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Doctor Who named the Timey-Wimey Ball trope, so naturally it uses it quite frequently.

As a rough general rule, Stable Time Loops work, but doing something that will prevent you from going back in the first place has varying degrees of bad consequences. The specifics, however, are a bit more complicated... At least the show is honest about the fact that it's not consistent.


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    General 
  • It's widely assumed, though never confirmed on-screen, that the Time Lords deliberately modified Gallifrey's own timeline to prevent any potential rogue time traveller with a grudge from ever altering the Time Lords' own history. It's also often assumed that whatever this is ensures Time Lords can only meet each other "in the right order" according to some absolute Gallifreyan timeframe, which is why for example a later incarnation of the Master can't just travel back to somewhere and somewhen they know an earlier incarnation of the Doctor's going to be and drop a piano on him.
    • This idea gets somewhat subverted in the Expanded Universe when various incarnations of the Doctor and the Master end up having encounters with each other out-of-sequence at various points, but this can be handwaved away in-narrative as most of these occur when the characters are dealing with higher-dimensional forces that disrupt the usual rule of time travel, such as the Gods of Ragnarok or the Ravenous.
  • The New Series complicates things with its back story of the (imperfectly) timelocked Last Great Time War and the destruction of Gallifrey. Especially given Gallifrey was already destroyed (and retroactively prevented from ever having existed at all, possibly) in a completely different Time War if you read the Wilderness Years novels...
  • To add to the weirdness that is time-travel in Doctor Who, look at its opinion on the Blinovitch Limitation Effect. In some cases it seems to suggest that Never the Selves Shall Meet, lest they cause reality to shatter. Or maybe that's only if there's another paradox nearby. Sometimes it causes memory loss if the two touch, like what happened to The Brigadier. Maybe the same object touching will just cause sparks. Or maybe nothing will happen at all except flirting. It's just whatever happens to work for the plot.
  • The Doctor has also stated in the past that his knowledge of history is "perfect"; this may mean that he knows exactly what he may or may not change.
    • And if there's any discrepancy, it's obviously history that got it wrong!
    • Or the Doctor is just flat-out lying. "Rule One – The Doctor lies", after all...

    Original Series 
  • Perhaps the show's earliest use of this is "The Space Museum". The First Doctor and his companions arrive at a planet with a space museum in it, but due to the TARDIS "jumping a time track", they arrive Just One Second Out of Sync, rendering them invisible and inaudible to anyone else. While there, they see themselves trapped in museum display cases. When their Invisible Main Character status wears off, the cases go away, they're still inside the museum, and they have to escape or otherwise find a way to avoid the fate they saw for themselves. The Doctor claims that time has alternatives.
  • "Day of the Daleks" may have been the Trope Codifier for the Timey-Wimey Ball in Doctor Who. Guerrillas from an alternate 22nd century try to assassinate Sir Reginald Styles to prevent him from disrupting a peace conference, which caused wars enabling the Daleks to invade Earth. In the process, they disrupt the conference themselves. However, the Doctor is able to travel back from this alternate future and stop the guerrillas.
  • The Doctor recognizes the Sontarans in "The Time Warrior", complete with asking about their interminable war against the Rutan Host, despite them never appearing in the series before. It's shown 12 years later that the Second Doctor had encountered them before, along with the Sixth Doctor. It's also possible, given that he's already been travelling for a few centuries, that he's heard of them or met them in a Noodle Incident; this first encounter features in the Big Finish audio "The Sontarans".
  • "Pyramids of Mars" has the Doctor show Sarah Jane how time has its alternatives. Even though Sarah Jane is from 1980 and knows that the world wasn't destroyed in 1911 by Sutekh, the Doctor takes her to 1980 and shows that Earth has been destroyed as they didn't stop Sutekh escaping. This is partly accounted for, as the Doctor says that individuals can shape the future but only powerful beings like Sutekh can outright destroy it.
