Narrative and paradoxes in Doctor Who 'time loop' stories

For a television show about a time-traveling alien and his mostly human, mostly female companions, Doctor Who, until very recently, has not engaged in any great depth with the complexities of time travel. For the bulk of the Doctor Who televised canon, time travel was simply a device to allow the Doctor to have an adventure within a particular historical period. The potential of time travel to meddle with cause and effect and ultimately narrative sensibility has been generally avoided by Doctor Who's writers and producers through intratext posited or natural laws of time that prevent or mitigate the contradictions of time travel. This chapter focuses on two Doctor Who broadcast stories that were directly concerned with time travel: "Day of the Daleks" and "Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS." In each narrative, the "this happens and then that" is maintained through "time loops" that are bracketing at the beginning/end of the stories. Within the loop, continuity is maintained while the overall narrative remains sensible outside of the loop, with the loop revealed as a "paradox," a "future-that-was-not." These time-loop stories are important for what is affirmed about living as a "being-in-time." They remind us that being-in-time involves both subjective and objective time. As creatures thrown into a technological society where objective time appears to be in ascendance, time loops, paradoxically, remind us that to be human, there is more to "time" than objective time. That the subjective experience of the passage of time-the time of fallible memory and unknowable future-is as important for human beings as the hard ordering of cause and effect