When is the Doctor from?
- Thread starter Crewman47
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To be honest, as I started thinking of all this while trying to make sense of the series 5 finale, I never really thought about how physical space would be affected. I've always thought of Gallifrey as not existing in our space, though. If something existed outside of the linear flow of time, what would you see looking at it from the outside? It must have had no physical coordinates, or else existed at certain coordinates but somehow outside of our space or inaccessible from it, like the Medusa Cascade. Maybe it was in the time vortex or something. I do like the visual of Dalek saucers and TARDISes doing battle in the vortex along with their alterations of time.
At any rate, it wouldn't be there anymore!
At any rate, it wouldn't be there anymore!
So how did that happen? Surely, the Time Lords weren't always the Time Lords. They evolved to that point. At some time in their history, they were not time travelers. So what about then? Did Gallifrey still exist outside of space and time? Or did the Time Lords shift it out of phase with the rest of the universe once they developed the technology?
You know, there are occasions when "wibbley-wobbley, timey-whimey" really is the best explanation.
You know, there are occasions when "wibbley-wobbley, timey-whimey" really is the best explanation.
That's my take. It was a response to the risk of getting their own history mucked with. Time would only move forward for them, and their past would stay the same no matter how much change was done to the timeline. There's also the romantic idea of being lords of time- what better way to demonstrate your mastery than by removing its power over you entirely, and setting up your throne to overlook all of time itself?
But of course, as you say, the best answer is simply "wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey". I'll never dispute that!
The Planet Gallifrey is held in a force field, but existed in real time.. the time war happened a loooooooong time ago according to lesser species.. when the time war happened, a time lock was established, which began in the future of earth say 52nd century, and worked it's way back through time, as the time lock began, it locked all things within the field outside of real time..all the things within the field were locked in time as well.. which meant past events on skarro could only be effected in the time lock.. (time in the past is set, and locked and cannot be changed in the time lock)
the events in the past happened, but are now locked in time, and are not reachable via time travel or tardis.. but as the time lock travels back through history, it alienates the time lords and daleks from their normal time, and cuts off certain time events while also making them fact..
example: the doctor does have a re-pour with UNIT, from his days in the 3rd incarnation..however, the doctor can mess with his former selves cause he himself is not part of the time lock.. were he to become a fixed figure in the time war time lock, he would then not be in the universe to mess with his former selves in the first place..
only his 8TH incarnation is inaccessible, due to his being partly locked in that "bubble" so to speak..
here is where things get tricky.. to me, if the daleks were to say escape the time war, and are not mad in the process.. and one tries to traverse time to the past to warn it's previous brother-en, it would not succeed, because the rest of it's race are trapped in time..the time lock is like a cascade of energy or a web which not only covers the battle and tries to contain the carnage in real time, it travels back into history and loops the battle in time itself..so certain events are locked in the time lock, like the 4th doctor's visit to skarro, but just that event, and it cannot be changed because it would be like a shadow of true reality being that the rest of the universe is held constant by that event.. it happened, but cannot be changed in the time war..
if a dalek were to land on skarro in that time, the fourth doctor and those events would be like watching a movie.. unable to change them..
so events in the time war happened, just sealed off from reality..past events also happened, and are sealed off from reality in the time war..it doesn't change true reality outside the lock, it just makes them begin to fade from memory.. higher species know of the loss as was stated in the stolen planet.. and the charles dickens episode with the Gelf..
lesser species, who weren't aware of the time lords, and daleks as much were oblivious to their disappearance..
as for when the doctor is from?
I think that if you look at the series, the time lords and the Doctor "seemed" in real time were on the same level when the events of omega were going on, and through the time vortex they could have manipulated time and energy..
my hypothesis is that the time war happened in the 55th century, the doctor is from there.. and was forbidden to go into the future of gallifrey, hence the clock in the tardis that shows real time on gallifrey..I think this feature eventually became locked into the Tardis chronometer, and became a standardized time when joining his people..
it makes sense..
Omega's space lightening beam had to start in the far off future..it could travel faster then light cause it traverse time-space.. then after the defeat, the displaced omega then ended up on 1980's earth, and transmat from that time to Gallifrey which existed in the future..
it made sense that the time lords would feel the power loss in the future, and because the 3rd doctor was in the past, they could still send him energy and transpose his former selves..cause energy back in the past still existed for the time lords, and so thus the events that happened in the 3 doctors had to have happened in the future..
this 52ND century makes sense, as the time agency grew up after the time lords faded into the time war..
but because of the time lock their memory fades, and they drift into myth and legend because of it..
