Why, because of DRAMA dear boy!
I can see the point of not messing with fixed-point events - I just think that WoM wasn't very well written in that regard.
Waters of Mars Comment & Grading SPOILERS
- Thread starter WillsBabe
- Start date
I can see the point of not messing with fixed-point events - I just think that WoM wasn't very well written in that regard.
Because Bowie base was a cross roads for him, a test if you will.
How he coped with that situation would determine how he would go on...live happily ever after or... well, that remains to be seen the next time, since he majorly failed the test.
Or, because he was wrong about not being able to change things, and the TARDIS knew it even if he didn't. It took him there so that he could prevail and save as many lives as possible.
In the end it doesn't matter whether he should have interfered or not. What's important is that he genuinely believed it was wrong to do so, enough to impart that belief to another. And that belief is what drove the story more than any actual temporal repercussions.
Alright, granted. What about the next part? "I've gone too far. Is this it? My death?"
How do his actions in Waters on Mars equal immediately "Is this my death?" Unless you are going to argue God is now going to smite him, or that there is a true and tangible cosmic karma where existence itself wants to snuff him out for 5 minutes of arrogance...I mean, I just don't see how he leapt to that conclusion unless he's been reading the spoilers here on the forums.
I hate when characters start to realize they are in a TV show, but on the Doctor would peak ahead at next week's script, I suppose.
I think it's more psychological than literal. I think that he realized by his actions he had stepped off the path of the righteous, and---just for a moment---he felt maybe he deserved to die (or at least regenerate) for doing so.
Or perhaps he felt the changes in the timeline rippling out, more severe than usual, and just for a second he was afraid he might have wiped himself from existence?
There isn't really a great explanation for that one.
Or perhaps he felt the changes in the timeline rippling out, more severe than usual, and just for a second he was afraid he might have wiped himself from existence?
There isn't really a great explanation for that one.
Except that I though it was clear that he was supposed to take part in the disaster at Bowie Base. The Doctor's presence bought Captain Brook the time she needed to arm the nuclear device. Given the chaos of the control room, it's questionable that alone she would have been able to arm the device; with the Doctor there she had the time to do so.
The question this raises is interesting. Was the Doctor also supposed to die at Bowie Base? The TARDIS escape was cut very close. What if the Doctor realized, when all was said and done, that he, too, was supposed to be dead, only he wasn't? That could be why he asks Ood-Sigma if this means he's going to die; he's literally living on borrowed time.
Adelaide's original contribution was bullshit.
The reason her granddaughter tried so hard to get into space in the original timeline is because she was mocked and jeered at all her life that her gran was a daft of bat that got drunk and blew herself up during some suicide kick. Not knowing she defeated an invasion made her an embarrassment surely? it wasn't an accident like with Challenger, she pushed the "blowup" button for no discernible reason. No one gets the benefit of the doubt if they're flushing a few trillion trillion dollarpounds down the space loo.
Every feint by the Master during his tenure fighting UNIT was trying to kick established history off it's blocks, and where on earth would Britain be if the Battle of Hastings had been reversed? Certainly not GREAT? The Doctor was waddling in the footsteps of a kook like the time meddler?
Hells, the Valeyard tried to "eat" him for all intents and purposes, and as soon as the Master met the Valeyeard, actually killing any contemporary Doctor he was at odds with with his own personal timeline
There was a New Avengers comic recently and Spider-Man is talking about saving the day by stealing a timemachine, this is, he jokes, after I kill Hitler... To which Captain"the Winter "Bucky" Soldier" America replied "O? I killed Hitler. Yup, it was me. I did it. I killed Hitler." .
Not evil enough, not off the rails enough.
Didn't some one post some fanfiction her a month or two back where the Doctor goes insane, Skins Rose and wears her as a suit?
The Time War was "time locked" by temporal weapons used during a temporal war so he couldn't save his people if he even wanted to, not that a lone dalek said "fuck you" to such obstacles and Freejacked Davros.
personally I thought he was just going to get around saving the crew by depositing them 200 years in the past or a thousand years in the future or the other side of t he universe so that they could keep out of histories way, if he was going to make a mess it was lazy more so than foolish not to clean up after himself.
The reason her granddaughter tried so hard to get into space in the original timeline is because she was mocked and jeered at all her life that her gran was a daft of bat that got drunk and blew herself up during some suicide kick. Not knowing she defeated an invasion made her an embarrassment surely? it wasn't an accident like with Challenger, she pushed the "blowup" button for no discernible reason. No one gets the benefit of the doubt if they're flushing a few trillion trillion dollarpounds down the space loo.
