Doctor Who confuses me at times.

He keeps chastising his companions for doing things in different time zones. “Paradox alert!” He keeps telling them. “Don’t do this – Don’t do that,” he keeps ranting, “It will change the future.” Drives them all crazy with his obsessive fear that things will change for the worse.

“It’s life, Jim … life, Jim … life, Jim, life … but not as we know it. Not as we know it’. No, wait a minute, that’s Mister Spock talking to Captain Kirk on the Enterprise. Spock could be just as bad at times. James Kirk wasn’t much better … he didn’t want to shoot anybody, he just wanted to punch them out because it gave him a chance to take off his shirt and flex his muscles. I think Jimmy’s obsession was Jimmy.

Anyway, getting back to the good Doctor. Constantly worrying about the paradoxes his companions kept trying to create; Rose trying to bring her father back from the dead; Martha and Donna constantly banging on to him to save somebody who was about to die in a fixed point in time; Rory considering killing Hitler and save the world from ww2, then eventually trying to commit suicide with Amy so he could bring them back to life even though he was already dead, had been for one or two thousand years and so on was enough to push him over the edge.

I suppose it was no wonder the Doctor was having mental spasms. But the Doctor eventually proved himself to be not only someone verging on the edge of paranoia, he has also been able to prove that he was right about what happens when you interfere with the chain of events that have already been put in place.

Not that I like the idea (or the reality) of war, but do you realise without ww2 we wouldn’t have had Radar, Gps, DVD’S, Aircraft’s Black Boxes, or the humble Microwave, just to name a few of the many things invented during the war which are still in general use world wide, or are progressive re-inventions of things that were invented back then. The D.V.D., for example, is an extension of the VIDEO PLAYER which was invented in England so the photographers who flew over FRANCE could get better layouts of the German forces than they could get with single frame cameras.

No D.V.D.’s!!! It would have been a case of, ‘Thanks, Rory … not!!”

But we are diverting again. We are talking about Doctor Who and his paronia regarding paradoxes. Let me show you what happened, and remember the doctor travels backward and forward in time, and sometimes sideways and this could often mean he could end up somewhere before it happened – or after it happened. Sideways, you say. In 2006 the Doctor and Rose, along with Mickey, travelled sideways to a parallel world where Rose finally got her own way and got her father back from the dead (sort of) and Mickey was able to move into a parallel world where he managed to take the place of his doppleganger without blowing the world up. And why should he? There were enough Cybermen there to do it for him. But, of course, that is not the point.

But the Doctor … the Doctor who knew better than to do what he did … succumbed to Donna’s nagging and saved a fixed point family from being barbecued by Mount Pompeii (or, at least, the alien space ship that blew up and made the rest of the world think it was a volcano to blame). Damn aliens … always blowing something up and blaming Mother Nature.

But this time the doctor paid for giving into Donna’s nagging and the end result was the doctor showing exactly what could go wrong once you interfered a set point of time.

This is how the doctor looked at the time he was in Pompeii.

This is what the man whose life the doctor saved looked like.

This is what the good doctor looks like NOW!

Well!!! That’s another fine mess you got me into, Donna

BUT WAIT, IT’S NOT OVER YET BABY BLUE.

THE DOCTOR WAS GREATLY AFFECTED BY WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM BECAUSE OF DONNA.

I MEAN, WHY ELSE DID HE DO WHAT HE DID AFTERWARDS?

It is possible that he knows something that us wee mortals don’t, but I prefer to think he had a brain snap, because this was the second time that he had assumed a body of somebody he had met not that long earlier.

He first did it in 1983 (Arc of Infinity) where THIS Doctor