  • In "The Five Doctors", the Doctors remember their previous encounters with each other. Two also remembers Omega just fine. He also knows that Jamie and Zoe had their minds wiped, even though that happened just before he turned into Three, so there's no way for him to be aware of that when he's just travelling about freely. This was eventually explained away by the "Season 6B" fan-theory-turned-official-explanation, which has the Time Lords' Celestial Intervention Agency scooping up the Doctor after his trial and forcing him to run missions for them, culminating in his regeneration and the beginning of Season 7. This theory has been officially confirmed in spin-off media such as the Past Doctor Adventures novel "World Game" and the Big Finish audio "The Final Beginning".

    New Series 
  • "Father's Day" sums it up pretty well. Pete Tyler being alive created a paradox, and anything else would make it worse. So yeah, interacting with one's past self makes sparks, and a paradox fills the air with gas fumes. Sort of. Not really at all, but if that helps just think of it like that.
  • "The Parting of the Ways": The Doctor says that the TARDIS protects itself from paradox. Whenever and wherever the TARDIS lands, the events that led it to go there, and led to the world it's in once it's there, become unalterable.
  • "The Girl in the Fireplace": The time portals that include the titular fireplace are so unusual that the Doctor has to make up new terms to describe them, and once the characters use them, the TARDIS can't enter the same region.
  • The Trope Naming episode, "Blink", actually involves a mostly-internally-consistent Stable Time Loop. It's the show as a whole that fulfills the trope by being inconsistent.
  • When the Tenth and Fifth Doctors meet up during Children in Need Special "Time Crash", Ten is in shocked disbelief to be seeing his former self, then goes on to use memories he picked up as Five meeting his future self to defuse the situation. When the illogic of this is brought up (not to mention the violation of multi-Doctor meet-up Canon established from the other three times this has happened), both Doctors mumble something about "Timey Wimey" and move on.
  • "The Fires of Pompeii": Donna asks why the Doctor will thwart aliens but not stop a particular historical catastrophe, and the Doctor replies that some points in time are fixed, while others are in flux. Him being a Time Lord allows him to perceive which is which and act accordingly, even against his nobler instincts. It's revealed in the climax that the reason he can't change the catastrophe is because he's the one responsible for making it happen.
  • More about fixed points in time in The Sarah Jane Adventures. Sarah Jane's parents dying is a fixed point in time because she has seen it, remembers it, and knows it happened. Changing that would be bad.
  • River Song. Her encounters with the Doctor are not synchronized at all. The journal checking seen in "Silence in the Library" and "The Impossible Astronaut", as well as the "spotter's guide" from "The Time of Angels", seem to indicate that she meets the Doctor in a random order, but when River's past/future with the Doctor is brought up in Series 6, it's implied that they're traveling in practically reverse order — the kiss at the end of "Day of the Moon" is implied to be River's last because it is the Doctor's first. This is despite the fact that they clearly aren't meeting in reverse order, since the Doctor meets her months after she is born four times after he "first" meets her. She also doesn't recognize Rory in "The Big Bang", despite seeming to know him already in "The Impossible Astronaut", which is earlier in her timeline (though that was most likely due to him having been erased from history at that point). In short, their meetings are mostly random, and any given time the two meet up may be synchronized, but — overall — they're moving in opposite directions.
    River: Rule 1.
    Amy: The Doctor lies.
    River: So do I. All the time. Have to. Spoilers.
  • The Doctor tries to mess with a fixed point in "The Waters of Mars". It doesn't end well. He explicitly states that there are fixed points in history which cannot be changed. Those points in history greatly affect the future and allow for time to follow a more or less consistent path. Anything he does to try and change history will simply cause the event to occur regardless. Even the Daleks are shown to respect this. The Doctor, feeling frisky, tries to alter one. Events remind him that even a Time Lord has limits.
  • In "The End of Time", the Doctor attempts to explain a Time Lock to Wilfred.
    The Doctor: They're sealed inside of a bubble. It's not a bubble, but just think of a bubble.