Captain Jack remembers seeing Dalek ships before and remarks they were destroyed..
if Abslom Daak is a regular fixture of the universe, it makes sense, he was a Dalek hunter in the 50TH century..
so my bet, is the 52ND century.. fits the universe most In my opinion.
I may have to reflect on this and word it in a better way, it may be jumbled..
the events in the past happened, but are now locked in time, and are not reachable via time travel or tardis.. but as the time lock travels back through history, it alienates the time lords and daleks from their normal time, and cuts off certain time events while also making them fact..
example: the doctor does have a re-pour with UNIT, from his days in the 3rd incarnation..however, the doctor can mess with his former selves cause he himself is not part of the time lock.. were he to become a fixed figure in the time war time lock, he would then not be in the universe to mess with his former selves in the first place..
only his 8TH incarnation is inaccessible, due to his being partly locked in that "bubble" so to speak..
here is where things get tricky.. to me, if the daleks were to say escape the time war, and are not mad in the process.. and one tries to traverse time to the past to warn it's previous brother-en, it would not succeed, because the rest of it's race are trapped in time..the time lock is like a cascade of energy or a web which not only covers the battle and tries to contain the carnage in real time, it travels back into history and loops the battle in time itself..so certain events are locked in the time lock, like the 4th doctor's visit to skarro, but just that event, and it cannot be changed because it would be like a shadow of true reality being that the rest of the universe is held constant by that event.. it happened, but cannot be changed in the time war..
if a dalek were to land on skarro in that time, the fourth doctor and those events would be like watching a movie.. unable to change them..
so events in the time war happened, just sealed off from reality..past events also happened, and are sealed off from reality in the time war..it doesn't change true reality outside the lock, it just makes them begin to fade from memory.. higher species know of the loss as was stated in the stolen planet.. and the charles dickens episode with the Gelf..
lesser species, who weren't aware of the time lords, and daleks as much were oblivious to their disappearance..
as for when the doctor is from?
I think that if you look at the series, the time lords and the Doctor "seemed" in real time were on the same level when the events of omega were going on, and through the time vortex they could have manipulated time and energy..
my hypothesis is that the time war happened in the 55th century, the doctor is from there.. and was forbidden to go into the future of gallifrey, hence the clock in the tardis that shows real time on gallifrey..I think this feature eventually became locked into the Tardis chronometer, and became a standardized time when joining his people..
it makes sense..
Omega's space lightening beam had to start in the far off future..it could travel faster then light cause it traverse time-space.. then after the defeat, the displaced omega then ended up on 1980's earth, and transmat from that time to Gallifrey which existed in the future..
it made sense that the time lords would feel the power loss in the future, and because the 3rd doctor was in the past, they could still send him energy and transpose his former selves..cause energy back in the past still existed for the time lords, and so thus the events that happened in the 3 doctors had to have happened in the future..
this 52ND century makes sense, as the time agency grew up after the time lords faded into the time war..
but because of the time lock their memory fades, and they drift into myth and legend because of it..
Captain Jack remembers seeing Dalek ships before and remarks they were destroyed..
if Abslom Daak is a regular fixture of the universe, it makes sense, he was a Dalek hunter in the 50TH century..
so my bet, is the 52ND century.. fits the universe most In my opinion.
I may have to reflect on this and word it in a better way, it may be jumbled..
I admit was only able to wrap my head around about half of that, but this bit I think would be very useful in a multi-doctor special.
11 and someone like Omega or the Master could be doing battle across the Doctor's own personal timeline. The further back they go, the less they can change events. 10, 9, maybe 8 could interact with 11, but as they go further back 7,6,5 etc aren't even able to see 11.
Thus we insert 11 and his nemesis into old episodes ala Trials and Tribbleations. Perhaps they even cause some old plot-holes to be sealed. Things that just seem to happen and make no sense in an old episode (there have to be some) could be shown to have been caused by 11. We just couldn't see him because we originally saw that episode from the perspective of that episode's Doctor.
Maybe we can play with merging this idea into the Watcher as well.
11 and someone like Omega or the Master could be doing battle across the Doctor's own personal timeline. The further back they go, the less they can change events. 10, 9, maybe 8 could interact with 11, but as they go further back 7,6,5 etc aren't even able to see 11.
