milne@uci-icse (06/30/85)
From: Alastair Milne <milne@uci-icse> The background of Dr. Who deals very much with controlling time. That is part of why the Time Lords are called "Time Lords". However, there is little evidence on the series that Gallifrey actually exercises such control anymore, and in fact, their habits of non-interference and withdrawal from the universe strongly suggest that they don't. However, time is most certainly controlled in two or three Dr. Who episodes. In "Meglos", the adversary jams the TARDIS, and therefore the Doctor, Romana, and K9, in a "chronic hysteresis loop", in which the same period of time repeats indefinitely, with a gap of normal time as the loop is "rewound". Interestingly, they are aware of the loop -- which starts driving them bonkers. In "The Armageddon Factor", the Doctor uses the nearly-completed Key to Time, with an artificial last segment, to put an attacking space ship into a time loop, so that for a couple of hours (or some such period) the ship is always 2 seconds away from attacking. In fact, the whole premise of the Key to Time was that it would permit its possessor to control the flow of time. The White Guardian wanted it to stop time temporarily so as to right a few things with the Universe before it fell to pieces. Earlier in the series, in "The Pyramids of Mars", the Doctor uses the time control from the TARDIS to shift the end of Sutekh's time-space tunnel several thousand years into the future, far past his (Sutekh's) lifetime: he would emerge dead of old age. Though it may be due to odd editing, it often seems to me that time inside the TARDIS must bear the same arbitrary relationship to time outside it, that space inside it bears to space outside it. It often seems that the Doctor has only just shut the door, going inside, when the TARDIS dematerialises, or before he comes back out with something that must have taken him half an hour, inside, to find. Rather like the Pevenseys' visits to Narnia. Alastair Milne