  • The cracks in time running rampant in Series 5 did so much damage that it's implied they broke time itself. They are capable of retgoning anything they consume, as shown in "Flesh and Stone". However, in the same story, River tells the Doctor she'll see him again when the Pandorica opens. In those events, shown in "The Pandorica Opens"/"Flesh and Stone", the cracks are sealed, even though River, in her own future, was able to see and interact with one, therefore being in the cracked universe, even though she had already witnessed the events that lead to the cracks being repaired. Basically, they outright broke time travel logic.
  • A "turnpoint moment" is mentioned in "Cold Blood"; the Doctor describes it as an "opportunity" here, stating that the rocky peace negotiations going on in this episode could really change the future to an outcome where humans and Silurians live in peace ever after. The eventual results are... mixed.
  • The whole of "The Big Bang" is built on this trope: The Doctor saving the day and escaping from the Pandorica is built on an ontological paradox — he shows up already escaped to enlist Auton!Rory in effecting his escape. The Doctor even explains that this would normally cause drastic side effects for the universe, but luckily the universe had already been destroyed. The affair was referred to in a later episode:
    River: He's interacting with his own past. It could rip a hole in the Universe.
    Amy: Yes, but he's done it before!
    Rory: And in fairness the Universe did blow up.
  • "A Christmas Carol" also features this heavily. It starts with the Doctor showing a video Kazran made as a boy to the older him — and travelling back in time to when he made it, leaving Kazran watching a video of the Doctor interfering in his past as his own memories change to reflect that this had happened. Kazran then has memories of not growing up while being visited by the Doctor, and memories of being visited by the Doctor. He then ponders how he's never met the Doctor before tonight, but seems to have known him all his life. It ends with the Doctor showing the younger Kazran the man he turns into, leading to the older one having a change of heart partly brought on by realizing that he's turned into his father, and partly by him being retroactively altered by the experience of being horrified at seeing his older self as a boy. Oof. It's implied that this method is far from perfect, as Kazran's own mind-reading controls no longer recognize him, despite the fact that they should logically have been programmed for the Kazran that existed in the current timeline. Who knows? It is a Timey-Wimey Ball, after all.
    • This is explained in the episode. The controls don't recognize him because they were programmed by his father, and after all the changes the Doctor made, his father never gave him control.
  • Just because the DW section for this trope needs to be larger, it's used extensively in "The Girl Who Waited". The TARDIS crew happens upon the Two Streams health centre. They take people who have contracted a fatal disease and place them in the "fast" stream, symbolised by a red waterfall. They can live their whole life and age normally in only a day. Meanwhile, their loved ones are in the slow stream, symbolised by a green anchor, and can watch their lover/family/friend have a fruitful life. Unfortunately, it all goes wrong when Amy gets trapped in the fast stream. Eventually Rory manages to break in to save her, but 39 years have passed, leaving his wife old and bitter. He can jump back in time to save younger Amy, but can only do so with older!Amy's help. However, she doesn't want to be re-written and stop existing. Eventually they decide to save both of them by breaking the laws of causality; at the last minute the Doctor reveals that this is actually a paradox and leaves Old!Amy behind to die. Though she won't really, because in a few minutes she'll never have existed.
  • "The Wedding of River Song" finally shows what happens if you alter a fixed point too much. All of time collapses, happening at once. You'll have Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill riding around on his personal mammoth while they discuss the political pressures caused by the War of the Roses, greet a Roman Centurion, and see a Silurian doctor for a check-up. Meanwhile, pterodactyls are considered pests and Charles Dickens appears on the news to talk about his new Christmas special. Only some people will be able to hang on to their memories of "correct" time. The date and the time will never ever change. They are the date and the time of when the fixed point was supposed to happen. If allowed to continue, time itself will break, causing THE DESTRUCTION! OF REALITY! ITSELF!
