Post by jjpor on Jan 23, 2009 16:03:39 GMT
There’s been some discussion on the TV Movie thread about the Time War and how the Doctor and Gallifrey relate to the rest of the universe in terms of, you know, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimeyness, as Ten so elegantly puts it. So, here’s my take on it; for the most part it agrees with what Merry and others have posted on the other thread, but I thought I’d put it in a thread of its own because, well, that thread’s for bashing discussing the TVM. This started out as a list of bullet-points and grew into an essay, almost a nonfic fanfic actually. I’ve posted it in Fanfic because it’s long, and because at some points I appear to be talking about the Whoniverse as if it’s “real” – admin, feel free to (re)move it if necessary. Right then:
Time is a subjective thing experienced by individuals. Thanks to those rascals Rassilon and Omega, it seems that Gallifrey was somehow insulated from the rest of spacetime, maybe in its own dinky little pocket universe (is this the “transduction barrier” mentioned in Invasion of Time?), from which its inhabitants could observe the rest of the universe (N-Space, in Season 18 terminology) in its entirety and interact with it at any point in its four dimensional structure – any time, any place.
So, individual Time Lords, and indeed those Gallifreyans who chose not to be Time Lords (the dropout Outsiders and maybe the mysterious Shobogans, whatever they were), experienced the passage of time subjectively, even as the passage of time in the wider universe was meaningless to them. And they all shared the same frame of reference as it were; that is, if the Doctor left Gallifrey and adventured in time and space for what seemed to him like a year of his subjective time, and then returned to Gallifrey, he would be on Gallifrey a year of its subjective time later than when he left. This is made explicit by the TV stories like Deadly Assassin, Invasion of Time, the Five Doctors and Trial of a Timelord that feature action on Gallifrey; not by anything explicitly said in the individual stories but rather by the mere fact that we can see Gallifrey moving on, individuals rising through the ranks, regenerating and so on. And also by the fact that the Doctor occasionally reveals how many years old he is (although he seems to skip a few centuries every so often!).
Travel into Gallifrey’s subjective past and future was certainly possible, as demonstrated by the Time Scoop deployed by Borusa to bring the Five (Four!) Doctors together, but would seem to have been strongly discouraged (as with many things that were strongly discouraged, powerful individual Time Lords and the shadowy Celestial Intervention Agency reserved the right to do whatever they liked, whenever they liked). In one of the NA novels, possibly Marc Platt’s mindbending Time’s Crucible, it is stated that such activities are strictly forbidden. It seems likely that TARDISes are created with inbuilt limitations to stop them from doing so.
However, in interacting with N-Space, it was quite possible for Time Lords to encounter people from the subjective past and future of Gallifrey who just happened to be interacting with the same point of spacetime as they were. The Two Doctors, which takes place entirely in the “normal” universe, is a case in point; Time Lords would appear to be immune to the unpleasant effects experienced by members of non-time active species when they encounter their past and future selves (for example, the Brig in Mawdryn Undead).
The Time War was fought between Gallifrey and a resurgent Imperial Dalek polity who appeared to have gotten over that little business with the Hand of Omega, and not to be too happy about it. Captain Jack explicitly states in Parting of the Ways that at some point in their history as played out in the normal universe, the Daleks vanished completely from the universe. Presumably, they had removed themselves from normal spacetime in exactly the same way as Rassilon and Omega had removed Gallifrey. The Daleks were playing for the highest of stakes; to supplant Gallifrey from the lordship of time and, presumably once they had done so, to remake the entire universe as they saw fit. In other words, to make it a universe inhabited only by Daleks. The Time War era Daleks presumably existed in their own subjective timeline just like Gallifrey, perhaps synchronised with Gallifrey’s.
So, to the combatants in the Time War, the conflict had a beginning, a middle, and very definitely an end. In early NuWho stories such as Rose and The Unquiet Dead, it is suggested that most of the other races in the universe remained largely unaware of it; the individual eruptions of the conflict into N-Space, when they were even comprehensible to non-time active species, were at many different points of time and space, in no coherent order and with no seeming rhyme or reason. Only very advanced species, such as the Nestene Consciousness and the Gelth were in a position to realise what was going on and that a single War was being fought across all of time and all of space.
