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January Meme: Five things the Doctor would do if she wasn't worried about messing up history
There are, of course, far more than five, given the Doctor’s life span (or lives spans), but here are five of many:
I. Return to Malcassairo just after the transport to Utopia has started, intercept same and ensure the end of the human race at the end of the universe isn’t self cannibalization into machines. This is not because of the Year That Wasn’t, it’s because the Doctor finds the idea that the Toclafane are the end of the human race one of the ongoing most painful revelations ever. (Sidenote: I’ve once written a story in which the Doctor does retrieve the Toclafane from Utopia post-Year That Wasn’t, but that’s a B5 crossover and the uninhabited planet he puts them on in another time zone turns out to be Z’ha’dum, so…)
II. Persuading young Adolf H. to emigrate to the US and become a sci fi writer sure sounded like a good way of solving the „if you can time travel, why not deal with Hitler?“ question Companions always pose during one idle hour of chit chat, but then the Meddling Monk happened to be in the vicinity, undercover, heard it, and actually did it, and the result was disastrous, until the Doctor fixed the timeline. The Companion at the time hit it off with Norman Spinrad and gave him the idea. Sometimes the Doctor still ponders variations of it, though she never talks about it out loud again
III. Saving baby Melody Ponds and returning her to her parents to raise. This would mean she’d never become River-as-she-knew-her and would probably make the universe explode, which depended on River being River a couple of times, to put it mildly, but well, it’s a thought.
IV. Teaching Alexander Hamilton the songs from the musical and get him to sing some of them. It would be easy – Hamilton being one of the two Founding Fathers who fancied the Doctor (episode „The Impossible Astronaut“ makes it canon) – but with Hamilton’s writing obsession, chances are he’d jot the notes and lyrics down somewhere, that said writings would be found long before they should by who knows whom, and the Doctor can’t do that to Lin-Manuel Miranda
V. Ensuring Aristotle’s book about comedy survives outside of the TARDIS library. The Doctor met Aristotle – nice chap, shame about those students -, and the book on comedy really is a hoot, but ensuring it doesn’t get lost during the Middle Ages would ruin the plot of a great novel, maybe even ensure it never gets written, so there’s that.
and, as a bonus:
Va. Tracking down Rassilon before he comes up with regeneration and taking him on a bender that ensures Rassilon will never have that idea. Someone else will instead – the Doctor, even when in a despairing, cynical and more than a little mad mood about her own people, would not be that suicidal and genocidal -, but it wouldn’t be bloody Rassilon, and without Gallifreyan society imprinting on his ideas, who knows how the Time Lords would have developed…. But no. Every Time sense the Doctor has tells her this would undo too much of the web that holds the universe together, would be too radical a change. Or maybe it’s just self preservation, because chances are she would not have existed. If she thinks too long about it, she runs again.
The Other Days
I. Return to Malcassairo just after the transport to Utopia has started, intercept same and ensure the end of the human race at the end of the universe isn’t self cannibalization into machines. This is not because of the Year That Wasn’t, it’s because the Doctor finds the idea that the Toclafane are the end of the human race one of the ongoing most painful revelations ever. (Sidenote: I’ve once written a story in which the Doctor does retrieve the Toclafane from Utopia post-Year That Wasn’t, but that’s a B5 crossover and the uninhabited planet he puts them on in another time zone turns out to be Z’ha’dum, so…)
II. Persuading young Adolf H. to emigrate to the US and become a sci fi writer sure sounded like a good way of solving the „if you can time travel, why not deal with Hitler?“ question Companions always pose during one idle hour of chit chat, but then the Meddling Monk happened to be in the vicinity, undercover, heard it, and actually did it, and the result was disastrous, until the Doctor fixed the timeline. The Companion at the time hit it off with Norman Spinrad and gave him the idea. Sometimes the Doctor still ponders variations of it, though she never talks about it out loud again
III. Saving baby Melody Ponds and returning her to her parents to raise. This would mean she’d never become River-as-she-knew-her and would probably make the universe explode, which depended on River being River a couple of times, to put it mildly, but well, it’s a thought.
IV. Teaching Alexander Hamilton the songs from the musical and get him to sing some of them. It would be easy – Hamilton being one of the two Founding Fathers who fancied the Doctor (episode „The Impossible Astronaut“ makes it canon) – but with Hamilton’s writing obsession, chances are he’d jot the notes and lyrics down somewhere, that said writings would be found long before they should by who knows whom, and the Doctor can’t do that to Lin-Manuel Miranda
V. Ensuring Aristotle’s book about comedy survives outside of the TARDIS library. The Doctor met Aristotle – nice chap, shame about those students -, and the book on comedy really is a hoot, but ensuring it doesn’t get lost during the Middle Ages would ruin the plot of a great novel, maybe even ensure it never gets written, so there’s that.
and, as a bonus:
Va. Tracking down Rassilon before he comes up with regeneration and taking him on a bender that ensures Rassilon will never have that idea. Someone else will instead – the Doctor, even when in a despairing, cynical and more than a little mad mood about her own people, would not be that suicidal and genocidal -, but it wouldn’t be bloody Rassilon, and without Gallifreyan society imprinting on his ideas, who knows how the Time Lords would have developed…. But no. Every Time sense the Doctor has tells her this would undo too much of the web that holds the universe together, would be too radical a change. Or maybe it’s just self preservation, because chances are she would not have existed. If she thinks too long about it, she runs again.
The Other Days
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