Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-5767263-20130619003610

Something that has been bothering me for a while is the sometimes-uncertain, sometimes-presumptuous way in which the cracks are mentioned in a number of articles. For instance, in the articles for "The Vampires of Venice" and Saturnyne, it is assumed or said to be "most likely" that since the cracks were sealed, the events mentioned in the articles never happened. Now, there is a problem with this that I'll touch on in a moment, but the manner in which this is written contradicts other articles like that of "A Good Man Goes to War" which says that which events did and did not happen any longer are not known for sure. This doesn't really flow with the former two articles, which sounds rather sure of themselves. I think that we should decide on a single explanation for events involving the cracks; did/didn't they happen, etc.

Now, concerning that matter, there is the question of what did happen. The article for the cracks themselves, as well as the article for "Flesh and Stone", state that after the Doctor sealed them in "The Big Bang", they never existed. The TVOV and Saturnyne articles comply with this, but assume that it means the listed events (namely Saturnyne being lost and the vampires coming to Earth) never happened. However, this is not how the cracks work, and we've seen that. Even when the Weeping Angels in "Flesh and Stone" were erased, the Byzantium stayed crashed. Though her parents were erased, Amy was still born. The Doctor himself walked into a crack, but the dolls that Amy made of him were still there, meaning that she still met him when she was young. So as you can see, there is a major precedent for the effects of things erased persisting beyond erasure when involving the cracks. Therefore, Saturnyne would still be lost and the Doctor would still have defeated the Saturnynians in Venice, because they still would have come to Earth through the cracks. Supporting this statement are a number of other quotes and circumstances, like in "A Good Man Goes to War" when the clerics talk about the Doctor chasing off the Atraxi, which he only did because Zero came to Earth through the cracks, or when, in "The Wedding of River Song", the Doctor reminds Amy of how she grew up with a crack in her wall and when we see River appear to Amy a the end of the episode "fresh out of the Byzantium". Clearly, the cracks still existed in the current "reality", if you will, and their effects would have as well.

In fact, I don't recall it ever being stated that the cracks never did exist - they were sealed, yes, but they were caused by the time explosion, which the Doctor overwrote by restoring all of history with the Pandorica. Even then, they still existed for a time (which seems to be the time in which their effects on the universe were seen by everyone, as evidenced by the future Doctor's appearance in "Flesh and Stone" being the same as his "rewind" from "The Big Bang), because there had to have been an explosion to stop. Even if the Doctor was erased when he stepped into them, it's clear from the past examples that his imprint on causality would not have been. He would still have been targeted by the Silence and his TARDIS would still have been destroyed, but the explosion itself would have been "overwritten" by him which is what caused the effects of the cracks that we saw and lead to the Doctor erasing himself by walking into one.

All in all, I think the solution to this problem would be to look at the evidence and edit all of the articles accordingly, as we actually have more of an idea of what happened when the cracks were closed than some of the articles would suggest. And the evidence, of course, says that everything involving the cracks still happened, that Series 5's part in the timeline is still intact, and that the cracks didn't "never exist," but were instead merely closed. If they weren't, then how could River jump from the "non-cracked universe" to the cracked one and then back again? To me, it seems like there is just one singular timeline in which everything except for the events in the totally-collapsed universe occurred, as the collapsed universe was overwritten by the Doctor's restoration field gambit.

If you disagree or see an error in my reasoning, then please, let me know. I simply think that the current inconsistency within the articles is not exactly up-to-standard and could stand to be revised; but I have tried to back up my statements with clear facts from the show in order to potentially help resolve the issue. I just didn't want to go on a massive edit-spree without discussing the matter first and making sure that there was an agreed-upon verdict. 