Doctor Who: What’s Stopping the TARDIS From Returning to Earth?

Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who episode “The Robot Revolution”.

Oh, the infinite promise of the TARDIS. That little blue box can take you through all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will, every star that ever was… except when it doesn’t. That is what Belinda Chandra (no Miss) learned in the Doctor Who series 15 opener, when the Doctor tried and failed to take her back to Earth on May 24^th 2025 (the airdate of this season’s penultimate episode, if you were wondering whether the finale will be a two-parter).

Like many of the Doctor’s companions before her, Belinda will find her journey in the TARDIS is a literal Odyssey – a long and winding journey home interspersed with getting lost and attacked by monsters, and even when you get there, you’ll probably have a fight on your hands.

But why is she having such a hard time getting back?

It’s Not Just the Doctor’s Driving (This Time)

The Doctor’s first companions, Ian and Barbara, took so long to get home simply because the Doctor didn’t know how to drive. Tegan Jovanka had similar trouble getting the Fifth Doctor to drop her off at Heathrow Airport for similar reasons. Even the Thirteenth Doctor’s “Fam”, Yasmin, Graham and Ryan, took a few goes between “The Ghost Monument” and “Arachnids in the UK” to get back to Earth.

At the very best of times, the Doctor simply hasn’t always been the best navigator. Or as the TARDIS itself put it in “The Doctor’s Wife”, it takes the Doctor where they need to go, which is not always the same as where they want to go.

But this time things are a bit more serious than the Doctor not being able to drive properly, and he’d know that if he ever actually looked at all those instruments on the TARDIS console rather than sticking his head out the door as if he was checking for rain. Because despite landing what he called “halfway” between Planet Missbelindachandraone and Earth, the empty space the TARDIS landed in was filled with debris including a London cab, the Eiffel Tower, an Egyptian Pyramid, and of course, the Statue of Liberty, because have you ever had an apocalyptic event if you didn’t destroy the Statue of Liberty? Something has happened to planet Earth, and on the day that Belinda left it.

This is hardly a new problem for the Doctor either. Depending on you count it Doctor Who is 62, 20 or (argue in the comments on the canonical age of the Doctor themself) – at this point they’ve done everything. But when the Doctor tried to return to Earth after it had been whisked away by the Daleks in “The Stolen Earth”, he was still able to land at the right point in time and space where there should have been an Earth. There are bigger problems here than the Earth simply not being there anymore (although the people of Earth might beg to differ).

Places the TARDIS cannot go

Whether or not the planet Earth is still in place on May 24^th 2025 (in Doctor Who I mean), something is blocking the TARDIS from actually getting there. As to what that could be, the answer is – a plot device that Russell T Davies invented to justify keeping Belinda on the TARDIS for the whole series, probably something we’ve never seen before with a name like the Continuum Nexus or a Contemporaneous Schism (not a Time Fracture, the Doctor fixed that one).

But if we want to round up the usual suspects, we have got some clues as to things that have stopped the TARDIS getting where it wants to be before.

First and foremost, there is the “Time Lock”, because while Russell T Davies will happily drop poetry like “the Could-have-been King with his army of Meanwhiles and Never-weres” one minute, he can get extremely Ronseal Quick Dry and Wood stain the next. The Time Lock is what sealed off the Last Great Time War from the rest of the spacetime continuum, barring anything from getting in or out except the Doctor, a last Dalek, the Dalek Emperor, the Cult of Skaro, Davros and his armies (rescued by Dalek Caan), the Master, and the entire planet of Gallifrey (twice). That might seem like a lot but it’s still pretty good for something containing a war across all of time and space.

So, it could probably contain the single date of May 24^th 2025. And if you’re me, or a lot of Doctor Who fans, you’re probably asking “What about May 23rd? Or May 25^th? Why not pop back to May 17th, spend a relaxing week in the south of France, then come back refreshed for your next shift at the hospital?

Or if you want to be really sure, travel forward to the year 4202 AD, book into the Time Hotel from last year’s Christmas special “Joy to the World”, get Joy’s Room on Boxing Day and sneak out while the Doctor from that episode isn’t looking (he’s still staying there for a year while he waits for another time portal to reopen), then spend five months going backpacking while you wait for pre-May 24^th Belinda to get abducted by robots.

(While we’re here – if something globally devastating has happened to Earth midway through 2025, why didn’t the Doctor in “Joy the World” notice while he was living at the Sandringham Hotel? Did he take a break from the hotel to go scuba diving with Donna Noble?)

If all these workarounds sound familiar, that’s because fans were making the same arguments a few years ago when the Doctor revealed he could not go back to 1930s New York to retrieve Amy and Rory after the Weeping Angels got them. Immediately fans were thinking “He’s immortal, why not go back to the 1920s and wait for a bit? Why not land the TARDIS in Washington and catch a bus? Why not meet up with Amy and Rory in the 1950s and have a catch up?”

While the episode itself seems like it leaves these plot threads dangling, on Blogtor Who then-showrunner Steven Moffat felt safer unleashing the more nerdy explanation, “New York would still burn. The point being, he can’t interfere. Here’s the ‘fan answer’ – this is not what you’d ever put out on BBC One, because most people watch the show and just think, ‘well there’s a gravestone so obviously he can’t visit them again’. But the ‘fan answer’ is, in normal circumstances he might have gone back and said, ‘look we’ll just put a headstone up and we’ll just write the book’. But there is so much scar tissue, and the number of paradoxes that have already been inflicted on that nexus of timelines, that it will rip apart if you try to do one more thing. He has to leave it alone. Normally he could perform some surgery, this time too much surgery has already been performed. But imagine saying that on BBC One!”

Could we be looking at something similar on May 24^th 2025? We already know that there are paradoxes at play. The whole of “The Robot Revolution” is essentially a bootstrap paradox. Belinda tells the robots to kidnap Alan, who they install as Robot King and who then orders them to kidnap Belinda. There is also the question of the star certificate, which somehow travels from Belinda’s bedroom wall to a point thousands of years in the past of planet Missbelindachandraone. Now that certificate has touched its future self, turning Belinda’s ex into a sperm and egg, and that paradox has got it aboard the TARDIS, where I’m sure there is plenty of potential for new paradoxes. Could that build of paradoxes be what is stopping the TARDIS from landing?

These theories, the buildup of paradoxes, the time lock used to contain a war, the imminent-yet-somehow-unnoticed-by-the-Doctor destruction of Earth, all point towards the elephant in the room. The title of the final episode of this season of Doctor Who. Due for broadcast on May 31^st this year, that episode is called “The Reality War”. The little video ident used to announce it shows us a road sign in Hackney, the brick wall behind it cracking apart in a decisively sci-fi timey wimey sort of a way. It is precisely the sort of title a man who likes Ronseal names like “Time Lock” would come up with if he wanted to one-up something called a “Time War”.

And whatever a Reality War is, it seems like Belinda will be in the middle of it.

Doctor Who continues with “Lux” on Saturday April 19 on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK, and on Disney+ around the world.

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