Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-4028641-20140106233604/@comment-188432-20140110183349

Actually, I'm not able to find support in DWU fiction for your assertion. The general distinction in the DWU is between “alternate” and “parallel” — not between “timeline” and “reality”. Pick up The Face of the Enemy or Imperial Moon or watch Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane? and you will see a distinction being made between “alternate” and “parallel”.

What is usually asserted is that an alternate timeline creates an alternate reality. For instance, in The Eye of the Giant, we get this little ditty by the Third Doctor:


 * The intruders faded away because we must be in alternate timelines, separated by that interface, and they simply did not belong in this one. Some interpenetration is possible, but clearly only for a limited time. The alternate lines are each trying, so to speak, to shape the same fundamental building blocks to different patterns. The patterns of those soldiers, or whatever they were, did not exist in our little bubble of reality, so they simply vanished.

Equally, Reckless Engineering, which is all about the Eighth Doctor flipping through different realities, gives this helpful exchange:


 * Fitz: Hold on — how many alternate realities are there? I mean — are we going to spend the rest of our lives going from place 'restoring' the right version of history?


 * Eight: I sincerely hope not. Could be one or two, could be hundreds.  Or an infinite number. If it's just the one or two, then we're more or less OK, we can go back and fix things, but if it’s a great number the Time Vortex will collapse and, well. It's the end.

In other words, the alternate realities are caused by messing with time — alternate timelines.

From The Eye of the Giant, we get this little ditty by the Third Doctor:


 * "The intruders faded away because we must be in alternate timelines, separated by that interface, and they simply did not belong in this one,’ the Doctor explained. ‘Some interpenetration is possible, but clearly only for a limited time. The alternate lines are each trying, so to speak, to shape the same fundamental building blocks to different patterns. The patterns of those soldiers, or whatever they were, did not exist in our little bubble of reality, so they simply vanished." In other words, an alternate timeline is a reality.

The distinction that DWU fiction gives is generally between alternate and parallel, not between timeline and reality. And that makes sense. In a show about time travel, timeline ought to equal reality.

Alternate realities are the result of altering the timeline. The general message of DWU fiction, however, is that parallel universes are a distinct kind of alternate universe. As Eight in War of the Daleks puts it, a "parallel timeline" was formed when the Dalek Prime used "time travel abilities to attempt to change the results" of an event. In other words, the two histories were the same, up to the point of a particular, and more or less singular, change to the timeline. The broader implication would be that a parallel timeline would be created if Lincoln wasn't assassinated or Germany won World War II. And though these could be described as an "alternate reality", generally "alternate" is reserved for when the changes are much, much bigger. The DWU generally seems to assert that all parallel universes are alternate, but not all alternates are necessarily parallel.

The Eighth Doctor implies a connection between the two in Time Zero. When he's asked, "Is that like alternative realities? Quantum theory and all that?" he responds, "No. You're thinking of universes parallel to our own, split off at some decision point in the past."

Then there's the reaction of the ordinary, non-scientifically-minded, human companion. Sam says in Interference - Book Two that she once had sex with Fitz but "Not properly. It was a parallel-universe-alternative-reality kind of thing." To some important characters in the DWU, the distinctions that we're trying to make here are completely irrelevant. It's all just other reality.

And finally, it should be noted that Terrance Dicks completely throws the cats amongst the pigeons with his odd definitions. He called E-Space "a smaller universe that exists parallel to our own", and then has Flavia actually call it, in dialogue in The Eight Doctors, a "kind of parallel universe". This is completely beyond the normal conception of what E-Space was, as depicted on TV. I don't think anyone thought that E-Space was formed by some meddling with a timeline. It feels much more like a "bubble universe" or "pocket universe" — something like where House lives in The Doctor's Wife. I mean, there's an entire serial dealing with the fact that there's a literal gateway between N-Space and E-Space. And Adric is charting a return journey there in Earthshock, so E-Space is a physical location, not a different reality.