I would suggest that big, Deep Space Nine-style space-operatic battles with armadas of Dalek saucers dogfighting with War-TARDISes were the exception rather than the rule. We know that some such setpiece engagements did take place; they are referenced in NuWho; the Gates of Elysium (where an entity known as the Nightmare Child apparently devoured the Dalek flagship; in my fic I suggest it might have been a “tamed” Chronovore deployed as a weapon by the Time Lords, but it could have been anything); the fall of Arcadia (which seems to have been the Stalingrad of the Time War; certainly, the Doctor is still traumatised by it long afterwards); the Dalek Emperor’s seizure of the Cruciform (which was, from the Master’s reaction to it, probably no picnic either; I have a mental image of the Emperor rampaging across a planet, Godzilla-style, inside a Dalek casing the size of a skyscraper). However, I would argue that the majority of the War consisted of events not unlike the ones we see in the TV stories; relatively small taskforces of Daleks and Time Lords making surgical strikes against strategic points in space and time, with their opponents intervening to try to stop them.
Of course, a large part of the strategy of the War probably consisted of efforts to rewrite history; it was a Time War, after all. The Time Lords seem to have been ideologically committed to preserving the “natural” course of history; certainly attempts to intervene in normal history were frowned upon (unless it was the CIA doing the intervening, and even they found it prudent to use cutouts in the form of renegades like the Doctor rather than dirtying their own hands). The Daleks, we might presume, had no such qualms and, in fact, probably were like children in the proverbial sweet shop trying retroactively to write as many other species out of history as they could. Of course, where they succeeded, there would be no living witnesses to their actions; another reason why the Time War managed to go unnoticed by many non time active species.
Now, here we get to the point where we have to make excuses for NuWho; presumably, such efforts to rewrite history would have a noticeable effect upon the Doctor’s subjective timeline; presumably, points in spacetime with which he had interacted in his past incarnations would no longer be the same. Yet, at many points in NuWho, it is made explicitly clear that the new series and the pre-Time War events of the old series share a single continuity. We have Sarah reminiscing about onscreen adventures she shared with Four in School Reunion; in Journey’s End, we have her reminiscing with Davros about Genesis of the Daleks! There are many similar examples, most of them throwaway lines by the Doctor himself.
To be sure, there are some inconsistencies, and it has become customary in fandom to explain these away as a result of the Time War affecting history; in fact, this is almost certainly correct. However, the problem is not that continuity errors exist, but rather that there are not enough of them! It seems likely that, as a Time Lord, with a unique understanding and sense of spacetime, the Doctor might be aware of multiple possible timelines at the same time, “remembering” not only the latest version of events but also the earlier drafts, as it were. In fact, such a thing is implied at a couple of points in the series. However, this would not be possible for a non Time Lord like Sarah. So, it would seem that the Time Lords were largely successful in their efforts to prevent Dalek depredations against the normal universe.
At this point, we might invoke the dreaded Blinovitch Limitation Effect, which eight out of ten housewives say is their product of choice for eradicating those pesky plotholes. This effectively prevents “re-dos” of failed attempts at temporal intervention; in the classic version, it applies to the actions of individuals, but I am sure there is some wriggle room where we can apply it to the actions of massive time-space empires as well… If we can, then the efforts of either combatant (we must not assume that the Daleks were always the aggressors, whatever Time Lord propaganda might have us believe, but certainly they lacked the self-imposed rules that might have made Time Lord aggression less common) to affect a given point in spacetime, one foiled by the enemy, could not be attempted again. As billions of such interventions and counter-interventions piled up, the overall effect was to “time lock” the entire War, as Ten says in The Stolen Earth. Other entities could conceivably still alter history, given the knowledge and technology to do so, but the Time Lords and the Daleks had effectively trapped themselves into one version of history, which coincidentally happened to be not too dissimilar to the original version. This is why the Doctor is unable to travel back and change the outcome of the conflict; given his desperate and traumatised state, particularly during his Ninth incarnation, I believe that, rules aside, he would have done so if it were possible (and of course, if it were possible without resulting in a win for the Daleks). Dalek Caan’s effort to save Davros from his death in the conflict was possible because it did not actually alter the history of the War; Davros played no further part in the War after being plucked out of it by Caan any more than he did after his death in the original version. Even so, Caan paid a terrible price; its “madness” (not that Daleks are not already mad from birth) was presumably the Dalek equivalent of the effects suffered by the Brig when he crossed his own timeline in Mawdryn Undead.