  • "The Day of the Doctor":
    • The Eleventh Doctor is brought by the Moment to meet the Tenth Doctor and the War Doctor (an incarnation between the Eighth and the Ninth Doctors, whom the others don't recognize as a Doctor due to... questionable actions). The War Doctor gets annoyed at the childish things his future selves say, including "timey-wimey" (as stated by the Eleventh Doctor). The embarrassed Tenth Doctor (who invented the phrase) says he has no idea where the Eleventh Doctor picked this up.
    • This episode also features time travel that dives into The Multiverse theory when the Doctor changes an event in his own timeline (namely, the end of the Time War). There's a hint that this was how it always was afterwards due to the lack of negative consequences, and the fact that the universe perceived that time was unchanged (and the fact that once the episode is done, the two earlier Doctors won't remember). The other super-timey-wimey moment is that it took 13 different Doctors to make it work, including one that could only exist thanks to the events of the NEXT episode.
  • "Kill the Moon" gives us an inversion on fixed points. Where a fixed point is a historical event that must happen, what we get in "Kill the Moon" is a crossroads, in which a single decision by humanity could change its history for eons to come. Even the Doctor claims to be unable to see the ultimate outcome and, because he feels this is humanity's choice, refuses to help, leaving Clara to solve the crisis.
  • "Orphan 55": The Doctor's speech at the end about how Orphan 55 is only one potential future for the Earth out of many relies on the Multiverse theory of time travel (every action creates a new timeline). Apart from the Tenth Doctor's explanation about the existence of parallel universes in "Army of Ghosts", the show has never explicitly used this in all of its great timey-wimey history. It is possible, however, that the Doctor was just saying that in order to cheer up her companions... (In addition, the Doctor has encountered various conflicting and incompatible futures of humanity and the Earth, so this wouldn't exactly be the first time the show's done something like this).
  • "The Giggle" features the Celestial Toymaker returning to the prime universe while the Doctor and Donna are away for just a couple of days, during which time he's managed to somehow implement a century-spanning long game, challenge and best the various heavy hitters of the Whoniverse (he trapped the Master's essence in a gold tooth and claims to have defeated the Guardians and God), take the time to play Yahtzee with the Doctor's personal history, and run a Toy Shop in the middle of SOHO on the side for shits and giggles. This can be justified given his alien nature and, more importantly, Reality Warper abilities. On a more personal note, the crisis concludes with the Fourteenth Doctor undergoing a "bi-generation", where the Fifteenth Doctor exists simultaneously with his predecessor rather than Fourteen changing into him directly. Available evidence suggests that Fifteen has been essentially pulled from a point in the Doctor's future where, after Fourteen's rest and semi-retirement with the Nobles, Fourteen regenerates into Fifteen, allowing the latter to benefit from his "rehabilitation" while simultaneously existing alongside the former. This is similar to Clara Oswald's fate after "Hell Bent", where while she is destined to die in "Face the Raven", she has all the time in the universe to travel before she has to fulfil her destiny.

    Expanded Universe 
  • The novels have an equally insane version, in which the Eighth Doctor (infected by Faction Paradox biodata) ends up interfering slightly in the life of the Third Doctor, leading to him regenerating on the wrong planet and being infected by Faction Paradox biodata. Of course, Faction Paradox live and breathe this trope (as well as Temporal Paradox) at the best of times. It's their hat.
    • On a more minor note, the Eighth Doctor also had three encounters with the Master despite his enemy being essentially dead at this point in the Doctor's life; during The Eight Doctors, the Eighth saves the Third Doctor from an attack by the "Delgado" Master and spoke with the "Ainley" Master during the Sixth Doctor's trial, and Legacy of the Daleks saw him contribute to the events that caused the "Delgado" Master to be reduced to his burnt form.
  • The Doctor Who New Adventures had the concept that Time itself was a sentient entity who consciously fixed various timeline hiccups resulting from time travel with the Doctor as her champion.
