Howling:Time Crack is stupid

I mean, come on, cause-less events? This makes absolutely no sense at all, and messes up past continuity no end to boot. EJA 14:51, May 10, 2011 (UTC)


 * Plus, time-crack it's time-addictive, and the hit only lasts five time-minutes. Don't time-do time-crack, kids!


 * More seriously, there are causeless events all over the Whoniverse. Every person standing in his own past is a causeless event when looked at linearly. Every pre-Genesis Dalek story is a causeless event even if you take the future into account. Everyone's knowledge of the Time Lords post-LGTW is a causeless event. To some extent, time travel is ridiculous, especially time travel that allows the past to be changed. You can come up with time travel theories that make sense of it, without even breaking what we know of physics (many-worlds branching, two-dimensional time, separate causal and chronological chains, etc.), but if you try to fit it into common sense, you're guaranteed to fail.


 * And as for messing up continuity, the Moff pretty clearly wanted to selectively edit a few events out of continuity while leaving the rest as consistent as possible, and the time cracks are just as good a way to do it as the many episodes, novels, BFAs, and games that did the same thing (starting with Genesis, Day, Remembrance, War, and City of the Daleks). --99.33.26.0 03:50, May 11, 2011 (UTC)


 * How is people's knowledge of the Time Lords a causeless event? EJA 08:02, May 11, 2011 (UTC)

EJA, the unregistered user is talking about the same thing that you've brought up in about a hundred different posts. He believes that the Time War caused time to be rewritten, so the Time Lords never existed, but people still remember them anyway. The main reason that cause-less events are more of a problem here, is that the effects are still seen when the cause has been erased. All the pre-genesis Dalek episodes, for example, could have been erased as far as we know, since the Doctor hasn't travelled back in time to the middle of a previous episode. When characters travel back in time, they are not a causeless event, there cause just hasn't happenned yet. When Amy's parents were erased, however, Amy's cause never had happened and was never going to happen, but Amy clearly still existed, without a cause. It would have made more sense if Amy ceased to have existed along with her parents. The same thing goes for Amy's photo of Rory and her engagement ring. The only part of the cracks that is really stupid, is the fact that many believe that they are being used to erase continuity, which is just a stupid idea. Shows should build on continuity, not erase it.Icecreamdif 01:16, May 12, 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I quite agree with you, Icecreamdif, good drama should build on continuity, and not discard it. But I'm afraid that the Cracks have muddled up just about everything in Dr Who to the point where it's fast ceasing to make any sense. EJA 07:33, May 12, 2011 (UTC)

time travel doesn't create causeless events, or at least not easily. if someone, eg the doctor, travels to the past, anything that would ultimalely affect what he does in the future becomes a fixed point in time eg: pompeii was a fixed event because if mt vesuvious hadn't errupted, it might have changed human history in a way that it would change the doctor's timeline which might mean that he couldn't come to pompeii and stop the volcano from errupting. that's the special time thing the doctor can detect, and he has to make sure he doesn't mess up his past. another example is in father's day. it was a fixed point because if rose had saved her father, she would have lived a very different life, more like how her parents lived in petes world, and wouldn't have met the doctor to come change that event. that's why the reapers came, to make sure time wasn't messed up in that way. so fixed points in time are just points that can't change without causing a big paradox. ok, i know i went completely off topic there, but i felt it needed saying 121.216.229.210 03:26, July 13, 2011 (UTC)

No, time travel does create causeless events, at least if you're looking for the causes along a linear timeline. The very appearance of the Doctor and Donna in Pompeii had no cause in the past. They literally appeared out of nowhere. Time travel into the past always breaks causality, period. (Of course if you have two time dimensions, and only travel in one, you can have linear causality along the other, and some of the novels imply that's how things work in the Whoniverse, or at least that's how Time Lords work. Or you can just abandon linear time; it's just an accident, or it's because of the Time Lords' creation of the Web of Time, that the illusion of linearity works at all. And there are other ways around it—travel into the past takes you to an alternate timeline, travel into the past always drags enough frames along so that it's no longer the past, etc.—but none of them seem relevant to Doctor Who.) --99.8.228.116 10:11, July 16, 2011 (UTC)