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


 * Why did Clara not try to kill the Silents? Has she never seen the moon landing? --  jp  barrass 
 * It seems unlikely, but it is entirely possible. Nobody has to watch the moon landing footage.
 * Also, that message was about the group that invaded earth. The different context and slightly different appearance of these silents might have been enough to break the suggestion. Clara's status as time traveller and "impossible girl" might also render her somewhat immune to that kind of hypnosis.
 * Also, it is revealed in this episode that the Silents are genetically engineered to be memory-proof, and we know from "The Inforarium" that memory-proofing is artificial (or at least, it can be). If we were to get speculative, it is entirely possible that the people who designed the Silents added safeguards to their post-hypnotic abilities that would keep them from being too powerful; for instance, it could be that Silents cannot use their commands to make somebody kill themselves. Giving them that kind of power would just be asking for an uprising. So by extension, perhaps they cannot force a person to put themselves in a position with a high risk of death (similar to how the Saturnynians' perception filters in "the Vampires of Venice" were overridden by the subconscious' survival instinct), which Clara certainly would have been if she had tried to attack the Silents because she was nude, defenseless, and outnumbered. Such reasoning could also explain why the Silents rely on their electrical attacks as opposed to just forcing their enemies to commit suicide.
 * I have a big problem with this episode, several problems in fact. But the one that is pertinent to this discussion is that the "Silents" in this episode appear to be genetically engineered by the Church solely for the purpose of being confessional priests. The Doctor seems to know this which he did not know when he spoke to Dorium in The Wedding Of River Song. But the real problem is that the Silents in this episode are a shadow of what we have seen in the previous stories. They simply blunder around trying to extract confession from anyone and everyone they meet with minimal success it seems. They don't appear to possess any will of their own and act in complete obedience to the Church.
 * This makes perfect sense when viewed in the context they were made for but it also makes you wonder how they get from this stage to the much more advanced beings clearly called "the leaders of The Silence" at the end of series 6. This episode calls them the Kovarian faction but why do these beings need factions? They appear to operate as slaves having factions serves no purpose to what they are. The weapon the possess doesn't make much sense either, they don't seem the sort of being that need weapons and on earth priests are not allowed weapons of any kind.


 * The timelords sent the Doctor a new regeneration cycle, so they must have known it was really him and that it was the right universe, so they didn't need to hear his name. Why didn't they come through the crack? --  jp  barrass 
 * The issue was not in confirming that the Doctor was on the other side. The Time Lords were intending for the Doctor to say his name in order to give them the all-clear and confirm that it was safe to come out, which it wasn't, because there was "half a universe" waiting to fire on them.
 * Ah, i like that explanation. Great: thanks. --  jp  barrass 


