“But you can’t rewrite history! Not one line!”
Yes, okay, I’m starting the blog loosely linked to “The Reign of Terror” with a line from “The Aztecs” but, quite frankly, there’s so little specific to the French fiasco that I want to talk about that I am going to use it to take the first look at the major problem that plagues the whole of Doctor Who. In 60 plus years of making it up as they go along, the rules of time travel have been definitively stated. And restated. And reworded. Changed. Unwritten and, quite frankly, torn up into little pieces and scattered into the wind. So many people quote the line from “The Aztecs” as being the show’s initial stance, but if anything it’s the exception to the rule. And, as with so many things to do with telling fantastic tales, start to think too hard about the words and actions of the lead characters and things begin to get awkwardly murky.
Disclaimer: Yes I know they’re making it up as they go along. But, because of the way my mind works, there are certain stories spread through the 60+ years that really infuriate me. The two most common categories that they fall into are “We’re obviously heading for a reset switch” and “The celebrity historical”. So let’s go back to our first celebrity, Mr Marco Polo and deal with two throwaway lines that show just how confusing things can get within the space of just one story. Episode five, “Rider from Shang-Tu” features a sequence where our heroes are about to be set upon by bandits. The situation seems dire. They’re surrounded. The Doctor comes up with a plan. A plan so brilliant and so utterly cunning that it’s amazing he hadn’t come up with it before. To escape the situation he suggests… that EVERYONE (Marco included) just gets in the TARDIS and they all bugger off elsewhere. Yes. Seriously. Not “let’s all hide in the ship until the bandits have gone and then get on with the journey but he suggests that they all just go anywhere it’s safe. Presumably, for whatever reason, he’s not worried about Marco telling everyone about the ship in the same way that he was with Ian and Barbara in “An Unearthly Child” and, just ever so slightly importantly, he doesn’t seem to give a damn about the concept that would later go on to be called the web of time. This is made even weirder by the fact that, in episode one “The Roof of the World”, Barabara states categorically that she knows Marco makes it back to his home in Venice. So which is the correct attitude to take? Is the universe on the side of Barbara (the historian) or the Doctor (the time traveller)? Yes, the same two sides we would get in “The Aztecs” only with their stances completely reversed. Barbara wanting to change the locals so they don’t perform human sacrifices and the Doctor trying to keep history on “track”. There is also the rather awkward side issue that the people we see in Marco’s caravan weren’t the same as the ones in our own history (ie the real world) so we don’t actually fully know what the history that Barbara knows really is. If you think about the events of the story between episodes one and five then our last piece of awkwardness springs up. By rights, Marco and his caravan companions should be dead a few times over by the time the bandit attack crops up. The only reason they’re alive is because the Doctor and co happen to be there to get him out of difficult situations. It’s Ian who goes off to the oasis to try and get water, Ping-Cho gets suspicious about Tegana because of her night time wanderings in the desert with Susan and no one dies of thirst because the Doctor collects the condensation from the walls of the TARDIS. Just exactly would have happened to history had the travellers not turned up. Does the whole of human history rely on two teachers getting curious and accidentally ending up on an unlikely set of adventures that see them reaching Marco in time to take their own place in history? At the end of “The Reign of Terror”, once our TARDIS crew are back in the ship, they have a conversation about how history can’t be changed (irony alert – this scene is rewritten for the Target novel so the history changing scene is, itself, historically changed). And though they don’t actually play too big a role in the French Revolution, there’s no denying that they are, in many ways, caught up in events and things probably would have unfolded differently had they not been there. Does this, therefore, mean that Ian was never in danger of freezing to death on Marinus as he hadn’t fulfilled his role in Earth history yet? The implication of the Doctor’s line in “The Aztecs” is that history is set in stone and therefore cannot be altered. Go down that route and you essentially remove free will from the universe and people like Tegana aren’t actually bad or evil as they’re just playing out their predestined role with absolutely no say in what they do. Option two, which still basically says that no one is actually evil, is that 99% of the people in the universe have no control over what they do and it’s only the 1% who are utterly important (hello Autloc!) that get to live out their lives with free will as they’re never going to do anything that changes anything in the universe. Personally, this is even more depressing than option one as I’d like to think that I had free will but, for me to think this, I have to admit that I therefore think my life is utterly meaningless and I haven’t changed anything for anyone.
Option three is the nightmarishly difficult one. There’s a rough structure to the universe, everyone has a role to play in it BUT it could all catastrophically collapse at any given moment if free will allows me to let off a small nuclear device in Paris and thus end the French Revolution in an even more violent and bloody manner than history was expecting. I could, if I was feeling malicious, suggest that this meant that Paris was so unimportant in the scheme of things that I’d still be around today writing this even with such a big hole in historical events but I think that’s a stretch even for me to believe. Which leads us to option four, the one that my brain desperately wants but knows makes for the hardest work in analysing things. History is totally flexible and just because something has happened once, it doesn’t mean that it has to happen and that the future could change without warning. It gives everyone free will if you stick to people and the universe moving in a linear manner but the complications once you factor in the fourth dimension are off the scale. And it’s option four that, naturally, is the one that I think the show is already going for. The Doctor knows full well that things can be changed but saw how upset Barbara was getting at not being able to change people (not through the weight of history but because their sacrificial ways were just too set in stone) and lied through his teeth to save her feelings rather than to save history.
Of course, this is season one. There’s the occasional change to things ahead, probably four or five “minor” tweaks to the rules (in season two alone) which means that we will have to revisit all of these stories again once new evidence comes to light. And as the TARDIS departs France and heads towards a new small-scale problem, we have to ask one final thing. Just how much delight does the Doctor take in smashing the Overseer over the head with the shovel? The TARDIS might have struggled to translate people speaking French in this tale (which is a blog for another story) but it doesn’t take an expert in body language to know that the Doctor really is far more up for a fight than we like to think. He’s come a long way from wanting to cave in the odd prehistoric skull or two, but this is definitely not a dull pacifist Doctor. Violence, fabby clothes and the ability to pass himself off as someone important… it’s worryingly easy to see just why the first Doctor claims to love this period of history. But, naturally, even this is going to change and the history book on the shelf has just begun re–writing itself…