As a follow-up from my previous post, this will be the first of my personal Doctor Who headcanon shares, which I intend to make a regular feature of this blog. These snippets of my fanboy imagination are inspired by the fandom “headcanon” accounts on Tumblr, e.g. this, this and this, although I intend to make mine a little less, er… Tumblr-y. So without further ado…
The Doctor really did activate the Moment and destroyed Gallifrey and all the Daleks to end the Time War in his original timeline, it was only when he subsequently went back to change events in The Day of the Doctor did the timelines diverge, or the original timeline was overwritten (depending on how you want to look at it).
Like I’ve said before, I don’t like what Moffatt and Co. did by nullifying the Doctor’s role in ending the Time War, regardless of DOTD’s quality as a self-contained feature. My adoption of this particular headcanon is my way of compromising with Moffatt: the Doctor did use the Moment to end the Time War, but he also didn’t. It’s a timey-wimey thing. Contradictory events of two timelines can co-exist at the same time, as Amy said in The Wedding of River Song:
AMY: “I killed someone, Madame Kovarian, in cold blood.”
RIVER: “In an aborted timeline, in a world that never was.”
AMY: “Yeah, but I can remember it, so it happened, so I did it.”
And in the minisode Good Night:
AMY: “When I first met you I didn’t have parents, I never had parents. And then you did whatever it was you did and rebooted the universe and suddenly I had parents, and I’ve always had parents, and I remember both lives in my head, both of them, in my head, at the same time.”
DOCTOR: “…Time is being rewritten all around us, every day. People think their memories are bad, but their memories are fine. The past is really like that.”
So, I know it probably seems like I’m breaking one of my headcanon rules with this one (Rule 6: “it wasn’t a timey-wimey thing”), but here’s an instance where show actually establishes, or at least leaves open the possibility (it’s left ambiguous as to whether the Doctor actually did use the Moment in the original timeline), that two different timelines have taken place surrounding the same events. In any case, I intended that rule to apply to “headcanoning” something out of history because one doesn’t like it without any onscreen suggestion that there was any timey-wimey business going on.
gallifreyan ramblings 