Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Girl Who Waited


 * The creators of the facility; who put great effort into making a comfortable environment for it's patients, never thought about the constant horror it would induce when the medical protocol states that the handbots should swarm on mass in order to treat someone who doesn't want treatment.
 * The only thing they didn't anticipate is that a human would wander into their facility. For the people they expected, there would be no good reason for anyone to avoid treatment. Almost anyone who did try to avoid treatment would be immediately sedated by the single handbot. If someone actively resisted to the point where you need a swarm of them, the choice is between scaring them or letting them die.


 * The facility is a medical emergency quarantine for terminally ill people to live out their lives in an entirely seperate and compressed time stream relative to our time stream. It is a medical facility with mastery over monumentally complex powers, yet it cannot be trusted to correctly identify that a patient has only one heart. Or indeed whether or not treatment would be antithetical to it's cause.
 * If it is assumed to be a closed system - only the planetary inhabitants involved - that makes a degree of sense.
 * Would this "closed system" also explain why the Handbots also didn't realise that she wasn't actually suffering from the plague?
 * Yes.
 * Essentially the premise would be "You are in Red Falls. Only Apalapucians with the disease enter Red Falls. Ergo, you can only be Apalapucian and you have the disease and these things need not be checked."


 * This is simple engineering. Obviously they were capable of writing the diagnostic software to detect species and presence of the plague. But there are two good reasons not to do so. First, more software means more effort; even if they didn't care about cost, that either means the facility would open later, or something more important would have to be dropped. Second, all software is imperfect. Even if the chances of a false negative are only 1 in a million, if the chances of a healthy or single-hearted person wandering into the facility are lower than that, you've actually made things worse rather than better by adding the diagnostic.


 * Amy claims to have learnt the trick of having Handbots feed back into each other on the first day, even though she had been there a week at the very least.
 * She most likely meant, her first day meeting them.

Taken further, probably each section of the facility maintains a separate archive of timeslices, demonstrated by the time-searching-and-linking that occurred when Amy went to the garden. The timeslices of the different sections are managed transparently to provide a consistent and nearly seamless experience to the occupant. This measure enables more optimal distribution of the time, because not the entire facility needs to be allotted to one visitor for their entire lifetime. Within a century, the facility can actually host more patients than their combined lifetime, as long as they are never in the same section at the same time. When they cross a section, and the target section within that same timeslice already contains an occupant, the facility automatically finds an unoccupied timeslice for the target section and provides the portal into that slot. Presumably, also the visitors get timeslices, so they each can spend time with their loved ones without having to queue. It's really quite clever, and, kind. However, what left me pondering was the question: Didn't the Doctor and Co. effectively sabotage the facility? They took the visiting frustrum (glass) with them, without ever replacing it (and even if they did, it was not placed in the same timeslice as it was taken from), and they also pulled off and replaced some cables. And to lesser consequence, Amy left signs within the engines section. Do these acts of sabotage actually not cause consequences, such as the innocent Apalapucian families who visit their beloveds, becoming permanently disconnected from their loved ones, possibly even retroactively? --Bisqwit 21:16, September 11, 2011 (UTC)
 * A bit of FridgeLogic hit me: Though it was not explicitly mentioned in the story, it makes sense to think that the different timelines within the facility form a linear progression. Once an occupant expires, the next occupant is taken in. The timeslices are managed by the factory, and the total timespan can be millenia long. Within a timespan of a century, many patients can be hosted by the facility, all in completely solitarity. Time travel magic ensures that patients taken in at the same hour end up in different timeslices.


 * So, when patients (presumably still with the disease) are "moved" into a "faster" (Red Waterfall) time-stream, the disease remains linked Anchored with the original (Green Anchor) time-stream? If it would kill the patient in "one day" but then this is not the same "day" that the patient experiences?