Howling:The Pandorica and The Cracks are unrelated?

River tells The Doctor in FaS that she already knows about the events concerning the Pandorica, and the Doctors adventures with it.

However, she doesn't know what the cracks are or what causes them.

Does this mean they're two separate plot devices? Ghadius 18:12, May 3, 2010 (UTC)Ghadius

Great point!

But if you think about it, if the Pandorica caused the crack, River's point of view--seeing the crack after the Pandorica--is actually the one that makes sense, and the Doctor's is screwy, because he's going to see the cause come after the effect.

While this happens all the time on the show, usually it's because of the Doctor's time traveling, but in this case it's the crack's time traveling. Non-time-travelers could have seen the crack in 1941, then live until 2010 to see the Pandorica open, so they'll see it just as backward as the Doctor.

Anyway, if the Pandorica opening in 2010 caused the crack to open in 1998 (and then begin moving forward and backward in time following Amy around), River wouldn't see that happening; in fact, nobody would unless they were somehow standing outside of time and watching all of spacetime evolve. (Even the Doctor doesn't see these kinds of changes directly, but at least he seems to know enough to reconstruct the view from the vantage point that they could be seen from.)

Is it just me, or is talking about causality in the Whoniverse even more complicated than figuring out the right tenses? --Falcotron 22:53, May 3, 2010 (UTC)

Don't you mean 1996? Delton Menace 00:43, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

My memory is terrible, so I actually remembered it as 1998... But I _should_ have meant 1996. Thanks to assuming that it was a simple typo. :) --Falcotron 16:27, May 4, 2010 (UTC)

A friend of mine suggested to me that causality can be preserved in the Whoniverse if you just assume that it's a 5-dimensional universe, with "metatime" (the axis along which the 4D spacetime evolves) as the 5th dimension, and the 5-dimensional universe is static. Each person or object has a worldsheet rather than a worldline, but from any point you can unambiguously trace the past of that point as a curve on that sheet (either a geodesic, if relativity is extended in the obvious way, or the shortest non-increasing curve if it isn't, which actually might give better results). And that curve will look just like a worldline.

The one major problem is that time-traveling wouldn't automatically let you remember meta-past events. (It would make it _possible_ for that to happen, but only if you coincidentally followed specific paths.) But if you come up with some technobabbly reason why time travelers' pasts should be the maximally-decreasing curve on the sheet instead of the same as for other people's, then it might work.

Anyway, this gives exactly what we're looking for--there is causality in the Whoniverse, but just because you can see the cause and the effect doesn't mean you can see the causal chain linking them, but a sufficiently clever time traveler could work out the causal chain indirectly.

So, the crack comes after the Pandorica in metatime, even though in the Doctor's and Amy's (and Churchill's and most other people's) worldlines, it actually comes before the Pandorica. For River, the crack does come after the Pandorica in her worldline, but the causal chain isn't visible anyway, so that doesn't help her. --Falcotron 17:01, May 4, 2010 (UTC)