Theory:Doctor Who audio discontinuity and plot holes/The Wax Princess


 * I know Big Finish isn't allowed to directly refer to anything that happens in the new series but I find it odd that they would release a story that flat out contradicts it. In this case, it's the events of A Good Man Goes to War. Specifically, the fact that Vastra killed and ate Jack the Ripper in 1888. I kept waiting for the villain in this story to turn out to be someone other than the Ripper but that didn't happen. There was a suggestion at the end that he was somehow made of wax but that was quickly forgotten. (Just as an aside, I don't think the walking wax figure in this story was ever explained). They didn't even acknowledge the contradiction in the behind the scenes interviews. I find it especially baffling since it was written by Justin Richards who also wrote Devil in the Smoke. So, any theories? And I'm not interested in hearing the usual excuses involving the Time War and the universe being rebooted.
 * This problem is not unique to this story. A Good Man Goes to War, The Wax Princess, Matrix and Ripper's Curse each give conflicting details of the Ripper. Some may suggest that the various mediums occur in different universes. But if all stories are to be placed in the same universe, the most probable explanation that I can think of is that there are just multiple Rippers.
 * In the third edition of REF: AHistory the following explanation for multiple Rippers is offered:

"Reconciling the three accounts of Jack the Ripper in Matrix, "Ripper's Curse" and on screen in A Good Man Goes to War does tend towards absurdity - the Ripper is respectively shown to be the Valeyard, to be a murderous alien, and to be an unnamed party dispatched by Madame Vastra, all in seemingly unrelated adventures.

As a unifying theory about this, though, perhaps there's a class of events that are destined to remain mysteries. After all, the main historical significance of the Jack the Ripper is that it's famous as a mystery. Perhaps what happened remains unknown and open to question even after we've seen an explanation. (A whimsical example of this from real life: IDW's publicity materials proclaimed that "Ripper's Curse" would be the "first" time that Doctor Who had dealt with Jack the Ripper, a statement the company retracted when it was pointed out that actually, it wasn't.)

This doesn't rule out all mysteries being unsolved - the Doctor seems to conclusively solve the mystery of Agatha Christie's real-life disappearance in The Unicorn and the Wasp, for example. But it might account for why there are historical mysteries with multiple solutions in the Doctor Who universe. Candidates might include the beginning of the universe, the extinction of the dinosaurs, the exact origin of man, how and why the Pyramids were built, the purpose of standing stones, the Fall of Atlantis, the Great Fire of London, what happened to the Mary Celeste, what happened at Tunguska, the sinking of the Titanic as well as a whole host of Fortean mysteries (the Loch Ness Monster, Yeti, Roswell, flying saucers, etc.). Within the fiction of the Doctor Who universe, the exact origins of the Daleks, the start of the Sontaran-Rutan war, the beginnings of the Time Lords and the reason the Doctor left Gallifrey might be "unfixed".

Great care should be taken, however to distinguish between "unfixed" historical mysteries and simply things where there's one explanation that's not been uncovered. It's also probably best not to use this as a handwave for any continuity problems - like, say, why the manned space program of the UNIT years is more advanced than the one seen in the new series, or the final fate of the planet Earth. But where Doctor Who has multiple explanations for the same historical mystery, we might usefully think the reason is that it's "unfixed"."

- Lance Parkin