Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Utopia

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

Remember, this is a forum, so civil discussion is encouraged. However, please do not sign your posts. Also, keep all posts about the same continuity error under the same bullet point. You can add a new point by typing:

* This is point one.
::This is a counter-argument to point one.
:::This is a counter-argument to the counter-argument above
* This is point two.
::Explanation of point two.
::Further discussion and query of point two.

... and so on. 

• How can Cassandra claim to be the last human in "The End of the World" when there are humans in "Utopia," set 100 trillion years later? I understand that she was very conceited and that some humans bred with other races and changed, but those humans in 100 trillion look identical to us, and Cassandra doesn't look human at all.

They might look identical but they might have something different inside.

The Doctor mentioned in the episode that humans constantly evolved into different forms before reverting to a state more like modern humans.

• At the end of Last of the Time Lords, Jack says that he can't die but he still keeps getting older. In this episode, he claims that his vortex manipulator went wrong and he was forced to live through the nineteenth and twentieth century. How come he has not aged?

He has. Compare this Jack to the one in Series 1. The rate at which Jack ages is simply much, much slower than normal Human ageing. Also, the Doctor earlier asked if Jack had had "work done".

He later mentioned in Children of Earth that he found a grey hair. He is ageing really slowly, but he still does age.

• Before the guards would let the Doctor, Martha and Jack into the silo, they yelled at them to show their teeth, in order to make sure they were not Futurekind. So how did the female Futurekind - who tries to sabotage the shuttle launch - get in?

Either that individual snuck in, or perhaps this could be a hint to the development of humans into Futurekind as referenced by Professor Yana.

• Jack hears Martha referring to the Face of Boe's last words but makes no connection with that being his own youthful nickname or wonder if there is a connection and also he doesn't flinch when Martha mentioned the name.

He likely didn't hear it, and/or chose not to bring this up at that point - considering the depth of explanation needed and considering and that they were rather busy.

Actually, if you watch carefully, you CAN see Jack reacting to the mention of his nickname. This is the very reason why he tells The Doctor and Martha this information at all.

• Jack is able to grab onto the TARDIS when it dematerialises, yet when others have attempted to in some way maintain contact with the TARDIS as it disappears, they are unable to, for example, Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale in Blink.

The series has never been consistent in the mechanics of the TARDIS dematerialising. Perhaps there is a specific point in the dematerialisation at which someone may hold on to the TARDIS and dematerialise with it, and Jack is the first to reach it by that point. Also, we don't know if the TARDIS actually faded away or if it took off vertically without dematerialising as established in The Runaway Bride. The reason Sally Sparrow and Larry Nightingale couldn't hold onto the TARDIS as it left is possibly due to the Authorized Control Disk telling the TARDIS to leave them behind. Perhaps there are Emergency Programs other than Emergency Program 1 which force the TARDIS to evacuate without the occupants just as K-9 Mark IV was left behind when the TARDIS dematerialised at the end of School Reunion.

In Series One Rose uses the TARDIS' soul powers to evaporate the Daleks and bring Jack back to life, which probably is the power that keeps him alive. So, in that point of view, Jack may have some similarities with TARDIS' essence which make him able to grab onto her and fly with her in time.

• Jack shouts "DOCTOR!" while clinging to the TARDIS. Is there air in the time vortex?

Doctor Who, like a lot of sci-fi breaks the rule of audio in space. You hear lasers and engines in space. So this is no different.

Jack only shouts "Doctor" once. That would only take one breath, which he certainly had in his lungs.

Well, he didn't afterwards. He did die immediately afterwards.

I'm sure that the TARDIS can create some sort of air bubble, considering how it can control and think for itself to some extent. For example, in "The Doctor's Wife" the lever goes down on it's own accord. This, combined with the notion of air bubbles (eg, The Beast Below). So, the TARDIS created its own air bubble to help Jack, who it recognised.

That explanation doesn’t quite hold water since the Doctor stated that the TARDIS was intentionally trying to throw him off

• According to the Doctor in Rise of the Cybermen his TARDIS is the last in the Universe, so how did the Master travel to the End of the Universe?

The Doctor thought it was the only TARDIS because he never knew anyone else survived. If the Master ran, he would have used his TARDIS.

This question assumes that the Doctor was wrong all the times he specifically said he was the last of his kind, and yet he was infallibly right the one time he offhandedly mentioned that he had the last TARDIS, which is kind of a silly assumption.

As an additional note, the Time Lords do have lots of other technology to travel in time without necessarily using a TARDIS.

• Why does refuelling the TARDIS take 20 seconds but in Boom Town it takes a whole day?

The Doctor references that the rift has been active, which obviously allows the process to happen much more quickly.

Yeah, the Rift was (mostly) closed back in Boom Town. But when Owen opened it in End of Days, it likely at the very least left some temporal residue.

