"Eve of the Eternal" Commentary, Part 1: The Void, Prologue

The Void:

"There's all sorts of realities around us, different dimensions, billions of parallel universes all stacked up against each other. The Void is the space in between, containing absolutely nothing. Can you imagine that? Nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down, no life, no time, without end. My people called it the Void, the Eternals call it the Howling. But some people call it Hell."

--The Doctor, Doctor Who, 2nd Season, "Army of Ghosts."

There's a lot of intriguing concepts in Doctor Who, but the concept of the Void absolutely fascinated me. The fact that Rose nearly fell into such a place fascinated me even more, and if I were talking to Russell T. Davies, my initial reaction to "Army of Ghosts/Doomsday" would have been to ask him what would have happened to Rose if she did fall into it.

The obvious answer is that she would have died. But what if she somehow survived?

To address that question, I had to consider the nature of the Void, and what exactly nothingness is. When the Doctor described it, one thing that caught my attention was that the Void doesn't even have such things as up and down, which, of course, aren't objects but purely directional prepositional terms. And that gave me an idea, which was to make the Void almost a realm of pure abstract, relying on linguistic constructions to consider the possibility of pure nothingness.

Think of it in the terms of The NeverEnding Story. In that film the characters describe a similar concept, simply called "The Nothing," which is destroying their world. Consider the following conversation:

Rock-Biter: "There used to be a beautiful lake, but then it was gone."
Teeny Weeny: "Did the lake dry up?"
Rock-Biter: "No. It just wasn't there anymore. Nothing was there anymore, not even a dried-up lake."
Teeny Weeny: "A hole?"
Rock-Biter: "A hole would be something. Nah, it was nothing."

It's a very deconstructionist type of approach. What is nothingness, in the purest sense of the word? Only we can't describe "nothing" without describing what is absent, like trying to describe what salt tastes like without describing what it doesn't taste like. It's not easy to describe something this abstract in concrete terms. In other words, this is beyond human comprehension.

This is distinct from cosmic voids, discussed in astronomy, which are the empty spaces between galaxy filaments and contain few, if any, galaxies. These voids are empty space. But concerning this more existential concept of nothingness, we have to think outside of terms of emptiness. The way I think of it, the entire plane of existence (for want of a better word) is divided almost into a dualism between Reality and the Void; Reality looks chaotic from a narrow, Earth-grounded perspective, but in the larger picture it is actually very orderly. Using the fundamental ideas behind chaos theory, Reality is a mesh of ontological patterns that may look chaotic but aren’t. There’s order amidst the chaos. But the Void is actual chaos. In this realm, the most fundamental rules that govern Reality do not exist.

Since the Void isn't considered to be a universe itself, I like to think of its nature as completely the opposite of a universe. A universe is a physical realm, with physical law and existence. The Void, by contrast, is a realm of raw abstract, a sort of limbo. Because by its nature it is nonexistence, anything from a universe that falls in eventually gets destroyed, vanishing into nonexistence. 

The key characteristic of the Void, in understanding this, is that opposites do not exist; importantly, the distinction between concrete and abstract does not exist; and this is why it appears to be a plane of pure nihilism. It is nothing and everything at the same time. The Void follows totally different laws from a concrete universe, including physical laws (think of the abstract in the subconscious, or dreams: dream worlds do not bend to physical law, but to your rules.) 

Since Rose is from the physical world, her body would be destroyed by a physical need. Cold doesn't exist in the Void (which my brother suggested as the factor which destroys her), but neither does oxygen. Void or no Void, Rose needs oxygen to survive, and so even before the abstract destroyed her, she would have died from suffocation. 

The raw nothingness would have eaten away at her physical existence, since nothing can exist there. Because the Void is a world of raw abstract, however, one thing in Rose isn’t harmed by it: her subconscious. Thus, even if her conscious mind is destroyed, Rose's soul survives because she takes refuge in her unconscious mind.

BUT... she manages to survive physically as well as mentally, which is the entire plot of Eve of the Eternal: how she survives, why, and what lasting effects the Void and her subsequent ordeal leaves upon her. 


