Annoying time travel things

[ordinal]

I did like the recent Who episode ( The Girl Who Waited ) but it also pointed out to me quite how far Who has gone in terms of absolute nonsense about time paradoxes and, particularly, "if we do X, Y will never have happened!" - something which was being subtly attacked in the plot. Whenever you hear this phrase in a Who episode you can be sure that it Does Not Mean What You Think It Means.


Warrior Amy was quite correct to say that going back to restore Junior Amy would have killed her. Despite the assertions that "this time branch would never have happened!" clearly it had happened because she was there talking, and Rory and the Doctor would have remembered everything about that event. If something never happened, it actually never happened. Here's what an episode would look like if the events in it had never happened:

* Doctor, Rory and Amy enter a mysteriously cheap gleaming white set.
* Amy goes through the wrong door.
* They are confused for a bit.
* Amy appears back in the TARDIS. Nobody quite knows why.
* End.

Admittedly that's not terribly dramatic, but that's always going to be the case if you have key elements in a story which never happened.

Now, time-travel-wise, what is really being happening is moving between different timelines; in that case, yes, you can have people who remember things from one whereas everyone in the new timeline doesn't, you're moving between similar universes. But you know what happens if you "collapse a timeline"? You destroy everyone in it. They did exist, and now they don't. The "universe reset button" in the last series basically killed everyone apart from our three protagonists.

There is an alternative to this, of course. Perhaps these paradoxical events really did "never happen". What we are doing in watching Who, in this case, is following the delusions of a series of people who are having acausal experiences not connected to external reality. Everything they remember having happened never actually happened and was all in their heads. Perhaps they are brains in jars, too. (This level of philosophy of mind also makes bad drama, as well, I admit.)

Comments

[vampwillow]

:: wanders over after seeing your note about being here on your twitter stream ::

I entirely agree with you and, yes, the need for maintaining televisual interest means that accuracy suffers. This is axiomatic.

[ordinal]

What I am particularly aggrieved by (well, not that aggrieved to be honest, but maybe irked) is the fact that they _could_ make it all internally time-travelly consistent and also dramatic. There is plenty of cross-timeline fiction that works perfectly well, and they do really use lots of timeline-type devices. Only they stick with the single-timeline, "but this now never happened, except you all saw it and the characters remember it" stuff. Bah.