Every feint by the Master during his tenure fighting UNIT was trying to kick established history off it's blocks, and where on earth would Britain be if the Battle of Hastings had been reversed? Certainly not GREAT? The Doctor was waddling in the footsteps of a kook like the time meddler?
Hells, the Valeyard tried to "eat" him for all intents and purposes, and as soon as the Master met the Valeyeard, actually killing any contemporary Doctor he was at odds with with his own personal timeline
There was a New Avengers comic recently and Spider-Man is talking about saving the day by stealing a timemachine, this is, he jokes, after I kill Hitler... To which Captain"the Winter "Bucky" Soldier" America replied "O? I killed Hitler. Yup, it was me. I did it. I killed Hitler." .
Not evil enough, not off the rails enough.
Didn't some one post some fanfiction her a month or two back where the Doctor goes insane, Skins Rose and wears her as a suit?
The Time War was "time locked" by temporal weapons used during a temporal war so he couldn't save his people if he even wanted to, not that a lone dalek said "fuck you" to such obstacles and Freejacked Davros.
personally I thought he was just going to get around saving the crew by depositing them 200 years in the past or a thousand years in the future or the other side of t he universe so that they could keep out of histories way, if he was going to make a mess it was lazy more so than foolish not to clean up after himself.
Last edited:
Maybe, but you don't know that. The smallest change can have huge effects on the timeline. Maybe Adelaide takes her granddaughter to a play that ends up inspiring her to become an actor. You can't take such a huge risk to save one person.
The episode clearly implies that Adelaide's grand daughter is very important. If you were to say replace Captain Kirk with a random Federation Captain would history still turn out the same way? One person can have a huge impact on the future of our entire species. We have plenty of examples of that in real life. The Doctor jeopardized everything that the Human Empire accomplished because he couldn't stand to let one woman he barely knew die. He jeopardized the lives of billions, possibly trillions, of people who exists in his "past" in order to save the life of one person.
Remember "City on the Edge of Forever"? Same deal. Kirk could have told her what would happen in order to prevent her from allowing the Nazis to win, but he couldn't take such a huge risk to save one woman when the stakes were so high. He had to ensure that history would play out the way it was supposed to.
I loved the robot.
Wow. I don't mind a bit of analysis, but you guys do tend towards overanalysing.
Once again I'm reminded of my favourite online alt.hist stories, Wikihistory. If you haven't read it, here's a link:
http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html
It's short, it's funny, you'll like it.
Serious now. Let's take a hypothetical. You are given a time machine, a loaded pistol, and directions to Sarajevo, 28 June 1914. You can stop the assassins, including Gavrilo Princip, determined to kill Franz Ferdinand (not the band). They were fighting what they saw as a just cause, but you know it'll make a large portion of the 20th Century crispy around the edges.
But out of all the conflict, economic, military, political, all that friction has produced intense advances in technology, medicine and physics to name 3. I'd argue that events of that day are still echoing around the world, nearly a hundred years later, and the events that precipitated it continue to resonate too.
So. Yiou can stop it. There lies Princip in a pool of his own blood, as the Archduke is whisked away to safety. No World War 1, hence no Depression, WW2, atomic weapons, computing, triage, and so on. You can say those things would have happened anyway, which I can say is probaby true, but they would take much longer to happen in a peacetime climate of a much more fractured world - the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would hang on. The Russian Revolution may or may not happen, and probably not. And that would be just the start of the massive changes between 1914 and 1920.
So it'd be safe to say that 28 June 1914 is a fixed point. To change that is to change everything. Do we, you and I, have the right, or even the rudiments of the knowledge, to reshape the world like that? It could have been made worse, by delaying WW1, as military scientists build nastier machines* to make the Great War, when it comes, even more hellish.
While I'd like to stop millions and millions of deaths, do I have the guts to live up to the consequences.
You could also elaborate this into a 9/11 story. I'm pretty sure anyone here, given the same time machine, would go to NY, 7AM, 9/11/2001, and phone the WTC and say there's bombs in both towers. Or phone the relevant airports and say, "hey, these passengers are terrorists". But someone could come back from the future and say, "this event changed things, and it has to stand". What then?
And of course another example is BTTF 2.
Messing with time to a big extent is incredibly tricky. Much as we might want to, we can't do it. And the Mars Mission of WoM is a similar kind of event, afaik.
