Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Woman Who Fell to Earth


 * If the TARDIS is in-fact, a living being, then why doesn't it come back to her at the end of the episode like it did in The Eleventh Hour?
 * The TARDIS may be damaged and unable to return.


 * When the Doctor speaks to Ryan and Yasmin for the first time, she mentioned that she had been a Scotsman half an hour ago. Which is weird, because she just landed minutes ago and neither her regeneration nor the explosion of the TARDIS or her fall could have possibly taken that long!
 * We don't see how long her fall was from her perspective. Also, she's just come out of an explosive regeneration, so it makes sense for her to mix up saying 30 seconds with 30 minutes.
 * When Felix Baumgartner took his stratospheric leap back in 2012 it took him just 10 minutes, the Doctor hadn't fallen nearly from that height. And we are talking about a Time lord here - or maybe a Time lady now? Even if you bring up the regeneration and the explosion of the TARDIS, her species is known for their special relationship with time. So I doubt she'd just mixed up minutes and seconds! The other thing - that also troubled me in "The End of Time pt 2" - was: Why wasn't she harmed at all from that fall? The Fourth Doctor had to regenerate when he fell from the Pharos antenna.
 * To answer your second question; she just regenerated so she's much more durable and stronger, if only for 15 hours or so. The Tenth Doctor was able to regenerate his severed hand in The Christmas Invasion and River Song survived several bullets to her body in Let's Kill Hitler. Also, your point doesn't disprove how regeneration muddles a Time Lord's brain; many Doctors muddle up things like time, the name of things and even the direction they walk in. Her confusion over time is no different from the Eleventh Doctor's confusion about which way is left in The Eleventh Hour.
 * Does the 15-hour buffer really make Time Lords impervious to external physical damage for that period? The Impossible Astronaut indicates that if a Time Lord sustains fatal physical injury before the regeneration process is complete, nothing can prevent them from definitively dying.
 * Your example was in a scenario where the Doctor was killed during the process. The points listed above account for those after regeneration completed. Also, The Wedding of River Song revealed that The Impossible Astronaut regeneration was a fake so is not accurate to the process established in other, real, regeneration.
 * Surely, the 15-hour buffer period qualifies as happening `during` regeneration, or else how would the Time Lord be able to regrow limbs, exhibit extraordinary strength, etc.? The complex cellular changes that occur during regeneration are precisely what allow those abilities to temporarily manifest; those abilities fade once the buffer period (and hence, the regenerative process) is finished. As for River's claim, the fact that the regeneration in The Impossible Astronaut was later revealed to be fake is irrelevant; other examples, most notably River's other attempt to kill the Doctor in Let's Kill Hitler, prove that she was being truthful about the possibility of preventing regeneration. This is backed up by other stories; in The Deadly Assassin for instance, the Master's TCE is capable of inflicting enough bodily damage such that regeneration never occurs.
 * Yes, regeneration is preventable. From what we know, if a Time Lord is able to make it to the next body then, yes, they are "de facto" immortal or at least heightened in power, strength and so on given all the energy bursting in them. So, the buffer starts after a Time Lord successfully makes it to the next body. If we are going to class your example as legitimate, at least for things outside the Tesselecta 'regenerating', then we can use what River said herself: "he didn't make it to the next [body]", solidifying that Time Lords need to be reborn in a new body given the previous one had died. and yes, after those 15 hours in the first cycle, the body stabilises and becomes as vulnerable the last body was.
 * Point is, she survived via regeneration energy, which is consistent with prior post-regeneration stories.
 * Given that the TARDIS was undergoing an unknown degree of extraordinary stresses at the time of the regeneration, it could well be that the flow of time was locally disrupted such that more time passed for the Doctor relative to the surrounding area. There have been examples of a malfunctioning or modified TARDIS causing such temporal disruptions before (the Paradox Machine in The Sound of Drums, for example). Incidentally, the erratic behavior of the TARDIS in this instance could also explain not only why it suddenly drops her out, but also why she survives the fall: its protective capabilities may have simply been triggered late, and by extending its shields (as in The Beast Below) or engaging its tractor beam (as in The Satan Pit), even if only briefly before its disappearance, the Doctor's fall would have been rendered less severe.
 * It is more likely that she just said 'half an hour' because it flowed better and the nature of the conversation did not require the details of her regeneration. Besides, she is not incorrect - she was a white-haired scotsman half an hour before this conversation.
 * She's not wrong, half an hour ago she was the twelfth Doctor (half an hour would put him probably in Ypres with the first Doctor), she didn't mention changing. She simply stated half an hour previous, shows in fact the 'white haired scotsman'.


 * The Thirteenth Doctor is still in her predecessors clothes, including his shoes. Given she is a lot smaller, so has smaller feet which won't fit the shoes, how is she able to run, walk and even leap without any difficulty? Further, bar the coat, everything else appears to fit her fine.
 * She likely retied the shoes tighter and tighten the belt to make the clothes fit her. Stopping Tim Shaw was more important than looking for new clothes that fit her properly.
 * The most common result of regeneration seems to be exactly what we saw here: the clothes somehow adjust enough to be comfortable, but not enough that it's not noticeable. But all kinds of other things have happened, all the way to Romana II getting a completely new outfit for each of the new bodies she tried on. As far as I know, the details have never been explained, but it's probably something something artron energy mumble mumble.


 * Several points regarding the swarm of Gathering Coils come to mind. How are they meant to work? When the Doctor & company disable it on the building roof, how was it able to reactivate and come back again at the end of the episode? Did Tzim-Sha do that, either when he collected its data (and the DNA bombs) or remotely after that? It seems unlikely that the Doctor would've left the roof without making sure the Coils were rendered harmless, especially given the threat they pose later. Which raises another point: exactly what did the Coils come to the construction site for? To attack the Doctor & company? If so, why did it just sit there at the top of a crane for Grace to attack it? Also, if the Coils are programmed with the identity (and location?) of the hunt's target (Karl), and access to that information would not normally be part of the hunt (since he was cheating by using it), how was Tzim-Sha supposed to identify who and where his target was? Out of a population of 7 billion+ people on a planet the size of Earth, it seem highly unlikely he could ever track down his target without some form of technology to assist.
 * One -Tim Shaw controls the coils so he tells it remotely where to go. Two - we don't know the properties of the coils; it seems self-regenerating (not being told how something works does not equate to someone telling us something that breaks continuity to a previously established fact). Three - The Coils came to destroy the infrastructure to stop the Doctor rescuing Karl. Four - Again, the Stenza are an alien race; it is perfectly feasible for Tim to find his target, he just used the coils to speech up the process.


 * Shouldn't have Graham, Ryan and Yaz have passed out immediately from being in the vacuum of space?
 * Why? Oxygen established that it takes a minimum of 15 seconds to pass out from vacuum asphyxiation. Which is what we see at the start of the next episode. And that's consistent with real-life science, past Doctor Who stories, and typical sci-fi tropes.