her after all. Then sent her off to England just before Amy died around 1990, so Mels would be there with Amilia and Rory while they grew up...to complete the circle, as Amy knows the rules.

 

[DrFrankhamstien]

Fair enough. I guess it's a similar situation to when the Doctor calls up the Brigadier in "The Wedding of River Song." When he calls, the Brigadier is already dead, and he died without seeing the Doctor again, so it's now established that the Doctor can't ever see him again (weird reincarnated Cybermen notwithstanding).

There is nothing on TV to suggest it's a fixed point in time, and it's not established that the Doctor cannot see the Brig again. The only thing preventing it on TV is the lack of Nicholas Courtney. In prose... Well, nothing is impossible. Indeed, I already have in a mind a way to make this happen (subject to talks with the Beeb). But won't be for quite a while yet.

 

[Lance]

The Doctor's got a time machine, but those 'fixed points' are what stop him crossing over his own timeline. In theory ("The Two Doctors" being the notable exception, though with all the unauthorised timeline experiments going on in that episode at least an explanation is there if we want it), the Doctor never just randomly runs into his other selves despite appearing all over time and space at various points. Clearly there's some kind of causality that governs that. Things like "The Third and Fourth Doctors worked for UNIT in the late 70s/early 80s" are fixed points in time, so while the Eleventh or Twelfth Doctor can certainly travel to that period, he can't simply pop up in UNIT H.Q. and say "Hi, by the way, I'm the Doctor, let me help". It's a part of his personal time stream that exists as a very specific point in time, both in his life as well as the Brigadier's, that he can not cross.

Same reason he can't simply go back and visit Lethbridge-Stewart before his death. Sure, he could break the rules and do that, ignoring the universal fact that the Brigadier never met the Doctor again after a certain point in his life, but it would causes rifts similar to the one seen in "Father's Day". Basically, reality is held together by these universal constants, and the Doctor takes not breaking them very seriously indeed.

Same deal with Adric. After "Earthshock", Adric is deader than dead-meat, and when Tegan asks the reasonable question 'Why can't we just go back to before he died?', the Doctor gets moody and categorically asks her never to request something like that ever again. Adric's death became a "fixed point" that couldn't be transgressed under any circumstances.

 

[DrFrankhamstien]

Fixed points. A plot contrivance used whenever an author wants it. There are no rules beyond that. Saying there are absolute 'fixed points' is a nonsense, and one not supported within the context of the TV show as a whole.

 

[Lance]

Hmm, while I agree it seems the context is fluid (the Doctor wouldn't save *anybody* if there was such a thing as time being completely unchangeable), I also think there's definitely some merit to the idea of 'fixed points in time'. Particularly in terms of the Doctor's own personal timeline.

In the 'Science of Doctor Who' TV special, Professor Brian Cox explained it as being like, time is a cone, and the future cone and the past cone, relative to a person's own passage through reality, can not intersect. You might be able to twist time around so that the future cone becomes the past cone, and therefore step into events that took place in the past, but in terms of your own journey through time, you've got set limits in what you can do. You can't meet yourself. And you can't do something that contradicts events as you personally already know them. If you don't follow these rules, then that's when shit gets let loose.

Classic Who called this the 'Blinovitch Limitation Effect', but didn't elaborate further. But "fixed points in time" works well as a base theory.

I guess you could say it's about perception. The Doctor "perceives" the flow of time in a particular way. Now, another time traveller might perceive time a different way. Each of them might make changes to each other's timelines, at a point in time where each person's timeline intersects with the other's, but not necessarily to their own within the flow of their own "cone", and they certainly can't go back and make changes to those people whom they've had contact with in their past. Once somebody like Amy or Rory is in the Doctor's 'time cone', then they never leave it, not even when they leave the TARDIS. Their out-of-TARDIS history becomes a fixed point for the Doctor. He can't go back.

 

[Ithekro]

The Doctor does say in the "Two Doctors" that someone who travels around time and space as much as he does is bound to run into himself eventually. The Older version tends not to remember what happened to his younger self every well as he is living the events for the first time (again). Though it is possible that the Troughton Doctor is a later Doctor rather than the Second Doctor given what we got from "The Day of the Doctor" with Tom Baker's Curator. In most instances, it is a known Doctor running into another known Doctor. The Tenth, War and Eleventh recently. The Third, Second, an First originally and specifically by the Time Lords. The First, Second, Third, and Fifth later on. (The First has to be the original in this case, though again the Troughton Doctor would be a later one to him remembering the events of the Three Doctors and leaving behind Jamie and Zoe).

Be odd if the Doctor, later in life, decides to get around some of his "fixed points" by taking on some of his old faces. He can drop in on the Brig as the Second or Third Doctors and no one will really notice (much). They probably would if he dropped in as the Fourth if he didn't act like he did back then. He could even get away with dropping in as any of the first eight Doctors, though sparingly, as his younger selves might start to notice that he's said to have been places he's not been before.