And all that aside, it's teh drammah. Live with it.
*and there isn't a contradiction there - a 1914-18 war produced machines, explosives etc of a certain capacity, a (say) 1920-24 war would have produced nastier weapons,
Once again I'm reminded of my favourite online alt.hist stories, Wikihistory. If you haven't read it, here's a link:
http://www.abyssandapex.com/200710-wikihistory.html
It's short, it's funny, you'll like it.
Serious now. Let's take a hypothetical. You are given a time machine, a loaded pistol, and directions to Sarajevo, 28 June 1914. You can stop the assassins, including Gavrilo Princip, determined to kill Franz Ferdinand (not the band). They were fighting what they saw as a just cause, but you know it'll make a large portion of the 20th Century crispy around the edges.
But out of all the conflict, economic, military, political, all that friction has produced intense advances in technology, medicine and physics to name 3. I'd argue that events of that day are still echoing around the world, nearly a hundred years later, and the events that precipitated it continue to resonate too.
So. Yiou can stop it. There lies Princip in a pool of his own blood, as the Archduke is whisked away to safety. No World War 1, hence no Depression, WW2, atomic weapons, computing, triage, and so on. You can say those things would have happened anyway, which I can say is probaby true, but they would take much longer to happen in a peacetime climate of a much more fractured world - the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires would hang on. The Russian Revolution may or may not happen, and probably not. And that would be just the start of the massive changes between 1914 and 1920.
So it'd be safe to say that 28 June 1914 is a fixed point. To change that is to change everything. Do we, you and I, have the right, or even the rudiments of the knowledge, to reshape the world like that? It could have been made worse, by delaying WW1, as military scientists build nastier machines* to make the Great War, when it comes, even more hellish.
While I'd like to stop millions and millions of deaths, do I have the guts to live up to the consequences.
You could also elaborate this into a 9/11 story. I'm pretty sure anyone here, given the same time machine, would go to NY, 7AM, 9/11/2001, and phone the WTC and say there's bombs in both towers. Or phone the relevant airports and say, "hey, these passengers are terrorists". But someone could come back from the future and say, "this event changed things, and it has to stand". What then?
And of course another example is BTTF 2.
Messing with time to a big extent is incredibly tricky. Much as we might want to, we can't do it. And the Mars Mission of WoM is a similar kind of event, afaik.
And all that aside, it's teh drammah. Live with it.
*and there isn't a contradiction there - a 1914-18 war produced machines, explosives etc of a certain capacity, a (say) 1920-24 war would have produced nastier weapons,
You lie!
While I agree with the general sentiment, I'd argue that WW1 was going to happen eventually even if that event was averted. The assassination was just a catalyst; the underlying cause of such a massive conflict was the incredibly widespread and convoluted network of treaties and mutual defense pacts which were spread throughout Europe at that time. All it takes is one little spark and every country would be inexorably drawn into the confrontation again.
And if the aftermath of that war had been handled a bit more competently, WW2 might have been averted.
And if the aftermath of that war had been handled a bit more competently, WW2 might have been averted.
Keep in mind, according to Waters of Mars, if WW2 were averted, all thos elives saved would have yelled at the Doctor for being arrogant, and he'd then have realized be needed to die for thinking (and succeeding in) the idea he could help.
Bastard! Saving people!
Dude, Asimov's Zeroeth Law.
No Robot shall comit an action to harm humaity or through inaction not commit an action which will save humanity.
something like that.
Humanity is more important than a person, or even three.
No Robot shall comit an action to harm humaity or through inaction not commit an action which will save humanity.
something like that.
Humanity is more important than a person, or even three.
There's a lovely bit in the novelisation of Back to the Future which isn't in the film where Doc Brown berates Marty just for going to the cinema. He hypothesises a situation whereby the cinema is on the verge of failing, but Marty's ticket means the weekly takings are just enough to keep in in business. A week later there's a fire and, because the place is such a fleapuit the fire doors are chained up, people die including someone who's going to be President one day.
Thing is tiny things will alter time more than any of us can fathom. As people have stated if WW1 hadn't happened all sorts of things wouldn't have happened. and in fact the world today might have been a worse place than it is, despite all those millions who died.
So Adilaide's grand daughter doesn;t fly the FTL ship, so what, as people have said someone will have.
Well yes, but what if that other person isn't quite as good a pilot as Brookes? And what if, because of this, the first FTL ship sufferers a calamity and is destroyed. Maybe this delays humanity expanding into the universe by a ten years, or a year, a week...but for whatever reason some alien power gets to Proxima Centuri first. History is full of radical little moments that would alter everything.
