Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Listen


 * If it was only just fear, then who wrote "LISTEN" on the Doctor's chalkboard and was under the cover's of child Danny's bed?
 * It's suggested that the Doctor wrote "LISTEN" in a moment of absentmindedness and that one of Danny's friends was playing a trick on him. However, it's by no means confirmed that either is the case.
 * Since the word in question was written in the Doctor's handwriting (it's been pointed out and is easy to see), it's probably the Doctor who wrote it himself without even realising it. That's Occam's Razor: the simplest of competing theories should be preferred to the more complex.


 * This seems to occur numerous times at the end of series 7 and now 8. In some episodes like The Name of the Doctor and Robot of Sherwood, Clara knows everything that has happened to the Doctor and all of his faces. But in some episodes, like this one, she doesn't know everything. In this episode, she doesn't know about her coming to the Doctor's childhood.
 * She didn't know about her coming to the Doctor's childhood because it hadn't yet happened for her. I think it's hyperbole to say she knows "everything that happened to the Doctor". Moffat has said she only remembers bits and pieces of her other lives as if they were "dreamlike images". Also, the timeline we saw in Name of the Doctor didn't include the Twelfth since it was from a reality where the Doctor died on Trenzalore. So it's debatable whether Clara visited him as a boy in the "original history" or not.
 * She most likely did do it in the "original history" (is there such a thing in Doctor Who, really?), but the Clara splinters were not with the Doctor every day of his life. There is no indication of there being another Clara present and no reason why the First Doctor, or any incarnation, would relate to her a dream he had as a child (though, technically, this happens in Listen with the Twelfth Doctor).


 * If "the monster under your bed that grabs your leg" is a dream that everyone has, but we saw that it was Clara who grabbed the Doctor's leg, then what about everyone else who has the same dream?
 * It's a dream. There doesn't have to be a reason for everyone to have it. A lot of people dream about that in real world too, but it's not like there's really someone under the bed.
 * Also: Most of us have that dream, but don't think it means anything, because it doesn't mean anything. The Doctor has that dream, and thinks it means something, because, uniquely, it does happen to mean something for him.


 * Wasn't the world of Time Lords supposed to be time-locked? With Ninth saying he couldn't return even if he wanted to. How come Clara just pops in there like nothing, in the time of Doctor's childhood for crying out loud?
 * Only the Last Great Time War was time-locked by the Moment, not the entire Gallifrey.
 * Alternatively, the Doctor states he disabled all the safety precautions, hence how the TARDIS is able to arrive at the last point before the universe dies. Perhaps with no safety allowed they were able to ram through.
 * Or, perhaps this is signifying that Gallifrey is no longer time-locked due to the events of The Day of the Doctor (TV story).
 * Remember too that the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors returned with the War Doctor to the time when the Moment was detonated (of course creating an alternate continuity instead). They remark that 'we shouldn't be here'. So someone or something has unlocked time, perhaps the Moment itself.
 * The shed is shown under a blue sky in The Day of the Doctor (TV story). This would imply that the shed is not actually on Gallifrey since it has an orange sky.
 * We've seen blue skies on Gallifrey before (The Invasion of Time). Presumably, the sky there changes colors at times much like happens here on Earth (various shades of blue, or grey, red, purple, at the right times and places). Despite that, it's true that we don't know for sure where that shed was located. We know that the Doctor's race were easily capable of off-world travel, so this may well have been some kind of "vacation" spot on another planet.


 * Considering the Doctor met Clara "prime" as a child (in the prequel to "The Bells of Saint John"), and is well aware of her early life (the leaf, etc., as per "The Rings of Akhaten" and "The Name of the Doctor"), it's odd that he'd think she was once an orphan who lived in a children's home in another part of the country.
 * It's not odd. We've seen that this incarnation of the Doctor is a lot more spacy and all over the place with his thoughts. He doesn't consider Clara's feelings or think much of her (of course he still cares about her and everyone else in the universe like the Doctor should, but he's far more flippant and dismissive than Tennant or Smith's Doctors were). He didn't realise Clara was on a date and that her date would most likely be on her mind considering how badly it was going. Because of that, he doesn't think to even consider that maybe Clara sent them somewhere wrong and just assumes that everything's fine, fitting in with his flippant, dismissive, and spacy/flaky nature. Twelve just doesn't see those things like we would expect him to.


 * There's simple explanations for much of what happens in the episode and there's plenty of closed loops that we never have to worry about after the episode ends, but some things just don't add up. The creature or thing under the covers of Danny's/Rupert's bed, then the whatever-it-is that opened the door at the end of time in Orson's little home, those things were there and definitely made the Doctor worry like he normally does when in actual danger. The door opening on its own at the end of the episode is the most glaring issue for me. If it was all based on a bad nightmare the Doctor had through Clara messing around in his childhood, what was it that opened up the door after the Doctor unlocked it? Something had to have been there is all I'm saying and we don't know what it was. Orson definitely thought something was out there or else he wouldn't have locked the door in the first place.
 * The lock was a pressure lock, the opening mechanism was triggered automatically after the unlocking. As for the blanket, it is said at least twice that it could be one of Rupert's friends.


