12 Abandoned Doctor Who Subplots
2. Turns Out You Can Pick A Time Lock
DALEK CAAN: I flew into the wild and fire, I danced and died a thousand times.
DAVROS: Emergency Temporal Shift took him back into the Time War itself.
THE DOCTOR: But that's impossible! The entire War is time-locked!
Again, not impossible Just a bit unlikely.
Yes, "it cost him his mind" and turned him into a babbling prophet version of the Visionary from The End of Time, but Dalek Caan's Emergency Temporal Shift did result in the show's grandest-ever series finale: The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. So we do owe him a lot for that.
That rapscallion Rassilon (yep, him again) managed to circumvent the time-lock during the final day (The End of Time) of the Time War by planting the tormenting rhythm of four into the Master's mind as child, then establishing the physical link to him with an- ooh shiny- Whitepoint star.
Then you've got the Moment, which is more than just your average galaxy eater - it can even bypass time-locks by opening time fissures, as we saw in The Day of the Doctor.
The time-lock mechanism added another layer of mystique to the Time War - the fact that the Doctor couldn't save his people... his family.
Therefore if you're in need of a seemingly working time-lock, head on down to the Torchwood Hub (sorry, you'll have to go back in time as it's now destroyed) and get one of Tosh's trusted time-locks. As parallel Pete Tyler would say: "Trust me on this."