Yeah WW1 would have happened anyway. But if it happened a year later then the whole course of the war might have been different. Maybe as a result an Austrian corporal doesn't survive to become the bitter figurehead of nationalism, maybe he dies in a trench somewhere. No Hitler, whoo hoo, right? Well maybe. With no WW2 what would Eurpoe be like today? Still rivened with wars between nations as it was before WW2? Maybe someone else would have taken Hitler's place...and maybe that person didn't go as mad towards the latter stages of the war, maybe Hitler's replacement didn't choose to fight a war of two fronts, and maybe this enabled Germany to survive much longer in WW2...long enough to develop nuclear weapons and maybe drop them on London, New York, Moscow? Or maybe we'd all be living in a utopian society now? Who knows.
Well I'm guessing the Timelords would
Thing is tiny things will alter time more than any of us can fathom. As people have stated if WW1 hadn't happened all sorts of things wouldn't have happened. and in fact the world today might have been a worse place than it is, despite all those millions who died.
So Adilaide's grand daughter doesn;t fly the FTL ship, so what, as people have said someone will have.
Well yes, but what if that other person isn't quite as good a pilot as Brookes? And what if, because of this, the first FTL ship sufferers a calamity and is destroyed. Maybe this delays humanity expanding into the universe by a ten years, or a year, a week...but for whatever reason some alien power gets to Proxima Centuri first. History is full of radical little moments that would alter everything.
Yeah WW1 would have happened anyway. But if it happened a year later then the whole course of the war might have been different. Maybe as a result an Austrian corporal doesn't survive to become the bitter figurehead of nationalism, maybe he dies in a trench somewhere. No Hitler, whoo hoo, right? Well maybe. With no WW2 what would Eurpoe be like today? Still rivened with wars between nations as it was before WW2? Maybe someone else would have taken Hitler's place...and maybe that person didn't go as mad towards the latter stages of the war, maybe Hitler's replacement didn't choose to fight a war of two fronts, and maybe this enabled Germany to survive much longer in WW2...long enough to develop nuclear weapons and maybe drop them on London, New York, Moscow? Or maybe we'd all be living in a utopian society now? Who knows.
Well I'm guessing the Timelords would
Preventing World War II when it occurred would quite possibly (in fact most likely) have led to a much worse, possibly nuclear, war later on. This is why 'messing with history' is a dangerous game - the new timeline could end up being much worse.
The way that 'fixed points in time' is semi-explained, it seems to be points which drive the overall thrust of history in one way or another - fixed 'events'. Different to the minutiae of the lives of one person or another.
The inconsistency here is not so much that the Doctor has interfered in history before; he usually does so on a fairly low scale level in the grand scheme of things, but more that the Doctor has interfered in a big way on alien worlds in the future. world-changing events like in Gridlock. Now that would completely alter the flow of their timeline from that point onwards, but because we see that as 'the future' and not our world, that gets a bit brushed under the carpet.
Basically, it seems that on DW, 'fixed point in time' are ones that relate to modern day Earth - either its history to date or immediate future.
I've always seen fixed points as events The (time traveller involved) Doctor knows happens, events which are established events in history where the outcome is a matter of record.
When the events where the outcomes are unknown, or are being tampered with by other time travelling species then they are free to be tampered with.
Ok....but then it was a fixed point in time that Pete Tyler died, that he died in a certain place and that he died alone.
Rose changed things, and I know brought down the Reapers as a result but, once the normal flow of time was restored things were altered, things the Doctor knew about in advance.
Now it may be that it was a tiny thing (the location of Pete's death and the fact that there was a mysterious blonde with him) but it was a change nontheless, and in fact quite a major change since a large part of Rose's desire to be with him when he died came out from the fact that she hated the fact he died alone. Well he didn't die alone, and we see Jackie telling Rose this so....
Oh don't get me started!
Rose changed things, and I know brought down the Reapers as a result but, once the normal flow of time was restored things were altered, things the Doctor knew about in advance.
Now it may be that it was a tiny thing (the location of Pete's death and the fact that there was a mysterious blonde with him) but it was a change nontheless, and in fact quite a major change since a large part of Rose's desire to be with him when he died came out from the fact that she hated the fact he died alone. Well he didn't die alone, and we see Jackie telling Rose this so....
Oh don't get me started!
Similar threads
