Howling:After someone's been absorbed by the Crack...

It's stated numerous times in Series 5 that once an object or person is absorbed into the Time Crack, it never existed at all. Retconned out of history entirely, so to speak (At least this appears to be the dominant theory). But what if you went back in time after someone was absorbed, to a place and time you know that person was, what would you see? Would there just be a patch of empty space where they used to be? After Rory was sucked into the Crack, what would you have seen if you'd gone back to the moment he took the Silurian's gunblast and saved the Doctor - would the bolt just hit air? This, to me, is where the scenario comes apart, as it's just too silly to contemplate. Other people I've asked about this say that after something's absorbed, there'd be a "hole" in time where they used to be, but how the heck does this actually work? I feel it's worth noting that throughout the show, the only time it's noticed that something is gone because of the Crack, is AFTER they've been absorbed, not before. I probably didn't word that very well, but I hope you get the idea. 82.2.136.93 16:30, August 4, 2011 (UTC)

I have come to look upon the plotting and continuity in DOCTOR WHO as very English: if you close your eye and squint it looks about okay, and it actually does work, even though it is neither elegant (in the mathematical sense) nor strictly logical. Talk to an expert in military engineering some time and ask about the evolution of World War Two ordinance in Great Britain and watch 'em turn beet red. Now, how does this apply to the Time Cracks? Explain, if you will, how Amy Pond could be when both her parents never existed? You can't? Neither can I. But it works. My advice is to stop worrying and just enjoy the paradoxes. nd in any cases, the cracks never existed, so I don't know what you're talking about. Boblipton 17:35, August 4, 2011 (UTC)

But if you were to travel back in time AFTER a Crack had absorbed someone, and go to a point where that person was involved, what would you see? Anyway, if Amy's parents never existed, how do people explain her existence? Did she just pop out of nowhere one day? What about all the hospital records that would show her mother being admitted into the hospital on the day she was born, don't they still exist? Some knowledge of her parents must still exist, otherwise how would her aunt know she's her aunt? 82.2.136.93 17:51, August 4, 2011 (UTC)

When you've gone and looked, let me know. Boblipton 18:36, August 4, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, but the Cracks did exist though, otherwise how did they survive the Weeping Angels in The Time of Angels/Flesh & Stone? God, I wonder what it must have been like in the hospital on the day Amy was born....the staff would've seen her just pop out of thin air! Daft. 82.2.136.93 21:28, August 4, 2011 (UTC)


 * You're forgetting that time travelers aren't affected by the cracks the same as normal people. But you can make the same point better by asking what would happen if, as a non-time-traveler, you just waited around until 2020 and went down to the Silurian city, then hid in the chamber and waited for the final scene where Rory got shot.


 * So, what would you see? Well, that depends on your theory of how changing history works. There are a number of possibilities, based on your theory of how changing history works.


 * 1. History keeps itself consistent. So, you'd see a different version of the events of The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood, where only the Doctor and Amy showed up. Some things might be exactly the same, but most of the events would happen pretty differently.


 * 2. There's just a naked paradox there. Even though Rory never entered the chamber, you'd still see everyone acting the same way they did in the episode, as if he were there, the shot would dissipate in thin air, Amy would start crying over a death that didn't actually happen, etc. If you tried to interview the characters, their memories would be completely different from yours, and they'd even have physical evidence to back it up (which might contradict physical evidence you had--e.g., if you'd videotaped the last scene).


 * 3. Somewhere in between: history doesn't make itself fully consistent, but it does hide naked paradoxes. So, everything would be exactly the same up until the point where you could see a difference—that is, Rory doesn't walk into the room, the shot goes wide, Amy cries over something else.


 * 4. History has other ways of protecting itself; it's just not possible for you to get a view of what happened, because the hiding place you chose happens to have its line of sight unexpectedly blocked, or because the shot goes wide and kills you, or the Reapers show up and cleanse the whole thing, or whatever.


 * So, which of these is the "right" answer? Well, they didn't give us any information in the episodes in question, and Moffat hasn't said, so the only evidence you can get is from other stories. The Whoniverse hasn't been entirely consistent on this. The best fit for the classic series seems to be #1 with a bit of #3, at least the EDA novels are definitely #2, while the new series seems to be #3 with a bit of #4.


