Theory:Doctor Who prose discontinuity and plot holes/Lungbarrow


 * The concept of Looming contradicts previous references by the Doctor to having been born and having been a little boy, as well as Gallifrey having maternity services.


 * The concept of looming didn't originate in this book; as early as Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible (the 5th NA) they'd already incorporated the looms, and the Cartmel contingent (including Marc Platt, who wrote both Lungbarrow and Crucible, and Ben Aaronovitch and a few others) had an explanation planned for how to deal with The Time Monster, Shada (TV story), and other mentions of 'time tots'. However, after the TV movie came out, they had to revise everything to include the Doctor's half-humanness. Platt sincerely believed that Lungbarrow managed to pull this off, and if you dig up the old threads on rec.arts.drwho and interviews from the time and so on, he and his backers do at least make a case for it, but I don't feel competent to summarize it (especially since I never liked it).


 * Some of the other writers (I believe it was originally Stephen Cole) came up with the idea that Gallifrey had both looms and natural birth, but the 'great houses' always used looms, and possibly only those who were loomed could become Time Lords (with the Doctor being, as usual, an exceptional case of some kind). Which explains why some of the NAs say that all Time Lords are loomed, and why it was a scandal on the House of Lungbarrow that the Doctor had a navel, and so on. The only big question here is why Romana, who's from a Great House (and isn't the Doctor), remembers being a 'time tot' (in Shada). Anyway, in some of the early EDAs, we get hints that this was true until Romana III changed the policy to use the looms exclusively so they could crank out new Time Lords as fast as possible in preparation for the upcoming War, but that wasn't true in the era when the Doctor and Romana were born.)


 * Lawrence Miles's explanation is that Lungbarrow and The Time Monster probably take place in different universes. (The NAs were in a bottle universe inside the EDA universe, which might itself be a bottle universe inside the classic TV series universe.)


 * Some of the other writers (I don't know who originally came up with this) suggested that Time Lord history changed. In the original history, they were born. After some change (that we don't know the background to), they'd been loomed ever since the Curse of Pythia. After another change (this one presumably caused by the Enemy or Faction Paradox), they'd had loom technology since the days of Rassilon, but nearly everyone had been born normally up until the point when Romana III became War Queen. (We saw this change affecting the Doctor; he remembered being loomed, and having a father, and couldn't remember which was a dream.) And after the next change (in The Ancestor Cell), they'd never existed in the first place, so it was a moot point. Anyway, whoever's idea this originally was, when Justin Richards took over the EDAs, he told the other writers that this was the official explanation, but no one was allowed to state it directly (which made sense given that the Doctor had amnesia, history was unraveling, etc.).


 * Dave Stone suggested that Time Lords were born, grew up normally for 21 years, then went into the looms and emerged as fully formed 21-year-olds. Like everything Dave Stone ever said, this was not entirely serious, but not entirely joking, and completely ridiculous and workably plausible at the same time.


 * So anyway, the problem isn't that there's no explanation for this discrepancy, but that there are too many…


 * So yah, I agree... sounds like a whole lot of hypothetical. Given the additional references in recent years to Time Lord children - Fear Her, The Sound of Drums, A Good Man Goes to War, etc - it definitely appears the series has dismissed the looming concept. But, folks can always hypothesise pretty much anything.


 * I don't actually see the issue here. Lungbarrow House was one of the Oldblood Houses, as first mentioned in, I believe, Christmas on a Rational Planet. As Romana was from a Newblood House, the best way to solve this is just to say that while Oldblood Houses loom Gallifreyans as full-grown adults, the improved Newblood Houses like Heartshaven loom

them as children, thus explaining the references to Time-Tots if you want to be literal about it. Regarding the Doctor's cot, I don't recall A Good Man Goes to War confirming that the Doctor ever slept in the cot, only that he used it/considers it 'his'.