Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Doctor Who and the Silurians


 * The vision impairment of the injured Silurian changes between episodes.
 * The worse the injuries take hold the more impaired the Silurians vision is. The Silurian isn't human.  His vision is different from a human being's, and there is nothing to suggest that it's an impairment.  His point-of-view seems to suggest that Silurians can see out of their "third eye".


 * It was raining when Dr. Quinn arrived but it wasn't raining when the search for the "thing" began or before Dr. Quinn arrived.
 * It started raining in the interim.


 * Further, Quinn arrives in the barn with a wet coat. But in the next shot, in the same scene, his coat is bone dry.


 * The name 'Silurian' is a misnomer, as scientifically-minded viewers pointed out. The creatures could not have come from the Silurian Period, as reptiles had not yet evolved. In The Sea Devils the Third Doctor acknowledges the error by saying the Silurians should be called Paleocenes. But this is incorrect as well, for the Paleocene Epoch marked the beginning of the Age of Mammals.
 * The Doctor estimates at that time when they may have been from. The fact that mammals were becoming dominant during the Paleocene Epoch doesn't mean the "Silurians" couldn't have been there as well.
 * Also, contrary to popular belief, the Silurians were NOT named after the era.
 * In-story, they were, and this is explicitly stated by the Doctor. It is true however that the name was chosen by the writers because it sounded cool.The 'Silurians' were contemporaries of the dinosaurs (they have a dinosaur 'pet'). But the dinosaurs were dead by the Palaeocene.
 * In The Hungry Earth the naming problem is neatly avoided.
 * No it's not; in fact, it's horribly compounded. The Doctor says they're also known as Eocenes (making the Palaeocene problem even worse, since the Eocene is the period after the Palaeocene, when the mammals really took over), and then says they're more accurately referred to as Homo reptilia. They're clearly not a species of Homo, a genus of mammals (in particular, humans) that descended from Australopithecines about 2.3 million years ago, so 'Homo reptilia' is nonsense.
 * They also use the term 'Earth reptiles' at some point. (This was the favored term for the Silurians, and the Sea Devils and various other species, in the NA novels.) This isn't inaccurate, but it's horribly vague (lizards and turtles are also 'Earth reptiles'—for that matter, biologically, mammals and birds are also subclades of reptiles), the word 'Earth' doesn't add anything at all, and it's insulting in the same way as calling us 'apes'.
 * The best term in that episode is probably 'lizard men', which doesn't attempt to be accurate at all, and therefore doesn't fail in any way.
 * They also use the term 'Earth reptiles' at some point. (This was the favored term for the Silurians, and the Sea Devils and various other species, in the NA novels.) This isn't inaccurate, but it's horribly vague (lizards and turtles are also 'Earth reptiles'—for that matter, biologically, mammals and birds are also subclades of reptiles), the word 'Earth' doesn't add anything at all, and it's insulting in the same way as calling us 'apes'.
 * The best term in that episode is probably 'lizard men', which doesn't attempt to be accurate at all, and therefore doesn't fail in any way.
 * The best term in that episode is probably 'lizard men', which doesn't attempt to be accurate at all, and therefore doesn't fail in any way.


 * The Doctor states that he's thousands of years old, which is inconsistent with the Second Doctor's statement of being only 450 years old soon after his regeneration (there's no indication the Second incarnation lasted for thousands of years).
 * The Doctor may have been exaggerating, or basing his age upon the relative age of the Silurians. The Doctor has been caught out lying about his age (DW: The Ribos Operation), and age can be interpreted many different ways when you are both a time traveler and an alien.
 * He may be reffering to his life span.