Doctor Who and Krenim

[aussiemuscle308]

We see in the Voyager episode 'Year of Hell' when the timeship is destroyed, it reverses all the changes that they've ever done to the timeline. I'm wondering, if the TARDIS was destroyed in DR WHO, would the same effect apply?

[CaptainChewbacca]

We see in the Voyager episode 'Year of Hell' when the timeship is destroyed, it reverses all the changes that they've ever done to the timeline. I'm wondering, if the TARDIS was destroyed in DR WHO, would the same effect apply?

The one time we saw a TARDIS destroyed in Who, it actually destroyed all life in the universe.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

The Krenim timeship was destroyed in a rather unusual way. After Janeway rammed Voyager into it, the 'temporal core' destabilised resulting in a 'temporal incursion' (aka, wipe from history effect) within the ship, erasing it from history. It seems unlikely that anything would have happened had it been dismantled or destroyed in a more conventional fashion.

[Serafina]

We see in the Voyager episode 'Year of Hell' when the timeship is destroyed, it reverses all the changes that they've ever done to the timeline. I'm wondering, if the TARDIS was destroyed in DR WHO, would the same effect apply?

Timetravel doesn't work like that in the WHOniverse.

We DO have a couple of examples where it does work like that:
When the Masters paradox machine is broken, and when the Timelords link out of the timelock is destroyed. In both cases, you had an active mechanism - in the first case to block out the Paradox, in the second case to drag everything inside the timelock outside of the timelock. Only when that mechanism was destroyed (and presumably before it could finish it's job*) did it's effects get reversed.

But you can destroy time-travel devices (such as a time-agents wrist armband) and kill timetravelers all you like, it doesn't reverse anything they've done. Destroying Gallifrey did not change the history of the universe despite their giant impact on it, killing a Dalek does not undo it's actions even when it has used timetravel, the death of Captain Jack (as the Face of Boe in the year five billion and then some) did not undo his time-travel-filled impact on history etc. pp.


It is quite possible that the Krenim Timeship also relied on active effects to uphold the changes it had made. We never see such active effects in any other instance of Trek time travel - Earth was not retroactively destroyed by the Whale probe after Kirk died or the Bird of Prey was destroyed, and other changes in the timeline don't get reversed when the source of change gets destroyed either.


* I think that the Paradox created by the Masters paradox machine would have eventually become too big to revert itself - at the point where it was destroyed, only a single planet had been affected for a single year.
Likewise, i think that the timelock was not completely broken yet, presumably this would have been the case when more stuff from the Timewar would have followed. Therefore, the still-somewhat-intact timelock had enough power to reassert itself.
Those are, at least for me, necessary rationalizations: Otherwise such changes would automatically undone, because nothing is eternal. The Masters paradox machine could have broken after trillions of years, and the machine breaking the timelock certainly wasn't constructed for eternity either. Some form of permanency is necessary in order for such things to make any sense at all.

[evilsoup]

We see in the Voyager episode 'Year of Hell' when the timeship is destroyed, it reverses all the changes that they've ever done to the timeline. I'm wondering, if the TARDIS was destroyed in DR WHO, would the same effect apply?

The one time we saw a TARDIS destroyed in Who, it actually destroyed all life in the universe.

Nono, it retroactively removed everything from the universe (because the TARDIS doesn't give a damn about the Conservation of Matter, oh no).

[Serafina]

We see in the Voyager episode 'Year of Hell' when the timeship is destroyed, it reverses all the changes that they've ever done to the timeline. I'm wondering, if the TARDIS was destroyed in DR WHO, would the same effect apply?

The one time we saw a TARDIS destroyed in Who, it actually destroyed all life in the universe.

Better yet, it deleted the universe itself from existence - the universe literary never happened.
Of course that might have been due to the engines being deliberately being blown up by an external force and the energy spilling into the vortex. TARDISes have certainly been destroyed during the Last Great Timewar, without the universe getting destroyed.

[Crossroads Inc.]

We see in the Voyager episode 'Year of Hell' when the timeship is destroyed, it reverses all the changes that they've ever done to the timeline. I'm wondering, if the TARDIS was destroyed in DR WHO, would the same effect apply?

The one time we saw a TARDIS destroyed in Who, it actually destroyed all life in the universe.

Better yet, it deleted the universe itself from existence - the universe literary never happened.
Of course that might have been due to the engines being deliberately being blown up by an external force and the energy spilling into the vortex. TARDISes have certainly been destroyed during the Last Great Timewar, without the universe getting destroyed.

Indeed I was wanting to say the same thing. In truth we aren't really sure WHAT caused the TARDIS to 'delete' the universe, but what we can be sure of is that there have been countless other TARDIS's destroyed in the timewar without any incident at all.
Now it could be that had something to do with the TimeLords being around. But you would think the Time Lords wouldn't make something that, if blown up a certain way, would DELETE the universe.

[DaveJB]

There was a story back in Jon Pertwee's era where he threatened to "Time Ram" the Master's TARDIS with his own, which would have destroyed both TARDISes but nothing else. On that instance he was trying to prevent the Master from destroying the universe, so clearly it isn't a catastrophe whenever any TARDIS is destroyed. Presumably what happened in "The Pandorica Opens" was related to how and why the TARDIS exploded in the way it did.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Stuff like this really makes me wish we ever had a chance of seeing even a GLIMPSE of the Time War. The Battle of Arcadia, even.

[Serafina]

Stuff like this really makes me wish we ever had a chance of seeing even a GLIMPSE of the Time War. The Battle of Arcadia, even.

