Time Travel. A History

This is London, the year 2007, and the writing on the wall is signed “Love from the Doctor (1969).” You, the viewer, know the Doctor as the protagonist of the long-running and multiply reincarnated television series Doctor Who. The program had its first go-round on the BBC in 1963, inspired partly by The Time Machine—not the book so much as the George Pal movie, released three years before. The Doctor is a survivor of the ancient alien race of Time Lords. He travels through time and space in a vessel called the TARDIS, which for reasons understood only by the most devoted fans has the permanent outward form of a twentieth-century blue British police telephone kiosk. Although the Doctor is an alien from far, far away, with the entire universe at his disposal, his travels are highly Earth centered, and his time-travel adventures favor historical tourism in the style of E. Nesbit’s magic amulet and Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine. He meets Napoleon, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Kublai Khan, Marco Polo, and many English kings and queens. He swaps tradecraft with Einstein. He discovers a time-traveling stowaway called Herbert, whose calling card gives his name as H. G. Wells. Time travel in Doctor Who is always good for jokes. Occasionally, however, the problems and paradoxes come to the foreground—never more acutely, never more cleverly than in the story of Sally Sparrow, the episode titled “Blink,” written by Steven Moffat and broadcast in 2007.

Still baffled by the writing on the wall, Sally returns to the abandoned house with her friend Kathy Nightingale. Sally loves old things, she says.^*2 We already know that old houses are redolent of time travel. Kathy wanders offscreen. The doorbell rings. Sally answers. A young man hands her a letter from his late grandmother, Kathy Nightingale: “My dearest Sally Sparrow. If my grandson has done as he promises he will, then as you read these words it has been mere minutes since we last spoke—for you. For me, it has been over sixty years.”

We have a puzzle to solve, we viewers and Sally both. We’re getting hints. There are monsters about. Their victims are liable to be transported into the past, willy-nilly, with no way to return.

If you were trapped in the past, how would you communicate with the future? In a general way, we are all trapped in the past and we are all communicating with the future, via books and epitaphs and time capsules and the rest. But we seldom need to message particular future people at specific future times. A letter for hand delivery by a trusted courier might work, or writing on the wall of an old house. In Terry Gilliam’s 1995 movie Twelve Monkeys (an elaborate remake of La jetée) the unwilling time traveler played by Bruce Willis dials a mysterious telephone number and leaves voice mail. These are one-way messages. Can anyone do better?

Kathy’s brother Larry works at a DVD store—that is, he is a specialist in a particular short-lived information medium (“new, second-hand, and rare”). We glimpse television screens in the background. Many of them display the face of one man, whom regular viewers will recognize as none other than the Doctor. Why is he on TV? He seems to be trying to say something urgent. “Don’t blink!” for example. He speaks in disconnected fragments. He can be heard explaining in the classic time-traveler tradition: “People don’t understand time. It’s not what you think it is.”

Larry has discovered this man in a hidden track on seventeen different DVDs: “Always hidden away, always a secret,” he tells Sally. “It’s like he’s a ghost DVD extra.” Sometimes Larry senses he’s hearing one half of a conversation.

The screen starts up again. The Doctor appears to be answering the big question. “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect,” he explains, “but actually from a nonlinear, non-subjective viewpoint it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly…timey wimey…stuff.”

“Started well, that sentence,” Sally snarks (for who among us has never talked back to the TV?).

The on-screen Doctor answers, “It got away from me, yeah.”

SALLY: Okay, that was weird. Like you can hear me.

THE DOCTOR: Well, I can hear you.