  • "Goth Opera", the first novel in the Doctor Who Missing Adventures, sees the Fifth Doctor facing a vampire lord in the 1990s who was accidentally brought to Earth by the Seventh Doctor in "Blood Harvest" in the 1930s.
  • Big Finish Doctor Who has used this trope from early on.
    • The 8th Doctor saving Charlotte Pollard from her death on the R101 causes a paradox, meaning anti-time starts infecting the Universe, causing odd things with history to happen during the Eighth Doctor audio stories leading up to "Zagreus". For example, Shakespeare has disappeared from history (which is explained in "The Time of the Daleks") and Benjamin Franklin was President. Finally, in "Neverland", Charley helps save the Web of Time, meaning that the paradox and anti-time infection become part of the Web of Time. To complicate matters further, later events lead to Charley believing that the Eighth Doctor has been killed shortly before she is rescued by the Sixth Doctor, leaving her trying to avoid giving away too much about his future even though she knows the Eighth Doctor didn't recognise her when they met for the first time. This matter is resolved when other parties agree to edit the Sixth Doctor's memory so that Charley's name and face are replaced with someone else, as well as giving the replacement companion a different departure.
    • "Seasons of Fear" has a very complicated Timey-Wimey Ball. The Doctor goes back in time to stop Sebastian Grayle, because Grayle prompted him in an artificial alternate timeline in which the Doctor hadn't even met him yet. Grayle then develops a hatred for him, eventually leading to him creating an artificial alternate timeline. To make this more complicated, it isn't clear how the Doctor met this Sebastian Grayle, as in 1806, Grayle goes back in time and is killed by his past self.
    • "The Foe from the Future" features the Doctor giving various speeches about how the human brain just isn't physically capable of understanding the necessary complex temporal equations to explain why Jalnik's original plan of mass evacuation into the past is a bad idea, or how Shibac can exist in the past even after his future has been erased.
    • "Flip-Flop" features a very odd version of this trope, with an apparently Stable Time Loop between two alternate timelines (one where the assassination of a planetary leader caused a war and another where she survived and pursued a policy of excessive appeasement), meaning there are two Seventh Doctor and Mel(s) who create one history by erasing another.
    • "Jubilee" involves the Doctor going into a parallel universe, but about a hundred years after it has diverged, with the Sixth Doctor experiencing Flash Sideways and remembering being in a Dalek war a hundred years ago. Then the Doctor ends up accidentally causing the war a hundred years ago in the past that created that divergent timeline, only it's actually happening then as well, because the Doctor's presence caused the timelines to merge, somehow. Then the Dalek survivor of the war a century ago talks the invasion fleet into suicide, which unmakes the alternate universe and resets the timeline. It makes a lot more emotional sense than it makes logical sense (a sentence which just summarizes the whole darn show).
    • The "Locum Doctors" trilogy opens with an unknown force causing the Seventh Doctor to "swap places" with the Third Doctor just before a trip to investigate an alien ship on a remote island ("The Defectors"), that same force subsequently causing the Sixth Doctor to swap with the Second just as the younger Doctor found a Cyberman tomb (“Last of the Cybermen”). In each case, the displaced Doctor forgets what originally happened to their predecessor during this experience because from their perspective it has no longer taken place, requiring companions Jo Grant and Zoe Heriot to help the 'new' Doctor work out what their previous selves would have done and resolve this matter to avoid changing history. When the Fifth Doctor is swapped with the First ("The Secret History"), he learns that these displacements were caused by the Monk, whose goal is to 'punish' the Doctor for actions that occurred during his last encounter with the Eighth Doctor ("To the Death"), the Monk incapable of accepting his own responsibility for those events.