Thus we insert 11 and his nemesis into old episodes ala Trials and Tribbleations. Perhaps they even cause some old plot-holes to be sealed. Things that just seem to happen and make no sense in an old episode (there have to be some) could be shown to have been caused by 11. We just couldn't see him because we originally saw that episode from the perspective of that episode's Doctor.
Maybe we can play with merging this idea into the Watcher as well.
If that's the case, then it could explain why the Doctor keeps coming to "present" Earth. He's estranged himself from Gallifrey, but still wants the comfort of having a home base to go to where time keeps moving forward. Since he's not forbidden from going to the past or the future, he still does, but tends to go far into his Earth's future or past while progressing forward normally when he goes to its present. So he's got a chronometer that keeps him in step with Earth time.
(Of course, that could imply he's only aged 50 years since his first regeneration. I'd prefer to think hundreds of years have happened to him off camera. Otherwise he's blowing through his regenerations awfully fast.)
The system that controls the time traveling functions of the TARDIS as well as whatever barriers are around Gallifrey could simply work together in such a way to assure (fundamentally or through design) that there is simply only one current 'time' on Gallifrey that cannot be manipulated by traveling through normal space and time in our universe. You might spend 400 years on Earth and traveling about our universe and go back with only days having passed there, or 2 weeks on Skarro and return to find several decades come and gone. When you leave and come back you can't choose when to come back, you simply hit the home button. It could even be something incarnate to the Timelord beings themselves in that their relative events are linked to the 'true time' on Gallifrey so that one can't ever abuse the system.
The series' original run seemed to take for granted that Time Lords were strictly synchronised, as exemplified by the fact that the Doctor knew the Rani's age in Time And The Rani. (But then again, the Doctor seemed to believe that the Time Meddler was from a time fifty or so years after his own.) NuWho seems to take a more fluid approach - they can't or mustn't violate the "causal nexus", so they can age at different relative rates as long as they don't meet out of order.
Regarding the Doctor's own era, there are a few (somewhat inconsistent) pieces of evidence. NuWho tells us that they invented black holes and that they were around before humans ("You look Time Lord. We were around first." or words to that effect.) An Unearthly Child tells us that they had mastered space travel when the human race was young, if I recall.
Baker's Doctor says (in Nightmare Of Eden, I think) that his date of birth is sometime soon. That would be sometime after the year 2100. He could be joking or fibbing, of course, or "soon" could be measured on a geological scale.
I don't think that there's all that much evidence that the Doctor's era is contemporary with Ravalox. However, in the same season he does mention that they're "the oldest race", with "ten million years" of pure scientific research. I think that this adds weight to the view of Gallifrey as being in the far distant past. Of course, it could be that Gallifrey was put "out of phase" with real time somehow after time-travel technology was developed. Shada had something similar, but if I recall it made it difficult to land on it.
Regarding the Doctor's own era, there are a few (somewhat inconsistent) pieces of evidence. NuWho tells us that they invented black holes and that they were around before humans ("You look Time Lord. We were around first." or words to that effect.) An Unearthly Child tells us that they had mastered space travel when the human race was young, if I recall.
Baker's Doctor says (in Nightmare Of Eden, I think) that his date of birth is sometime soon. That would be sometime after the year 2100. He could be joking or fibbing, of course, or "soon" could be measured on a geological scale.
I don't think that there's all that much evidence that the Doctor's era is contemporary with Ravalox. However, in the same season he does mention that they're "the oldest race", with "ten million years" of pure scientific research. I think that this adds weight to the view of Gallifrey as being in the far distant past. Of course, it could be that Gallifrey was put "out of phase" with real time somehow after time-travel technology was developed. Shada had something similar, but if I recall it made it difficult to land on it.
I honestly figured that the Doctor never encountered the Cracks before "The Eleventh Hour" because upon the TARDIS traveling from 1 January 2005 to 7 April 1996, he and the TARDIS had entered a sort of temporal "bubble," a sort of closed time-loop that resolved itself after the Universe was rebooted in "The Big Bang."
I've got the same idea (except I think I called it meta-time. Yours sounds better and eliminates the superfluous hypen). I think I posted on it at some point, but I can't find the reference and don't care to do a detailed search. I believe I was explaining how it was that, no matter where you went in history, from Pompeii to Captain Jack in the 51st century, the Time War and the extinction of the Daleks and Time Lords was always in the recent past for anyone from a society with routine time-travel.
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