There is still the nice tale of the Brig's funeral and wake were all the Doctors attend. It is assumed it was only 1 to 11, but it could easily be all of them. 1 - 112 or whatever.

 

[Lance]

I can't easily account for the others, but in the case of "The Two Doctors" there's a random element which might have allowed the 'accidental' crossing of the Second Doctor and the Sixth Doctor in a perfectly natural adventure: there are illegal time experiments going on at Space Station Cameca. Possibly it created a meeting of the two Doctor's future time cones, in one space, in one time. Instead of the Doctor not being able to cross 'back' into events that are a part of his past, the time experiments blasted a hole through causality through which that happened almost by accident.

Which adds an extra frisson of urgency to the Time Lords recruiting the Doctor to shut down the experiments in the first place.

It is notable that Six doesn't seem to recall being there as Two. Almost as if, even in crossing paths, the two Doctor's are in different time streams. So, it's not an event that is "established" in Six's past, hence it's okay for him to meet Two. It almost isn't breaking the laws of time at all.

I'm going cross-eyed.

 

[Iamnotspock]

There is still the nice tale of the Brig's funeral and wake were all the Doctors attend. It is assumed it was only 1 to 11, but it could easily be all of them. 1 - 112 or whatever.

I've never been too keen on that idea. The Doctor meeting himself "only happens in the gravest of emergencies", except when he wants to relive an event like his best friend's funeral over and over again? For all his protestations of "You've got no right to be here! What about the first law of time?" when meeting himself, not to mention "This is a very bad idea, two sets of us being here at the same time," why would he risk messing with the space/time continuum, and the wrath of the Time Lords, by deliberately converging at the same time and place with his other selves? Why would he want to? They're all the same person. I prefer to think, in light of The Wedding of River Song, that it was the Eleventh Doctor who attended.

 

[DWF]

I can't easily account for the others, but in the case of "The Two Doctors" there's a random element which might have allowed the 'accidental' crossing of the Second Doctor and the Sixth Doctor in a perfectly natural adventure: there are illegal time experiments going on at Space Station Cameca. Possibly it created a meeting of the two Doctor's future time cones, in one space, in one time. Instead of the Doctor not being able to cross 'back' into events that are a part of his past, the time experiments blasted a hole through causality through which that happened almost by accident.

Which adds an extra frisson of urgency to the Time Lords recruiting the Doctor to shut down the experiments in the first place.

It is notable that Six doesn't seem to recall being there as Two. Almost as if, even in crossing paths, the two Doctor's are in different time streams. So, it's not an event that is "established" in Six's past, hence it's okay for him to meet Two. It almost isn't breaking the laws of time at all.

I'm going cross-eyed.

Circular logic only makes you dizzy.

 

[DrFrankhamstien]

Circular logic only makes you dizzy.

Some would get dizzy walking in a straight line. (Slight mis-quote. But what's the point of a good quotation if you can't change it?)

 

[Relayer1]

The way I see it, The Doctor has no interest spending decades in New York. He wants to pop in and out quickly. He is prevented from doing this because of the temporal anomalies the Weeping Angels created.

Not wanting to go too deeply into technical details (stop me if you're having trouble following me), Amy and Rory could, er, catch a train to somewhere else...

 

[DrFrankhamstien]

The way I see it, The Doctor has no interest spending decades in New York. He wants to pop in and out quickly. He is prevented from doing this because of the temporal anomalies the Weeping Angels created.

Not wanting to go too deeply into technical details (stop me if you're having trouble following me), Amy and Rory could, er, catch a train to somewhere else...

Fact is, Moffat messed up and he had to explain off screen in some interview - as he does so much, instead of just writing a script that has some sort of logical plot progression and contains the answers within the script.

 

[Iamnotspock]

The way I see it, The Doctor has no interest spending decades in New York. He wants to pop in and out quickly. He is prevented from doing this because of the temporal anomalies the Weeping Angels created.

Not wanting to go too deeply into technical details (stop me if you're having trouble following me), Amy and Rory could, er, catch a train to somewhere else...

Fact is, Moffat messed up and he had to explain off screen in some interview - as he does so much, instead of just writing a script that has some sort of logical plot progression and contains the answers within the script.

Yes, it amuses me that his DW Magazine Q&A page consists almost entirely of requests for clarification of plot points. However, in this case his explanation worked for me, and I thought it was pretty implicit in the episode; it's a fixed point in time that Amy and Rory never see the Doctor again, full stop, and if he were to visit them again - no matter where - New York would burn, as that's the location of the time anomalies.

So, they could hop on a boat to England and meet the Doctor there and it would still destroy New York.