Doing It Again...

So here’s a question: can the Doctor have the same adventure twice? Obviously, I’m going to say yes – my standard answer being that in a quantum universe, anything is possible. However, there are some fans for whom it’s a real problem: the sort of fans who insist on defining and zealously policing a rigid canon. I’ll talk about the politics of canon debates some other time, but the sad thing is, it seems to me that some people want a canon solely for the opportunity to exclude things from it. I’ve had arguments with people who want to dismiss the audio adventures as non-canonical on the basis of Jubilee being the inspiration for the tv episode Dalek. It’s not like they’re the same story in anything but basic ideas. (And if repetition of ideas was enough to disqualify stories, we ought to throw out Planet of the Daleks for revisiting The Dead Planet – or for that matter, The Caves of Androzani as a rehash of The Power of Kroll.) As if the Jubilee/Dalek thing wasn’t bad enough, I’ve even encountered someone who wanted to invalidate Spare Parts for being the same story as Rise of the Cybermen – well, it was pretty apparent that person hadn’t actually heard Spare Parts and was just going on what he’d heard third-hand from posts on Outpost Gallifrey – but he wanted a justification for his exclusion of the audio adventures and thought he’d found it. Never let the facts get in the way of a good canon debate…

The 2007 series gave the canon-exclusionists their most powerful ammunition yet, in the form of two literary adaptations. Whereas it was apparent quite early on that Human Nature would be adapted from the novel of the same name, we knew very little in advance about Blink, other than that it would be a “Doctor-lite” episode and really scary! Nearer to the time of broadcast, a few facts had started to emerge – most notably that the main protagonist was called Sally Sparrow. Those of us who’d read Steven Moffat’s story in the 2006 Annual would already be familiar with that name, of course – and so it began to look as if Blink would be an adaptation of it. At least they were honest about it, mentioning it on Confidential and popping the original story up on the website. What I found interesting was the relative lack of consternation about this adaptation – in complete contrast to the pages of argument on Outpost Gallifrey over the previous fortnight regarding the canonical status of Human Nature. It may be that an Annual story just doesn’t register on most people’s radar in the way the New Adventures did…

Nevertheless, there were a handful of comments that Blink had effectively removed the Annual story from canon. Once again, I marvel at the willingness of Who fans to discard stories on the flimsiest of evidence, but in this case, I really don’t see the need. Admittedly, the basic idea is the same, but most of the details are different. The two Sally Sparrows live in different time periods, are different in age and appearance. The settings are completely different. There are no Weeping Angels in the Annual story. It’s just the notion of the Doctor, separated from the Tardis, sending messages via a recording medium that links the two tales. It’s no more a rehash than Dalek was of Jubilee, and we survived that. I think the question only arose because Moffat named his heroine Sally Sparrow, perhaps in homage to the Annual story, perhaps because he just liked the sound of the name. If only he’d called her Mandy Magpie, I don’t think there would have been an issue.

Human Nature is another matter entirely – as probably the single most popular Who novel ever written, the adaptation was always going to cause ructions on all sides of the canon debate – arguments that are still rumbling on to this day. It seems obvious that Paul Cornell himself anticipated this, and tried to head them off with a blog entry on the subject of canon. I’m not sure if he really thought it would still the debate, but it seems unlikely. (Many, but not all, of his points I would agree with, incidentally…)

But inevitably it happened – even before broadcast, people were declaring the novels as non-canonical, again based on that spurious argument that the Doctor couldn’t have the same adventure twice, and that the tv version had to trump the novel. Even despite the fact that the novel existed first! (It’s a mind-set that’s difficult to shake off. Even for someone like me, who spends so much of his time fitting all forms of Doctor Who together, there’s still some subconscious impulse to regard the tv series as the taproot, as somehow more real than any of the other media. Certainly, I know that I can recite the dialogue from entire episodes, whereas I can’t remember more than basic details even of books I read quite recently.)