The Prologue: On this Wednesday

I think I noted on whofic.com that the prologue (which isn't in the original version on fanfiction.net) is inspired by the short story "An diesem Dienstag" (On this Tuesday) by Wolfgang Borchert, who was a German author writing about his experiences in the Wehrmacht in World War II. "An diesem Dienstag" is mainly about the Russian front. Some excerpts (roughly translated from the original German) include:

The week has a Tuesday.The year half a hundred.The war has many Tuesdays. 

On this Tuesday The girls practiced big letters in school. The teacher wore glasses with thick lenses. They had no brim. They were so thick, that her eyes looked very soft. Forty-two girls sat in front of the blackboard and wrote with big letters: 'OLD FRITZ HAD A GOBLET MADE OF TIN. BIG BERTHA COULD SHOOT ALL THE WAY TO PARIS. IN WAR ALL FATHERS ARE SOLDIERS.'

On this Tuesday Mrs. Hesse rang her neighbor's doorbell. When the door opened, she showed off a letter. 'He has become captain! Captain and company commander, he writes. And it is forty below here. It took nine days for the letter to arrive. And he addressed it to Mrs. Captain Hesse!
She held the letter high. But the neighbor didn't look at it. 'Forty below,' she said. 'The poor boys. Forty below.'

On this Tuesday [The doctor] walked so bent over, as if he were carrying all of Russia through the hall. 
'Should I give him something?' asked the nurse. 'No,' the Doctor replied. He spoke so softly, as if he were ashamed. Then they carried out Captain Hesse. There was a bumping noise outside. 'They always bang around like that. Why can't they lay the dead body softly?'
And his neighbor sang softly, 'Ziche, zacke, juppheidi, Dashing is the infantry.'

On this Tuesday Ulla sat in the evening and wrote in her exercise book in capital letters: IN WAR ALL FATHERS ARE SOLDIERS. IN WAR ALL FATHERS ARE SOLDIERS. 
She wrote this ten times. In capital letters. 

In the prologue for Eve of the Eternal, I took the similar motif "on this Wednesday" and applied it to the Battle of Canary Wahrf in the Doctor Who episode "Doomsday," using it to show the perspectives of several different characters, including Yvonne Hartman, Adeola Oshodi, and Jack Harkness, and to convey the shock and horror that the brief war between the Daleks and the Cybermen left upon London. These two excerpts show how I followed this motif:

Wednesday is a central point in a cycle of human time-telling, named after Odin, the Norse god of victory and of death. Each week has a Wednesday, the year fifty-two, and wars an indefinite quantity. But this war had only one day, and that was Wednesday.  

...

On this Wednesday, On this sunny, summer day, On this bright, summer day, it was silent in London for the briefest moment, when smoke slowly rose into the air, carrying with it the ashes and blood of the dead, before the cries of terror and grief penetrated the shock of battle. 

On this Wednesday, August 8th, 2007, Five million Cybermen invaded Earth. Twenty-million Daleks escaped the Time War. Three hundred thousand humans died across the world, and On this Wednesday, Rose Tyler fell into the Void. 

The second half of the prologue shows the Doctor in the immediate aftermath of Rose's fall, wandering through Torchwood Tower in numb shock, barely registering what's going on around him until he steps into the Tardis, and hears his ship softly crying. This makes the unbearable truth real for him, that Rose is dead, that she fell to her death right in front of him, and he breaks down as well.

I intended this segment of the story to not just be a prologue for Eve of the Eternal, but for the entire series. This is, after all, the starting point, and Rose's fate changes everything that would have happened in Doctor Who. I mentioned chaos theory earlier, and once again we're playing with the idea that time can take any direction following the smallest changes, which is one of the ideas put forth by chaos theory. Even once Rose comes back alive, the story doesn't become a sort of "Series 4 with Rose" or "Series 5 with Rose" that often appears in fan fiction, because of the idea that time is not linear, but, to quote the Doctor, "a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff." None of the same stories that occurred in Doctor Who following the episode "Midnight" happen in The Perennials, and some characters fates take a completely different turn from what they would have. For instance, River Song's story and origins are completely different in The Perennials, and they are completely different because Rose fell into the Void instead of getting trapped in a parallel world.