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As the TARDIS is beginning to explode, the Doctor tells River that if she leaves the engines will stop. Why did River run into a wall when she tried to leave the TARDIS?Ī good question. The universe is now much smaller, taking up essentially only the Earth-Moon area, so time and space travel is much, much less complex. The Doctor kindly explains this in a throwaway line. Why was the Vortex Manipulator so good at time travel if it’s meant to be crap? The Doctor chose not to open it in The Pandorica Opens because he wasn’t certain what was inside, not because he couldn’t open it at all. They only need to be secure from the inside. That’s the thing about prisons: you have to be able to open them from the outside to put someone in. How come the Pandorica was so easy to open? And that episode shows that the rules can be broken, but doing so tends to have serious consequences.
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As Waters of Mars makes clear, they are not physical but legal constructs, designed to stop people playing silly buggers with the time-stream. In this circumstance it’s understandable that the Doctor throws the rulebook away: he knows that if he screws this one up, then it can’t really get any worse than, er, the universe having been destroyed. More generally, after the loss of the Time Lords, the rules of time seem to be rather less well enforced than they were.
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Essentially the Doctor is crossing his own time-stream and this is deeply frowned upon because of the trouble it can cause if it doesn’t work – look what happened in Father’s Day!īut, by this point, the universe has collapsed and they are all doomed. But Day also shows its weakness – one change and the whole timeline goes up in smoke.