Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Wheel in Space


 * 'Wheel in space' is almost certainly ahead of Moonbase. So if "every child," knows Cybermen existed in 2070, and this is future, why does Jarvis say the idea of Cybermen is "rubbish"?
 * This could be seen as some form of denial, much similar as the kind that Holocaust Deniers have.
 * If Zoe was reading the Hourly Telepress in the year 2000, and this episode takes places well after 2070, that means she's about 80, which is even more far-fetched than Victoria being 13. As implausible as it seems, it causes fewer continuity problems to place this story in the 2010s. Maybe Henry van Statten built it....


 * How can the Doctor show Zoe a memory of a scene where he was not present?


 * Dr. Corwyn directly examines the Doctor's chest with apparently sophisticated medical equipment and doesn't remark upon the Doctor's binary vascular system. This seems to directly contradict later stories where an ordinary stethoscope easily reveals the Doctor's second heart (DW: Doctor Who (1996), The Christmas Invasion, and Smith and Jones). The fact of the Doctor having two hearts doesn't debut until Spearhead from Space, which postdates this story by about a year. Nevertheless, this is one of the only scenes of its kind prior to Spearhead.


 * There are several references made to metors and meteorites approaching the station. Meteors are the flash of light caused by asteroids hitting the atmosphere of a planet. Meteorites are the remnant rock that hits the surface. In space, they would be called asteroids.
 * Despite their true definitions people refer to Asteroids as Meteors or Meteorites just as they would call Lighting thunder or Frankenstein's monster Frankenstein.


 * The Cybermen ionize a star in M13 to deflect asteroids to the station. Apart from the various scientific idiocies (it would take thousands of years for any light waves to reach Earth and they would be unable to deflect asteroids), this seems an insane amount of trouble to go to to break into the station. Surely a simpler way would occur to the logical Cybermen.


 * The Cybermen's entire attack is geared toward turning the Wheel into a beacon. Space is a big place. Wouldn't setting up a little tin satellite anywhere in the millions of miles of the Solar System have been more effective than the massively convoluted plot they end up using?


 * When Zoe is discovered hiding in the box in the TARDIS, the background is simply TARDIS interior circles painted onto a draped cloth. In longer shots, the join between the TARDIS set walls and the cloth is jarringly obvious.