“The Aztecs” tells us that we can’t change anything (though, at the end, the Doctor’s words to Barbara could be taken as a sign that she changed things for one man and one man only). “The Reign of Terror” let events unfold with the TARDIS crew simply trying to survive and not get involved too much. “The Crusade” muddies the waters greatly acting as a sort of warm up for “The Space Museum” with it’s whole plot being centred around trying to influence time (remember, the Doctor and co being made into exhibits is only a possible future, not a definite one). Now “The Time Meddler” comes along and not only seems to rewrite the whole of the Doctor’s background but also says that not only can time be changed with ease, it’s already been done. Whatever rule book the show had been using, Ian and Barbara obviously took it home with them as a souvenir as, from here on, we seem to be playing to a new, very weird set of rules. Do they make sense? No, of course not. However, with a bit of careful thought, it might be possible to at least look at if the events outlined in the story make more sense than maybe appears.
Before we get into the whole business of changing time and all that it implies, there’s an interesting couple of points to be made about the opening scene where it’s revealed that Steven had stowed away on the ship after all. First up, there’s the fact that Steven is in there at all. Thanks to the location of the part four cliffhanger, we never actually see the TARDIS crew leave the ship. By the time we rejoin them in part five they’re already out in the jungle exploring. So technically we never actually see the Doctor lock the doors of the ship. Even so, later in the episode, it looks very much like Vicki isn’t able to get in the ship to see if her friends are inside so we have to assume that, whilst we weren’t looking, the Doctor remembered to lock the doors (as he does quite consistently during the previous two seasons). This puts us in the interesting situation of trying to piece together what happens when the cameras aren’t looking at the end of part six. As far as we can tell, they find the Dalek time machine before they find the TARDIS, hence Ian and Barbara realising that they could go back to the Earth and go home. Whilst they’re investigating that possibility, we see Steven struggling to avoid getting caught by the Fungoids, we then go back to the Dalek time machine and get the Ian and Barbara London 1965 scenes as witnessed inside the TARDIS. That doesn’t actually leave any logical time for the TARDIS doors to be unlocked and for Steven to be able to get in. Does this mean that the Doctor and Vicki got back to the TARDIS, realised they’d left something in the cave and went back to collect it, leaving the door unlocked in the process? Given how quiet the jungle appears to be for the Dalek time machine sections, this could also just about explain how the Doctor and Vicki never heard Steven shouting in the jungle if they had to head off elsewhere first. More interestingly though is the idea that Vicki genuinely believes that there might be a Dalek in the ship. Ignoring the whole “when could it have got in through a locked door” issue (as I can’t yet see any time that it might have happened) there’s the fact that Vicki seems to believe that a Dalek could have actually got in through the Police Box doors. Clearly, in some off screen adventure/conversation, she’s been left with the impression that the doors to the Police Box are some sort of illusion and that the “real” entrance to the TARDIS is wide enough for a Dalek to get through (then navigate round the control room, open the inner doors and sit doing nothing for a few hours till it hears them talking again). This actually feels as though it’s a very valid possibility as there are dozens of times that we see the outside world clearly through the double doors even though only one narrow Police Box door is open.
Doors and daleks aside, time to face the bigger revelations of the story. Revelation one is, naturally, that the Monk has a TARDIS. Oh to have seen that cliffhanger with no idea what was to come. This being season two, there’s no knowledge of Time Lords, Gallifrey or the such just yet, so is this revelation one that overwrites anything? In “The Chase” we find out that the TARDIS has a time path indicator and it’s been in the ship, according to the Doctor, “ever since I constructed it”. Does the “it” refer to the time path indicator or the ship? There’s also Susan’s claim to have invented the name TARDIS. Way back in “The Dead Planet” the Doctor claimed to have been a pioneer once. We know he’s got a very wide range of scientific knowledge but always struggled with the fourth dimension. The possibility has to be that the Doctor was actually part of a team that designed and made the first TARDIS (there’s nothing to say that the Doctor’s TARDIS is the even the first, it could be quite some way down the line) and that the plans and blueprints to make more are quite common. That would also explain how the Doctor knows about the existence and purpose of the automatic drift control that’s in the Monk’s TARDIS. As for the fifty years earlier comment, other than raising some very interesting questions about the relative ages of the Doctor and the Monk (there’s only 7 years difference between the two actors in real life), it suggests that the Monk was possibly some sort of junior technician and the Doctor was 50 years his senior. It’s a revelation but certainly not a total rewrite.