This time-locking presumably led to a change in strategy; subtle alterations to history no longer being an option, we might expect to see a reversion to more direct methods; taking real estate and holding onto it. This is the phase of the War when terrible battles like Arcadia and the Cruciform took place; presumably there were strategic reasons why the Daleks needed to capture these locations before they could move to the invasion of Gallifrey itself. Once things got to this stage, the Time Lords could only lose, having neither the manpower nor the firepower to match the Daleks in toe-to-toe battle (witness their poor showing against the Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey). Things moved relatively quickly and inevitably to the Daleks’ move against Gallifrey itself, and the horrific denouement of the entire War.
So Gallifrey burned, and from the point of view of the Doctor, unable or unwilling to travel into his subjective past, and unable to alter the outcome of the War to prevent its destruction, it was gone forever, along with all of its inhabitants. There may well have been Time Lords who were not on Gallifrey when it was destroyed, and some of them might even still be alive; most, however, were probably mopped up by the Daleks. Their genocidal zeal aside, it made tactical sense for them to secure their rear areas before moving on Gallifrey; it seems likely that the only surviving Time Lords other than the Doctor were those like the Master, who were able to hide themselves so thoroughly that in effect they were no longer Time Lords. One thing seems clear; the idea that its destruction in the War led to the erasure of Gallifrey from time, so that it had never existed, cannot be true. It is clear from the testimonies of characters such as Captain Jack, or indeed Jabe in The End of the World, that the Time Lords are still remembered by some, even if it is only as a legend. And individual Time Lords such as the Doctor and the Master still exist, which surely they would not had their homeworld never been.
This does not explain the obvious question, however; even if Gallifrey’s subjective timeline came to an end, its inhabitants had, before the War and during it, interacted with the normal universe throughout its history. If Six and Two could adventure together in Seville, and more to the point if Ten and Five can interact in Time Crash (which seems to be canon, despite its non-official status; certainly, it was written to fit into continuity), surely the Doctor’s past and present incarnations could interact with War-era Time Lords in the universe; either learning of the War before it happened, from their subjective viewpoint, or warning the War-era individuals of how the conflict would end, allowing them to take preventative action. We might presume that Nine and Ten would avoid forewarning either pre-War Doctors or War-era combatants for the simple reason that they believe such action would not be effective against the “time-lock” and because of the terrible consequences of attempted temporal alterations in the post-War universe, as suggested in Father’s Day. We might also presume that War-era Gallifrey would make an effort to avoid forewarning pre-War Time Lords as part of their general commitment to non-interference. However, even if the President (who, most of the various media seem to suggest, was none other than our very own Lady Romanadvoratrelundar) and the High Council maintained such an ethical stance even in a time of grave crisis (and given the hypocrisy of Time Lords this is not a given), surely the CIA would not if the survival of Gallifrey was at stake. Of course, we do not know that some of the secret missions on which the Doctor was sent by Gallifrey were not directed, in defiance of all of Gallifrey’s laws, by the War-era CIA; it is common in fandom to interpret Genesis of the Daleks as the opening shot of the War; indeed this interpretation was offered by RTD (and sheepishly followed in my fic). Might it not in fact have been a retroactive attempt to stop the War from ever breaking out, directed from Gallifrey’s subjective future?
