Blinovitch Limitation Effect - The Original Series

The Original Series

The Effect was introduced in Day of the Daleks (1972), when Jo Grant asks the Third Doctor why a group of time-travelling guerrillas on a mission to assassinate a diplomat cannot simply go back into the past and try again if they fail. In reply, the Doctor cites the principle and begins to explain, but is interrupted before he can explain further. The "Effect" was invented by script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts to gloss over the plot problems inherent in the time travel premise of the serial. The interruption introduced by the writers meant that the explanation did not have to be expanded upon.

The Effect is next mentioned in Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974), where the Third Doctor states that it "tends to limit research into time travel" but once again he does not go into detail as to why. The novelisation of the story reveals that Blinovitch was a "great bear of a man from Russia" who had reversed his own timestream, reverting to infancy.

The next time the Effect is mentioned on-screen is in Mawdryn Undead (1983), but there it is not a scientific principle that prevents people from redoing their actions (for whatever reason). Rather, it is a physical effect that occurs when two versions of the same person from different time periods make physical contact. This results in an energy discharge, shorting out the "time differential" between them. The Mawdryn Undead storyline establishes that the younger version of the character involved in the discharge, Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, is traumatized by the event and, for the next several years, loses his memory of the Doctor. It is possible, however, as Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood theorise in their reference book About Time 5, that the energy discharge is simply a side effect of the principle's operation. It also appears, given the number of times that the Doctor has met his other incarnations, that the Effect does not apply to Time Lords, or at the very least can be mitigated. The Doctor appears to show sensitivity and resistance to temporal distortions, notably in The Time Monster (1973), Invasion of the Dinosaurs and City of Death (1979) (where Romana does as well).

The effect does not appear to present a problem with characters interacting with their own ancestors, as Ace met her infant mother and worked extensively with her grandmother in The Curse of Fenric (1989).

The Virgin New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Revelation (1991) by Paul Cornell gave Blinovitch the first name of Aaron (and the title of his book as Temporal Mechanics). The Virgin Missing Adventures novelisation The Ghosts of N-Space (1995) by Barry Letts stated that Blinovitch formulated his principle in the British Museum's reading room in 1928, and although he was not the first to discuss it, he was the first to formulate it properly.