First and foremost, there is the “Time Lock”, because while Russell T Davies will happily drop poetry like “the Could-have-been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres” one minute, he can get extremely Ronseal Quick Dry and Wood stain the next. The Time Lock is what sealed off the Last Great Time War from the rest of the spacetime continuum, barring anything from getting in or out except the Doctor, a last Dalek, the Dalek Emperor, the Cult of Skaro, Davros and his armies (rescued by Dalek Caan), the Master, and the entire planet of Gallifrey (twice). That might seem like a lot but it’s still pretty good for something containing a war across all of time and space.
So, it could probably contain the single date of May 24th 2025. And if you’re me, or a lot of Doctor Who fans, you’re probably asking “What about May 23rd? Or May 25th? Why not pop back to May 17th, spend a relaxing week in the south of France, then come back refreshed for your next shift at the hospital?
Or if you want to be really sure, travel forward to the year 4202 AD, book into the Time Hotel from last year’s Christmas special “Joy to the World”, get Joy’s Room on Boxing Day and sneak out while the Doctor from that episode isn’t looking (he’s still staying there for a year while he waits for another time portal to reopen), then spend five months going backpacking while you wait for pre-May 24th Belinda to get abducted by robots.
(While we’re here – if something globally devastating has happened to Earth midway through 2025, why didn’t the Doctor in “Joy the World” notice while he was living at the Sandringham Hotel? Did he take a break from the hotel to go scuba diving with Donna Noble?)
If all these workarounds sound familiar, that’s because fans were making the same arguments a few years ago when the Doctor revealed he could not go back to 1930s New York to retrieve Amy and Rory after the Weeping Angels got them. Immediately fans were thinking “He’s immortal, why not go back to the 1920s and wait for a bit? Why not land the TARDIS in Washington and catch a bus? Why not meet up with Amy and Rory in the 1950s and have a catch up?”
While the episode itself seems like it leaves these plot threads dangling, on Blogtor Who then-showrunner Steven Moffat felt safer unleashing the more nerdy explanation, “New York would still burn. The point being, he can’t interfere. Here’s the ‘fan answer’ – this is not what you’d ever put out on BBC One, because most people watch the show and just think, ‘well there’s a gravestone so obviously he can’t visit them again’. But the ‘fan answer’ is, in normal circumstances he might have gone back and said, ‘look we’ll just put a headstone up and we’ll just write the book’. But there is so much scar tissue, and the number of paradoxes that have already been inflicted on that nexus of timelines, that it will rip apart if you try to do one more thing. He has to leave it alone. Normally he could perform some surgery, this time too much surgery has already been performed. But imagine saying that on BBC One!”