Which brings us to the tricky topic of changing time. “But you can’t rewrite history! Not one line” seems to have been the show’s initial stance but it’s clear that there’s far more to this than setting that rule in stone. Believe it as a literal statement and you get to the stage where you’re eliminating the concept of free will from the Doctor Who universe. Everything that we see happen was always pre-destined to happen and no-one has any say in what they do as the whole of the universe is already written out for us. So let’s reinterpret the line, as a slight change of emphasis could make a world of difference to the meaning. The key word is “you”. Does this mean absolutely anyone or does it mean “Barbara can’t” (as that’s who the Doctor is talking to). The Doctor has a TARDIS and is clearly some sort of science wizard so perhaps HE could change time but Barbara, being a mere 20th century mortal, couldn’t. The Doctor’s delivery could be done as we hear it so that he’s got the knowledge he isn’t lying to Barbara but is keeping a much more complicated truth from her. We’ve already seen that the concept of history is difficult to define when you’re a time traveller so it’s a shame that Barbara didn’t take “The Space Museum” as a chance to throw this line back at the Doctor to get the truth out of him (either that or there’s been an off screen reconciliation between the two of them and he’s been more honest about things to her). Between “The Aztecs” and “The Time Meddler” there are quite a few windows where any number of adventures could have taken place. It’s normally assumed that “The Chase” takes place immediately after “The Space Museum” as the Doctor is working on the Time Space Visualiser but we don’t know just how long he’s been doing it for. “Have you nearly finished” from Vicki almost has the tone of a petulant teenager wanting to know “are we there yet” for the umpteenth time. Given that the Doctor admits he doesn’t fully understand the fourth dimension and he’s now working on a device that allows you to peer into it, I’m wondering if he’s been doing some reading up on it at night time so Vicki doesn’t get to show him up too many more times. Or he might have pulled a similar trick to that suggested in “The Rescue” where he got to spend a lot more time in the TARDIS doing research than passed in the outside world. Plus, of course, there’s the whole fifty years business. If you compare (for example) 1974 and 2024, there have been huge advances in technology and the understanding of science in that time. Could it be that the Monk simply has fifty more years of education in the subject and is more up to date with his knowledge? The real key line is in part four when the Doctor directly accuses the Monk of being a time meddler. This almost sounds like he’s using a term that’s widely known where both he and the Monk come from. When he used “can’t” with Barbara, was it more along some sort of legal lines of what you can and can’t do, rather than actual physical laws of the universe? When it comes to the Monk it could even be some sort of religious commandment that he’s thinking of breaking (it’s not like he sheds the robes for his next story and tries to pass himself off as an Egyptian God and so they might actually be “real”). The real problem in “The Time Meddler” is that the Monk already HAS changed time and the Doctor doesn’t actually seem too fussed about the bit he knows about.