 * Why was Clara fine after hanging on to the TARDIS in the vortex? Captain Jack died!
 * The Doctor specifically noted that the Tardis extended the shields to cover her. Given that it was trying to shake Jack off during his trip, while she's the one who saved the Tardis' Doctor throughout his whole timeline, it's understandable that she'd be treated differently.
 * How could the Doctor lie about having a plan at the end of the episode? --  Ransom Time 
 * Technically, he didn't say what kind of plan he had, or which situation it may pertain to. His comment about not having a plan to Clara was to clarify he didn't have a plan for what she thought he meant. Also, moments later he reminds Clara that they already supposedly saw what happens here, so they can't change it. It's likely that he did have a plan of sorts- to die. Or in contrast, perhaps his plan was to "talk very fast, hope something good happens, take the credit".
 * Or maybe his plan was to lie about having a plan.
 * The Doctor is on his last life, so why did the Teselector have to imitate his regeneration in The Impossible Astronaut, it would have been believable enough if he just died as he had no remaining regenerations.
 * Perhaps the doctor didn't realise he was on his last life until he realised that he had lived significantly longer than all his other incarnations and then put 2 and 2 together and came to the conclusion that 10 had used two regenerations, resulting in the eleventh doctor being the thirteenth incarnation.
 * Neither the War Doctor, whose adventures were mostly time locked, nor the aborted regeneration which created the MetaCrisis, were particularly widely known of. While it would have been historically accurate to show that incarnation dying without regenerating, the Doctor's goal was to create a plausible enough "final end" to preserve the fixed point in history of this being his recorded death.  Not depicting a failed attempt at regeneration would have led to doubt and a suspicion that he might well have survived in a new body, since historical record still showed him as the "Eleventh" at this point.
 * Why did he ask the TARDIS if he could regenerate after being poisoned in Let's Kill Hitler? Even though the poison prevents regeneration, he doesn't have any regenerations remaining anyway!
 * Perhaps the doctor didn't realise he was on his last life until he realised that he had lived significantly longer than all his other incarnations and then put 2 and 2 together and came to the conclusion that 10 had used two regenerations, resulting in the eleventh doctor being the thirteenth incarnation. This would also explain why the TARDIS says that regeneration is disabled.
 * The Doctor has claimed that he tried very hard to forget the War Doctor ever existed. Given how good he is at erasing memories, and that at the time he was poisoned, very sick, and quite possibly a little delirious, it's understandable that he might forget that his standard escape from certain death was no longer an option, until reminded by his TARDIS.
 * If they Silence really worked for the papal mainframe, and were specially made as priests for confession. Why did the conquer the earth all those thousands of years ago. It was explained that it was renegades who tried to kill the doctor, but how does conquering the earth fit into there plan? Surely its a bit much to start a thousands year plan to kill the doctor, aren't there easier ways?
 * The Silence needed a spacesuit in order to control River, which they knew because they were aware of the myth of Lake Silencio. They set out to guide humanity's evolution in order to get them to the point at which they could fashion a working spacesuit for them, because the Silents are parasites who do not make anything for themselves. And since they are the self-proclaimed "sentinels of history," they would want to respect the flow of time and make as few changes to the timeline as possible. Integrating themselves into history and slowly shaping it the way they wanted would probably be a better way of achieving that end than popping out of the sky and demanding a spacesuit would have been, and taking a spacesuit from the future would have been cheating because had they not gone back in time and influenced the creation of the first spacesuits, there would be no spacesuits in the future to take.


 * The renegade chapter of the church that tried to kill the doctor, was referred to as Krovarian chapter implying she was there leader, but it was made clear that Krovarian was a servant of the silents.
 * She thought she was their leader, and it suited them for her to think that. So they let their faction be called after her.
 * The silents who invaded earth were likely a splinter group of the splinter group, who had goals beyond Krovarian's plan to kill the doctor.
 * However, Kovarian's group and the Silents in 1969 were shown to be in collaboration; Kovarian procured Melody and brought her back to 1969 to be trained and supervised, while the 1969 Silents devised the spacesuit that Kovarian would later use for the assassination attempt at Lake Silencio.
 * The Silents are not very out-in-the-open types; they tend to operate from behind the scenes as demonstrated by their spacesuit scheme on Earth. Kovarian could very well have been a public face for the group.
 * Why didn't the Doctor take the people of Christmas away from the planet so they weren't in danger?
 * He never had the means to do so. The Tardis was away from Christmas almost the entire time, and in the end he was dying anyway...
 * Actually, this is wrong. The Tardis is standing in the village during the fighting before Lem piloted it away. It is some kind of ice growing on it, though. I don't know what that is but I guess it has something to do with the doctor not using it again.
 * In The Eleventh Hour the Doctor said that if the wall was taken down the crack would still exist. The same thing would happen here, with the people taken away the papal mainframe might have taken the forcefield down and let the planet be destroyed (with no lose of life to innocent bystanders). They would then discover the crack was still there and the alien races would likely start hunting the Doctor across time and space to stop him answering the question. So to stop this he stayed on trenzalore with the people there to isolate the conflict. In a war it is easier to defend one town on one planet instead of the entire universe.
 * The simplest explanation would seem to be that they wanted to stay, to defend their home rather than relocate. The Doctor made it clear that he was going to stay, basically to protect Gallifrey from potential access by the bad guys.
 * For the first 300 years, the Doctor did not have his TARDIS, and very soon after that, the war began. He never had a good opportunity to evacuate the town (let alone the planet, as it was said that the races were willing to burn Trenzalore entirely if it meant stopping the Time Lords from coming back).