Re: How to solve the 'last Dalek' problem...

On Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:10:46 GMT, Stephen Wilson
<sr.wilson@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"zarbiface" <zarbiface@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1177955817.580544.133990@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On 30 Apr, 18:12, "Stephen Wilson" <sr.wil...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"zarbiface" <zarbif...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1177952478.874321.308670@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Daleks are time travellers. It doesn't matter if they're all dead
NOW, when troops of Daleks from other points in time could invade. Or
is that too obvious?

The Daleks fought a time war with the Time Lords. Both sides were wiped
out,
not just from that point in time, but from all of time - past, present
and
future.

So none of the classic Dalek stories happened then? Or did they get
wiped out at a convenient point just after they'd been destroyed in
each story?

This is where the concept of time gets complicated. They happened up to the
point of the time war. Then the time war wiped out the Daleks and Time
Lords, so the classic Dalek stories unhappened. Time simply found a way of
making sure that events occurred as they should, but in a slightly different
way. The higher beings have the ability to perceive the events as they would
have been before the time war and as they are since the time war (hence
Jabe's computer recognising the Doctor as a Time Lord, but also knowing that
he shouldn't exist).




And there are weird trickle-down effects to the "lesser species": both
56th century Jack and the guy on the game station "know" that the
Daleks were wiped out "a long time ago" -- and no one ever proposes
that the Daleks might be from before the war. The historical "triage"
seems to have left some bizarre anachronisms, in that no matter when
in time, you go, you'll never actually meet a Dalek or a Time lord --
you probably won't even meet anyone who's personally met one, but you
can still see effects of their actions in the past. (The Big Finish
audios make some similar claims, even going so far as to suggest that
causality, on the grand scale, is in fact something the Time Lords
themselves imposed on the universe, and without them, the laws of
cause-and-effect may not really apply on the grand scale).

Remember too that Gallifrey was always depicted as being only casually
linked to time for the rest of the universe: The Three Doctors shows
Gallifrey and Earth experienceing events out in the universe at the
same time, which would mean that the Doctor had often traveled to his
*own* future, yet there are other times when it seems that Gallifrey's
"present" is in the distant past or the distant future relative to us
-- in fact, it appears that whenever you are in history when you go to
Gallifrey, you end up in the Doctor-relative Present there, and Time
Lords seem to always meet each other in the same order. This may be a
necessary condition of being a temporally transcendant power.

If this is the case, then any point in time for the universe is the
"present" for Gallifrey, and, sas the planet was destroyed and no
longer has a "present", you can not go to any point in history and
find Gallifrey in existence.

It rather defies our normal sense of causality, but that's rather the
point: when you are a transtemporal superpower, causality itself does
not apply in the same ways.
.

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