DW Question That Has Been Bothering Me Forever

[alixtii]

Consider these two facts:

1) In all of New Who, we have not seen any Time Lord other than the Doctor. This is despite the fact that all the Time Lords were time travellers (or at least had the potential to be; presumably some of them stayed home and raised families and didn't go gallivanting through time). As a result of his ending the Time War by wiping out both the Time Lords and the Daleks (or so he thought), the Time Lords no longer have any influence over time and space, because they don't exist anymore. The Doctor is the last of the Timelords. In order for all this to be true, it is necessary that not only do they no longer exist but, in the new altered timestream brought about by the Doctor's actions, they never existed to begin with.

2) Civilizations within linear time remember the Time Lords. Jabe, Mr. Finch, Margaret?

Both of these facts are clearly canon, but I cannot for my life figure out how to reconcile them. They seem like they should be mutually contradictory; if 1 is true then 2 should be false, and vice versa. I understand that Who likes to play fast and loose with temporal mechanics, making stuff up as they go along, and in principle I approve, but this paradox seems to be so glaring that I just can't get past it. Yet there has to be some way to fanwank it, and I wouldn't be surprised if those more involved in the fandom than I am have already come up with some sort of answer. Any ideas?

Comments

[booster17.livejournal.com]

1) Higher, ie evolutionally challenged races were affected differently by the wiping out of the Time Lords. The Gelth were reduced down to gaseous beings, but still kept all their knowledge. It's only us poor stupid apes that never noticed a thing.

2) - They exist/will exist now. We just haven't seen them yet. Just as the Daleks were reborn in this new universe (similiar to the Cybermen), a new set of history including them occured.

3) All anyone knows from history is every now and then, somebody calling themselves a Time Lord turns up and changes things around. There's at least ten different descriptions of these Time Lords, therefore indicating a civilisation.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

1) That's a good point, and I can pretty much get myself to handwave the part where it makes no sense (because I understand it doesn't bear too much overthinking). I'm just not convinced its applicable to all the species we saw demonstrate memory of the Time Lords' civilization.

2) Well, I don't doubt that we'll see other Time Lords eventually. But if they managed to escape the aftermath of the Time War, the way the Daleks did, that's different than if they existed in this timestream's past. The latter is apparently not the case, because if the Time Lords are still in the past somewhere, why can't they control travel between parallel worlds "anymore" (whatever that'd mean)?

We didn't see the Daleks independently develop within this timeline, after all, the way we did with the Cybermen in the parallel world. They were simply shielded somehow from the effects of the Doctor altering the timestream, as was the Doctor himself (I am assuming).

3) But the point is that those who remember (like Jabe) recognize the fact that the civilization no longer exists; they're not mistakenly confusing 10 Doctors with an entire current civilization.

Also, it's not clear that One throught Eight are still running around the altered timestream, is it? In fact, they can't be, because then they'd be interacting with other Time Lords like the Master, and then the Doctor wouldn't be the last Time Lord, would he? So there can only be five different reports of the Doctor at most--incarnations Nine through Thirteen.