 * You can explain this by saying that it's the Web of Time that pulls things around to tidy up history, maybe with some help from the Guardians, the Eternals (at least Time herself), etc. In the EDAs, with the Web of Time under direct attack and Gallifrey erased and Faction Paradox running around and so on, that doesn't work at all. Then the Doctor restores everything, but the Last Great Time War starts up, the Eternals flee, both sides are wiped out, and we're left with a Web of Time that's still there, but somewhat damaged, and no longer being maintained. (That last bit comes from RTD, explaining why the Reapers were never seen in the classic series.)


 * Of course most of that explanation goes beyond the bounds of what we see on-screen (and on-page) and is just speculation. The behind-the-scenes explanation is obviously not that someone worked out all of the details of how changing history worked in the pre- and post-LGTW universes; it's that Moffat wants to write different kinds of stories than Cartmel did. So your only choice is to try to come up with a theory that fits the slim facts, or just not worry about it; there's no "true" theory that someone has invented but kept hidden from us. --173.228.85.118 09:15, August 7, 2011 (UTC)
 * Well, I'd like to believe that people like Rory, after they're absorbed by the Crack, aren't TRULY erased from the timeline completely; they just cease to physically exist at that moment, and everything they did prior to that remains unchanged, only other people cannot consciously access their memories of that person due to a side-effect of the Crack. Like a kind of selective amnesia. Honestly, I reckon this sounds far easier to get to grips with than the idea a lot of people seem to have, that after someone's eaten by a Crack, the past consists of those not eaten interacting with an empty space where that person used to be. It's the same with the Daleks in The Stolen Earth/Journey's End - you can't seriously believe, even in the context of the Whoniverse, that after they were absorbed, all those buildings on Earth just blew up by themselves, and people dropped dead in the streets for no reason, or pointed up at the empty sky and screaming in terror! 82.2.136.93 13:12, August 7, 2011 (UTC)
 * These things happen. Poeple think they see things. people have heart attacks, people who never buy lottery tickets win the big prize. It's a funny old world and some days it looks like cause and effect is just an illusion. Boblipton 13:32, August 7, 2011 (UTC)
 * These things happen. Poeple think they see things. people have heart attacks, people who never buy lottery tickets win the big prize. It's a funny old world and some days it looks like cause and effect is just an illusion. Boblipton 13:32, August 7, 2011 (UTC)
 * These things happen. Poeple think they see things. people have heart attacks, people who never buy lottery tickets win the big prize. It's a funny old world and some days it looks like cause and effect is just an illusion. Boblipton 13:32, August 7, 2011 (UTC)


 * You're attacking a straw man here. The obvious alternative to your story isn't that the same events happened without the Daleks; it's that those events didn't happen at all. The buildings are still there, the people are still alive, and nobody screamed in terror, so there's nothing to explain away. Remember, Moffat's storytelling reason for erasing Journey's End was to make people in the 2011 Whoniverse act like they were never attacked by the Daleks; leaving them in devastated cities with horrifying memories but with the cause of those memories removed wouldn't do that. And neither would your explanation, leaving them in the same situation but with the memories themselves edited to censor the cause. Those people are living on a timeline where Journey's End just never happened. And you can't argue that such a thing is impossible in the Whoniverse, because that's exactly what we saw on-screen in Last of the Time Lords (and other past stories).


 * Also, from a physics point of view, if you assume the consistent histories interpretation of quantum physics, removing the Journey's End Daleks gives you Moffat's altered history for free. (I won't try to explain consistent histories in detail; if you don't know about it, start with the Wikipedia article or Murray Gell-Mann's pop-science books.) Removing the causes but leaving the effects might be plausible. But leaving both the causes and effects while systematically altering the brains of everyone in the precise way needed to edit out their memories of the causes seems to require some kind of intelligent, conscious, super-powerful agent behind the cracks to do that.


 * Finally, watch The Big Bang again: the Doctor tells us that spacetime is shrinking, and we see that the history of the drastically-reduced spacetime has been drastically rearranged to make it as consistent as possible.


