Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Timeless Children


 * How was the Doctor able to recall Jack's recent return in her memories when she wasn't there when it happened?


 * Wow! What an episode! So much to unpack and so many questions. First one: if the Doctor is the Timeless Child from a world other than Gallifrey then she isn't a Timelord. She must have a different biological structure to the Shebogans, contradicting countless references to her/him having two hearts (and two brains, which is a thing now apparently) and to the Chameleon arch which rewrote his Timelord DNA.


 * Second: What happened to the humans who went through the barrier to escape the Cybermen offscreen? Did they go to Gallifrey?
 * If the Master killed all the Timelords how can their cyber-converted dead bodies still retain regenerative abilities? Come to that, if they were preserved intact why didn't they regenerate?
 * What happened to the Cyberium at the end, unless we are meant to presume it was an organic life form?
 * If Brendan was the Timeless Child/Doctor why did he not regenerate when he fell off the cliff?
 * "Brendan" did technically regenerate. The perception filter just hid that fact, making it look as if he simply, miraculously came back to life after his fall. Which makes sense considering the whole point of the filter was to hide the truth.


 * So was the Doctor able to regenerate endlessly all along? If so, that makes the events of The Time of the Doctor a bit more confusing in hindsight; would the Eleventh Doctor have regenerated anyway even if the Time Lords hadn't gifted him a new "cycle"?
 * Yeah, the Doctor as the Timeless Child makes for a grand and powerful story but it plays merry hell with continuity. You're right, the granting of a new cycle makes no sense if it was unecessary, unless the Timelords only pretended to do so in order to continue shielding the Doctor from the truth. Then again, we are meant to suppose that the truth was hidden even from the Timelords themselves. The Timeless Child does explain a line in Kill the Moon (TV story) when the Doctor speculates if he would regenerate forever. I guess explanations are possible but it empties The Time of the Doctor (TV story) of all its power and Pathos. We remember too that the Great Intelligence attempted to kill the Doctor in all his incarnations and Clara followed it to rescue him. So are we meant to believe that somehow the Great Intelligence could only go back to the Hartnell Doctor? I can't help feeling that the Timeless Child is going to create huge problems for the show in the future.
 * Unless the pre-First Doctor Doctor (the timeless child, part of The Division) somehow became, physically, as other Time Lords when becoming the First Doctor, with the same physiology and limitations (including no memory of his/her former existence). Thus, no memory of the earlier stuff (in some senses, a different person), and the same limit on regenerations.
 * Additional point: if the Doctor was never actually in any danger of not regenerating after their eleventh incarnation, how was the grave at Trenzalore able to exist in any capacity?
 * Yep, just one of the many continuity problems this new canon is going to bring up.
 * It's been demonstrated numerous times that the Doctor can indeed die if the death happens too fast to allow for regeneration (i.e. Turn Left, The Night of the Doctor).


 * If the Timelords got their regeneration powers from the Doctor’s dna and not from the time vortex, why was River Song able to regenerate?