Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Curse of the Black Spot


 * Wouldn't the TARDIS translation circuit make Captain Avery understand what the Doctor meant by "sensors"?
 * If he doesn't know what they are, he still wouldn't understand what the Doctor meant. It's like how the people in Pompeii didn' t know what a volcano was.


 * If the crew on the alien spacecraft got a human disease then why didn't the 'Siren' put them in stasis as well instead of leaving them to die? Toby had a fever and he was put under stasis. Shouldn't the same apply?
 * We didn't see their arrival. Presumably they arrived merely stunned, but the Siren overpowered them and got them into stasis. The same would have happened to the Doctor and friends, but he did his usual fast talking followed by fast action.


 * When Doctor and Co got zapped into the alien ship, they arrived merely briefly stunned. All other victims were stored in suspended state upon arrival, even those who had no life-threatening injury. Why the different treatment?


 * Even for Dr Who, it's a bit of a stretch to have a crew of sailers with no knowledge of science more advanced than the astrolabe able, with no training, to successfully pilot an alien spacecraft that doesn't even have controls labeled in a langauge they could understand.


 * A repeat of the classic 'Period Terminal Illness' hole: The Doctor could cure anyone if he wanted by just taking them on a day-trip to a period when medicine has advanced sufficiently. Collect boy, go forward a few centuries, collect antibiotics, return boy. If this is against the Doctor's non-interference rules or risks the integrity of the timey-wimey ball, then so be it - but it would be nice to see the possibility at least mentioned and dismissed rather than leave it dangling.


 * When the Doctor and Avery were running out of the TARDIS, Avery opened the door first. Since Avery was from the 17th century, how did he know how to open a door mechanism that hadn't been invented for another 300-400 years?


 * What reason did the Doctor have for his "let the Siren take us" plan? It was easy to dismiss the apparent "hail mary" play at the end of Amy's Choice--he knew the whole thing was the dream, he trusted Amy, he couldn't bear to contradict Amy, at the very worst it was a 50/50 chance. But this one just seems like "out of ideas, maybe this will work, otherwise we all die".
 * Isn't interdimensional travel supposed to be impossible since the end of Gallifrey, as 10 said back in series 2?
 * Maybe the spacetime reboot changed the rules.
 * There are many different kinds of parallel universe, both in real-life physics and in the history of Doctor Who. Maybe one kind is closed off, but another kind isn't.
 * Martha in the Mirror already had interdimensional travel (and through reflections, even) in the middle of series 3, so maybe the Doctor was just wrong, or at least not very precise.


 * Is there any reason the ship has been totally becalmed for 8 days? It doesn't seem like it has any connection to the siren or the alien spaceship, and no other explanation is given.