Board Thread:The Reference Desk/@comment-82.20.113.152-20130213135009/@comment-1166667-20130405154146

82.20.113.152 wrote: Well, the history of the universe in Series 5 clearly has differences from that of the universe of subsequent series (e.g. Amy has parents in one, and in the other she never has), so therefore it has to be a parallel/alternate reality. The incident with the Byzantium took place in the earlier reality, so River must have hopped from that to the post-Pandorica version. They're both distinct timelines. They're not though. Big Bang Two didn't create a new timeline, it simply rebooted the timeline. Amy's special Time Crack-powered memory was able to revive her family (who themselves were only missing as a result of the Time Cracks). If anything, the "second" universe is actually a corrected version of the original.