None of this explains what the loss of Gallifrey really means with regard to the alteration of timelines and the creation of time paradoxes in the post-War universe. The Time Lords and Daleks were far from being the only time active powers, even if they were the most accomplished. The likes of the Sontarans, and even the 51st Century Time Agency of Earth, possess crude time travel capabilities and the unscrupulousness to use them to alter what are, from their subjective viewpoints, past events. Father’s Day would appear to suggest that Gallifrey had actively policed such efforts before its destruction; indeed, this was probably why a supposedly non-interventionist power had an organisation like the CIA in the first place. With Gallifrey’s subjective timeline being separate from that of the wider universe, of course, it would be able to police all attempts at alterations made by inhabitants of the wider universe; such attempts would not have taken place “before” or “after” the War; from the point of view of Gallifrey, viewing N-space in four dimensions from the outside, such a distinction would be meaningless.
This does not explain why Rose’s unwise actions in Father’s Day drew the attention of the reaper entities and not those of a CIA intervention squad. As Magnus asked in the other thread, how can there be a 1987 in which the Time Lords exist, and one in which they do not? Travelling with the Doctor in the TARDIS (and we might assume that the TARDIS, like Gallifrey, exists outside of normal spacetime), Rose was at the time of her action existing in the subjective Gallifreyan timeline at a point after Gallifrey burned. Viewed from Gallifrey’s position outside N-Space, however, London, Earth, 1987, is a fixed point in spacetime, and continues to be so even when Gallifrey itself is gone; while it still existed, Gallifrey should have been able to observe that point and see Rose’s actions, just as Two can interact with Six in the Two Doctors even though Six is from his subjective future. And surely, the eruption of the reapers into N-space in response to various post-War time alterations would have been observed by Gallifrey and investigated, leading the Time Lords perhaps to deduce that Gallifrey itself would at some point be destroyed. It is possible that by altering history from a point in Gallifrey’s subjective future, Rose managed to remain unseen by the CIA; that is, the Time Lords could see London, Earth, 1987 as it existed before Rose rewrote history, but they could not see the altered version she created because she had done so from a point of their own timeline that did not yet exist. It would explain why all of the occasion upon which Time Lords have interacted with past incarnations of the Doctor were initiated from Gallifrey’s subjective present; Borusa, for example, did not Time Scoop Six, Seven or any of the Doctor’s future incarnations, but rather only the ones he already knew existed. Thus, although pre-War or War-era Time Lords could meet post-War Time Lords in normal spacetime, and even interact with them, they would not be able to observe their actions from outside of N-Space in the same way as they could observe those of Time Lords from their subjective present and past or indeed those of non-time active species. This seems to be backed up by the fact that the pre-War Time Lords seem not to have observed those events of the War which took place in N-space before they happened from their subjective viewpoint.
This might also account for the non-intervention of the Time Lords against the more serious time alterations made by the surviving post-War Daleks. Caan’s removal of Davros from the Time War was minor compared to the alterations wrought by the resurrected Dalek Empire. The fact that Henry Van Statten did not recognise the Dalek in his collection for what it was in 2012 proves that the events of The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End represented a rewrite of Earth’s history by the Daleks. From their subjective viewpoint, the post-War Daleks, having removed themselves from normal spacetime in the same way as Gallifrey prior to the War, were acting after the destruction of Gallifrey had taken place. Their alterations to history therefore may have been in some way invisible to the pre-War Time Lords, who could only observe the version of history that existed prior to the rewrite. The other obvious question, of course, is where were the reapers to close the new timeline?
The Master’s similar actions in The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords were protected by the paradox machine he had constructed from cannibalised TARDIS components; it seems possible that the Daleks, with access to a similar level of technology a prerequisite for their involvement in the Time War, were able to protect themselves in a similar manner. It may be that the reapers, far from being the universal force Nine seemed to suggest, are one of many extra-universal entities that exist outside of N-Space and feed on time energy, and which seem to have flourished in the absence of Gallifrey to control their potential food sources; other examples include the Trickster and the Weeping Angels; the reapers could be the most feared of such entities simply because they are the least subtle in their feeding habits.
