DrReynolds said:
Jiffletta said:
Rick portal guns to another dimension, which the Tardis explictly cannot travel to without falling into a hole left by a void ship (Rise of the Cybermen). About half an hour later, Rick kicks something back through a portal to blow up the universe The Doctor is in. Battle ends.
How is that not eactly how this goes? Rick doesn't have to play by The Doctors rules and can just escape to somewhere The Doctor could never touch him, then just work up a way to blow up the reality The Doctor is trapped in. Even if it takes him multiple attempts, The Doctor still can never possibly touch Rick, so there is no chance of Rick losing this.
That is mentioned in
Rise of the Cyberme as being a side effect of The Great Time War, an arc that has now been resolved. Otherwise, TARDISes can travel to alternate universes (dimension is a misnomer here), they just have safeguards to prevent them doing this which The Doctor can turn off he wants. This actually demonstrates that Time Lords can disable travel to alternate universes, potentially nullifying Rick's most powerful weapon.
And anyway, if Rick portals away can't The Doctor travel back in time to before he does so and stop him?
For why The Doctor can't go back in time to kill Rick - fixed points in time. Given the scope of things Rick has done, there is no possible way he could not be considered a fixed point, and thus, if The Doctor tried that sort of thing, either unkillable dragons would start eating everything, or all of history would break and start happening simultanously, until The Doctor stopped trying to **** with the timeline, depending on if we pay attention to Fathers Day or The Wedding of River Song. There is no way for a Time Lord to get around the fixed points rule, The Waters of Mars was very clear on this.
For Time Lords being able to disable interdimensional travel - thats not even close to how that works. First of all, the safeguard is on the Tardis, not the universe - thats why a partially repaired Tardis could jump to an alternate dimension, back before the time war was a thing. Second of all, Ricks portal gun has been shown to work in dpite of no assistance - we saw it work after he destroyed the Citadel of Ricks and wrecked their teleportation room.
As for the Tardis being able to jump between dimensions now, no, it can't. Rise of the Cybermen made is clear - the only means by which Tardis's could travel interdimensionally was with a series of, for lack of a better term, channels through reality. The Time Lords may be still alive, but they are at the end of space and time, as seen in Hell Bent, where they can't keep those channels running anymore. So we're back to the Tardis only being able to travel between dimensions in the most ludicrous of circumstances. Even on the off chance you can get the ideal circumstances to travel between dimensions in the period after the war (The only way The Doctor got to to a parralel world was through the hole left by a Void ship), and even ignoring that even under those circumstances, the reality you jump to is random, that still leaves the Tardis completely dead.
Take the absolute best case scenario for The Doctor - The Doctor manages to find a hole in reality that leads directly to the universe Rick is in at that moment. Okay, from that point on, Rick can just portal away, and start the whole thing over again. Meanwhile The Doctor is ****** - the Tardis dies when it is outside the universe it draws power from, and even if The Doctor gets insanely lucky, and there is yet another power cell that can be used to recharge the thing, it takes a full day to recharge. So thats 24 hours where The Doctor is a sitting duck, unable to move from their location, with no possible way to fight back against Rick.