Even diehard Whovians must admit that theDoctor Whoreboot has had its fair share of plot holes and inconsistencies. While some fans consider that these timey-wimey inconsistencies add to the show’s charm (and the fact that it never takes itself too seriously), others are left feeling confused and frustrated by them.
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Mistakes are a given for a show whose premise is time travel. Some are small and easily overlooked, whereas others are glaringly obvious and take a little more than mere suspension of disbelief to reconcile – if they can be reconciled at all.
The Age of the Doctor
It’s a given that, as a Time Lord, the Doctor ages differently from humans. In the Classic series, Doctor Seven (Sylvester McCoy) announced that he was 953 years old. It’s not untilChristopher Ecclestontakes over the role of Doctor Nine that the Doctor’s age is raised again. In the Season 1 episode “Aliens of London,” Nine tells Rose (Billie Piper) he is 900 years old.
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This might seem like a minor thing, but it wipes several decades off his previously stated age. It also means the existence of his predecessor, Doctor Eight (Paul McGann), and his later incarnation, the War Doctor (John Hurt) is effectively extinguished. Just because he travels through time doesn’t mean the Doctor ages in reverse.
Paradox Fixers: Good For One Use Only
In Season 1’s “Father’s Day,” Rose creates a paradox when she travels back in time to save her father from a hit-and-run accident that causes his death. Shortly afterward, gargoyle-like Reapers appear which – as Doctor Nine explains – are there to repair the damage caused by Rose’s interference with her timeline.
Subsequent seasons see the creation of multiple paradoxes. One example is the plot of the Season 7 episode “The Angels Take Manhattan,” which actually depends on the creation of a paradox that allows Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) to return to the present day. Where were the Reapers then, or all the other times a paradox was created? Apparently, they were a single-use item.
The Confusion of River Song
River Song (Alex Kingston) is introduced in Season 4’s “Silence in the Library.” River and the Doctor have bumped into one another at different points in their respective timelines, with River eventually marrying Doctor Eleven (Matt Smith) in the appropriately titled Season 6 finale, “The Wedding of River Song.” But, in “Silence in the Library,” River and the Doctor (David Tennant) are meeting for the first time.
To figure out where in his timeline Doctor Ten is situated, River questions him about The Crash of the Byzantium – the subject of Season 5’s “The Time of Angels” – before realizing she hasn’t met this regeneration. Which is strange: she should have known that The Crash of Byzantium was an adventure she undertook with Eleven, who looks and acts very differently from Doctor Ten.
Daleks That Don’t Like Killing?
In the Season 7 opener, “Asylum of the Daleks” wild Daleks are about to break free from the asylum they’re being housed in. After being captured by the killing machines, Doctor Eleven discovered that the insane Daleks are being kept alive because of their Divine Hatred which, to them, is considered beautiful.
The problem with this storyline is that the Daleks are renowned for killing inferior versions of themselves; they’ve done it many times before. Plus, in a head-scratching narrative move, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory were tasked by the Daleks to go on a suicide mission to destroy the Dalek asylum from the inside, thereby going against their stated plan to protect the Divine Hatred.
Unhurried Angels
Introduced in the Season 3 episode “Blink,” the Weeping Angels are one of the best baddies of theDoctor Whoreboot. Creepy-looking aliens that retain their stone statue form while they’re being watched, the Angels move instantly as soon as you stop watching – even to blink.
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Throughout the episode, audiences are shown how quickly the Angels can move in on their prey, jumping forward large distances with each blink – it’s what makes them particularly terrifying. But at the end of the episode, when Sally (Carey Mulligan) and Larry (Finlay Robertson) are trying to gain entry to the TARDIS the Angels appear to have run out of steam, advancing in inches rather than feet.
Gallifrey: Now You See It, Now You Don’t… Until You Do Again
Doctors Nine and Ten made a big deal out of “fixed points in time,” those events that cannot be changed no matter what. The destruction of the Time Lord’s homeworld of Gallifrey during the Time War was one such fixed point in time, but the show alters that without any of those pesky paradoxes popping up. In a head-shaking turn, in the 50th anniversary special “The Day of the Doctor” it’s revealed that Gallifrey was not destroyed during the Time War but frozen in time in a bubble universe. If that’s the case, then why didn’t time unravel?
Digging an even bigger plot hole in the Season 9 finale, “Hell Bent” Doctor Twelve (Peter Capaldi) returns to Gallifrey, which has somehow escaped the bubble universe. No explanation is given but after two seasons of the Doctor trying to free Gallifrey, that very important mission he was on had abruptly evaporated.