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’m not sure it is “correct” or even if I believe it to be correct; I don’t think it really answers the serious questions posed by Magnus on the other thread, but I’m open to discussion, jeers, brickbats etc. I’m sure some of you will have spotted holes you could drive a truck through (I’m looking at you, Magnus!)
Time is a subjective thing experienced by individuals. Thanks to those rascals Rassilon and Omega, it seems that Gallifrey was somehow insulated from the rest of spacetime, maybe in its own dinky little pocket universe (is this the “transduction barrier” mentioned in Invasion of Time?), from which its inhabitants could observe the rest of the universe (N-Space, in Season 18 terminology) in its entirety and interact with it at any point in its four dimensional structure – any time, any place.
So, individual Time Lords, and indeed those Gallifreyans who chose not to be Time Lords (the dropout Outsiders and maybe the mysterious Shobogans, whatever they were), experienced the passage of time subjectively, even as the passage of time in the wider universe was meaningless to them. And they all shared the same frame of reference as it were; that is, if the Doctor left Gallifrey and adventured in time and space for what seemed to him like a year of his subjective time, and then returned to Gallifrey, he would be on Gallifrey a year of its subjective time later than when he left. This is made explicit by the TV stories like Deadly Assassin, Invasion of Time, the Five Doctors and Trial of a Timelord that feature action on Gallifrey; not by anything explicitly said in the individual stories but rather by the mere fact that we can see Gallifrey moving on, individuals rising through the ranks, regenerating and so on. And also by the fact that the Doctor occasionally reveals how many years old he is (although he seems to skip a few centuries every so often!).
Travel into Gallifrey’s subjective past and future was certainly possible, as demonstrated by the Time Scoop deployed by Borusa to bring the Five (Four!) Doctors together, but would seem to have been strongly discouraged (as with many things that were strongly discouraged, powerful individual Time Lords and the shadowy Celestial Intervention Agency reserved the right to do whatever they liked, whenever they liked). In one of the NA novels, possibly Marc Platt’s mindbending Time’s Crucible, it is stated that such activities are strictly forbidden. It seems likely that TARDISes are created with inbuilt limitations to stop them from doing so.
However, in interacting with N-Space, it was quite possible for Time Lords to encounter people from the subjective past and future of Gallifrey who just happened to be interacting with the same point of spacetime as they were. The Two Doctors, which takes place entirely in the “normal” universe, is a case in point; Time Lords would appear to be immune to the unpleasant effects experienced by members of non-time active species when they encounter their past and future selves (for example, the Brig in Mawdryn Undead).
The Time War was fought between Gallifrey and a resurgent Imperial Dalek polity who appeared to have gotten over that little business with the Hand of Omega, and not to be too happy about it. Captain Jack explicitly states in Parting of the Ways that at some point in their history as played out in the normal universe, the Daleks vanished completely from the universe. Presumably, they had removed themselves from normal spacetime in exactly the same way as Rassilon and Omega had removed Gallifrey. The Daleks were playing for the highest of stakes; to supplant Gallifrey from the lordship of time and, presumably once they had done so, to remake the entire universe as they saw fit. In other words, to make it a universe inhabited only by Daleks. The Time War era Daleks presumably existed in their own subjective timeline just like Gallifrey, perhaps synchronised with Gallifrey’s.
So, to the combatants in the Time War, the conflict had a beginning, a middle, and very definitely an end. In early NuWho stories such as Rose and The Unquiet Dead, it is suggested that most of the other races in the universe remained largely unaware of it; the individual eruptions of the conflict into N-Space, when they were even comprehensible to non-time active species, were at many different points of time and space, in no coherent order and with no seeming rhyme or reason. Only very advanced species, such as the Nestene Consciousness and the Gelth were in a position to realise what was going on and that a single War was being fought across all of time and all of space.
