Howling:The Tenth Planet - part of a negated timeline?

I've been wondering recently if the class series story "The Tenth Planet" might actually take place in an earlier version of history that's since been negated. It's set in 1986, but the technology is far too advanced for our 1986 - There is something called International Space Command, and Earth possesses Z-bombs, which are said to be powerful enough to split the planet apart. Obviously, these things don't exist as of the present day in the Whoniverse, otherwise the goverment would probably have used a Z-bomb rather than plain nuclear warheads in the Osterhagen Project in "The Stolen Earth/Journey's End." The thing is though, if the timestream of that story was negated, what happened in the subsequent version of history when Mondas came to Earth? Even if the Cybermen were still defeated, it would not occur in the same way, and much of subsequent Cybermen history would be effected. If we assume that the timeline in the episode is negated, what could have negated it? Of course, if anyone can come up with explanations as to how it could still fit in current Whoniverse history, I'll be very interested in reading them. 82.2.136.93 08:16, August 2, 2011 (UTC)

So, any comments anyone would like to make? Like I said, I'm perfectly happy to be proven wrong in my assumptions. In fact, I'd much rather be proven wrong, and be shown how the scenarios *could* possibly fit together in one timeline. 82.2.136.93 18:55, August 2, 2011 (UTC)

The Cracks in time were pretty much made for issues like this so yeah it was erased. Cory Jaynes 03:36, August 3, 2011 (UTC)

There were plenty of issues like this long before the cracks. As I've mentioned in other threads, go read Paul Cornell's essay on continuity in the Whoniverse. History changes, sometimes way off-camera, and it often seems to change in ways that make the Whoniverse more like the real world than like earlier predictions from the Whoniverse. And that's fine, because this is a show about time travel (unlike, say, Star Trek, which can never set any episodes in the modern era because we didn't have a Eugenics War in 1993).

In this case, there have been a few references to the change, but only as throwaway jokes (like the frequent "1970s… or was it the 80s?" lines about the UNIT era). The novelization of Silver Nemesis (maybe also on TV, but I don't remember) has Lady Peinforte viewing a totally different 1988 from the past than the one she arrives in. The EDA Escape Velocity has a little joke about mixing up the Challenger (which exploded in real life, and in Father Time, in 1986) with Zeus IV (which exploded in The Tenth Planet). And so on.

Of course as fans we want to know what changed, how, and why. In this case, there's a plausible (for fan-wank) explanation. Remember that Attack of the Cybermen featured a group of Cybermen deliberately going back in time to change the events of The Tenth Planet. And in that same story, the Doctor suspects that the Time Lords have been monitoring the Cybermen's attempts to change history and using him as an unwitting agent. So, it seems at least plausible that there were multiple attempts to alter 1986, and the end result just happened to be that Whoniverse 1986 looked a lot like real-life 1986. --173.228.85.118 03:58, August 3, 2011 (UTC)

For argument's sake, let's say that the person who invented the Z-bomb died before he could create it, or he chose to do something else. The Z-bomb was instrumental in defeating the Cybermen. If it didn't exist, would the Doctor have to go to the new version of 1986 and defeat the Cybermen some other way, so that Mondas still blew up in that year? 82.2.136.93 17:34, August 4, 2011 (UTC)

Also everybody could of all been drunk during the 1980's so no one remembers. 173.51.78.230 15:15, August 5, 2011 (UTC)

The Eugeniics War never stopped Star Trek from doing episodes set in the present day. Enterprise did an episode where they travelled back to 2004, which was pretty much the same as the real 2004, and Voyager did an episode where they travelled back to 1996, when the war should have still been going on, but there was no reference to it. The truth is that the writers for both Doctor Who and Star Trek couldn't imagine the shows lasting as long as they did, so they didn't think that they would have to match the actual future. Then, when they make later episodes, it makes more sense to show the present day as it really is than to make it match the view of there view of the future from 20 years ago.Gowron8472 01:52, August 6, 2011 (UTC)


 * @82: It depends. The one fact we know is that in the current timeline, Mondas didn't destroy the Earth in 1986, and yet the history shown in The Tenth Planet is no longer the history of that current timeline. Maybe it's because the Doctor went back and stopped the Cybermen again in an unrecorded adventure. Maybe there's a different version of The Tenth Planet in the current past. (If I had to bet, I'd guess that if you tied Eric Saward up in a chair and tortured him until he explained it, that would be his answer, but who cares?) Maybe a different attempt at changing history by the Cybermen accidentally destroyed Mondas in 1985. Maybe the Mondas-Earth collision never happened because of some side-effect of some completely unrelated time travel story (like Father Time). Maybe there's actually a paradox, but nobody on Earth can see it, so it's no big deal. I personally like the idea that it was a side-effect of the Cybermen trying to change history, as I explained above, but there's really nothing wrong with any of the other possibilities.


 * @173: Anyone who lived through the 80s can tell you that everyone wasn't drunk, everyone was coked up. Sorry.


 * @Gowron: Well, at one point, the Eugenics Wars _did_ stop Star Trek from doing episodes set in the present day (Rick Berman said so when talking about the episode where Sisko, Bashir, and Dax went back to the 2020s), but apparently they later changed their mind. (I stopped watching after Deep Space Nine ended, but a bit of googling shows that they obviously did.) But the point is that it was a problem for them; they could only make such episodes by contradicting their established history.


 * Of course it's true that, behind the scenes, both franchises had a similar problem (and most other sci-fi franchises would kill to have that problem); the difference is that Doctor Who had a built-in way out. If some of what we saw is no longer part of the past of the non-time-travelers the Doctor meets, that's perfectly reasonable in the Whoniverse, and it's all (with a few notable exceptions, like Turn Left) still part of his past. It's not necessarily a paradox when history changes, and paradoxes aren't impossible anyway, so it's not a problem for continuity. You have to accept that history changing is possible even if you don't want to go as far as Paul Cornell and say that nothing could ever be a continuity error, because we've even seen it happen on screen (e.g., The Year That Never War). --173.228.85.118 10:31, August 7, 2011 (UTC)