Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Power of the Daleks


 * Not only does the Doctor regenerate, but his clothes do as well.
 * A side effect of a first regeneration?
 * Doctor's first regeneration was less violent than the others, so it is possible that he had more control over it.
 * This still doesn't explain how it could happen. Would we have to consider it as a production error?
 * Its suggested that the Troughton Doctor is a younger Hartnell Doctor. And, they have swapped places. It was first referred to as a rejuvenation, and not a regeneration.
 * The TARDIS appears capable of its own feats of block transfer computation (q.v. Logopolis (TV story) and other stories), creating matter out of raw energy and calculation, and vice versa. It's entirely feasible to suppose that some if not all the clothes in the copious wardrobe rooms are 'library' items- created by the TARDIS to suitable blueprints, and can be 'smart' adjusted accordingly- thus how every Doctor's chosen outfit is conveniently in their size. This may also go some way to explaining the fourth Doctor and Romana's lightning fast costume changes in Robot (TV story) and Destiny of the Daleks (TV story). If this is the case, and since we know the TARDIS is affected by the Doctor's regenerations, it's wholly coherent to assume that the regenerative instability from the Doctor's first change of appearance may have affected the TARDIS enough to slightly glitch the wardrobe software- note that the second Doctor's costume is a (deliberate) scruffy parody of the first Doctor's wardrobe.
 * By the same token, we can't legitimately call it a production error, because it was intentional. From the original character biography for the Second Doctor, or "The New Doctor Who", on his planned love of disguise (as evident in his first three stories as produced):
 * "In his first story, he wears a flyblown version of the costume associated with the character."


 * How do the colonists not recognise the Daleks after the events of Doomsday and Journey's End?
 * It's pretty well established that even many people from the early/mid 21st century--from Zoe Heriot to Henry van Statten--didn't know about the Daleks. If this does get explained away, it seems likely that people from farther in the future wouldn't know about those events either.
 * Time in the Whoniverse is two-dimensional; Power may be after Doomsday along the fourth dimension, but it's clearly before it along the fifth. To limited species like humans who only sense 4 (or 3.5) dimensions, anything which is later on either time dimension is unknown.
 * In the 11th Doctor novel The Dalek Generation humans don't know of the Daleks as villains. We don't know when the story takes place, so bad history records is an easy answer to this.
 * Perhaps the simplest explanation is the one given in Remembrance: humans just have an extraordinary ability to forget past events (hence why Ace knew nothing about Yetis in the Tube, or the Loch Ness Monster in the Thames.
 * This is technically a discontinuity issue with the later stories, not this one; they weren't written at the time this aired, so the producers of this story can't be reasonably blamed or criticised for contradicting events in stories they had no idea would ever even exist. In any case, this is simple; the events of this story happen long after the events of the later ones, plenty of time for history to be lost (or, indeed, overwritten due to various "timey-wimey" issues).


 * IIRC, Ben says the Doctor was always going on about Daleks before regenerating. But didn't we see mostly every moment of their time together before this, with no mention of Daleks? The War Machines went directly into the Smugglers went directly into the Tenth Planet, right. Apologies if I've got show/novelisation mixed up.
 * I suppose the Doctor must have made off-screen references to the Daleks.
 * We didn't see every moment. For example, The Smugglers takes place over far more than 100 minutes of in-universe time.


 * In episode one, the Doctor has a dagger that he got from Saladin, however he never met Saladin, as evidenced in The Crusade when the Doctor says he has always wanted to meet Saladin but is unable to.
 * Maybe he met Saladin some time later.
 * Alternatively, he could be lying; it's not like anyone he's talking to can call him out on it.