    • "Daughter of the Gods" opens with Jamie and Zoe accidentally interfering with the TARDIS's flight path so that it collides with its own past self, causing two TARDISes to crash-land on the planet Urbania. When the Second Doctor and his companions explore the planet, they discover that the First Doctor has been on Urbania for three months with Steven Taylor and Katarina, as the ship was diverted from its "destined" trip to Kembel when the two TARDISes collided, with the result that the Daleks have completed the Time Destructor without the First Doctor's interference. Despite the First Doctor's history having been changed, the Second Doctor still remembers the original course of events, explicitly telling Katarina at one point that while she has known his previous self for three months from his perspective he barely knew her for a day. Ultimately, the only way to stop the Daleks is for the Second Doctor to repair his TARDIS using the new dematerialisation circuit assembled by the First Doctor over the last three months, performing a tricky manoeuvre that erases everything that happened since the TARDISes almost collided, with only the Second Doctor demonstrating a vague recollection of what just happened once the timeline has returned to normal.
    • The two-part audios "The Paradox Planet"/"Legacy of Death" see the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive on the planet Aoris, where the inhabitants of Era 24 of the planet's history are at war with their own past in Era 14, around a thousand years ago, which they consider "the age of greed", believing that the short-sightedness of Era 14 led to environmental devastation. However, when the Doctor becomes part of the war, he realises that it was basically caused because of the attacks from the future; a key reason for the environmental devastation is that Era 14 never pursued the use of local crystals as an alternative source of power, but this was only because Era 24 kept travelling back and stealing the crystals whenever they found a good supply. In essence, Era 14 was only perceived as greedy and stupid because the attacks from the future prevented them from pursuing more environmentally friendly options, but once the first attack started their future was basically set in stone.
    • "Companion Piece" features River Song (a character who was only born 'after' the Time War) being captured by the Nine, a pre-Time War Time Lord, and forced to tell him about the Doctor's companions as the Nine decides to try and create a "collection" of every person the Doctor has ever travelled with. At one point, the Nine attempts to capture Bliss, a student who met and travelled with the Eighth Doctor during the Time War, but as the War hasn't happened "yet" as far as the wider universe is concerned, Bliss is a computer sciences student rather than a student of temporal theory and has absolutely no idea who the Doctor is (River avoids giving the Nine details of the future by explaining that Bliss was subject to a "complex temporal event" before she met the Doctor).
  • Past Doctor Adventures
    • Asylum starts off with Nyssa being picked up by a young Fourth Doctor, long after she had departed from the Fifth Doctor. Both she and he seem embarrassed about the situation and the Doctor specifically asks her not to tell him any details that could lead to a paradox, euphemistically describing it as "saving it for a nice surprise". She then discovers that the research she was doing on Roger Bacon has inexplicably changed into research on Isambard Kingdom-Brunel, forcing them to head back in time to Bacon's time to discover what caused the future to change. When the crisis concludes, the Doctor nonchalantly claims that he can travel with the younger Nyssa knowing that she will be all right, but both privately recognise that the Doctor's knowledge of Nyssa's future means that he will have to take care of her when she becomes his companion later.
    • Festival of Death starts with the Fourth Doctor, Romana and K9 arriving on the G-Lock, a space station existing on a breach into hyperspace, where they find that everyone present already recognises them, to the extent that they are arrested and accused of the recent attack by the station supervisor and find that they have already arranged for someone to come and let them out. Over the course of the novel, they have to go back in time three more times to ensure that they have met everyone they have to meet; at one point there are two different versions of the Doctor and Romana on the station at once, the second versions taking care to avoid meeting their younger selves.
    • Imperial Moon opens with the Fifth Doctor revealing the existence of the time safe, a safe where the user puts things in later for prior use; the Doctor describes it as a permitted temporal paradox that should only be used for something truly important. In this case, the safe provides the Doctor and Turlough with a diary about a British expedition to the Moon in 1878, prompting the Doctor to go back to the date indicated in the diary and join the expedition after he reads about him and Turlough meeting the expedition (the Doctor refusing to read any further to avoid the risk of being tempted to change his future).
