If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
This continuity error first came to my attention when I was reading the doctor who wiki article on The Stolen Earth.The dalek invasion of earth shown during this episode took place during early 2009,but if this is the case how did Henry van Statten not know what the living creature he had in his vault was in Dalek (TV story)? even though this episode takes place in 2012 only three years later.My first thought was that it was not really 2012 and the tardis scanner was somehow wrong,but when I checked my copy of the series one shooting scripts several direct references were made to 2012 in the stage directions They are wearing the 2012 equivilant of a bluetooth earpiece,The computer scrolls with complicated and not necassarily legible 2012 text.
The article suggests several solutions for this problem such as that van statten somehow missed the events in the same way donna missed both the sycorax invasion and the cybermen/dalek war.This seems unlikely as all van statten's staff would have had to have missed it as well.Another of my thoughts is that the dalek creatures were only seen by the public in britain and prehaps only the planets and spacships were seen in utah,but this dosnt seem to fit as adam on van statten's stafff was english and so would have probably been present.The simplest solution suggested by the article is that certain events in time are in flux and so after the stolen earth happened the events seen in dalek were removed from history,I think this is logical as dalek caan used time travel to save davros so the whole dalek army was really the result of dalek caan interfeering with history.--666hotline 18:27, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps van Statten did know about the invasion, but being miles underground, he and his staff decided to ride it out there, and therefore may not have got a close up view of the Daleks, and then wouldn't know about their true identity when he found his one. Also, he could have simply forgotten about the name "Dalek" after seeing it on television afterwards or, as I've seen somewhere before, he preferred the name Metaltron. Again, perhaps he had no communications in the museum and didn't see images of the Daleks at all, far or close.