Are "Timelocks" of the kind mentioned in the series "Dr. Who" a naturally occuring phenomena?

Question

Do timelocks occur naturally, without inducement? Do they always occur where the past is concerned? This would imply that travel into an elasped past is impossible, and that only an excursion into a nearby parallel reality is possible (caused by the arrival of a person into that reality).

Is the past "timelocked" and therefore cannot be undone, contrary to much science fiction speculation?

Answer 1

Timelocks are not natural; they are a consequence of history.

Timelocks were mentioned in two episodes of Dr. Who this season.

In one episode the Dr. and his companion Donna came to Pompeii on the day before volcano day.  A lot of human history is based on that explosion so it is an event that had to happen; making it timelocked.  However, he could still rescue a few people AND his intervention caused the volcano to explode by ending the alien's influence on Mt. Etna.  His presence, his actions and the events that he changed were part of history and necessary for history to happen as it was supposed to.

The time war era is probably timelocked not just because it is such an important point in history but because there was so much time twisting done; enough to damage the very fabric of reality.  Otherwise those in the war would keep coming back to the event to try and change the result.  There has to be a limit to how much change is allowed.  The Doctor spends most of his life dancing on that threshold.

Violating a timelock changes future history and can create a time quake.  A powerful enough timequake could destroy the fabric of reality.  The bigger the timelock (the more important the event or the more it affects things) the larger the possible timequake.  A timequake would be the complete undoing of past events to restructure the time line into its current (and changed) form.

The past is in flux, and the Doctor changes it all the time, mostly by just being there.  Occasionally he is just an observer, or is involved in minor events, but often his presence is part of the history of the event.  If he didn't interfere with the aliens in Mt. Etna then that would have caused a timequake.  Usually what he does doesn’t change history very much, but often he his a critical person to the event, and often he works behind the scenes.  When he fought against the manikins in the first episode he prevented an invasion of Earth and no one, but Rose Tyler knew it, she loved that fact that this was a typical day for the Doctor.  He does a lot of that, he foils plots right and left and is as much a tool of time itself as a traveler.  He has free will and choice so he can make the bad decisions and feel the pain of that choice, but his actual choices are far more limited.  This is why he lost Rose Tyler, this is why he had to erase Donna’s memory and why he does a lot of things that he does.

The doctor mentioned that he sees the raw time stream, he sees the events, the possible conclusions, variables and changes all superimposed on each other.  When he is in a timelocked event then he sees less, because less alternates are possible.  This vision would give him vision into the future, up until the changes his presence causes grow too large.  He is like a bubble and everything warps and wraps around him as he moves across the time stream.

The Doctor could go back to the time of the great Time War and fight the Daleks possibly saving his race, but equally possibly giving the victory to the Daleks.  Therefore he avoids doing it, for the fabric of reality to remain whole he has to.

In this season's finale the Daleks could have gone back and broken the Timelock on the Timewar themselves, but that would render them a paradox and so destroy them.  They would face the same risks as the Doctor in changing the time stream; with the additional risk of snuffing out the entire universe.

There are laws that even the Doctor can't break, like the translation between dimensions.  He had to send Rose back to her home dimension and he had to remove his alter version from his dimension because the universe couldn't stand two doctors at once.  Of course as we see in the series time and the universe are flexible and paradoxes are allowed for a time.  The Doctor has to be careful to not make any changes that would wipe himself out.  He never can be sure just what the threshold of change will bring and what consequences his influence will have, but being a Time Lord he CAN predict that threshold, see the consequences and sense what has to be done.  He has vision of the time stream.

This is why when he meets the archeologist for the first time in the planetary Library he can't let her tell him what is going to happen or it will change events.  Just like he couldn't tell the archeologist that she was going to die on that (to her) future trip or it would damage his own timeline. She saved him and died, so to save him she had to remain dead.  It is a sacrifice that he often has to make and everyone is painful to him.  That is part of the appeal of the character.

The only reason why the alternate dimension Rose Tyler was allowed back into the Doctor's dimension was because the Daleks were messing so many things up; changing the history of 26 planets by moving them and threatening to destroy their races and all of time so that they could be the only life form in existence.  This had huge reproductions and affected alternate dimensions that were based on our own dimension.

A clever bit of writing to make the plot complex, to allow for the return of Billy Piper's character (Rose Tyler) and to give her what she ached for her own human Doctor.  It also tied in two other TV series (Torchwood on the BBC and the Sarah Jane Chronicles on Sci-Fi) and brought back some old friends like K-9 and Micky (or was he Ricky?).  However, it cost Donna all her memories and it cost the Doctor his latest companion.

One constant theme is that everyone around him is temporary.  His companions come and go and if he is with them too long they start to age and die while he keeps on staying the same age (the same problem proposed in the Highlander series).  He alone is timeless and unchanging.  He also has to shoulder the burden that he alone is the master of time’s events and must spend his life traveling from crisis to crisis, doomed to forever be a puppet of the time stream itself.  He is both a Time Lord and a pawn, in some future what he has done in the past is a part of history and he has no choice, but to do it.