TIME-CLASH: "DOCTOR WHO" & "BARNEY MILLER"

In January of 1980, the detectives of the 12th Precinct in NYC arrested a man who was on top of the arch in Washington Square Park.  He claimed to be a time traveler from 2037 AD named Adam Boyer.  Professor Boyer was the cultural historian at Columbia University in that future time and his specialty was the life of the late 1900s.  

According to Boyer, there were certain differences in the future from what the detectives were accustomed to:

• Lawyers were outlawed in 1998. All legal matters were handled by realtors.
• In 1981, tons of gold were discovered in Medicine Hat, Canada.
• This caused the price of gold to plummet to $35 an ounce.
• In 1984, the gold standard was replaced by zinc.

We're now in the first day of 2018* and none of those things happened.  With such a litigious society as ours, I doubt we would ever see lawyers be outlawed and replaced by realtors.  Then again, we elected a real estate developer as President, so it wasn't impossible.

How come these things didn't happen?

The Doctor could have been involved, of course.  I'm sharing this during the traditional "Who's On First?" blogathon day, so odds are that he would have to figure into this somehow.  But he shouldn't be the catch-all for all changes made in the Toobworld timeline.  We have plenty of other suspects from other TV shows.

1) Helen Cutter

'Primeval'

Helen went back in Time to the age of the dinosaurs and altered the course of History drastically and yet by not so much.  Thanks to the precedent set in 'Primeval' with Claudia Brown, it was because of Helen that there were so many important recastaways in other TV shows like 'Phyllis', 'The Jeffersons', 'The Sopranos', 'Columbo', 'Seinfeld', and 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea'.  (One day Helen Cutter will be inducted into the TV Crossover Hall of Fame because of all the shows can theoretically connect by the changes she made to the timeline.

2) Dr. Sam Beckett

'Quantum Leap'

With every life that Sam changed by leaping into their lives, seismic ripples spread out along the timeline from those points on.  People they encountered - or didn't - because of Sam's interference would then go on to make changes to the timeline themselves.  So many future events in Toobworld were either created or destroyed because of him.

3)  Starfleet

The 'Star Trek' franchise

Various ships in the fleet or just some of its personnel went back in Time which could have altered future events.

There are plenty of TV time travelers who could make any one of those predictions by Dr. Boyer null and void.

But let's say it was the Doctor.  And he wanted to ensure that the gold standard would remain stabilized.

We never learned how the gold was discovered in Medicine Hat, Canada, but for the sake of a good story, let's say it was by accident.  That a hiker was lost in the forests and literally stumbled over a vein of ore.

I'd say we crib a memorable moment of misdirection from the denouement of the greatest time travel novel ever written ("Time And Again" by Jack Finney) - the Doctor appears on the scene and "helpfully" sets the hiker on the correct path, taking him away from the discovery of gold.  Afterwards, the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to bury the evidence, never to be found.  (Or calls upon his alchemy skills with the screwdriver to turn the gold into another element.)

As for the outlawing of the lawyers, maybe something as tragic as the death of Edith Keeler in 'Star Trek' was needed to prevent realtors from taking over our judicial system.

What if, in the original timeline before Helen Cutter futzed with it, Alan Birch, the lawyer representing Chicago Hope Hospital, was never gunned down at a train station in 1995?  What if he was the key to the proposal to eliminate lawyers that would take effect three years down the line?  But when the timeline reset, the Doctor could see that Birch's death would mean the death of that proposal as well.  And then he prevents his companion from intervening to change at least this part of the new world history back to the way it was and lets Alan Birch die....

I've given you the basics to write up some fanfic, you imagineers.  Off you go!

Geronimo!

* I wrote this story on January 9th, 2017.