Incremental progress meets Zeno’s Paradox

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Elizabeth Sandifer

Elizabeth Sandifer created Eruditorum Press. She’s not really sure why she did that, and she apologizes for the inconvenience. She currently writes Last War in Albion, a history of the magical war between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison. She used to write TARDIS Eruditorum, a history of Britain told through the lens of a ropey sci-fi series. She also wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk, writes comics these days, and has ADHD so will probably just randomly write some other shit sooner or later. Support Elizabeth on Patreon.

19 Comments

  1. Paul Fisher Cockburn
    July 15, 2024 @ 5:57 am

    “This theory is in fact surprisingly robust for something completely pulled out of my ass far enough into Doctor Who continuity that I had a lot of constraints.”

    The best theories always are.

    Your suggestion that the arrival of a Tardis inherently destabilises time around it could also retrospectively explain why their officially sanctioned use was so carefully restricted by the Time Lords (who were keen to establish and keep Time in check). Also, that – as suggested a while back – the Doctor’s habit of stepping outside the ship and getting “involved with things” has always been his worst breach of Gallifreyan law.

    Reply

    • Ross
      July 15, 2024 @ 9:35 am

      I don’t like it, but an insane theory always gets bonus points from me if it manages to contradict Widely And Forcefully Established EU Canon. Given how much work the Virgin EU put into hammering the idea “The presence of the TARDIS makes time EXTRA stable such that not a single molecule can go any way other than what was shown on-screen”, I would be delighted if “Actually the TARDIS showing up makes time a free-for-all” turns out to make more sense.

      Reply

      • Josh04
        July 15, 2024 @ 10:03 am

        I read “the virgin EU” and immediately my mind summoned into being “the chad Big Finish”, I’ll see myself out.

        Reply

    • John Binns
      July 18, 2024 @ 11:31 am

      Maybe time works differently when the Doctor travels without the TARDIS?! Other examples include Inferno (yes the console but with an unusual power source) and Genesis of the Daleks…

      Reply

      • John Binns
        July 18, 2024 @ 12:07 pm

        My (memory-based, classic series) list also includes

        The Keys of Marinus*
        Evil of the Daleks (Skaro)
        The Three Doctors (Omegaworld)
        The Sontaran Experiment*
        Revenge of the Cybermen
        Mawdryn Undead (Earth 1977/1983)
        The Five Doctors (Hurndall, Troughton and Pertwee to the Death Zone, Davison to the Capitol)
        Resurrection of the Daleks (ship stuff)
        The Trial of a Time Lord (space station/Matrix)

        At least some of those are useful from an ‘opportunity to deny canonicity’ perspective!

        Maybe Keys and Sontaran Experiment don’t count because they only involve travel in space rather than dimensions/time.

        Reply

  2. Anthony Bernacchi
    July 15, 2024 @ 9:50 am

    “You can also argue Clara and Bill, but both are left with access to time travel, so there’s an infinitude of options there.”

    Minor nitpick — Clara definitely doesn’t count because it’s made clear that she’ll eventually have to return to the moment of her death in “Face the Raven,” which takes place in her native time.

    Reply

  3. Prandeamus
    July 15, 2024 @ 11:25 am

    You can probably handwave the Ponds, too. Mutter “Angels” and don’t blink.

    Reply

    • John G Wood
      July 16, 2024 @ 5:05 pm

      You don’t even need to handwave the Ponds because they are in roughly their own time when they leave the TARDIS. It’s only the angels that move them elsewhen, and the theory does not seem to apply to angels (though their shenanegans do seem to allow more cause-effect looping, so Time is not entirely immune to their influence).

      Actually, I reckon you can handwave Katarina too by fanoning that she was about to die in the chaos and was taken out of time at the end of her life; therefore she was going to have hardly any more impact on the world of 1200 BC.

      That just leaves Vicki. I can’t make a similar argument there (the rescuers were on their way), so I guess we just have to rely on her sheer awesomeness as a cure-all.

      Reply

      • HelenaHermione
        July 20, 2024 @ 10:15 pm

        Unless Vicki was never supposed to be rescued, or the rescuers finding an empty, abandoned ship is actually part of the timeline. (Actually, I went back and I read the synopsis of The Rescue-the rescue ship never arrived. The real natives of the planet Dido destroyed the signal to the rescue ship after dealing with ‘Koquillion’. Vicki was the only survivor left from her ship, and she had no family. Basically she probably was supposed to die then, and the fact the Doctor rescued her just handwaved her disappearance. Not to mention the fact that she switches places with Katarina in Troy, leaving with Troilus and…she turns into a myth, Cressida. So she’s displaced from time in a way.)