    • Warmonger is a sequel and prequel to "The Brain of Morbius"; the Fifth Doctor is forced to go to Karn to get medical help for Peri after a serious injury and ends up becoming caught up in Morbius's original military campaign while Morbius still has his body. To stop Morbius, the Doctor must not only contact the Gallifrey of his past, but must then rely on their support to form a military alliance of various old enemies, such as the Sontarans, Cybermen and Ogrons, to oppose Morbius's forces and thus ensure his defeat and subsequent near-execution.
    • The Time Travellers features the First Doctor, Barbara and Ian visiting a future London which was destroyed by WOTAN because the Doctor hasn't been in 1966 to stop it "yet". Somehow, there's also a reference to Daleks in 1963, even though that also hasn't happened to the Doctor yet, and the Daleks only travelled back to 1963 in the first place because of other adventures the Doctor hasn't had yet.
  • On its own, "Continuity Errors" is a relatively straightforward Set Right What Once Went Wrong story. In context, however, it's part of Decalog 3: Consequences, an intricately multibraided Stable Time Loop where we follow a single chain of events that is affected by multiple Doctors in no particular sequence. So within this story, we see Andrea's personal history alter in "real time" as the Doctor changes things in the past, and when he first arrives on New Alexandria, these alterations hadn't happened because he hadn't gone back and done them yet. But the next story, "Timevault" by Ben Jacques, reveals that, much earlier in his personal timeline, the Doctor visited a future that only exists because of those changes.

    Fan Fiction 
  • Gemini, this trope is invoked so as to defy Stable Time Loop: It’s easier for the Daleks to change the past than it is for anybody else, so the military is trying to create super-soldiers that can change the timeline as easily as the Daleks can.
  • In "The Choice", the Tenth Doctor, Rose and Mickey are shocked to find the Chameleon-Arched Ninth Doctor working in a garage in the Powell Estate, the Doctor leaving Rose to keep an eye on his human past self while he and Mickey try to retrace that period of the Ninth's life to work out what happened. They eventually determine that after leaving Rose the first time, the Ninth Doctor visited various places to try and make subtle changes to history, which led to him being infected by a rare Dalek poison that can only infect Time Lords under specific circumstances, requiring him to use the Arch to escape being killed by the infection. In order to cure his past self, the Tenth Doctor has to inject himself with an antidote at three different points in his timestream, requiring him to not only inject himself and the human Ninth, but at one point he has to make contact with the Eighth Doctor to inject him with the antidote, as Ten missed a chance to inject a younger Ninth from a point before he was exposed to the toxin in the first place.
  • In “Déjà vu” (written before “The Day of the Doctor”), a Time Lord plot draws the first ten Doctors to a pre-Time War Gallifrey, even though characters note that, from Gallifrey’s perspective, the Ninth and Tenth Doctors don’t exist ‘yet’ and shouldn’t have been drawn to a point in their past. The same plot sees a Time Lord renegade using the first five Doctors to power a machine that can manipulate Gallifrey’s past, with some changes taking place even as the present remains the same, such as a timeline where the Second and Third Doctors died in the confrontation with Omega.
  • "Aliens of London" features the survivors of Torchwood: Children of Earth facing the return of the 456 with the aid of the Tenth Doctor. While Alice initially thinks of the Doctor as just another alien playing with humanity, Gwen convinces Alice that the Doctor isn’t like that by showing Alice video footage of the Doctor’s “future” death as he stops his people destroying the universe and sacrifices himself to save an old man (“The End of Time”), which has already happened for Earth even though this version of the Doctor hasn’t experienced those events yet.
  • In the Doctor Who/Forever crossover "Forever Doctors", the Eighth Doctor finds a pair of Daleks from the Time War in New York, even though (from the Doctor’s perspective) the War hasn’t started yet. Later on, Lucie Miller meets with an agent of UNIT and is shown pictures of the various Doctors to identify which Doctor she's with, with the image of the Eighth Doctor being the more weathered Doctor of his relative future.
