I'm the Goddamn Nightwyrm

It is a well-known maxim with time travellers that they must be careful not to alter anything in the past, else they create irrevocable repercussions through time. If a time traveller is also a space traveller, then the potential for mishap is exponentially increased. The Doctor is one such traveller, moving through time and space, having adventures and saving beings from situations beyond the norm. But what if the Doctor is misguided in his altruism? What if the Doctor is actually corrupting the space/time continuum through his actions?

The Doctor is the last surviving member of the near-human Gallifreyan race, also known as Time Lords. One of the oldest and most technologically advanced races in the Doctor Who universe, the Gallifreyans developed the ability to travel through time and space with their TARDIS machines. As a result, they became the self-appointed guardians of the continuum until their hubris led to their eventual downfall.

The Doctor was always one of the mavericks of his race. While he would mostly adhere to the strictures of his race, his empathy and compassion led him to regularly bend or break the rules as he saw fit in order to prevent the deaths of beings he encountered in his travels. This put him at odds with the majority of his race, and led him to be censured or punished as a result. However, now his race is gone and he is encumbered with the role of policing his own actions.

In the TV series, the Doctor often mentions some of the rules that he and his Companions are bound by. For example, they must never travel within their own timeline, and there are key points in time where an event must happen and cannot be changed. These rules make perfect sense as they are there to prevent paradoxes, or to ensure that the future happens as it should. But therein lies the rub. Only the Doctor himself understands this future, and it is unknown to anyone (possibly including him) whether his actions to preserve this future are actually doing the right thing or not.

The time continuum can be seen as a “garden of forking paths”, where a person chooses one alternative at each decision point and thereby eliminates all the others. However, it is often posited in science fiction that an alternate reality is created at a decision point, which is the reality that would have been if a path not taken was the one actually chosen. A good example of this is Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles in which the title character is warned by a time traveller that she will die a certain way, and when this is avoided, the timeline portrayed in the TV series becomes an alternate reality to the canonical timeline of the Terminator movies.

In preserving the future that the Doctor has seen to be ideal, he is attempting to affect key decision points in time in favour of his vision. However, in doing so, he may be unconsciously working against the future through “butterfly effects”. In his highly-myopic view of humanity becoming one of the greatest civilisations in the universe, he will often pick their side over another; this has inadvertently led in the past to the extinction of races such as the Saturnynians, which may have been destined for greater glory than humanity, or the death of a being who is the forefather of someone fated to aid humanity in their development.

The inclusion of Companions in his travels is also a key risk for the continuum. Those who have travelled with him, and have retained their memories, may be able to influence events in their timeline in an attempt to contribute to the Doctor’s vision, but may result in a divergent timeline away from their goal. In addition, there have been Companions who have died during their travels; no-one can say for sure what role they would have played in the timeline, had they not met the Doctor and travelled with him.

TARDIS is an acronym for “Time and Relative Dimensions in Space”. This inherently implies that the machine can land in any of the alternate realities throughout the continuum. There are times that it is obvious that they have landed in an alternate reality due to significant societal differences (e.g. as in the “Rise of the Cybermen” episode). But there will quite often be times where the reality that they have landed in is similar enough to the “main” reality that the travellers would not be able to tell the difference. In these cases, any actions that the Doctor takes may eventuate in greater repercussions for that particular timeline than it would in another.

However, there are two temporal paradox theories that may be protecting the continuum from the Doctor’s actions. For one, the timeline protection hypothesis posits that the Doctor is incapable of causing a paradox as the natural continuity of the timeline would either create twists of fate to prevent him creating an adverse butterfly effect, or would ensure that his actions were actually responsible for the history he knows. In the episode “Day of the Daleks”, Sir Reginald Styles is targeted by 22nd Century guerrillas, who believe he’s behind the deaths of VIP delegates. Because of those deaths, the Daleks were able to take over Earth in their time. In truth, a fellow guerrilla who was left behind was to blame, which is the true cause of their timeline ensuing.

Another theory is the teleological Harmony Theory. This suggests that the universe will correct itself, even if the Doctor eliminates a particular timeline. This may mean that he prevents someone dying by being shot on a certain day, but that person is killed later the same day in a fatal car accident. An example of this is in the “Waters of Mars’ episode where the Doctor ignores a critical point in time and preserves the life of someone he meets, but she takes her own life in order to preserve the natural timeline.

These theories point quite strongly to the idea of destiny or fate being something natural to the universe, and unable to be influenced by any one person. It may be that humanity is destined to becoming one of the greatest civilisations in the future of the Doctor Who universe, and the various actions that he takes in his travels may have no bearing on this inevitable future. The idea of destiny is a hard concept for some to swallow though, as seen in the Flash Forward TV series, but avoiding it ironically tends to lead to self-fulfilment of that destiny.

In the end, no-one truly understands the full repercussions of his actions, not even the Doctor. The only ones who possibly did were the elder Time Lords, and they may have censured him regularly for very good reason, but with their demise, the Doctor is left unmonitored. Whether the Doctor is a wise demigod or a misguided fool remains to be seen. His actions do create ripples across timelines, such as the extinction of races, and that may likely be why we’re seeing a dark and tortured soul through the giddy exterior of his 11th incarnation.