I would suggest that big, Deep Space Nine-style space-operatic battles with armadas of Dalek saucers dogfighting with War-TARDISes were the exception rather than the rule. We know that some such setpiece engagements did take place; they are referenced in NuWho; the Gates of Elysium (where an entity known as the Nightmare Child apparently devoured the Dalek flagship; in my fic I suggest it might have been a “tamed” Chronovore deployed as a weapon by the Time Lords, but it could have been anything); the fall of Arcadia (which seems to have been the Stalingrad of the Time War; certainly, the Doctor is still traumatised by it long afterwards); the Dalek Emperor’s seizure of the Cruciform (which was, from the Master’s reaction to it, probably no picnic either; I have a mental image of the Emperor rampaging across a planet, Godzilla-style, inside a Dalek casing the size of a skyscraper). However, I would argue that the majority of the War consisted of events not unlike the ones we see in the TV stories; relatively small taskforces of Daleks and Time Lords making surgical strikes against strategic points in space and time, with their opponents intervening to try to stop them.
Of course, a large part of the strategy of the War probably consisted of efforts to rewrite history; it was a Time War, after all. The Time Lords seem to have been ideologically committed to preserving the “natural” course of history; certainly attempts to intervene in normal history were frowned upon (unless it was the CIA doing the intervening, and even they found it prudent to use cutouts in the form of renegades like the Doctor rather than dirtying their own hands). The Daleks, we might presume, had no such qualms and, in fact, probably were like children in the proverbial sweet shop trying retroactively to write as many other species out of history as they could. Of course, where they succeeded, there would be no living witnesses to their actions; another reason why the Time War managed to go unnoticed by many non time active species.
Now, here we get to the point where we have to make excuses for NuWho; presumably, such efforts to rewrite history would have a noticeable effect upon the Doctor’s subjective timeline; presumably, points in spacetime with which he had interacted in his past incarnations would no longer be the same. Yet, at many points in NuWho, it is made explicitly clear that the new series and the pre-Time War events of the old series share a single continuity. We have Sarah reminiscing about onscreen adventures she shared with Four in School Reunion; in Journey’s End, we have her reminiscing with Davros about Genesis of the Daleks! There are many similar examples, most of them throwaway lines by the Doctor himself.
To be sure, there are some inconsistencies, and it has become customary in fandom to explain these away as a result of the Time War affecting history; in fact, this is almost certainly correct. However, the problem is not that continuity errors exist, but rather that there are not enough of them! It seems likely that, as a Time Lord, with a unique understanding and sense of spacetime, the Doctor might be aware of multiple possible timelines at the same time, “remembering” not only the latest version of events but also the earlier drafts, as it were. In fact, such a thing is implied at a couple of points in the series. However, this would not be possible for a non Time Lord like Sarah. So, it would seem that the Time Lords were largely successful in their efforts to prevent Dalek depredations against the normal universe.
At this point, we might invoke the dreaded Blinovitch Limitation Effect, which eight out of ten housewives say is their product of choice for eradicating those pesky plotholes. This effectively prevents “re-dos” of failed attempts at temporal intervention; in the classic version, it applies to the actions of individuals, but I am sure there is some wriggle room where we can apply it to the actions of massive time-space empires as well… If we can, then the efforts of either combatant (we must not assume that the Daleks were always the aggressors, whatever Time Lord propaganda might have us believe, but certainly they lacked the self-imposed rules that might have made Time Lord aggression less common) to affect a given point in spacetime, one foiled by the enemy, could not be attempted again. As billions of such interventions and counter-interventions piled up, the overall effect was to “time lock” the entire War, as Ten says in The Stolen Earth. Other entities could conceivably still alter history, given the knowledge and technology to do so, but the Time Lords and the Daleks had effectively trapped themselves into one version of history, which coincidentally happened to be not too dissimilar to the original version. This is why the Doctor is unable to travel back and change the outcome of the conflict; given his desperate and traumatised state, particularly during his Ninth incarnation, I believe that, rules aside, he would have done so if it were possible (and of course, if it were possible without resulting in a win for the Daleks). Dalek Caan’s effort to save Davros from his death in the conflict was possible because it did not actually alter the history of the War; Davros played no further part in the War after being plucked out of it by Caan any more than he did after his death in the original version. Even so, Caan paid a terrible price; its “madness” (not that Daleks are not already mad from birth) was presumably the Dalek equivalent of the effects suffered by the Brig when he crossed his own timeline in Mawdryn Undead.
