Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Web of Fear


 * Where do all the other robot Yeti come from? Surely Travers could not have brought them all back from Tibet. If think we assume that they were built from scratch under instruction from the Great Intelligence, by the first Yeti or the possessed Arnold, then why bother to disguise them as Yeti at all? Surely they were only originally made to look like Yeti to exploit the folklore of Tibet for purposes of cover, but in 1960's London that would be almost totally redundant.
 * They were built following a basic simple design, and to create fear in order to once again allow them to operate with minimal human interference.


 * When talking about underground trains the Doctor tells Victoria they came a little after her time but she is from 1866 and an underground train line opened in 1863.
 * He was mistaken; it must be difficult remembering all of human history.
 * Most of the underground system actually did come about after her time. She didn't seem to know about it, which prompted the Doctor's response.
 * The London Underground in Victoria's time was basically a glorified three-mile railway tunnel, not the sprawling electrified mass transportation network it had evolved into by 1967. In that sense, the Doctor was speaking entirely accurately.


 * The Yeti changes shape in the museum scene (not intentional, surely?).
 * It certainly seems to be intentional, with a deliberate cross fade between the Yeti's two forms. The Yeti were redesigned between their first story and this one, and the change was shown by having the one in the museum "morph" into the new form after being reactivated.
 * Of course it is intentional that is why we see a big close up of it happening! The redesign was to make the Yeti more frightening, in the original story they were meant to pass for possibly genuine Abominable Snowmen, the redesign also gave them large brightly lit eyes to make them more visible in the dimly lit underground sets. Additionally, the Doctro explicitly comments that the Yeti look different than they did last time.


 * When Jamie and the others are looking at the scanner in the first episode, Frazer Hines rests his hand on the console but withdraws it quickly as if he's burnt it.
 * The TARDIS console contains a lot of energy, it could very well have been hot at that point.
 * If you notice there are a lot of lights on the console in this sequence Jamie (Frazer Hines) accidentally touchs one of the bulbs causing him to pull his hand away, and note later TARDIS scenes have a less iluminated console. light bulbs become very hot very quickly.


 * The 'explosion' at the end of episode one happens several times.
 * It only appears that way. The secondary glowing is merely a side effect of the web absorbing the energy of the blast. (This is confirmed in episode two, when dialogue describes another absorbed explosion as "pulsating".)


 * How was the Doctor sure that Jamie was not possessed by Great Intelligence? Arnold was possessed but seemed normal. Surely the Doctor had to suspect everyone except himself.
 * Having had experience of the Intelligences methods The Doctor would know that its accomplis would already have been in place before he, Victoria and Jamie arrived in the underground.
 * Jamie is one of the Doctor's closest friends and travelling companions. If we can't simply assume that the Doctor knows Jamie well enough to know that he is almost certainly not possessed by an alien intelligence, then we can surely forgive the Doctor for assuming so. Especially since we don't really have a baseline for Arnold's "normal", and the Doctor certainly doesn't, but Jamie's baseline for "normal" is well-known to both him and us.