Howling:RTD fixed points vs. Darvill-Evans fixed points

This probably isn't worth the thought I've put into it, but… I think RTD borrowed the term "fixed point in time" from the NAs, without borrowing its meaning. Am I right?

The original meaning of a "fixed point in time", from the NAs, is this: The "universal present" is somewhere around Rassilon Era 6500; everything before that is the past, and therefore immutable; everything after is the future, and therefore in flux. But time travelers "drag their present" with them. So, when the Doctor visited Perivale in 1989, he created a fixed point that was part of his (and therefore the "universal") present, and is therefore now part of the past, and therefore can't be changed.

The new series completely tossed out the way history worked in the NAs, and even gave us an in-universe explanation: With the destruction of Gallifrey, the Web of Time was replaced by a great big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. (The BBC novels had earlier done the exact same thing, except with a different destruction of Gallifrey in a different Time War, and without the word "timey-wimey".)

Nevertheless, the new series (unlike the BBC novels) uses the term "fixed point in time", all the time. Is it the same concept, or even related? For example, the Silence seeing the Doctor get killed at Lake Silencio in 2011 was a fixed point in time, one that the Silence intentionally created. Does that have anything to do with the Doctor dragging his present along to 2011? I can't see any way in which it does.

(By the way, if I'm right that they're completely unrelated concepts, I think the RTD version is a much more interesting one. But that's neither here nor there.) --70.36.140.233talk to me 06:25, September 28, 2012 (UTC)