 * ::That's not to say that the consistent-histories explanation is the one the writers always use, but it's pretty clearly one of the explanations in their bag of tricks, and the one Moffat was relying on for his 2010 story arc. --173.228.85.118 00:25, August 8, 2011 (UTC)
 * If the Dalek invasion never happened, then what happened to Donna and Wilf? What happened to Mickey? They were all fundamentally effected by the events in that story. 195.188.243.175 13:12, August 8, 2011 (UTC)
 * If the Dalek invasion never happened, then what happened to Donna and Wilf? What happened to Mickey? They were all fundamentally effected by the events in that story. 195.188.243.175 13:12, August 8, 2011 (UTC)


 * Don't forget that time travelers are an exception. Just as Amy remembered the Clerics who never existed, Mickey remembered the invasion that never happened. We already saw the exact same thing explicitly in the Year That Never Was, so why is it so hard to accept in this case? For that matter, Mickey has memories (and maybe even souvenirs) of things that are thousands of years in the future for everyone else, and this is no more or less paradoxical. --173.228.85.118 04:24, August 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * Also, we see at the end of "Flesh & Stone" that the Byzantium still crashed and everyone on board was still killed, despite the Weeping Angels that caused it having been absorbed by the Crack and thus "unwritten" from existence. The presense of the Angels was precisely the reason that River Song and the Clerics were sent by the Church. If the Angels never existed, the Byzantium couldn't have crashed, and the story itself couldn't have happened. The same criteria applies to the Daleks in TSE/JE, and Rory from all stories between TIH and CB. What happens before the Crack shows up is essentially unaltered. 213.121.200.42 14:27, August 8, 2011 (UTC)


 * No, the presence of one Angel is why they were sent; nobody knew about all of the others. So the fact that they were erased makes no difference. And as for Rory, we actually saw history being different right at the end of CB: the waving future Rory and Amy from THE are replaced by just Amy, and Amy points and says, "Hey look, there I am again", followed by her remembering the Doctor promising her a holiday in Rio just the two of them. And that's all despite the time-traveler exception (which of course the Doctor explained a bit earlier). --173.228.85.118 04:24, August 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * Saying that none of the events in The Stolen Earth/Journey's End ever happened is not acceptable; its removal would negate too much of what came after it. 82.2.136.93 22:00, August 8, 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, it's what Moffat wrote, it's what he says he wrote, and it makes sense if you just drop your insistence on a kind of linear time that doesn't work even in simple stories, so if it's not acceptable to you, I'd suggest you watch a show that doesn't have any time travel in it. --173.228.85.118 04:24, August 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * While I can understand the wish of fans to have a relatively simple(?!), comprehensible and consistent view of the world of Doctor Who, that is simply not going to happen. The stories of the RTD era are not the stories that Steven Moffat wishes to tell, nor does he wish to shackle seasons after he has retired as Executive Producer to the stories that he wishes to tell. Were writers of Dr. Who forced to write stories that are consistent with forty-eight years of television, more than a hundred novels, more than a thousand comic strips and G*d knows how many audio stories from the BBC and other sources.... well, the research would be impossible and even the most enthusiastic effort to be consistent would be subject to a billion nits. Moffat's view of an irrational-seeming universe in which paradox and causeless effects reign, while uncomfortable for many, also opens the door for many stories that are valid as stories. I am interested in the stories, not whether or not something written in Series Six contradicts something that appeared in a book that was read by maybe ten thousand people, of which maybe a couple of hundred copies survive and eperhaps fifty people have a clear memory of. The best attitude to maintain is a religious one of faith and mystery. I don't understand how the events of the RTD era can be wiped out with many, but not all, of the effects left in place. Perhaps that is the new central mystery of the Whoniverse, even stranger and more mysterious than the Cartmel Master Plan. In the meantime, I will continue to enjoy the characters, situations and jokes of Doctor Who. Except for the freaking color-coded Daleks. Boblipton 22:16, August 8, 2011 (UTC)
 * I fully understand that it's impossible for new writers to be entirely consistent with every single piece of DW fiction previously produced. I'm just saying it would be nice if they explained how things still happen when their causes have been deleted from the timeline. Besides which, removing the actual Dalek invasion itself would cause massive damage to the timeline. Dalek Caan wouldn't have been around to help bring the Doctor and Donna and Wilf together, so no Donna and Wilf means no one to help the Doctor defeat the Racnoss, and the Master. 213.121.200.42 09:29, August 9, 2011 (UTC)
 * and as we saw in turn left, no donna means the doctor dies. so yeah, big problems there. also, how can someone errase an event? it's not like it's a physical object like a person or the tardis. it is a mixture of objects doing different things. so how can you errase an event while not errasing the people and objects that were part of it? Imamadmad 06:39, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
 * I fully understand that it's impossible for new writers to be entirely consistent with every single piece of DW fiction previously produced. I'm just saying it would be nice if they explained how things still happen when their causes have been deleted from the timeline. Besides which, removing the actual Dalek invasion itself would cause massive damage to the timeline. Dalek Caan wouldn't have been around to help bring the Doctor and Donna and Wilf together, so no Donna and Wilf means no one to help the Doctor defeat the Racnoss, and the Master. 213.121.200.42 09:29, August 9, 2011 (UTC)
 * and as we saw in turn left, no donna means the doctor dies. so yeah, big problems there. also, how can someone errase an event? it's not like it's a physical object like a person or the tardis. it is a mixture of objects doing different things. so how can you errase an event while not errasing the people and objects that were part of it? Imamadmad 06:39, August 10, 2011 (UTC)
 * and as we saw in turn left, no donna means the doctor dies. so yeah, big problems there. also, how can someone errase an event? it's not like it's a physical object like a person or the tardis. it is a mixture of objects doing different things. so how can you errase an event while not errasing the people and objects that were part of it? Imamadmad 06:39, August 10, 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, you're asking for speculation here, because all Moffat said is that the events didn't happen because of the cracks. But it's pretty easy to come up with a good answer. The cracks erased the Daleks before they got to the first planet they attempted to steal, or even got to Caan before he broke the time lock. They erased the Cybermen before they could build the Cyberking. And so on. There, the events don't happen now. The humans on Earth aren't gone, they just have a different history than the one we saw. --173.228.85.118 04:24, August 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * All of the events of the Dalek invasion could not have been erased from the timeline, because doing so would fundamentally alter the course of all events afterwards. What would've happened when the Master was resurrected, and created the Master Race? How would he have been defeated, would the Doctor have had to do it all over again? 82.2.136.93 11:59, August 10, 2011 (UTC)


