10 Years Ago, Doctor Who Changed The Time Paradox Game Forever
Who composed Beethoven's 5th?
As many longtime Doctor Who fans will tell you, despite hundreds of episodes over the course of six decades, there are a few story types that every era, and every Doctor, has to experience at least once. And perhaps the most famous Who formula of all is the “base under siege story,” in which the Doctor finds themselves in some kind of base, trapped, while some sort of menace runs rampant, or some creeping dilemma threatens to drive everyone nuts. “ The Tenth Planet,” the final adventure of the 1st Doctor (William Hartnell), is an early example, while the 10th Doctor’s (David Tennant) “The Impossible Planet” is a more famous base under siege story from the modern era. But the best story from this subgenre of Doctor Who episodes was released exactly 10 years ago, and the reason it’s still so brilliant isn’t because it’s a perfect base under siege story. It’s brilliant because this two-parter delivers a perfect time travel paradox, which is equal parts whimsical and fatalistic.
On October 3, 2015, Doctor Who Season 9 continued a confident and excellent string of episodes with the now-classic two-parter, “Under the Lake” and “Before the Flood.” Peter Capaldi’s highest point as the Doctor was still several episodes away, later in this season. But, in this two-parter, his 12th Doctor has never been a more convincing or perfect Time Lord, complete with a sneaky downside of what that title really means.
Spoilers ahead.
“Under the Lake” finds the Doctor (Capaldi) and Clara (Jenna Coleman) popping up at an underwater base in the year 2119. The human scientists working there are being haunted by what appear to be ghosts, starting with one that seemed to emerge from a generic-looking spaceship. The title of the episode refers to the fact that this section of Scotland was above ground in the 1980s, and a flood put everything into a watery grave for an unknown reason.
You’d think the big spoiler here is that, yes, through time travel, the Doctor himself causes the flood that creates “the lake,” and while that’s true, that’s not the two-parter’s biggest twist. The heart of this story, instead, relies on the kind of paradox that Who (and other sci-fi stories) sometimes shrug off, but is the sort of speculative temporal brain teaser that gets fairly dark if you think about it seriously for even a second.
The ghosts are attacking and murdering members of the underwater base’s crew, which transforms the victims into more ghosts. The Doctor realizes this process is part of a complex transmitter designed by a ruthless alien called the Fisher King. And had this been a single-part episode, that specific revelation, and some kind of reverse-the-polarity fix could have resulted in a decent, if not particularly special, Who episode. Instead, because writer Toby Whithouse crafted this as a two-part episode (most installments of Season 9 are), the mystery of the ghosts gets solved fairly quickly, and then, the story gets bigger and more complicated.
In order to stop the base under siege, the Doctor decides to head back in time to the moment when the base didn’t exist at all, and the Fisher King’s strange spacecraft/hearse showed up. But, just as he does that, the Doctor also learns that at some point in the past, he too will be murdered, because his ghost is haunting Clara and the survivors in the future.
Peter Capaldi and Colin McFarlane in “Before the Flood.”
Except, of course, the Doctor isn’t going to perish, and the ghost we see in the future/present isn’t a ghost at all. Instead, it’s a hologram that the Doctor created to look like one of the ghosts. And the reason why is laid at the very beginning of the second part, “Before the Flood,” in which Capaldi gives a hilarious, rock n’ roll explanation, directly to the camera, about the nature of a Bootstrap Paradox. As the Doctor reveals to Clara at the end of the episode, he only got the idea of programming the faux-ghost hologram with the names of the future potential victims to motivate himself in the past. But when he first had that idea is unclear. As he makes plain, he only imitated his own actions, which had already occurred, which suggests a gap in cause and effect, because the germination of the idea was directly impacted by its eventual result.
The Doctor’s kooky story at the top of “Before the Flood” floats a hypothetical scenario in which a time traveler becomes Ludwig van Beethoven, because the “real” Beethoven, and thus, Beethoven’s famous creations, don’t exist in the past, and the hypothetical time traveler only composes that music because of future knowledge of it already existing. Who has had fun with these kinds of paradoxes before: Donna Noble seems to have incepted the idea of Miss Marple in the mind of Agatha Christie in the Season 4 episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” which again, seems like a Bootstrap Paradox because Donna was inspired by the result of Miss Marple, which in turn, seems to have inspired the creation of Miss Marple in the past. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has a great joke along these lines, too: Scotty gives the formula to create transparent aluminum to a 20th-century engineer, and when Bones worries about changing history, Scotty scoffs, “How do we know he didn’t invent the thing?”
The point is, generally, sci-fi franchises like to joke around with this kind of thing and turn the whole exercise into a head-scratcher with no discernible answer. The 11th Doctor’s (Matt Smith) escape from the Pandorica a few seasons prior was probably the show’s most recent consequential paradox prior to “Before the Flood,” assuming you don’t count all the Doctors retroactively saving Gallifrey in “The Day of the Doctor.”
But the reason that “Under the Lake”/ “Before the Flood” changed the nature of paradox stories in Who is all connected to tone. Once the Doctor sees his own ghost, there’s a moment where he truly accepts that version of the future can’t be changed. He even tries to break the rules by taking the TARDIS back to the future before the temporal loop is complete, but the TARDIS firmly doesn’t let him. This isn’t unheard of in Doctor Who, but it is interesting because there’s a fatalist element at play here.
The Doctor (Peter Capaldi) and Clara (Jenna Coleman) face the future in "Under the Lake."
The Doctor can’t actually change the future; he can only manipulate his perception of what he’s seen and imagine another outcome. In other words, the Doctor perceives that he’s glimpsed something that looks like a ghost of himself, and has to do everything in his power to make the future match that perception.
The reason this is so great is that perception and true meaning aren’t identical. The Doctor manages to save the day by tricking himself with his own belief in the inescapability of destiny. This is a victory, technically, but the writing from Whithouse and performance from Capaldi make it feel like a tenuous one. The Doctor doesn’t seem happy or pleased with himself about this outcome, at least not as much as usual. And, we’re left with a sense of dread, all because we’ve figured out that the Doctor can’t always change his own future, just as much as he can’t do anything about his past.
