Psychology If you want to localise that “we” it all depends on what you assume to be “surviving”. If it’s walking around and breathing, that should be fine. If it’s cultural well being, that’s less certain what with the cuts to education and Murdoch and Cowell almost controlling everything we see and hear but as long as there are books and paintings and Regina Spektor we should be ok on that too. There’ll always be doom and gloom but the trick is to bathe in the shards of light in between and try to tolerate the rest.
Besides, depending upon who you listen to, the Doctor wouldn’t save us even if he was here anyway. In the old 90s Doctor Who novel Interference by Lawrence Miles, we offered a glimpse of the timelord’s thought processes. The Eighth Doctor (McGann) is being tortured in a Saudi Arabian jail (yes, really) and during his ordeal, a fellow captor, Badar, a kind of Salman Rushdie substitute, berates him for not changing the history of Earth wholesale, not, for example, killing Hitler.
The Doctor warns him about the web of time and how any changes he consciously makes leading the collapse of creation, but Badar suggest that this is just a cover story because he’s too scared to try and that in fact when he says that he doesn’t become “involved” in local politics, whenever he does take side – for example with humanity against some alien threat or other – it’s all about politics – and what makes Earth so special anyway?
The implications of in relation to the question are stark. Essentially what this does is tell us that if the fictional Doctor could somehow pop through the walls of reality into our dimension, he wouldn’t interfere anyway, that he wouldn’t save us, barring the sudden appearance of an alien battle fleet. Certainly, if Torchwood is anything to go by, the wars we’re currently enduring are happening in the Whoniverse anyway (and so by implication 9/11 was an event there too).
My understanding is that if he’s aware of an event, he can’t or shouldn’t change it, and that since “local politics” of our dimensional mirror are close enough, that he’d cop out on us too, no convenient landing of the TARDIS when some idiot presses the wrong button or there’s too much shouting. As far as I can remember, there’s no word in Interference or anywhere else on what his attitude to disasters is but if The Romans, The Fires of Pompeii and The Visitation are any indication he’s just as apt to causing them, especially if there’s fire involved.
Arguably that has changed a bit in the new series. He interferes on Starship UK because he sees a child crying and there's the whole Waters of Mars business in which he simply couldn't help himself, even to the point of arguably becoming a monster himself. But it's inconsistent. What about the two blokes who are exterminated in after the Doctor riles up the Dalek for shits and giggles and his basic lack of remorse afterwards? Given that we're supposed to enjoy his alieness, I suspect that when faced with this new reality, he'd be inclined to leave us to rot and spend the next forty-five minutes in the TARDIS with Amy. I know I would.
In other words, even with the inexplicable appearance of a fictional construct, we’re on our own. But away from those five paragraphs of Who related cynicism, I do genuinely think that we will be ok. We will survive. Of course we will. As Woody Allen says in Hannah and Her Sisters, “The heart is a resilient muscle” and that goes for the rest of humanity too. Even after a nuclear holocaust, you’d have to hope that there’d still be a few of us knocking around on a remote island ready to get things started again. As the wise mug says, all we need to do is “Keep Calm and Carry On”.
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