FIXING CONTINUITY GLITCHES:

THE DOUBLE TIMELINE: EXPLAINING THE CONUNDRUM OF THE SECOND DOCTOR

The Second Doctor, lovingly portrayed by actor Patrick Throughton, became a bit of a problem during his return appearances in the 80s. No one was upset with the actor when he reprised his role in both The Five Doctors and The Two Doctors, but we were just a little bit bothered with the writers (only a bit, though - cause it's hard to begrudge Terrance Dicks or Robert Holmes!). By no means did we think either of these beloved scribes had written particularly bad stories, but they did commit a greater sin. They got some really important continuity wrong. In fact, aside from the "Dating the UNIT stories" debate, this is probably the next biggest continuity glitch that has ever occurred in the show.

As Dicks and Holmes were writing their respective scripts, they had both forgotten that during the Second Doctor's era - his origins were still a mystery. Only in his final dieing moments is it revealed that he is a Time Lord who who ran off in a stolen TARDIS. By the time this information is shared, he is very firmly captured by his people and about to be sentenced to exile and regeneration. There is no real oppurtunity for Doctor Two to go out and travel some more. He is doomed.

And yet, when we see him in The Five and Two Doctors, this particular incarnation is speaking quite freely about the Time Lords and his fate at their hands. He is even undertaking missions for them. All of which would seem to be impossible. When his stories were being made in the 60s, Throughton's Doctor had no open association with the Time Lords. If he had made contact with them before his final story, they would've inflicted the same fate on him as they did in The War Games. But the Second Doctor that we see in the 80s stories seems to be radically different from the one we watched during his adventures in the 60s.

Is there any way we can reconcile these discrepancies? The Discontinuity Guide, a wonderful work of non-fiction that was published in the 90s (if it's not in your collection, you need to find it), does a great job of fixing the problem. It proposes the concept of a "Season 6b". The basic idea of the theory is that the Celestial Intervention Agency (or CIA, for short) was watching the Doctor's trial and pulled him out of it just before he was about to be regenerated. They made a deal with him - he would be granted his freedom to roam the Universe but he would need to undertake missions for them from time-to-time. The concept works great and gets the whole incongruity to gel. It's the theory that I tend to stick with.

But before The Discontinuity Guide was published, I had formulated a theory of my own. One that works even better in light of things that we've now seen in the New Series. And while I still agree more with the notion of a Season 6b, I thought it might be fun to share my own pet theory, here:

During Episode One of The Three Doctors, we see the Chancellor and the Lord President on Gallifrey looking at an event from the Second Doctor's timestream on a scanner screen. They pluck him out from that event and bring him to the present where he starts working with his third incarnation. The sequence we see on the screen is not from a previous Second Doctor story. It looks a bit like it's from The War Games but it's not - they filmed entirely new footage. I suggest that this was "an unseen adventure". A story that was never televised that took place while he was travelling with Jamie and Victoria. Probably somewhere near the end of Season Five.

Once the Second and Third Doctor are united, we see them enter into a sort of mental communion in which the Third Doctor gives the Second Doctor a full update on the situation. This is one of the most significant events that helps form my theory. Doctor Three lets his predecessor learn his entire future. He's not just letting him see the current crisis, he's letting him learn all about the events that would lead up to it. He might even be doing this on purpose with the hope that he can meddle in his own past and change the outcome of those events.

Which is exactly what happens. The Time Lords are not aware that the Two Doctors entered into this psychic conference with each other. They erase the Second Doctor's memories of the Omega Crisis when he returns to his proper timeline, but they don't erase the memories his third incarnation implanted. The Second Doctor is now sitting somewhere near the end of Season Five with a knowledge of what is going to happen to him shortly. Being the anarchistic fellow that he is, he makes an attempt to change his own future.

