Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Parting of the Ways

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Parting of the Ways doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

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• Why is the doctor so useless against the Daleks in this story he has defeated them many times before how come he lets everybody die he has faced more advanced dangerous daleks than this before, also he is a coward as he knows that the Daleks will destroy the earth [and when at full power all of reality] anyway yet he wont kill a few humans, which is all that is left on earth after the Dalek attack anyway to save quite possibly if these Daleks are allowed to go on at an advanced rate all of reality. Why was he so willing to destroy gallifrey in the war, to end it but not earth which will suffer anyway, with the population either wiped out or made into new daleks.

Rose 'made him better'. we dont know if he destroyed gallifrey after he had regenerated into the 9th or not but hes not as bloodthirsty as he was when the first four episodes of the new series involved him blowing something up. killing humans is also more personal to him as rose is human and so many of his companions have been human. and dont forget hes heard lynda, jack, everyone else on board the game station die over the intercom. he may have decided that he wasnt about to singlehandedly kill anyone else, not directly, anyway. but i see your point :) i dont like it when the heros get all soppy and mushy either

• When Rose was Bad Wolf, why did she not see the Cult of Skaro and destroy them?

At that point, the Cult was in the Void. It's unlikely she would have been able to see them. Or she did and dismissed it as irrelevant since it had nothing to do with saving the Doctor and Earth at that moment in time.

She didn't destroy Henry van Statten's Dalek, or any of the Daleks seen in the previous 26 seasons either, and she could have.

Killing Statten's Dalek would have created a Time Paradox, and we all know how well those turn out. It is likely that the same would apply to all the other past daleks.

• How does the Doctor know to turn his head when his hologram appears to Rose in the TARDIS? He can't have been transmitting live because he said that "he bets" Rose was fussing and moaning - as in he couldn't see her. It's unlikely that he would have gotten to know her so well he could turn his head at the right moment and stare at the right place.

There are interactive computer programs in real life that can somewhat react in this way, making it entirely plausible that Time Lord technology is able to do so to the level shown.

Alternately, the Doctor's Time Lord time-sense somehow tells him that at that moment in time, Rose will be standing in that exact spot. Events that have occurred in the future have resonated backward in time elsewhere in the show (the heartbeat from the creation of the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor, for example), so it is possible the Doctor might have been able to sense far enough "ahead", especially given the psychic link he has with the TARDIS, to know he should turn at that point.

At any rate, I think the turn was clearly intended to cause the audience to wonder how he knew ahead of time to do that, serving to make Time Lords even more mysterious, so trying to explain it may be missing the point.

• Rose asks the Doctor why he cannot simply travel back in time and warn the humans about the Daleks. He replies that he has become part of events and so cannot do that. However, in the TV movie, the Eye of Harmony destroys the Earth, before the Doctor basically rewinds time and prevents it from happening.

Time-Flight and other stories have also established that the Doctor can't or won't change certain events. The Eye of Harmony's destruction of Earth was not meant to happen - as the Doctor was familiar with post-1999 Earth, so it had to be undone.

• The Doctor saves Rose's life by taking the vortex energy out of her. He then returns the energy to the TARDIS. Why, then, do the effects of the energy kill him? It should either kill them both (as they both had the energy in them) or neither of them (as they both lost it).

Some novels have stated that, while regenerating, a body can absorb artron energy and feed it into the regenerative process. Assuming that the vortex energy is the same as artron energy, it is possible that the Doctor deliberately triggered a regeneration, possibly allowing him to absorb the energy from Rose. The regeneration then had to complete. It's also possible the vortex energy had a different effect on the Doctor's Time Lord physiology when he absorbed it, or for some reason he was not able to return all of it to the TARDIS. Or, since the vortex energy makes one temporarily omnipotent, the Doctor may have used it to repair the damage to her body.

• At one point in the episode, the Daleks are "bombing whole continents," and we see on a computer map that their bombing is so drastic as to radically change coastlines of entire continents. With all the things Rose/Bad Wolf changed, why does she leave that destruction in place, and why does no one seem concerned about it after the fact?

Bad Wolf/Rose happened after the bombing, so it is likely when she said I bring life, the continents were restored.

• Why would it take it 2 to 3 minutes to get across the solar system? Haven't the Daleks moved around galaxies before?

As the Doctor mentioned in Journey's End the Daleks they are fighting were scavengers and were not a full Dalek Empire, thus explaining why it would take so long. Had they used the kind of speed that would be needed to move "around galaxies", they would have quickly overshot the Earth and been many star systems away from their target. Slower speeds are needed for moving over comparatively tiny distances.

• If the Earth is altered, how is it the same in the year 5,000,000,000?

The Doctor mentioned in "The End of the World" that it was restored to the classic appearance.

• Lynda says that she thinks that the Doctor and she are the first contestants to get out of the games, however earlier on Lynda says to the Doctor he must remember when all the housemates walked out of the Big Brother house.

Lynda was under the impression that all the contestants (except for the winners) were killed upon leaving. She presumably means they're first to escape out of the games and into the Gamestation.

• Why does Rose restore Captain Jack's life, but not those of any of the hundreds of other people the Daleks killed? If she's able to disintegrate every Dalek in existence, it shouldn't exactly be hard.

She knows and likes Jack a lot so wants him to come to life again

She may have restored their lives too. If Jack is the Face of Boe, he is part of the race of "Boekind". These people would be the other "Boekind" that are heard of.