AS PROMISED - my Doctor Who How-It-All-Works breakdown (with potential Gallifrey spoilers). A shout out to a couple of people who mentioned wanting to read it - Im looking at you, Kristin, Richard, and Im pretty sure Christopher is just geeky enough to enjoy it. Have fun, yall. ;) Yesterday I mentioned that during an incredibly long drive and without anything in my car that actually plays music, I had a whole lot of time on my hands to think. And, for whatever reason, I started thinking about time travel in Doctor Who. And the more I thought about it, the more conclusions I came to, and had this crazy “THIS MAKES SENSE” epiphany that should probably never come from fictional rules on a fictional show. Some of you, though, expressed an interest in hearing about it, and so here it is. All broken down and perfectly logical. Let me know what you think. We already have a picture about dimensionality in general. Point, line, square, cube. Time is the fourth dimension, and if you were to picture it, it would be as the path that the cube (our three dimensional universe) moves along. In the Whoniverse, there are a lot of different universes (a lot of different cubes moving along paths) because, as they say, every decision creates an additional universe (‘Rise of the Cybermen’). We’ll call this collection of Whoniverses the Metaverse. A few things, here – Time Lords only exist in one universe – the one in which the show takes place. Time Lords are not interdimensional beings. They cannot travel from one universe in the metaverse to another (‘Doomsday’) because it would cause the metaverse to collapse. This would be because Time Lords, having access to every point in time, and therefore making all the same decisions to suit whatever their fancy happened to be, would cause all universes would be the same, which would take it straight back to there only being one universe. There would be no additional universes in the metaverse because a being with access to all points on the timeline would alter that timeline to fit their wants in exactly the same way in every universe. As such, only one universe can contain Time Lords at all. Therefore, we can call Time Lords ‘The First Decision’ – the thing that originally caused other universes within the metaverse to exist. As such, the path that contains Time Lords upon which we are travelling is The Original Universe – all others are created by decisions alternate to this one. Though the TARDIS has the appearance of travelling through space, it actually doesn’t (‘The Runaway Bride’). Instead, it disappears here and reappears there (‘Rose’). We can extrapolate, therefore, that the Doctor’s TARDIS exists at all points in time on this timeline, but outside of space – thereby allowing it to be “bigger on the inside”. It isn’t truly, therefore, that a TARDIS is infinitely large on the inside – just that within it, the concept of area (as in square footage) doesn’t exist (‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’). We know that, in order for the Doctor to cause the TARDIS to appear at a chosen point in space and time, he has to do calculations (‘Day of the Doctor’), and that he is often a bit off (‘The Idiot’s Lantern’), probably because the Doctor barely passed his Time Lord test (‘Key to Time’). This is because while the interior of the TARDIS is seemingly infinite, the exterior is not. Therefore, we can presume that there is a barrier between the inside of the TARDIS and the outside, otherwise the ‘outside of space’ element of the TARDIS would leak out, causing the metaverse to collapse (‘The Big Bang’). We can also guess that when the Doctor has made his calculations for the TARDIS’s appearance at a different space-time, he briefly lowers the barrier and then puts it back somewhen else. This accounts for River saying that the TARDIS sound is caused by “leaving the brakes on” (‘The Time of Angels’). Since the TARDIS doesn’t actually move, it doesn’t have brakes. A better phrasing would be that the Doctor leaves the anchor (TARDIS exterior) down, which also explains why, when the TARDIS disappears here and reappears there, it fades out of one existence as it fades back into another (‘Blink’). We also know that the Doctor cannot cross his own timeline. This is because the TARDIS exists at all points in time, and outside of space. So, when entering his own timeline, he would be able to see every moment he has ever lived simultaneously; and that anyone else going into his timeline would thereafter be scattered throughout time – thereby illustrating, again, that the TARDIS exists at all times, but outside of space (‘The Name of the Doctor’). So, now that we have the basic rules of the Time Lords and the TARDIS down, back to the rules of the metaverse and what we can extrapolate about