This time-locking presumably led to a change in strategy; subtle alterations to history no longer being an option, we might expect to see a reversion to more direct methods; taking real estate and holding onto it. This is the phase of the War when terrible battles like Arcadia and the Cruciform took place; presumably there were strategic reasons why the Daleks needed to capture these locations before they could move to the invasion of Gallifrey itself. Once things got to this stage, the Time Lords could only lose, having neither the manpower nor the firepower to match the Daleks in toe-to-toe battle (witness their poor showing against the Sontaran invasion of Gallifrey). Things moved relatively quickly and inevitably to the Daleks’ move against Gallifrey itself, and the horrific denouement of the entire War.
So Gallifrey burned, and from the point of view of the Doctor, unable or unwilling to travel into his subjective past, and unable to alter the outcome of the War to prevent its destruction, it was gone forever, along with all of its inhabitants. There may well have been Time Lords who were not on Gallifrey when it was destroyed, and some of them might even still be alive; most, however, were probably mopped up by the Daleks. Their genocidal zeal aside, it made tactical sense for them to secure their rear areas before moving on Gallifrey; it seems likely that the only surviving Time Lords other than the Doctor were those like the Master, who were able to hide themselves so thoroughly that in effect they were no longer Time Lords. One thing seems clear; the idea that its destruction in the War led to the erasure of Gallifrey from time, so that it had never existed, cannot be true. It is clear from the testimonies of characters such as Captain Jack, or indeed Jabe in The End of the World, that the Time Lords are still remembered by some, even if it is only as a legend. And individual Time Lords such as the Doctor and the Master still exist, which surely they would not had their homeworld never been.
This does not explain the obvious question, however; even if Gallifrey’s subjective timeline came to an end, its inhabitants had, before the War and during it, interacted with the normal universe throughout its history. If Six and Two could adventure together in Seville, and more to the point if Ten and Five can interact in Time Crash (which seems to be canon, despite its non-official status; certainly, it was written to fit into continuity), surely the Doctor’s past and present incarnations could interact with War-era Time Lords in the universe; either learning of the War before it happened, from their subjective viewpoint, or warning the War-era individuals of how the conflict would end, allowing them to take preventative action. We might presume that Nine and Ten would avoid forewarning either pre-War Doctors or War-era combatants for the simple reason that they believe such action would not be effective against the “time-lock” and because of the terrible consequences of attempted temporal alterations in the post-War universe, as suggested in Father’s Day. We might also presume that War-era Gallifrey would make an effort to avoid forewarning pre-War Time Lords as part of their general commitment to non-interference. However, even if the President (who, most of the various media seem to suggest, was none other than our very own Lady Romanadvoratrelundar) and the High Council maintained such an ethical stance even in a time of grave crisis (and given the hypocrisy of Time Lords this is not a given), surely the CIA would not if the survival of Gallifrey was at stake. Of course, we do not know that some of the secret missions on which the Doctor was sent by Gallifrey were not directed, in defiance of all of Gallifrey’s laws, by the War-era CIA; it is common in fandom to interpret Genesis of the Daleks as the opening shot of the War; indeed this interpretation was offered by RTD (and sheepishly followed in my fic). Might it not in fact have been a retroactive attempt to stop the War from ever breaking out, directed from Gallifrey’s subjective future?
