Time and Reality Die in Spectacle: Doctor Who as the Perfect Crime

The 2005 reboot of the television serial Doctor Who follows a time-traveller named The Doctor. We soon learn that his race and planet have long ago been destroyed. The same fate is in store for Earth, its immolation a spectacle for galactic tourists. Subsequent episodes are played out in the shadow of this predestined apocalypse. By returning to the present we escape our human end, but in so doing infect reality with a principle that erases its meaning. The perfect crime is constituted in the very hypothesis of time travel that gives this programme life.