| rdfs:comment
| - They primarily exist to pad episodes out to 45 minutes, and to keep the Doctor from doing something drastic to history like letting England win the World Cup, or Hitler win World War 2. Attempting to rewrite a fixed point in time can cause terrible consequences, like the episode The Wedding of River Song airing. It may also spawn Time Dragons that proceed to eat the entire cast of a terrible '80s soap opera like Eastenders or Doctor Who.
- In the alternate reality which the Time Lord known as the Doctor called home, fixed points in time were immovable events that could not be altered. The Doctor identified the Battle of Wolf 359 as a fixed point in time, warning his human companions against preventing the tragedy. (TNG - Assimilation² comic: "Issue 7") Kathryn Janeway's death across the multiverse around stardate 57445 (2380) was a fixed point in time, according to Q. (VOY novels: The Eternal Tide, Acts of Contrition)
- Fixed points were events and/or individuals who had such long-standing impacts on the timeline that no one, not even Time Lords, dared interfere with their natural progression. The Doctor, free to interfere in alien invasions and save planets in most cases, could neither interfere nor interact with these fixed points, out of fear of damaging reality. Fixed points could be flexible and did not have to happen exactly the way they had in the original timeline but meddling with one could potentially result in reality falling apart. Were a fixed point to be interfered with, time would often find a way to make the timeline continue with minimal changes.
|
| abstract
| - They primarily exist to pad episodes out to 45 minutes, and to keep the Doctor from doing something drastic to history like letting England win the World Cup, or Hitler win World War 2. Attempting to rewrite a fixed point in time can cause terrible consequences, like the episode The Wedding of River Song airing. It may also spawn Time Dragons that proceed to eat the entire cast of a terrible '80s soap opera like Eastenders or Doctor Who.
- In the alternate reality which the Time Lord known as the Doctor called home, fixed points in time were immovable events that could not be altered. The Doctor identified the Battle of Wolf 359 as a fixed point in time, warning his human companions against preventing the tragedy. (TNG - Assimilation² comic: "Issue 7") Kathryn Janeway's death across the multiverse around stardate 57445 (2380) was a fixed point in time, according to Q. (VOY novels: The Eternal Tide, Acts of Contrition)
- Fixed points were events and/or individuals who had such long-standing impacts on the timeline that no one, not even Time Lords, dared interfere with their natural progression. The Doctor, free to interfere in alien invasions and save planets in most cases, could neither interfere nor interact with these fixed points, out of fear of damaging reality. Fixed points could be flexible and did not have to happen exactly the way they had in the original timeline but meddling with one could potentially result in reality falling apart. Were a fixed point to be interfered with, time would often find a way to make the timeline continue with minimal changes. For example when the Tenth Doctor saved Adelaide Brooke and two of her crew, Brooke (to whom the Doctor had confided the nature of fixed points, and more specifically, why her death was one) committed suicide to preserve the timeline with minimal changes. Because of the survival of the other two crew members, the events that occurred on Bowie Base One were revealed to the public. Adelaide was hailed as a hero for stopping the viral menace, which did not happen in the original timeline, but this and her death ensured that she would be an inspiration to her descendants. On this occasion the Doctor had been able to bend a fixed point. However, he risked the safety of the whole of reality in the process even though he had not truly broken it because of Adelaide's sacrifice. (TV: The Waters of Mars) Adelaide was confronted by a Dalek as a child, but it recognised her as a fixed point in time and left instead of killing her, inspiring her to pursue it into space and become that fixed point. The Eleventh Doctor was fated to die at Lake Silencio, meaning he had to die there, or more precisely, that the universe needed to believe that he had died there. That didn't stop others from attempting to kill him, however, as when Gantok prepared to kill him in revenge for being beaten at live chess, the Doctor was saved from being shot by his non-destined killer by a trap hole that fed Gantok to the ravenous skulls of the Headless Monks. However if one actually broke a fixed point in time, as when River Song refused to kill the Doctor, time would freeze and collapse; reality would "die". If this happened whomever had broken the fixed point had to make physical contact with the person who was also a main part of it. In other words, when River shot the Doctor at Lake Silencio, the fixed point in time was focused entirely on just the two of them and time was still in flux all around them, explaining why the Doctor couldn't get time started again by touching either Amy Pond or Rory Williams, who had also been at Lake Silencio. If the Doctor and River touched each other - or kissed as they did at their wedding - time would start moving again. River is the only known person to change a fixed point to such a degree that the whole of reality was put in danger. With a "still point in time" such as Lake Silencio, it was easier to create a fixed point in time. The only known way to actually create a fixed point in time was by writing events down after they had occurred. If someone read about events that were going to happen to them in the future then the events had to happen the way they had been written (or at least happen in a manner that would eventually lead to someone writing about them as they had been read) because a fixed point would be created. Time was still in flux as long as the reader had not read about his or her own future. Although such events had to play out as they were read, the original author's interpretations of such events were not always true. The Doctor had seen records of his "death" at Lake Silencio, but as it turned out, the Silence simply assumed that the fixed point at Lake Silencio meant that the Doctor would die, never realising that he could actually fake his death instead. The Doctor did turn up for his "death", just as he was destined to do, but he had "dressed for the occasion" and was safely inside the Teselecta at the time. This allowed him to survive his encounter with River at Lake Silencio, thus outwitting the Silence, and fooling almost the whole universe into thinking he was dead. (TV: The Wedding of River Song, The Angels Take Manhattan) Jack Harkness was a unique fixed point in time and space who was made immortal by the Bad Wolf. The Ninth Doctor sensed that Jack was a fixed point immediately after his first resurrection. (TV: The Parting of the Ways, Utopia) It should be noted that the Doctor, during his first incarnation, held to a much stricter definition of fixed points, once telling his companion Barbara Wright that "not one line" of history could ever be tampered with (TV: The Aztecs), although he was being hypocritical as he had recently had extensive interaction with historical figures such as Marco Polo. (TV: Marco Polo) When he was later given a chance to alter a timeline where human society was virtually falling apart in 2006 due to the actions of the Machine in 1966, the Doctor admitted to Barbara that they actually changed history every time they left the TARDIS, helping Barbara understand that he preferred to avoid bigger changes to history due to the risk of making things too complicated and inspiring the Doctor to change key events now and defeat the Machine later in his own lifetime (TV: The War Machines, PROSE: The Time Travellers).
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)