Re: I thought there was no such thing as the "bootstrap paradox"?
Well it actually isn't a paradox, because all the events are logically self-consistent and non-contradictory.
A paradox involves non-resolvable contradiction. Thus the Grandfather Paradox - I go back in time and kill myself as a baby, so there's no grown-up me to go back in time to kill me as a baby, so I survive to grow up...
This is a paradox because each event contradicts itself and cannot logically take place - If I live to grow up and travel in time, then I do not live to grow up and travel in time.
"Father's Day" did involve a paradox in that the earlier versions of the Doctor and Rose saw later versions of themselves, that those later versions did not originally see.
"The Big Bang" didn't involve a paradox since Rory used the sonic from the future to get the Doctor out of the Pandorica, and that Doctor then went back in time and gave Rory the sonic. If the early Rory had decided not to release the Doctor from the Pandorica, or the later Doctor had decided not to give the sonic back to the the earlier Rory, then that would have been a paradox.
I don't know why this is so difficult for some people to understand. Personally I learned about such self-consistent time loops as a kiddy back in the 70s by reading Harry Harrison's "Technicolor Time Machine" and "The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World" .
For a very interesting concept of a whole civilisation who naturally live in a vast loop of time, read the children's book "The Tree Wakers" by Keith Claire. Maboria is a world (or universe) that exists within the same recycled thousand centuries of time. They are never born, never die, and luckily for them do not get bored as they only remember back a few hundred years. Unluckily for them their loop of time intersects our linear one some time in the early 1970s so they have to put up with a rather hippyish storyline, but the underlying concept is quite sound. Amusingly Maboria has exactly 10,000 vintages of wine.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
