Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Time Monster


 * In episode one, the interior of the police box prop is visible.
 * You cannot see inside, it is dark because when you walk into the darkness you appear into the console room. The TARDIS is made like this so you don't see into the spaceship.


 * The V1 is black and white.
 * The fact that it is going though time might make it black and white.


 * Since the V1 is moved forward through time while in mid-air, so that it explodes in the programme's present, how can it be that the local remembers it having fallen in the past?
 * The incident presumably occurs at both points in time.


 * The Doctor's supposedly backwards dialogue when played backwards is still gibberish.
 * Perhaps it is gibberish so that people who can understand backwards dialogue won't understand it, and the doctor is non of the wiser that he is talking rubbish.


 * The effect of the crystal ages Stuart by over fifty years. Despite this, his nails and hair do not grown out to match his rapid aging.
 * The physics of death by accelerated ageing are problematic throughout Doctor Who (cf. "The Claws of Axos", "City of Death", "The Leisure Hive", "Timelash", "The Sound of Drums"). Strictly speaking, if all that is happening is that Stuart's personal time is being speeded up within a small area, he should die of dehydration long before he has a chance to become an old man. One could hypothesise that the ageing effect is being accomplished at a microscopic level, wearing out each individual body cell while bypassing the bodily functions. Not that this excuses the chicken in "City of Death" (which very explicitly was within a bubble of accelerated time, without any food supply, and should just have died).
 * Given that we don't quite exactly know what was being affected (cells or whole body, for example) or how the technology truly works, all we have to go on is speculation. Whatever the time effect is, it obviously causes aging or a simulation thereof, but the person does not actually 'pass through' the intervening time - meaning, Stuart didn't live through 50 years without food or water. The process also obviously didnt accelerate growth of nails or hair, nor have his heart beat fifty years worth of times, nor anything else requiring all that energy one would have gotten from fifty years worth of eating food. It's a bit of an ipso facto, but without truly knowing the technology and temporal laws involved, there we are.