Actually the doctor says it should only take about twenty seconds, then says the rifts been active. This means that for some unknown reason, the doctor can now recharge the tardis after 20 seconds now, instead of a full day. Its not because the rift was active.

• If the Time Lords have never been that far in the future, how does the Doctor know that that is the "end of the universe"?

The Doctor must have recognised that the TARDIS stopped at the year 100 trillion because it could go no further into the future, the end of the line so to speak.

Plus, he'd already been to the end of the universe in PROSE: The End. Although he did seem to imply that he'd never been either.

It is highly possible that the Time Lords knew about the end of the universe, with all their knowledge of time travel, but simply had no cause to go there.

It's actually established in Frontios that the Time Lords had a law against visiting the end.

Correct. They weren't allowed to go there, in part because they knew it was the end of the Universe. It wouldn't be very hard for them to calculate.

• The Master is now human, yet he starts to remember his Time Lord self. How is it possible that when the Doctor and the Master became human, their minds did not burn up like Donna's would if she ever remembered everything that had happened while she had travelled with the Doctor.

Donna was specified to have a Time Lord consciousness in a human mind, while the Doctor and Master became Human and lost their Time Lord consciousness. Donna was the only one to try to have both at the same time.

Chameleon arches are something specifically designed by Time Lords, and obviously they wouldn't have built them if using one meant your mind burned up. Donna's transformation was an unforeseeable accident; nobody built any safeties into it.

• In the last appearance of The Master, he had finished all his twelve regenerations and was dead. So how did he get here and managed to regenerate one more time?

The Time Lords resurrected him, so that may have given him a whole new line of regenerations.

I assume you're talking about the Eric Roberts master. Actually, he's appeared since then in audio dramas as Alex MacQueen, when he says 'they plucked me from my predicament and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. A new lease of life', the 'they' is the time lords, and I think the predicament is having to hop from body to body, like Geoffrey Beaver's master did, and the new lease of life is a new regeneration cycle. But, he did also get resurrected by the Time Lords because they thought he'd make a perfect warrior for a time war.

And future episode The Time of the Doctor now confirms that Time Lords can be granted a new set of regenerations with permission.

• What is the person who was chased by the Futurekind doing out of the silo?

Arriving? Scavenging for parts? There seem to be policies for people entering the silo, which implies that they have those policies for a reason.

He spoke of the Silo like some sort of myth, and had clearly not seen his family for years, who'd arrived without him. He was very clearly just arriving there, probably from hiding.

• The Futurekind are obviously shocked when Jack shoots his gun, as if they had never encountered a gun before. But the guards of Silo 16 have guns, and the Futurekind have obviously been encountered before.

They knew what a gun was, so they backed up because they were afraid of being shot.

• Why did Jack recognise the Doctor? There's no reason to believe he knew anything about Regeneration before this point.

Jack mentions aiming his Vortex Manipulator at the 21st century, arriving a couple hundred years early and having to wait to find a version of the Doctor that matched up with him. So clearly he learned about regeneration at some point after being abandoned.

If Torchwood had access to UNIT records then he might have learned about regeneration that way.

Piece of Mind shows him meeting the Sixth Doctor.

• How did Jack know that that was The Doctor's hand? Did he do a scan of it, detecting the Time Lord DNA and figure out it could've only be The Doctor's?

Quite likely. The real question is how did he find it? Was he just hanging out underneath the Sycorax ship? And he happened to be in the exact right place at the exact right time?

OK, here’s what I’m thinking; the Torchwood that was based in London may have gained the hand (either they just found it themselves or acquired it off of someone else). Then either one of these two happened: 1. Jack may have heard about it since the one in Cardiff (which he was in charge of) was another faction of Torchwood and when he realised what it was, he acquired it off of them. Or 2. Ianto stated in his flashback in Fragments that after Torchwood One was destroyed, two of Torchwood Three’s members went to the wreckage. Maybe they also acquired one or two of the items from there (we already know that items Torchwood One had were recovered after it was destroyed, such as the Immortality Gate).

On the other hand, the trivia section of IMDB's page based on Utopia said that Jack was supposed to state that the hand had been recovered from a newsagent's roof (though I don't know who posted it and where they got that information).

• Why doesn't the Doctor recognise the Master? He met the War Master several times in the audios.

He’s already met characters who were played by the same actor (e.g. Private Moor, King Peladon and Professor Hobbes, all of whom were played by David Troughton). Otherwise, I think Big Finish are intent on explaining it when the time comes.

• One thing gets me Something odd. Who sent the signal to lure humanity to the cold world? Sounds a trap. Maybe Rassilon as part of his campaign to destroy life so he can become a god? Or Omega? Or the Valeyard? Or one of the Gods of the Pantheon which included Sutekh, the Toymaker, the Trickster, the Mara, Maestro, and the Mara? Maybe the Gods of Ragnarok? Or someone else? Smelt as a trap.