His boldest step is to leave Jamie and Victoria behind at the end of this unseen adventure that we witnessed a fragment of in The Three Doctors. He doesn't intend to leave them there forever. He wants to go out into Time and Space and actually get good at steering the TARDIS. Only then, will he go back and get them. A properly steerable TARDIS will mean he can keep travelling with his companions but avoid certain adventures that he knows he must not have. But he also knows that altering his timeline like this can be dangerous business. He'd rather not put his friends at risk as he first undertakes the decision. Only once he sees that he can really control things will he allow Jamie and Victoria re-join him.

So, for a while, the Second Doctor travels alone. He starts developing the ability to steer his erratic time vehicle a bit accurately but not quite well enough to go back and get Jamie and Victoria, yet. It may be sometime during this part of his life that he does have a fight with the Terrible Zodin. We don't know much about his relationship with her - but it may have happened, here. Eventually, however, he does arrive on Earth in the 80s and reads about his old friend the Brigadier in an article in The Times. This inspires him to pop into yesterday and visit him. The visit should be relatively safe as he has no intention of bringing the Brig on board the TARDIS. Just a quick hop back to say hi to him.

For once, he's able to steer the TARDIS properly and he joins Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart for the UNIT reunion. But since he sees no evidence in the article in The Times that he was at the event, he chooses to visit the whole thing as discreetly as possible. After he arrives, we hear the Doctor claiming to be "bending the rules a bit" to be there. He remains pretty non-specific about how he is altering the Laws of Time, but this could be what he's alluding to. That he's actually actively trying to change his own future.

Of course, when he first sees Jamie and Zoe in the Tower of Rassilon, he thinks it might be possible that he is witnessing some sort of "echo" from a parallel reality. Could his timelines still be intermingling a bit? He's not certain so he doesn't want to do anything to harm them. But then he takes a better look at them. They seem older than they were when they were travelling with him. So if they are from that alternate timeline, they would've had the experiences they had during The War Games and would've been sent back to their own time and had most of their memories of him erased. Yet this version of Jamie and Zoe seem far too familiar with him. So he knows that they are illusions and dispels them.

This explains, of course, how the Doctor is able to know that Jamie and Zoe shouldn't know who he is anymore. Even though their memories would've been erased during a moment in his own timeline where it would've been impossible for him to go out and start travelling again. A bit convoluted, of course. But then, most fan theories that are fixing continuity glitches are.

The Doctor continues travelling on his own for a bit and gets better at steering the TARDIS. In his pursuits to improve his navigating skills, he actually ends up doing a bit of re-decorating and a newer version of the console is installed. Finally, he decides it's safe to go back and get Jamie and Victoria. He was hoping to come back to the exact point in time where he left them, but he only does so well. He's a few years off and they are now a bit older. However, they are still willing to climb back aboard the TARDIS and travel with him some more.

So, off they go. The Doctor appears to have effectively changed his own future and is back to his usual antics: travelling with friends and getting into trouble. But such actions do still create ripples in the Causal Nexus. They are subtle but they do not escape the eyes of certain Time Lords in high places. Members of the Celestial Intervention Agency detect the time disturbance the Doctor has created by altering his future and trace things back to him. They find him and confront him on what he's done. They threaten to bring his actions to the attention of the High Council unless he's willing to strike a deal with them. Knowing the Doctor could make an excellent operative, they promise to keep their silence if the Doctor will undertake missions for them from time-to-time. Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the Doctor accepts their conditions.  This latest addition to the CIA is given his first task: confront his old friend Dastari about the Kartz/Reimer time travel experiments.

Victoria doesn't like the sound of any of this and asks if she can be dropped off somewhere where she can pursue an interest she is developing in graphology. Wholly confident that he can pick her back up again, the Doctor complies. The CIA, however, notice the deviation in his course to let Victoria disembark and install a device in the console that will give them dual control of the TARDIS. Just to make sure he goes where he's meant to.  While such an action infuriates him, the Doctor still takes Jamie to Space Station J7 and they have a meeting with Dastari.