Of course, the argument soon brought NA supporters out into the open, to offer any number of reasons why Human Nature could have happened twice, without “de-canonizing” the novels. Many of these invoked the Time War, as having in some way undone the previous sequence of events. (Indeed, Cornell suggested this in his blog entry.) This is quite an easy get-out clause, though, and in fact it comes up more and more frequently these days as a catch-all explanation for continuity discrepancies. And frankly, that’s just lazy…

I suppose I haven’t been as bothered by all this as some people – it’s not as if the notion of adventures happening twice is particularly new. The Ultimate Adventure stage play happened to three different Doctors. Shada happened twice as well (and in that case, the repetition was explained in the story). Then there are a number of comic strip adventures for the fourth Doctor, that previously happened to the second or third Doctors. And all this happened long before the Time War came along to start buggering about with the timeline. In The Complete Adventures, I’ve suggested explanations for all these occurrences. One idea I’m particularly taken with is that the Doctor, on some subconscious level, is drawn towards such areas of quantum instability, as if feeling the need to restore missing sections of his timeline. (Or maybe the Tardis deliberately seeks out these space-time discontinuities…)

My quantum universe model allows for all versions of the same story to have occurred in the same continuity. There’s no need to imagine they’ve somehow un-happened. They just haven’t occurred in the current quantum iteration of the continuum. There’s an important point about Human Nature, that the canon debate has largely ignored – the tv story is not just a straight adaptation of the novel. It seems superficially very similar, certainly the closest of the adaptations so far, but it’s not identical by any means. Some of the characters are similar, but have different names. Some have the same name, but are different characters. Some are missing altogether. Most importantly, the Doctor’s reasons for becoming human are completely different – and the villains of the piece aren’t the same either. (And where were the scarecrows in the novel?) So my fundamental question is: if the events of the novel didn’t happen, who defeated the Aubertides? (As with Blink, I have to wonder if fandom would be quite so bothered by all this if Cornell had changed the names of his characters and called the story something else. Who am I kidding...?)

Here’s a theory, then: everything in the novel happened back in a different branch of the quantum universe – the seventh Doctor decided to try being human, the Aubertides came for his biodata, and were eventually defeated. So far so good. Centuries later, the tenth Doctor is in a different quantum permutation of the continuum. (It could have been the effects of the Time War, it could have been anything – but those past memories just aren’t accessible to him any more. However, we can imagine that the Tardis memory banks retain that knowledge at some quantum level.) When the Doctor activates the chameleon arch, he leaves all the details to the Tardis. The John Smith schoolmaster persona would be automatically drawn upon to create the Doctor’s new human form; and the Tardis would then locate a setting in which to place him, homing in on an area of quantum instability to try and protect the integrity of the Doctor’s timeline.

Or it could just be a massive coincidence…

Many Worlds (Slight Return)

Well, I haven't written anything here for a while. But now people have been asking me (well OK, one person...) - when am I going to update my blog? The truth is, I've been put off Doctor Who somewhat recently, and the culprit is most definitely the final story of the last series. I've already expressed my misgivings about Last of the Time Lords, so I won't bother going over all that again - except to say it leaves a bad taste in the mouth and a sense of general indifference. I'll get over it. Although there continue to be things that don't inspire confidence - the whole Catherine Tate business for a start - on the whole I've enjoyed the new series and I think the producers generally know what they're doing. And at the end of the day, it's only a tv show... (Hmm... Do fans expect too much from Doctor Who? There's a topic for a future entry right there.)

So let's forget about that for now and concentrate on something I can talk about - continuity! I've been giving some further thought to my Many Worlds Interpretation as outlined below. For my sins, I was discussing this on Outpost Gallifrey - (I think there's another blog entry some time in the madness I've encountered on the OG forum...) - and one of my correspondents accused me (yes, accused - that's not too strong a term) of using a "multiverse" explanation as a way of avoiding continuity issues. Naturally, I strenuously denied this. I was however being disingenuous. MWI is indeed a multiverse theory. But I think I can be excused because the concept of multiverse is fairly nebulous and can have varying definitions depending on who you're talking to.

Generally speaking (in science fiction anyway) a multiverse is taken to be any number of alternative universes exisiting in parallel, usually with alternative versions of your main characters. This concept crops up in Doctor Who a few times (Inferno and Rise of the Cybermen being the most obvious) but those are very specific examples. And that's not what I'm postulating with MWI - although my OG antagonist clearly thought that I was. So it was to distance myself from the whole "parallel universes" thing that I denied my belief in a multiverse. Because that way lies madness - there are people who want to believe that the novels and the audios exist in different parallel universes. And some authors even want to try and prove it. (I'm looking at you, Gary Russell...) And back along, Lawrence Miles thought that Virgin and BBC novels existed in separate universes - though seemingly none of the other authors did - but as that gave rise to some interesting ideas, I'll overlook it.