 * Why would he have to do it all over again? On his timeline, things happened the same way we saw them. On the timeline of non-time-traveling Earthlings, things happened differently (and we don't know exactly how), but it doesn't take any special effort from him for that to have happened. And as for fundamentally altering the course of events--well yeah, that's the point. Moffat wanted a fundamental change in the way people react to aliens, and that pretty much requires a fundamental change to the history we saw over the past 4 years. So what? If history can be changed, it can be changed, in big ways as well as small. --173.228.85.118 04:24, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * But that one Weeping Angel that caused the Byzantium to crash was one of those erased by the Crack, so it never existed in the first place. So how did the Byzantium crash in a reality where there never were any Angels? Why was River Song sent there? 212.121.200.204 11:55, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * For some other reason. It must have been a good one to get her out of prison. Boblipton 12:10, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * A reality where there were never any Angels? What, you think that ever Angel in the universe was on the Byzantium? Of course not. There are plenty of others all over the place.
 * Anyway: We don't know for sure that the Angel that caused the crash was one of the ones that fell into the crack. And, if it was, all of the 4 ideas above work fine here: 1. You get the most consistent history possible without that Angel, which means the clerics and the transport ship (but not Amy, River, and the Doctor) lived through a completely different story than the one we saw, with a different reason for River being sent there. 2. There's a paradox; there was no reason to send River, as far as their memories and records are concerned they never sent River, so they never did so, and yet there she is. 3. Somewhere between those two. 4. Things are changed just enough to make the paradox invisible—maybe there are orders to send River but they're forged, and they can trace them back to River herself, so the only inconsistency (between River's history, where she didn't forge those orders, and their history, where she did) just looks like River lying. And of course there are plenty of other possibilities. The fact that we don't know which answer Moffat chose (because he probably never explicitly chose one) doesn't mean that there's no answer. --173.228.85.118 19:28, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * You want a simple explanation? Here's one. The Byzantium crashed and its home box went home. Now, in this world, when there's a crash, the authorities go out, get the flight recorder and conduct a full investigation. That's what that unit was doing. Why was River Song there? She was doing something with the unit when it was ordered to investigate and since the Bishop had to go take part in the investigation, he couldn't drop her back at Stormhaven first. I am not offering it as the explanation. For that, you'd need some statement in the show or from Moffat. Happy now? Boblipton 19:58, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * Well if nothing seen in the episode is reliable, then it's pretty dang useless, isn't it? If a Crack can come along and rewrite reality so whatever happens doesn't really matter, what's the point in following any of the stories? 82.2.136.93 21:10, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * You seem to enjoy them because of the intellectual premise of understanding the reality. How would you have dealt with, say, the American TV show COMBAT, which had a five-year run about a theater of war that lasted a couple of years? How about MASH's 12-year coverage of a 4-year war? I enjoy the characters, the jokes and yes, the frequently dizzying plot turns that a malleable reality provides. If that's not to your taste, it's not. It's not up to anyone to justify your enjoyment of WHO except you. Boblipton 21:20, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * History can change in the Whoniverse. Little changes happen all the time, huge changes happen every once in a while. On top of that, different people have different, sometimes inconsistent, timelines. How you could have sat through the series 3 finale and not gotten that is beyond me. They tell us flat-out that those events happened for everyone on the Valiant, but didn't happen for everyone on Earth below. That's how history in the Whoniverse works. The cracks haven't changed that at all; they're just one more example out of hundreds.
