Doctor Who: 10 Huge Plot Holes The Writers Hoped We Forgot

7. Where Were The Reapers When They Were Needed?

In the first series of the revived Doctor Who, Paul Cornell was set the task of providing the basic answers of time travel repercussions. What happens if you meet yourself? What happens if you change a big event? 'Father's Day' was an episode that built foundations for all future timey-wimey NewWho episodes; there are set points in time that cannot be altered, and the Doctor can see them all. If you change one of these fixed points, there are horrible consequences; reapers appear from outside time itself, trying to sterilise the wound in the universe. Paradoxes = Very bad. What must happen must always happen, and all that malarky. So where were the reapers when River refused to shoot the Doctor on the beach in Utah? Did the reapers die when all of time and space exploded at once? When Amy and Rory jumped off that roof, why didn't they just die, for the reapers to feast upon their freshly dead bodies? What was this talk in 'Hide' of the paradoxes resolving themselves by and large? It's as if that episode was written out of existence or something.