aka Doctor Who: The Movie
Plot synopsis
The Doctor is transferring the remains of his nemesis, The Master, back to his home planet of Gallifrey. He is able to come back to life though in the form of slime and causes the TARDIS to land in San Francisco in 1999.
As soon as The Doctor exits the TARDIS, he is shot and rushed to hospital for an emergency operation. Grace, a female surgeon, accidentally causes his death. When he regenerates to become the eighth Doctor Wh, he asks Grace to help him.
The Master takes over a man’s body and with the help of Chang Lee, a misguided youth, plots to take over The Doctor’s body.
The final showdown takes place inside the TARDIS just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, as the Master is about to destroy the Earth.
The Master kills Chang Lee and starts to transfer the Doctor’s unused lives to himself. Grace runs to the control panel and diverts the energy of the TARDIS causing it to go into a temporal orbit.
When Grace returns, she is freeing The Doctor from his chains, but The Master kills her. The Doctor kills The Master in a fight. Time then runs backwards, so Chang Lee and Grace come back to life.
The Doctor resets the controls of the TARDIS, so that it travels forwards to midnight on New Year’s Eve. Grace and Chang Lee leave to continue their lives on Earth, while The Doctor takes off for another adventure in his TARDIS.
My comments
The Doctor tells Gareth to answer the second question on his mid-term exam. He tells Grace that Gareth’s destiny is to save the human race several times.
When she asks about her future, he says, “The Universe hangs by such a delicate thread of coincidences, it is useless to meddle with it unless, like me, you are a Time Lord.”
When the TARDIS went back in time, if Grace and Chang Lee came back to life, why didn’t The Master? The film failed to explain this.
The Doctor asks Grace and Chang Lee if they would like him to return them to 29 December. They say they would not want to live through that again, so he drops them off at midnight on New Year’s Eve.
As The Master is dead, they would have been dropped off on the original timeline. Therefore, it makes no sense that they would they have had to live through all that again.
And finally, if the TARDIS had returned any earlier than at the exact time it left, then they may have met another version of themselves.
Summary of time travel
The Doctor’s comment about a “delicate thread” implies a double-well timeline. He was confident of not changing the timeline himself but did not want to give away too much about the future in case it caused the timeline to diverge away.
In the diagram below, the present moment is when the Doctor arrives, which causes a small divergence. He realises that The Master is going to stop the timeline from converging again by destroying the Earth at midnight. So the Doctor goes back to a point in time before they arrived, which allows the original timeline to be restored.
The TARDIS then travels forward again and lands on Earth just after midnight. They are happy to find the Earth intact, which means the timeline was indeed successfully restored.
Category of time travel
Science fiction: time-travel vehicle
Model of time
Open past, open future with a double-well timeline.
