Post by legios on Nov 6, 2016 21:14:24 GMT
I take the view that _both_ the 1970's and 1980's dating are correct. It depends when in Gallifreyan Mean Time you view them from. Originally, the Cyber-Invasion of Earth took place in the mid-1970's with a relatively young U.N.I.T responding to them, and the Doctor's exile took place in the late-1970's and early 1980's. However, the massive damage to the substrate of the timeline during the Time War altered these events and actually left some of them only partially within the timeline (this also leads to the apparent technological regression which sees the Doctor Who universe's version of the 21st Century having not yet put a man on Mars, despite U.N.I.T having a Moonbase and our own knowledge that they _should_ have put at least seven Mars Probes into space during the 20th, of which an absolutely minimum of two were manned landers). Subsequent to this the interference of the Silence at what _should_ have been a fixed point in time leading to the Doctor's death caused paradoxial alterations propagating back along the timeline, shifting the resulting partially paradoxial events backwards in time. The propagation of this change intersecting with the Doctor's, and the audience's, timeline in several places.
The upshot is that the U.N.I.T stories, when the audience first encountered them took place in the near future, and Sarah Jane Smith departed for her trip in time with the Doctor in 1980 - when Brigadier Alasdair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart was still a serving U.N.I.T officer. However, they subsequently shifted backwards in time to take place in the early 1970s, which is how the Doctor subsequently encountered an Alasdair who was retired and teaching maths at Brendon. This timeline, however, is not entirely metastable - as a later incarnation of the Doctor still met an Alasdair who had married Doris - which is a remaining element of the _original_ timeline prior to the back-propagation of the temporal stresses (I suspect that it represents a fixed point, but cannot prove it in a logical manner.
These various pieces of evidence look irreconcileable to us because, as only vicarious time travellers, we lack the Doctor's ability to reconcile the idea of temporal shifting of non-fixed points in relation to fixed temporal events...
Also, Faction Paradox have a particular Godfather who takes great delight in messing around with some elements of Earth History just to see what kind of patterns it makes. His interventions in the history of the detective agency The Protectors for example have led to its near erasure from the continumn entirely on previous occasions. (And if I catch him with his hand in the spatio-temporal Card Catalogue one more time I swear that I am going to reclassify him under zoology, mammals, extinct once and for all...)
:-)
Karl
The upshot is that the U.N.I.T stories, when the audience first encountered them took place in the near future, and Sarah Jane Smith departed for her trip in time with the Doctor in 1980 - when Brigadier Alasdair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart was still a serving U.N.I.T officer. However, they subsequently shifted backwards in time to take place in the early 1970s, which is how the Doctor subsequently encountered an Alasdair who was retired and teaching maths at Brendon. This timeline, however, is not entirely metastable - as a later incarnation of the Doctor still met an Alasdair who had married Doris - which is a remaining element of the _original_ timeline prior to the back-propagation of the temporal stresses (I suspect that it represents a fixed point, but cannot prove it in a logical manner.
These various pieces of evidence look irreconcileable to us because, as only vicarious time travellers, we lack the Doctor's ability to reconcile the idea of temporal shifting of non-fixed points in relation to fixed temporal events...
Also, Faction Paradox have a particular Godfather who takes great delight in messing around with some elements of Earth History just to see what kind of patterns it makes. His interventions in the history of the detective agency The Protectors for example have led to its near erasure from the continumn entirely on previous occasions. (And if I catch him with his hand in the spatio-temporal Card Catalogue one more time I swear that I am going to reclassify him under zoology, mammals, extinct once and for all...)
:-)
Karl
