I have an interesting musing in my head

[constantine]

During the second season, the doctor told us that dimensional travel shouldn't be possible any longer since the time wars ended - it would have been during ge of steel.

However

Season 1 pretty much deals with alternate realities, in the form of the daleks and even rose manipulating the timeline in order to set things right - now pardon me if this sounds like a limited intellect at work, but doesn't that sound a little like an alternate dimension?

[MidgardDragon]

Perhaps if you could expand on your thoughts, I could understand what you mean better. What about Season 1 involved alternate dimensions?

Now that I've sat here and thought about it for a sec, here are some possible solutions (assuming you mean the Daleks going back in time and installing the Jagrafess.

1) Everything that happened had always happened. The Daleks had always went back in time and installed the Jagrafess. The Doctor just didn't know about it because they stayed hidden, and never heard about it in the future because he took care of it. Of course this one might seem unlikely since he's always saying stuff like "this isn't supposed to be here."

Or maybe 2) The Doctor was wrong, the TARDIS can travel through slight variations in timelines. I did read that Rose's part was left open ended in case they ever wanted to revisit her again, so I imagine the writers have a scenario that would allow her and The Doctor to reunite.

Or maybe 3) Going back in time and changing things doesn't create an alternate dimension/timeline in the Whoniverse. This seems like the case to me, as often as we see changes in the past on the show and yet they remain on the same timeline. From what I can tell going back in time and changing things on one timeline simply changes that particular timeline, it doesn't create an alternate dimension like in much of popular science fiction.

Of course I could be completely wrong, it's been a while since I've seen Season 1, this is just the impression that I got, and don't remember it being explicitly stated otherwise.

[constantine]

well, my understanding was that every time you change something in your past, you get sent on a different course of events that would never have happened had you not change said event - ergo a parallel dimension?

[MidgardDragon]

I know that is the way it is in much time-travelling Sci-Fi, but was it ever explicitly stated that that's how it works on Doctor Who?

[constantine]

surely the rules would stay the same though?

[MidgardDragon]

No, the rules in all of Sci-Fi are not the same. There are many different interpretations of how time travel works. From changing the past simply changing your thoughts/memories, to creating alternate timelines for every choice we make. There's time travel in which paradoxes basically make the Universe implode, and time travel where a paradox is just ignored. Too many different stories, too many different rules. You've got to figure out in the Doctor Who Universe what the writers have decided the rules are before you can have this discussion. There's no one true law as far time travel is concerned, only the laws invented by the writers of different things, that only apply to their specific Universes.

[constantine]

hrm. that fiction part of science fiction is such a pain when it comes to trying to figure out the logic in a plothole. hehe

[Maagic]

Originally posted by MidgardDragon
I know that is the way it is in much time-travelling Sci-Fi, but was it ever explicitly stated that that's how it works on Doctor Who?

In "The Shakespeare Code" he said it was like in "Back to the Future"

[MidgardDragon]

Then here are some rules:

According to Doctor Emmett Brown in Back to the Future Part II, whenever a time-traveler alters key events occurring in the past, they effectively bring an alternate timeline into existence at their point-of-entry, and their original timeline is erased, even though its events are not forgotten by the time-traveler. Thus, every time travel jump into the past depicted in the Back to the Future saga “destroys” a current timeline and “creates” a new one, although the term Doc Brown often uses to describe the deleterious effects of this process is “erased from existence”. Travelling to the future will not create a new timeline. The time traveller will merely move forward along his current timeline.

When events in the past are changed, a time-traveler will acquire memories of both timelines, and the skewing of time can be expressed graphically, as Doc Brown actually illustrates for Marty McFly in a crude chalkboard drawing in Back to the Future Part II. Doc further explains that the new timeline causes the world to "change around" the time traveler leaving him or her unaffected (a process known as the Ripple Effect) unless the new timeline precludes the time traveler's existence (e.g. Old Biff's return to 2015).

Accordingly, there is no second version of the time traveler, as had been suggested by Imagineer Bob Gordon in issue #108 of Starlog Magazine, years before the second film was released.

So if the first timeline is erased, in essence the new timeline is still the same timeline, just altered. Of course this also says "key events" so one has to wonder which events are "key"?

[constantine]

in the case of season ...whatever, wouldn't a key event be anything around satellite five?