  • Paul Gadzikowski’s ‘The Father’ trilogy sees the Fifth and Eighth Doctors meet the Time Lord who would become the Doctor’s father before he’s even ‘conceived’ the Doctor, the Doctor subsequently arranging for his infant self to receive a good childhood. “Transformations” sees the Fifth Doctor take Admiral Kirk and others back in time to investigate Saavik’s origin after she’s identified as half-Time Lord (and thus learn that Saavik is the Doctor’s half-sister), “One Child Born” ends with the Doctor leaving his infant self to be raised by Lois Lane and Clark Kent so that he gets a suitable moral upbringing, and “Posterity” has the Eighth Doctor learn that his human DNA came from samples taken from Buffy Summers (making her the Doctor's mother).
    • On a wider scale, on top of the above, the fic "Historical Revision" reveals that the time of Starfleet is the time of the early Time Lords, so Rassilon is still a young man in Kirk's era.
  • "Trial and Error" starts with the Twelfth Doctor, Bill and Nardole attempting to retrieve Missy's TARDIS, only to run into the Valeyard. When circumstances result in the Twelfth Doctor finding himself on the space station where his sixth incarnation's trial will take place, the Doctor is forced to disguise himself as the Valeyard to ensure that the past works out as he remembers it, only for matters to become more complicated when the younger Master gets involved.
  • In "Where is Hannah Montana?", when Miley Stewart and Lilly Truscott end up travelling with the Tenth Doctor, at one point Robbie Ray has to assure Miley that she should keep travelling with the Doctor because a recent perusal of his wedding album has revealed that Miley was the singer at her parents' wedding, which they haven't been to yet. When Miley finally asks the Doctor to take her to visit her mother, they find themselves facing an older version of a man they recently confronted who talks about how the Doctor, Miley and Lilly will contribute to his future defeat, again giving them advance notice of an event they haven't experienced yet.
  • In "Protect and Survive", the Seventh Doctor learns that his insane Thirteenth incarnation has changed human history through a particularly convoluted plan that culminates in nuclear war in 1962 in order to prevent the Doctor from ever having human companions, as the older Doctor now believes that those companions made him too weak to stop the Time War. The two incarnations confront each other in 1936, the earliest date when history diverged from the timeline the Seventh knew, but the Thirteenth states that he's gone back and forth through time so often that there's no way for the Seventh to find the 'earliest' point in his timeline when he started his current plan and cut him off that way. The Thirteenth confidently predicts that, once his changes to the timeline have settled, the 'new' Doctor will find a paradox-proof box of instructions he sent to his past self's TARDIS so that the new Doctor can set up that same chain of events as he will now be ruthless enough to do, but the Seventh Doctor stops this plan by committing suicide. As the Doctor 'now' killed himself before the Thirteenth could go through with any part of his plan, the original timeline is restored, and when the Seventh Doctor discovers the instructions left by the insane Thirteenth, they only leave him all the more committed to the idea that he cannot allow himself to become the version of himself capable of such insanity.
  • Various examples in Twilight Storm, including;
    • Bella meets UNIT in 2010, and they have records of her time with the Doctor from a trip she will make to the Doctor's original UNIT colleagues in the 1970s in her personal future.
    • The Tenth Doctor takes Bella to visit his old friend Steven Taylor, but Steven has already met Bella when circumstances in her future led to her going back in time to help the First Doctor and Steven with a crisis.
    • In The Day Of the Doctor, Bella is thrown to meet the Eleventh Doctor who talks of their relationship as something long in the past and has to reconcile that with the Doctor she knows in the present.
    • In The Funeral, Bella meets the Eleventh Doctor at a point after she parted with the Tenth Doctor but before his involvement in Day of the Doctor.
  • The Road to Shalka is a Whoniverse fic, so it had to happen. Specifically, it happens in Skypigs, where the villain is trying to Make Wrong What Once Went Right, two Doctors (with their respective entourages) stop him together and we meet the companion's long-dead parents. Before they were a couple.
  • Time v3.0 does its best to encompass all the chaotic mess that was the Time War, uses this trope up, down, and sideways.

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