The Prison Wall That Doesn’t Reset (But Everything Else Does)
In the ninth season episode “Heaven Sent,” Doctor Twelve is trapped in a prison with a wall made of Azbantium, a mineral 400 times harder than diamond. The problem for the Doctor is that he is killed over and over again by the creature who also inhabits the prison. Each time he dies, the room resets.
Over the course of 7000 years, the Doctor finally breaks through the wall and can continue with his plan to travel to Gallifrey. The burning question for audiences was: if the room reset every time the Doctor died, why didn’t the wall reset also?
Healing River
Trying to help Rory during the Season 7 episode “The Angels Take Manhattan,” River Song is grabbed by a Weeping Angel. To escape she breaks her wrist, which is conveniently healed by Doctor Eleven using his regeneration energy.
We’ve seen the Doctor use regeneration energy before when Ten regrew his hand after it was severed in the Season 2 special “The Christmas Invasion.” However, that was possible because it occurred within the first 15 hours of his regeneration. Doctor Eleven healing River’s broken wrist occurs so long after his regeneration that he shouldn’t have had any regeneration energy left.
The Impossible Girl’s Impossible Escape
The Doctor dubbed Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) “The Impossible Girl” because of her propensity to show up randomly in Eleven and Twelve’s timelines. In Season 7’s finale, “The Name of the Doctor” Clara enters the Doctor’s timestream to save his life and, in so doing, is shattered into countless echoes across multiple points in space and time, unable to return.
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Refusing to accept Clara’s act of self-sacrifice, Twelve enters his own timestream to save her. At the season’s conclusion, he finds Clara before running into his previous regeneration, the War Doctor (Hurt). The next time we see Twelve and Clara – in the 50th-anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor” – all is well and there’s no mention of how they’d escaped the Doctor’s timestream. Indeed, everything we had learned about timestreams in the previous episode had been conveniently overlooked.
Timeless Plot Holes
The mystery of The Timeless Child was bandied about sinceJodie Whittakercame on board as the Thirteenth Doctor. It was not until the Season 12 finale, “The Timeless Children” that the mystery was solved when The Master (Sacha Dhawan) revealed that when The Timeless Child fell from Universe Two into our universe the Shobogans – the original inhabitants of Gallifrey – harnessed her innate regeneration ability through genetic engineering, thereby creating the Time Lord race. And with that single plot device, more than 50 years ofDoctor Wholore was rewritten and a plethora of plot holes were created. Hold on to your sonic screwdriver because this is going to take some explaining.
“The Timeless Children” clarifies that the Doctor’s incarnations go back well before Doctor One (William Hartnell). As one of the earlier incarnations, the Fugitive Doctor (Jo Martin) flies a TARDIS in police box form even though it was established in the second-ever episode ofDoctor Whothat the TARDIS’ chameleon circuit was broken, and it was stuck in that form. Meaning that the Fugitive Doctor’s TARDIS is an anomaly. Originally, The Timeless Child possessed potentially infinite regenerations, which the Time Lords limited to 12 to prevent immortality. If the limit is self-imposed, why was it necessary for the Time Lords to grant Doctor Eleven extra lives (“The Time of the Doctor”) so he could regenerate?
It’s always been lore that Time Lords have two hearts. The question is: did the Doctor’s original species have two hearts – a trait that was passed on through genetic splicing to the Gallifreyans – or did the Gallifreyans already have two hearts? Meanwhile, River Song’s origin story was already complicated; it became even more so with the Timeless Child narrative. Having the Time Lords master regeneration by themselves offered some plausibility to River – the offspring of Amy and Rory conceived in the TARDIS in the Time Vortex – possessing regenerative abilities. But if regeneration was genetically engineered by the Time Lords, then the circumstances of River’s conception shouldn’t have gifted her that power.
When Clara entered the Doctor’s timestream, she was exposed to their entire past, present and future. She gained enough information from the timestream to lead the Doctor to the correct TARDIS so it makes sense she’d be aware of all of their past iterations, including those that pre-dated Doctor One. Finally, the Timeless Child story arc also introduced The Division, a shadowy organization of rogue Time Lords who guided events throughout the universe, contravening the official Time Lord policy of not interfering. However, The Division’s existence contradicts all the times – from Doctor Three (Jon Pertwee) onwards – the Doctor has acted at the behest of the Time Lords and interfered anyway.
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