 * If the Doctor wanted to find this "perfect hider", why did he let the opportunity go in Rupert's room, only to risk his life later on, trying to find it again at the end of the universe?
 * He's not exactly thinking logically in this episode so that explains some of it but also he didn't know what it would do if any of them actually saw it so he might not have wanted to risk anything happening to Rupert.


 * The planet at "the end of the universe" had a sun. But in Utopia, Malcassairo was the last planet in the universe and all of the stars had burned out. So this couldn't have taken place after that, but if it took place before, then everyone wouldn't be dead as the Doctor said as the Futurekind and Toclafane, or their ancestors, would still be on Malcassairo.
 * They simply may have been wrong (or slightly overstating it) to say in Utopia that *all* the stars had burned out. Or, what we see here that looks like a sun may have been something else - maybe it was even some energy caused by the Universe reaching its eventual end.
 * Malcassairo is only one of the last planets, the last planet is Gallifrey in Hell Bent.


 * If Danny dies in Dark Water, who is Orson? Presumably Danny doesn't have any siblings (as they would probably be sharing a room in the children's home) so who is Orson, how can he exist and how/why did he have the toy soldier at the end of the universe?
 * Danny may have already had a child. Or, he may have had siblings/other relatives who for whatever reason were not known or were not with him at the time he was in the home as a child.
 * According to Moffat himself in an Ask Moffat in DWM, the most likely explanation is that Orson is the descendant of one of Danny's siblings.
 * Orson Pink became a member of Faction Paradox after running over Danny Pink with a car.
 * Correction, Orson Pink is the descendant of one of Danny's father's siblings.


 * Why is the Doctor crying about joining the army when Gallifrey would not have an army because of their non-interference policy?
 * It's been established several times that Gallifrey does have a military. They couldn't have fought in the Time War otherwise.


 * If Clara left "Soldier Dan, the leader who carries no weapon" with the young Doctor, why didn't he recognise it when she presented it to Rupert? Did he see the one Orson had?
 * How much time has passed since the Doctor was a boy? Conjecture: Enough time to forget a toy that has long since lost its significance.


 * How does Clara receive the phone call that distracts her and sends her to Danny's past when she prevents it from even happening by going straight back to Danny right after she had just left him? He had no reason to call her. Especially since she shows up later to apologise at his place.
 * After she goes to apologise, they argue again and this time it's Danny who leaves. Presumably the call she received while in the TARDIS before came from after that moment, with Danny trying to apologise for his behaviour.
 * Actually, wrong, we didn't see who called Clara, did we? Someone else must have called her and she at that moment thought it was Danny wanting to apologise, as simple as that.


 * The Doctor says there is no creature he knows with a perfect hiding mechanism. Don't the Silence and the Vashta Nerada have really good hiding mechanisms ?
 * "Really good" and "perfect" are not the same thing. The Silence and Vashta Nerada, after all, were discovered by the Doctor, so obviously they're not perfect hiders. If they were, no one would have ever found them, even the Doctor. Which makes one realise that his quest to find the perfect hider is impossible for a single, glaringly obvious reason.


 * At the time the episode was produced, the young Doctor Clara meets was explicity meant to be the First Doctor (as in the first life of the Doctor), to the point of the child actor being made up to look like a young William Hartnell. The later retcon of The Timeless Children establishing the first Doctor was female and one of many incarnations before the William Hartnell version, makes its difficult to reconcile with the rewritten canon unless Clara accidentially piloted the TARDIS into an alternate timeline. 23skidoo ☎  19:55, 30 June 2022 (UTC)
 * The general rule is not to take later episodes into account when discussing discontinuity and plot holes. Having said that, my personal head canon is that the TARDIS only took the Doctor back as far as he could remember (since anything before that was wiped by the Division). BastianBalthazarBux ☎  11:23, 1 July 2022 (UTC)
 * Alternatively, this is the first impact Clara had on The Doctor (prior to this known as the timeless child but seemingly abandoned by the Division since the caretakers don't seem to know their identity) - perhaps without Clara's fear speech, they would never have been driven to leave Gallifrey.
 * And it should also be noted that since I made my original post, Chris Chibnall stated in a 2022 Radio Times interview that he expects his "Timeless Children" retcon to be itself retconned by a future writer. (In this way this supports BastianBalthazarBux's comment about not taking future episodes into account.) 23skidoo ☎  15:54, 23 March 2023 (UTC)