        Reply

  4. Narsham
    July 15, 2024 @ 3:27 pm

    “Although, actually, breaching the TARDIS is also supposed to require a godlike being. Perhaps this is all just the work of Goronwy, God of Holday Camps.”

    We all know that there’s only one God of Camps on this show, and it’s the Master.

    Which works, actually.

    Two options:
    1. This is a glimpse into alternative time where Doctor Who is shit. Unfortunately, we don’t return to the “regular” timeline for quite a while yet.

    I really like El’s hasty theory: it even makes sense if you consider the Time Lords to be the sort of people who would want to insist history needs to continue in a fixed and unchanging way but also opt to travel to points in history while retaining the ability to do anything they like. It’s the ultimate imperialism: history binds everyone except for us.

    Reply

    • Prole Hole
      July 16, 2024 @ 5:20 pm

      The Cube daft but it’s obviously meant to be, in the same way the “junk mail” that breaches the TARDIS in The Greatest Show In The Galaxy is. It makes sod all sense, it’s just there to get the story underway.

      Yeah, even as someone lighter on the Chibnall era than some, that’s the best thing I can find to say about this. Simply awful.

      Reply

      • Elizabeth Sandifer
        July 16, 2024 @ 8:09 pm

        Of course, that junk mail did in fact have god-like power behind it.

        Goronwy hypothesis looking better all the time.

        Reply

  5. Przemek
    July 15, 2024 @ 3:45 pm

    This is awesome. Headcanon accepted. Thank you.

    Reply

  6. BG Hilton
    July 15, 2024 @ 10:28 pm

    Literally all I remember about this episode is someone repeatedly calling ‘Benny.’ The only reason I remember that is that’s my name, and I was finding it really irritating.

    Reply

  7. Jarl
    July 17, 2024 @ 1:08 am

    they were fucking benny to death

    Reply

  8. Einarr
    July 18, 2024 @ 10:41 am

    Perhaps more than any other script of the era, this is one that I suspect really could’ve been an absolute classic in the hands of a competent production team. I would dearly love to read some of the drafts since I largely like Ed Hime’s work, both on DW and elsewhere, and I suspect the script did not read nearly as incoherently as the finished broadcast work does, suffering as it clearly does from unfinished effects work and brutal footage/editing shortcomings. I also think the director and team did not grok that much of the disaster movie element going on here was meant to be a blackly humorous comedy, and it’s just not played like that at all, done as deathly serious/dour action film on a budget in a way that doesn’t have a chance in hell of working. I’m convinced Benny’s proposal-slash-euthanasia-request is supposed to be funny and chilling at the same time, for example, rather than just … bafflingly poor.

    Reply

  9. Riggio
    July 19, 2024 @ 3:07 pm

    If anything can inspire you to revisit the genuinely worst era of Doctor Who, it can be the kind of creativity that you mustered in this post. Like a lot of the commenters said, it actually makes a lot of sense for the story of the Doctor’s having annoyed the Time Lords so much over the years if landing a TARDIS and exploring destabilizes the history and timeline of where you end up. You can think of this as why the Doctor was so dogmatic about Barbara not “changing history” back in The Aztecs: not only because there was no guarantee that changing their human sacrifice rituals would have saved them from Spanish conquest, but also because they were actually in a very precarious situation that could change history. Barbara might have changed history so radically that it could have prevented her having even been born. So the theory works a lot with what we’ve seen on screen over the decades.

    I found the story itself so difficult to watch that every shout of “Benni!” felt like being hit in the head with a brick. To see it all come down to a climate change warning story so didactic and ham-fisted that it isn’t even halal to watch the episode was an equal measure of pain.

    Reply

    • HelenaHermione
      July 20, 2024 @ 10:22 pm

      Not to mention ‘Space Babies’ and how stepping on that butterfly changed Ruby Sunday, and the Doctor had to fix it. Time is always in flux there.

      Reply

  10. Ross
    July 20, 2024 @ 10:26 pm

    At the risk of ruining a good time, it seems reasonable to interpret the Doctor’s statement as symbolic rather than literal – not necessarily that these specific events are only one possible future, but that the interpretation of these events as Earth’s “ultimate fate” is only one possibility – something more similar to the Doctor’s musings in “Kill the Moon” that the moon hatching into a space-dragon doesn’t necessarily contradict the appearance of an identical moon further in the future.

    Reply

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