Doctor Who concepts: Time tracks and why they need to be explored in the New Series
By James Aggas
First Doctor serial The Space Museum introduced a potentially intriguing concept to Doctor Who: the idea of “time tracks”. But what are they? And should they be explored further?
The First Doctor serial The Space Museum isn’t a strong Doctor Who story, at least, not as a whole. The last three episodes come across as a rather generic and disappointing story.
However, a key reason why it’s so disappointing is because of how fantastic the first episode is. Because that introduces a cool (if admittedly slightly vague) concept into Doctor Who: time tracks.
The way the story introduces this idea is with strange things happening on the TARDIS. After they all briefly blackout, the TARDIS crew suddenly find themselves out of the historical clothes that they were initially wearing and in their considerably more ordinary clothes, instead. Glasses that were dropped and smashed are suddenly reformed, without a scratch on them.
Even when they decide to go outside and explore a nearby space museum, they continue to come across strange occurrences. They walk on dusty ground, but don’t leave any footprints; they move around, but are not seen or heard by the planet’s inhabitants. But most disturbing of all, they see themselves as exhibits at this museum.
If that story sounds exciting and intriguing, well, it is, but just for that first episode. And that’s mainly because the idea of a time track is explored in the first episode. As Vicki explains it:
"Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, also has dimensions of its own."
Specifically, the Doctor explains that, despite everything they’ve been seeing and experiencing, they hadn’t truly arrived yet. It’s just that due to a fault on the ship, they had, in the Doctor’s words, “jumped a time track”, and ended up seeing their own personal future as a result.
It Takes You Away was one of the stranger and more distinctive episodes of Series Eleven. Could the exploration of time tracks allow for further strangeness?
(Image credit: Doctor Who/BBC.
Image obtained from: official Doctor Who website.)
New Series potential
What’s really fascinating with this concept is that there are a lot of ways you could explore it. For example, we could get plenty more strangeness that look at the nature of time tracks in more detail, in audio stories such as Aquitaine and this year’s First Doctor Adventure Tick-Tock World.
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It would definitely be fun and interesting to see the Thirteenth Doctor and her crew in a story a little stranger and full of time-wimeyness. It Takes You Away, while it wasn’t what I expected, was one of the stronger and more memorable stories of last year, and a key reason why was because of how different and unusual it was.
A story focused around time tracks and what happens when they’re jumped could allow for something different, yet still fit Thirteen’s era perfectly. Especially if it gives us glimpses of each of the crew’s potential futures.
For something more straightforward, yet still intriguing, the idea of jumping a time track was used to explore an alternative timeline in Fifth Doctor audio The Mutant Phase. Alternative timelines are an interesting idea, and if you do it right, you could have the Doctor give a decent explanation of why it’s not simply a “parallel world”, as we’ve seen previously.
Either way, there’s certainly a lot of potential for the idea of time tracks to be explored more deeply in the TV series, and it would be a shame for such an intriguing idea not to be used in future series.
How long after his regeneration did the Ninth Doctor meet Rose?. dark. Next
Do you think that time tracks should be featured at a later point in the TV series? Do you think there’s potential in the idea? Do you think the concept was introduced well in The Space Museum? Let us know in the comments below.