Oh, YES!

The hints we got are pretty damn awesome already. Things like "million dieing every second, only to be resurrected by time itself to find new ways to day over and over again" just sound epic and awesome.
Mind you, if done poorly it would just take away the mystery without adding anything. Still, a few glimpses should be quite possible and very good.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I wonder if they could bring back Eccleston for some scenes from the Time War. The Soontarans made it sound like the Doctor was the Supreme Allied Commander of the Timelord forces for a while, they even said he led them in battle before his disillusionment.

[Serafina]

I wonder if they could bring back Eccleston for some scenes from the Time War. The Soontarans made it sound like the Doctor was the Supreme Allied Commander of the Timelord forces for a while, they even said he led them in battle before his disillusionment.

It should be the eight doctor then, not the ninth, at least as far as i understand it. Eight supposedly fought the time war, wiped out both the Daleks and Time Lords and regnerated afterwards. Otherwise the first episode of season 1 doesn't make any sense, where he is testing out his new body.
So no Ecclestone, unless they change (unseen) continuity.

[Rossum]

Fighting a war against the Time Lords would be pretty crazy even withtout their TARDISs, I mean Time Lords are pretty darn hard to kill if the Doctor or the Master are even remotly 'normal'. The Doctor has been killed several times and regenerated, had his hand cut off and had it regrow into a half-human version of him who then piloted the TARDIS to save the real him, been erased from history and revived by a woman remembering him on her wedding day, and once made a clone of himself to travel into his own body and fight a sapient infection.

The Master... he's regenerated, possesed bodies, got new regenerations, traveled to the end of time with his memories stored in a watch, died without regenerating, had an arcane ritual revive him, turned into palpatine, turned humanity into a clone army, etc.

Imaine a whole army of things like that... well, imagine an army of things like that who weren't renegades.

[Serafina]

To be fair, Time Lords are relatively easy to kill face-to-face. Just destroy both their hearts, a task possible even with a normal handgun and easy with heavier weapons.
Of course that's assuming that they do not use any of the weapons available to them. They rarely bother with direct combat, simply because they don't have to - they have erased entire races from existence without any trouble. The one time they got into an all-out conflict - well, let's just say that it got very horrible and would have ended with causality itself being destroyed and the time lords being victorious.

Or just look at what the Doctor can do when he actually gets aggressive. Stand up to dozens of Daleks, unharmed and unflinching. Destroy entire races, imprison people in black holes for all eternity and so much more.
Thankfully, he wants to be as much a pacifist as possible. Violence is his last resort. This also applied to the Time Lords for most of their history, and when that changed the Last Great Time War broke out.


What you really have to worry about is Time Lord technology, not the Time Lords as physical fighters. Well, that really goes for almost all races, including humans.
Most races could not even defend against their timetravel or time-based attacks and would simply vanish from history. Even those who can put up resistance don't have the Time Lords mastery of time and space.


As i said, it would be really interesting to see what actually happened throughout the Time War. The Time Lords and Daleks apparently created entire new races to fight for them, destroyed entire regions of spacetime and locked entire planets in timeloops full of war. Those concepts would be hard to portray well tough, but if it is possible if would love to see them one day.

[mr friendly guy]

When the Krenim time ship blew up it was stated that somehow (minus the long winded technobabble) it was due to its weapon somehow being activated when Voyager rammed it. So arguably there it didn't need to constantly maintain the time line since the reversal back to the OTL was due to its weapon being turned against him.

When Vosk was killed (according to memory alpha) the time line reverted because due to the actions of the Enterprise crew he was killed off before travelling to the future to enact the history alterations required to have space Nazi's. In which case this is just a variation of the change history plot device by killing person before they do something, no different than Skynet trying to kill John Connor, only this time the equivalent of Connor had a time machine to travel to the future and didn't need to travel forward one day at a time.

In these respect I think if Trek creates a new time line, or an alternative one, it certainly doesn't need a device to maintain it. However this new time line is just as vulnerable to time travellers interfering as the OTL.

Time travel with DW seems a bit weird in that casuality can be fucked over, if you are willing to pay the price. The TL clearly did it in the classic series like the Three Doctors and the Five Doctors by crossing their own time line. We see in new who "Father's Day" the price paid for doing that, ie the Reapers appear. In the novel "The quantum archangel" its said that the Chronovores have that type of job to correct these alternative time lines that spring up.

As a generally rule the TL don't cross their own time lines, alter time except in something they consider an emergency, which varies as the plot dictates - for example in the novels they excised entire species from time which its implied they started the conflict. Again this suggests that time travel doesn't need something to maintain the new time line if you just pay the price. HOWEVER...

the Master required a paradox machine to do it. If I try and reconcile this, I would speculate that some time travel alterations have bigger effects than others, so Rose saving her dad who is in reality a nobody, would be a small alteration, but the Toclafane wiping out millions of humans in the past would be a bigger one. This would require more effort to "pay the price" so to speak. Moreover the Master just relied on the Doctor's TARDIS for his paradox machine, while at their height the Time Lords had goodness knows what devices to do the job.

In that respect, arguably time travel alterations in Trek is easier in the sense that there doesn't seem to be an extra price to pay besides the risk of being wiped out from time with your alteration, but which both franchises have an adequate plot device to protect them from it. In Trek's case its "temporal shields" and in Who is the time machine itself, perhaps because the inside of the TARDIS is in another universe it protects occupants from what happens in the outside one.