The Torchwood Institute - A Doctor Who and Torchwood Blog

Sunday, February 11, 2007

The True Creator of the Daleks

Paul Cornell's post about canonicity in Doctor Who is a massive extended statement about the whole questions about continuity and canonicity in Doctor Who. Which, of course, inspires my own...

One of the interesting points that was raised in the comments to Paul's post looks at the motivation for limiting the "canon" to be just the Television Series, or whatever -- is to make Doctor Who something that you can understand all of. I'd be surprised if a person exists who has seen, heard, or read every Doctor Who story that has been officially licensed and released.

Since reading Paul's comments I've been trying to work out the "rules" of how Time works in the Doctor Who universe a bit more -- that's part of the fun part of continuity discussions that leads me to enjoy books like Lance Parkin's AHistory. Because the first reference to Torchwood isn't in Tooth and Claw -- but in Bad Wolf, and Torchwood has a fairly direct involvement with the events of The Christmas Invasion. So Torchwood existed in the time line at least a little bit before the Doctor was the cause of it when he met Queen Victoria. Does that mean that the change in the time line "bleeds back" a bit? Was this something that was written into the time line purely because of the Time War? [Did Torchwood exist behind the scenes during World War Three?)

I've thought for a while that the Big Finish audio adventures -- but also any of the other novels that take place in a "Past Doctor" time have a strange involvement with how time works in Doctor Who. There is something "current" about those, as well as taking place in the past. I'm not sure it has happened yet, and it might only happen vaguely for continuity reasons -- but I think it's inevitable that we'll see a Past Doctor story that at least strongly hints at Torchwood, for example.

But I think we see how one story later in the Doctor's time line can impact previous ones -- The Gathering is a sequel to The Reaping, even though the sequel takes place earlier in the Doctor's timeline. And if you listen to the stories, you were certainly aware that (in the real world) the story was written after School Reunion and the Rise of the Cybermen.

So the Doctor's entire history is rewritten all the time. But does this mean that the Doctor wasn't a Time Lord -- but something else entirely -- until some time before The War Games. Was the Doctor responsible for unleashing the Daleks on the universe as a result of his encounters with them -- he wasn't aware of the Daleks when he first went to Skaro, but given their importance to the universe as a whole that seems impossible. So perhaps they only became so powerful as a result of their contact with the Doctor and (perhaps) other Time Lords?

No wonder the Doctor blames himself for the destruction of his own people.

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