them – If each universe in the metaverse is in essence a cube travelling along a line, and those lines can never touch nor cross, then the metaverse should be constantly expanding as new decisions are made and new offshoots are created. This would imply infinite potential expansion in the metaverse. However, we know that is not true because of the ‘fixed points in time’ (‘Waters of Mars’) wherein an event is completely set and must happen across all universes, lest the metaverse collapse. But why must there be fixed points at all (outside of it making the plot more interesting)? Consider that the number of universes the metaverse has to exist within is finite instead of infinite. Fixed Points, then, are resets – to bring all universes back to some kind of starting point and begin spawning offshoots anew. With this in mind, imagine the metaverse as a series of sausage links. The sausage cannot be infinitely large; therefore when the expansion hits a certain point, it must collapse down again – leaving the fixed point as the spot between the two sausages. And what do you care about any of this? Well, hopefully, if you’re a Whovian, it’s just interesting. If you’re a Whovian who wants to theorize about the location of Gallifrey since the Doctor moved it, well, spoiler spoiler spoiler to follow. We have established the relationship between time and space by using the TARDIS as an example. The TARDIS exists at all points in time, but outside of space. Now, with Gallifrey, we have the opposite – as the Doctor said, Gallifrey was moved outside of time (‘Day of the Doctor’). However, we know that Gallifrey still occupies space, otherwise all incarnations of the Doctor wouldn’t be needed to ‘move’ it. Ignoring, for the moment, that we don’t know how that’s possible (though I have ideas, lemme tell ya), we now also know that Gallifrey, wherever it is, is taking up space outside of time. If it touched the timeline of any universe at all, it would cause the collapse of the metaverse (‘Doomsday’). The next Doctor Who series is going to be largely devoted to the Doctor trying to figure out the location of Gallifrey outside of time. Go back to the sausage link metaverse. With all these threads of universes all over the place, and none of them being permitted to touch nor cross, but always spawning offshoots, and a finite amount of universe-space to work with – the part of the metaverse that is the sausage link is incredibly busy. There is no space along all that time to hide something that is actually taking up part of the three dimensional world. So, the best place to hide Gallifrey is when the universe paths come back together for a fixed point, because all that universe-space that the threads would normally be taking up is still there, the threads are just, for that one decision, compressed. For how to find Gallifrey? Well, that’s pretty easy, because we probably already did. The Void Ship from ‘Army of Ghosts’ which the Doctor says was designed “to travel in the space between universes” but “is impossible” because he has heard the theory of it, but it’s one of those things that you can imagine, but that can’t actually exist. This is because of what we’ve already figured out – moving your cube in random, disconnected spaces inside of the actual sausage link would be nearly impossible to calculate unless you had infinite time on your hands. The Void Ship is followed by Cybermen, but they did not create it. It contains four Daleks and The Genesis Ark (which employs the Time Lord technology of being bigger on the inside). Who would have access to Daleks, and have Time Lord technology, and imprison the Daleks in said technology? Time Lords. Since this never existed in the time in which the Doctor was on or had anything to do with Gallifrey, it had to have been created since then. Since Time Lords cannot exist in other universes (being the First Decision), the only Time Lords who could have created the Void Ship are the ones on Gallifrey as it is now – outside of time. This means that even though Gallifrey is outside of time, they are still creating. In fact, you could view the Daleks on the Void Ship as their version of Laika. The reason that Gallifrey doesn’t exist in the exact same void that the ship did (and that the Daleks and Cybermen now occupy) is that the Doctor didn’t have the technology to make Gallifrey move out of the way of universe paths (like the Void Ship can). Gallifrey occupies a static place outside of time, so we are again back to Gallifrey being in the space around a fixed point. And there you have it. My full theory of how time travel works in Doctor Who, and where Gallifrey is now. Ba-bam, yall.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 04:21:58 +0000
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