Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Family of Blood


 * In the dance, why doesn't the Family shoot Martha? She wouldn't have enough time to react to the gun being fired (as seen elsewhere in the story)
 * They may have been afraid of hitting and killing Mother of Mine, who is after all being used as a shield by Martha.


 * Why didn't Martha just keep the fob watch in her pocket the whole time?
 * Because it's programmed to rewrite human DNA. Martha's human, and as saturated with Arton Energy as Smith is. We saw what it did to Tim. It'd do the same to Martha.


 * What happened to the scarecrows?
 * Without the Family to animate and control them they reverted back to their previous state.


 * Why didn't the Family of Blood die after they were imprisoned for eternity?
 * The Doctor wanted them to pay for what they had done, so he used his knowledge to grant them immortality in a way they would not like. The forms of their punishments may also have made them immortal, i.e. being frozen, time slowing down at the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, and the unknown properties of the mirror dimension.


 * If all that is required to defeat the Family is to distract them long enough so as to tamper with the controls of their spaceship, rendering them effectively helpless, why does the Doctor choose to employ such an overcomplicated plan that puts a lot of innocent humans in danger and only leads to the very killings for which the Doctor feels obliged to punish the Family so severely for at the climax?
 * They were actively shooting at him when he ran from them, and had to escape and hide from them before he could get them to such a point.


 * Considering the Family's ship was theirs, why weren't they aware that the Doctor having pushed all the switches would have had a bad/unwanted effect on the ship?
 * They weren't paying attention.


 * No explanation is given for how exactly the Doctor manages to capture and punish each member of the Family at the end of this episode, apparently demonstrating the possession of unprecedented powers on his part.
 * The Family realise that they should stop, they look up at the Doctor after the explosion and, realizing they have no way to escape, possibly give themselves up to him.


 * It isn't possible that the Doctor can trap Sister of Mine in every mirror because a mirror is basically an object with a reflective surface, in fact, you see things by the light being reflected off them, so everything except pure black is a mirror.
 * We're talking about a species that has harnessed the energy of black holes to travel through the space/time continuum and used bowships to fight giant vampire bats in space. It may not be possible per se, but the Time Lords were capable of a lot of impossible. That, and the Doctor is definitely not one to mess with. If anyone could find a way to trap a body within the confines of what we call a mirror for all time, it'd be him.


 * Son of Mine says that the Doctor visits Sister of Mine every year. How is this possible if the Tenth Doctor blew up the Tardis in The End of Time, when he regenerated, surely a mirror wouldn't withstand that, after all, the Swimming pool did ed up in the library, so what happened to the mirrors and Sister of Mine?
 * The Doctor does have a time machine; he could have visited her every year until the end of the time (in her timeline) all in a short contiguous span (in his). More importantly she's trapped in every mirror, not just that particular mirror, so it doesn't matter if that mirror broke.