 * And yes, of course that means that no past episode is necessarily a reliable record of consensus history. (For the most part, they're a reliable record of history on the Doctor's personal timeline, but even that isn't always true—e.g., Turn Left.) So, if you think that makes it useless to watch the episodes, that's fine; there are shows handle time travel differently, and even more shows that don't have time travel at all, and you can watch those shows. --173.228.85.118 03:58, August 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * You want a simple explanation? Here's one. The Byzantium crashed and its home box went home. Now, in this world, when there's a crash, the authorities go out, get the flight recorder and conduct a full investigation. That's what that unit was doing. Why was River Song there? She was doing something with the unit when it was ordered to investigate and since the Bishop had to go take part in the investigation, he couldn't drop her back at Stormhaven first. I am not offering it as the explanation. For that, you'd need some statement in the show or from Moffat. Happy now? Boblipton 19:58, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * Well if nothing seen in the episode is reliable, then it's pretty dang useless, isn't it? If a Crack can come along and rewrite reality so whatever happens doesn't really matter, what's the point in following any of the stories? 82.2.136.93 21:10, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * You seem to enjoy them because of the intellectual premise of understanding the reality. How would you have dealt with, say, the American TV show COMBAT, which had a five-year run about a theater of war that lasted a couple of years? How about MASH's 12-year coverage of a 4-year war? I enjoy the characters, the jokes and yes, the frequently dizzying plot turns that a malleable reality provides. If that's not to your taste, it's not. It's not up to anyone to justify your enjoyment of WHO except you. Boblipton 21:20, August 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * History can change in the Whoniverse. Little changes happen all the time, huge changes happen every once in a while. On top of that, different people have different, sometimes inconsistent, timelines. How you could have sat through the series 3 finale and not gotten that is beyond me. They tell us flat-out that those events happened for everyone on the Valiant, but didn't happen for everyone on Earth below. That's how history in the Whoniverse works. The cracks haven't changed that at all; they're just one more example out of hundreds.
 * And yes, of course that means that no past episode is necessarily a reliable record of consensus history. (For the most part, they're a reliable record of history on the Doctor's personal timeline, but even that isn't always true—e.g., Turn Left.) So, if you think that makes it useless to watch the episodes, that's fine; there are shows handle time travel differently, and even more shows that don't have time travel at all, and you can watch those shows. --173.228.85.118 03:58, August 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * History can change in the Whoniverse. Little changes happen all the time, huge changes happen every once in a while. On top of that, different people have different, sometimes inconsistent, timelines. How you could have sat through the series 3 finale and not gotten that is beyond me. They tell us flat-out that those events happened for everyone on the Valiant, but didn't happen for everyone on Earth below. That's how history in the Whoniverse works. The cracks haven't changed that at all; they're just one more example out of hundreds.
 * And yes, of course that means that no past episode is necessarily a reliable record of consensus history. (For the most part, they're a reliable record of history on the Doctor's personal timeline, but even that isn't always true—e.g., Turn Left.) So, if you think that makes it useless to watch the episodes, that's fine; there are shows handle time travel differently, and even more shows that don't have time travel at all, and you can watch those shows. --173.228.85.118 03:58, August 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * And yes, of course that means that no past episode is necessarily a reliable record of consensus history. (For the most part, they're a reliable record of history on the Doctor's personal timeline, but even that isn't always true—e.g., Turn Left.) So, if you think that makes it useless to watch the episodes, that's fine; there are shows handle time travel differently, and even more shows that don't have time travel at all, and you can watch those shows. --173.228.85.118 03:58, August 12, 2011 (UTC)
 * And yes, of course that means that no past episode is necessarily a reliable record of consensus history. (For the most part, they're a reliable record of history on the Doctor's personal timeline, but even that isn't always true—e.g., Turn Left.) So, if you think that makes it useless to watch the episodes, that's fine; there are shows handle time travel differently, and even more shows that don't have time travel at all, and you can watch those shows. --173.228.85.118 03:58, August 12, 2011 (UTC)