From here, of course, the events of The Two Doctors can logicallly ensue. The Sixth and Second Doctor have their adventure together and then both incarnations return to their own business. The Second Doctor goes back to pick up Victoria and the Sixth Doctor keeps arguing with Peri.

We can assume that Doctor Two continued travelling in this altered timeline for a while longer. He would still get sent on missions by the CIA once in a while but he would, mainly, just enjoy a whole new lease on life. Perhaps Victoria still left him and he and Jamie pick up Zoe. Or perhaps other companions were found. Who can say for sure? But, more than likely, the Doctor chose to openly avoid his confrontation with the War Lords. Knowing that if he did encounter them then this would lead to his exile.

This avoidance might have been his undoing. Perhaps the War Lords rose to such a power in the galaxy that the High Council of the Time Lords had to investigate them. Perhaps, in that investigation, they discovered the divergence the Doctor created in his own timeline. Alternatively, the disruption the Doctor was causing in Time may have just become too difficult to hide and it was, eventually, brought to the High Council's attention. Whatever the case may be, the Doctor was apprehended and the problem was corrected.

We're not sure exactly how they solved the problem, of course. But these are the Time Lords were talking about: they're pretty good at manipulating the Fourth Dimension. It may be that they just snatched the Doctor back up and put him on trial again and sent him into exile. That what he did when he was sent back to his timeline after The Three Doctors is now True Canon.  We would hate to think, though, that all those televised stories we saw in the latter part of the 60s were deleted from the Doctor's personal history (okay, maybe we wouldn't be so upset if The Space Pirates never happened!).  So it may be possible that the Time Lords arranged for both timelines to exist at the same time. That, somehow, both these realities exist together. That when the Doctor thinks back to the days of his second incarnation, he has two sets of memories. Perhaps, even key participants in both chronologies also remember two versions. Or, at least, they did for a bit. More than likely, poor old Jamie got his memories erased again when the High Council caught up with the Doctor a second time.

This idea of two different timelines existing concurrently might seem outlandish. But we recently witnessed something similiar with the Eleventh Doctor and his excursions on Trenzalore. In Name of the Doctor he very definitely visits the planet at a time after his death where the TARDIS is in a vicious state of disrepair. These events had to have happened in order for him to meet Clara and start travelling with her. But in Time of the Doctor, the outcome we see in Name of the Doctor is changed. He gets a whole new regeneration cycle and does not die on Trenzalore. But if that is the case, then how does Name of the Doctor happen? Again, it has to occur or the Doctor and Clara would never meet.

The answer, of course, is that Time Lords can allow their timeline to split like that once in a while if it has to. And then re-join, later, at an appropriate point. For a time, though, the Doctor's life actually travels along two paths at once.

In fact, this may have also happened at the end of the Trial of a Time Lord season. In one timeline, he goes off and has a bunch of adventures with Mel where they, eventually, fight the Vervoids. In another timeline, he and Mel leave the Space Station where the Doctor's trial took place and, a short while later, the Rani forces the TARDIS to crash and cause the Doctor to regenerate. This would explain why we still see him in the costume he was wearing during his actual trial in Time and the Rani rather than the costume he was wearing in Terror of the Vervoids.

Of course, a simpler explanation would be that the Doctor chose to change back into the outfit he wore during his trial after the events of Terror of the Vervoids. But I hate simple explanations.

So, up until Name and Time of the Doctor, we have not seen any televised evidence that the Doctor can have two timelines at once. Which made my theory of the Second Doctor's alternate timeline a bit more difficult to swallow. But in light of this new evidence, it could be entirely possible that the Doctor's timeline can split now and again and create these sort of complex paradoxes.  Given how complicated extensive time travelling can be, it's entirely possible that Time Lords can do these sort of things.

Or maybe it's just easier to believe in the Season 6b theory.

Yeah. It probably is....