None of this explains what the loss of Gallifrey really means with regard to the alteration of timelines and the creation of time paradoxes in the post-War universe. The Time Lords and Daleks were far from being the only time active powers, even if they were the most accomplished. The likes of the Sontarans, and even the 51st Century Time Agency of Earth, possess crude time travel capabilities and the unscrupulousness to use them to alter what are, from their subjective viewpoints, past events. Father’s Day would appear to suggest that Gallifrey had actively policed such efforts before its destruction; indeed, this was probably why a supposedly non-interventionist power had an organisation like the CIA in the first place. With Gallifrey’s subjective timeline being separate from that of the wider universe, of course, it would be able to police all attempts at alterations made by inhabitants of the wider universe; such attempts would not have taken place “before” or “after” the War; from the point of view of Gallifrey, viewing N-space in four dimensions from the outside, such a distinction would be meaningless.
This does not explain why Rose’s unwise actions in Father’s Day drew the attention of the reaper entities and not those of a CIA intervention squad. As Magnus asked in the other thread, how can there be a 1987 in which the Time Lords exist, and one in which they do not? Travelling with the Doctor in the TARDIS (and we might assume that the TARDIS, like Gallifrey, exists outside of normal spacetime), Rose was at the time of her action existing in the subjective Gallifreyan timeline at a point after Gallifrey burned. Viewed from Gallifrey’s position outside N-Space, however, London, Earth, 1987, is a fixed point in spacetime, and continues to be so even when Gallifrey itself is gone; while it still existed, Gallifrey should have been able to observe that point and see Rose’s actions, just as Two can interact with Six in the Two Doctors even though Six is from his subjective future. And surely, the eruption of the reapers into N-space in response to various post-War time alterations would have been observed by Gallifrey and investigated, leading the Time Lords perhaps to deduce that Gallifrey itself would at some point be destroyed. It is possible that by altering history from a point in Gallifrey’s subjective future, Rose managed to remain unseen by the CIA; that is, the Time Lords could see London, Earth, 1987 as it existed before Rose rewrote history, but they could not see the altered version she created because she had done so from a point of their own timeline that did not yet exist. It would explain why all of the occasion upon which Time Lords have interacted with past incarnations of the Doctor were initiated from Gallifrey’s subjective present; Borusa, for example, did not Time Scoop Six, Seven or any of the Doctor’s future incarnations, but rather only the ones he already knew existed. Thus, although pre-War or War-era Time Lords could meet post-War Time Lords in normal spacetime, and even interact with them, they would not be able to observe their actions from outside of N-Space in the same way as they could observe those of Time Lords from their subjective present and past or indeed those of non-time active species. This seems to be backed up by the fact that the pre-War Time Lords seem not to have observed those events of the War which took place in N-space before they happened from their subjective viewpoint.
This might also account for the non-intervention of the Time Lords against the more serious time alterations made by the surviving post-War Daleks. Caan’s removal of Davros from the Time War was minor compared to the alterations wrought by the resurrected Dalek Empire. The fact that Henry Van Statten did not recognise the Dalek in his collection for what it was in 2012 proves that the events of The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End represented a rewrite of Earth’s history by the Daleks. From their subjective viewpoint, the post-War Daleks, having removed themselves from normal spacetime in the same way as Gallifrey prior to the War, were acting after the destruction of Gallifrey had taken place. Their alterations to history therefore may have been in some way invisible to the pre-War Time Lords, who could only observe the version of history that existed prior to the rewrite. The other obvious question, of course, is where were the reapers to close the new timeline?
The Master’s similar actions in The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords were protected by the paradox machine he had constructed from cannibalised TARDIS components; it seems possible that the Daleks, with access to a similar level of technology a prerequisite for their involvement in the Time War, were able to protect themselves in a similar manner. It may be that the reapers, far from being the universal force Nine seemed to suggest, are one of many extra-universal entities that exist outside of N-Space and feed on time energy, and which seem to have flourished in the absence of Gallifrey to control their potential food sources; other examples include the Trickster and the Weeping Angels; the reapers could be the most feared of such entities simply because they are the least subtle in their feeding habits.
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I’m not sure it is “correct” or even if I believe it to be correct; I don’t think it really answers the serious questions posed by Magnus on the other thread, but I’m open to discussion, jeers, brickbats etc. I’m sure some of you will have spotted holes you could drive a truck through (I’m looking at you, Magnus!)