What I'm suggesting is a single universe where all possible outcomes and permutations exist. The series itself supports such a notion - there's the famous scene in Pyramids of Mars where the Doctor travels into the alternative future. Looking back over my previous entry, I think some confusion has crept in when I said this:

Every time the Doctor steps out of the Tardis, he changes the conditions of the universe around him. At any moment, only some of his past adventures might actually have happened to him.

What's probably more accurate to say is that all of his past adventures have occurred to him, but he might not be aware of them all at any precise moment. Because quantum theory is all based around observation - so the Doctor may find himself in a part of the continuum from which it is impossible to observe (or even remember) certain other events. We could even take this idea one stage further and suggest that it's us, the audience, who are the observers. At one time, we could only see the tv episodes, and so we perceived them as following on from each other. With successive iterations of the universe, the books and comics and audios start to appear and we "perceive" that they must have fitted between the episodes in ways we just couldn't conceive before. Well, it's a thought...

The Many Worlds Interpretation of the Quantum Whoniverse

Many, many moons ago, I was a scientist. Oh yes, I took a degree in astronomy. For a number of complex reasons, that didn't work out and now I'm a local government officer. But hey, those are the breaks... Nevertheless, I've always maintained an interest in cosmology, especially the more cutting edge ideas of quantum mechanics. I'm absolutely fascinated by it, and sometimes I even like to pretend that I can understand it all...

Why am I telling you this now? Well, believe it or not, it has a very great relevance to the problems of Doctor Who continuity. Seriously. The Many Worlds Interpretation is an incredible piece of cosmological thinking - I really can't describe it here, but here's Wikipedia's page on it, which gives a very good overview. Alternatively, you might like to try this page. But here's my (possibly inaccurate) layman's summary of it:

The Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) posits that all possible outcomes to every single event exist simultaneously within the universe, each within their own mutually unobservable "world". What this means is that history ceases to be a linear progression, a single (four-dimensional) path through the space-time continuum. Rather, it's more like an ever-branching tree, where every possible event is to be found somewhere along one of its branches.

So what does this mean for Doctor Who continuity? Well, we've all heard the arguments, such as "the comics contradict the tv series, so they can't be canon"; or "Richard E Grant and Christopher Eccleston can't both be the ninth Doctor, so Shalka isn't canon". Leaving aside for now that canon is a dirty word (I'll come back to that at a later date), you can see how MWI slices through such arguments. It's perfectly possible for contradictory outcomes to exist within the same space-time continuum. You don't need to resort to putting books and audios into parallel universes or anything like that. The key is that phrase "mutually unobservable". Once each possible outcome has split into its own "world", it can't interfere or interact with any of the other "worlds". In any instant, you can only observe the version of the space-time continuum you happen to be in at that instant. Every time the Doctor steps out of the Tardis, he changes the conditions of the universe around him. At any moment, only some of his past adventures might actually have happened to him.

On a prosaic level, it accounts for how both The Paradise of Death and Invasion of the Dinosaurs can follow on from The Time Warrior; or how The Infinity Doctors can feature a short-haired eighth Doctor living on Gallifrey. It can even account for how the fifth Doctor doesn't remember having lived through the events of The Five Doctors four times over already.

In a series whose central character can travel in time, and where history has been shown to change at the drop of a hat, it seems crazy to want to order the universe into a single, coherent, linear timeline. And here's real science to say that actually time doesn't work like that.

Not so long ago, I was nearly hit by a car. I was using a pelican crossing, and the man was green - but this car came out of nowhere, right through the red light and didn't even try to slow down. Some instinct made me pull myself out of the way. Weirdly though, I didn't feel shaken up or anything. I was really calm about it, and I found myself rationalizing the incident according to MWI. I realized that in a different part of the space-time continuum, my broken body was flying through the air and smashing down onto the surface of the road. But not in this "world". I was alive because I was in that quantum reality where the car missed me. You can only observe the part of the space-time continuum you happen to be in at any instant - and obviously, I couldn't observe a reality in which I was dead. (Go and do a web search for "quantum suicide" if you want some really extreme thinking along these lines...)

So there you are. Somewhere in the universe, I stuck with the astronomy and became a scientist.