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When the Eighth Doctor told Gareth how to pass his exam, was he preventing The Enemy of the World or causing it? (piefed.ca)

submitted 15 hours ago by Tango@piefed.ca to c/doctorwho@lemmy.world

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The Doctor tells Grace that in ten years Gareth will head the seismology unit at UCLA, and devise a system for accurately predicting earthquakes, which will "save the human race several times". The movie takes place in 1999, so Gareth will devise this system circa 2009. "The Enemy of the World", a Second Doctor TV story, in which Ramón Salamander comes close to global dictatorship through the use of an earthquake machine, takes place in 2018. Now, in all likelihood, the events of TEOTW are no longer canon, since I feel like that would have come up during the Thirteenth Doctor's tenure if Salamander was that significant a public figure. But I could be wrong.

So the question becomes: was the Eighth Doctor preventing those events or causing them? TBH it's kind of weird that he knew about Gareth's poetry exam at all.

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[–] Australis13@fedia.io 4 points 14 hours ago

I suspect you could argue it from either angle, e.g.:

Salamander's only able to build his earthquake machine because Gareth improves science's understanding of earthquakes, or
The Eighth Doctor's intervention means that Gareth's technology immediately undermines Salamander's scheme, changing the future (and hence the Doctor's own past).

Given New Who doesn't show Salamander or any figure like him, it seems highly probable that The Enemy of the World shows a (then) future that no longer exists. The destruction of Skaro in "Remembrance of the Daleks" has similarly been undone by New Who with the Time War, showing the devastated Skaro in "Asylum of the Daleks".