Doctor Who

[Shells7]

Hi, this might be a dumb question as I can't remember much of the history of Doctor Who, but if he can travel in time could he not have gone back after he and Rose got separated and save her?

[jenky]

What happened in those episodes was that they had jumped into a parallel universe (not in time). It was something that happened by accident, and was not meant to happen normally. It had been made possible by nasty people tinkering with various bits of time and space causing holes in the void that they fell through.
At the end they closed the holes up to prevent it happening again.

[tonymclark]

For many years the Doctor could not control the Tardis, so could not predict where it would land.
To have the Doctor able to travel back and rescue a companion, or any other character, would have ment writers would get lazy, and anything would be possible.

[Mungo jerry]

Tonymclark is write, Also if you think about it that would be the simplest, solution to every problem the doctor faces, in which case no one would watch them as they'd all have the same story line!! Boring!!!!

[Backdrifter]

Yes, but also, in last year's series, they made a point of showing how Rose caused all sorts of problems by preventing her dad from dying when they went back in time to the moment of his death. Having altered the course of time, events started getting jumbled up and these screeching monsters appeared and caused havoc, that the Doctor said were like bacteria rushing to a "wound" in time. Only by having the dad sacrifice himself was the wound healed and everything reverted to normal. So I reckon that storyline was included partly to demonstrate that he can't just time-jump back to prevent the bad stuff. (As well the guys above saying it'd just be boring and lazy!)

[Smashed78]

You can't cross your own time stream :-) As backdrifter correctly says doing so causes chaos and time to be damaged.