As mere humans (with the exception of genius child Vicki naturally) we aren’t yet fully equipped to work out the consequences of changing the past. We’ll happily talk about “the Grandfather Paradox” as if it were 100% definitely an absolutely guaranteed thing but, long term, Doctor Who will show us it doesn’t work like that. Realistically how much difference would it make to the universe if Stonehenge was built a few years ahead of schedule? I suppose you could argue that IF it’s a calendar then a couple of farmers might have had better crops for a few years? Or one druid wouldn’t have slept on the equivalent of a sofa for forgetting his wife’s birthday? Maybe one or two slaves might have lived who otherwise wouldn’t and so they got moved on to another project (where they promptly expired because time had a sense of humour). Remembering that there aren’t Time Lords yet, and thus no one to enforce laws, it could be that the Doctor would like to go back and “fix” Stonehenge but knows he can’t pilot his own TARDIS that well or that he thinks it really is too trivial to worry about. The problem with the Monk’s plan and why the Doctor’s determined to stop it is pretty much… it’s total chaos. Wipe out Vikings, so King Harold doesn’t get shot in the (insert historically accurate body part here), meaning the whole of human history from that point is different. The Monk claims he knows Harold would be a good King but on what evidence? Weirdly, given some of the dialogue in “The Daleks’ Master Plan”, it’s actually remotely possible that the Monk has been experimenting with time tracks and, as per “The Space Museum”, has seen a whole load of potential futures. Just how definite the future would be and how far ahead he was able to look though is very much in doubt. Suppose one change to time gives you two outcomes. Then each of those outcomes leads to a change which gives another two outcomes and so on… The Battle of Hastings is in 1066 and Shakespeare is born in 1564.So in 500 years, even if there was only one change per day, you’re looking at an impossibly large set of potential futures for 1564 (if you think that’s bad, just wait… in another decade or so that number’s going to get infinitely larger). Even if, by some amazing chance, Shakespeare is still born in whichever version of 1564 we’d end up in, the chances that he’d write Hamlet are stupidly small (though see the blog for “The Space Museum” as to why part of me wants the Monk to succeed). As for television being invented by then and all the technological advancements that the Monk dreams of? Not a hope. The second most depressing part of this story though is that the Monk isn’t an evil person, just deluded. Here we have no reason to doubt his motives (though, as we’re about to see, he’s probably expecting to make a small fortune out of it somehow), just that his method is never going to work predictably and it goes against the “golden rule”. Not a law, not a physical impossibility, but a golden rule. That distinction is very important because I suspect it means that the Monk might already have made a big change to the known history of Earth which would have worked for the better (and made the Monk a profit).
Two hundred pounds deposited in a bank in 1968, a quick trip two hundred years into the future and he collects the interest. Seems a fairly standard thing for a time travel heist until you look carefully at the numbers. Two hundred years on from 1968 would place you very firmly in the immediate aftermath of “The Dalek Invasion of Earth”. This means, as it’s a statement of something that the Monk HAS done, that we need to come up with a solution. There are two possible ones I’m going to propose and, undoubtedly, there are many more. But it’s the end of season two, so I want to end on as optimistic a note as possible. Option one is the semi-optimistic version. As of yet we don’t have any knowledge of what state technology had reached just before the Dalek invasion. In the blog for that story, I threw some numbers around for a potential population of the Earth but deliberately held back on another version of events. As a species we do seem to be very good at reproducing but we are also a very adventurous race. There will be evidence down the line that suggests not every human actually lived on the Earth by the time of the Dalek invasion and, whilst it’s definitely not good for humanity that the Daleks did what they did, who knows on which planet the banking systems were based. After all, the Monk doesn’t say he collected the interest from the London branch itself. So for those who want a vaguely upbeat end, we’ll assume that, after the invasion, the call went out to our colonies and we rebuilt and repopulated pretty quickly.
For the real upbeat ending, let’s assume that the Monk really is just a meddler and really does have the interests of humanity at heart (and in his wallet). We’ve seen in “The Time Meddler” that he doesn’t have any qualms about wiping out a whole load of Vikings to achieve his ambition and, as horrendous as they were in the 11th century, they were hardly as evil as the Daleks were. Plague bombs? Here, I can sell you a cure. Dalek saucers? Here, let me sell you an early warning system. And for the ultimate in home defence system, let me sell you a narrow front door made from a leftover Dracula android I picked up in 1999. It’s heart breaking to think that the Monk may actually have already rewritten the future so that the invasion never happened. The Doctor and co did end up on 22nd century Earth, Susan fell in love and left the TARDIS on good terms with both her shoes. Yes, it’s heart breaking that the Doctor never found this out… but it’s a nice thought isn’t it. And one day, we shall come back to it. Yes, we shall come back.