Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Gunfighters

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Gunfighters 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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• Episodes one and two have the world's quietest gunshots, and in episode four's climactic gunfight Earp and Masterson apparently walk through a withering barrage of fire unscathed.(it helped that nobody was aiming at them).

This is part of Johnny Ringo's plan to distract the Earps while he attacks from behind: he orders the Clanton's to open fire while still out of range. When the Earps get close enough, however, they take cover.

• The Clanton gang have amazing accents, Billy obviously having been to finishing school, and Johnny Ringo to the RSC.

It's possible that their actual accents were so incomprehensible to the Doctor that the TARDIS translated them for him.

Then it's too bad that the TARDIS never translated some of the harder to understand alien voices.

• Johnny Ringo, Kate and Steven arrive back in Tombstone before Doc Holliday and Dodo, yet they departed first.

They didn't arrive at Tombstone, they arrived at the Clanton farm.

• At the end of the first episode, the Doctor is seen outside the Saloon yet Kate gets there before the Doctor and she left the dentist after the Doctor.

That was something done purely for dramatic effect. The Doctor had been quite obviously walking very slowly due to the distress of having his tooth pulled. So it is quite understandable he took longer than her.

• There are several historical errors. Johnny Ringo did not take part in the gunfight, and was not killed at this time; Pa Clanton died weeks before; there is no Reuben Clanton or Warren Earp; Ike Clanton survived; and Phineas Clanton did not take part.

Some events in the Whoniverse are different than in the real world and the events of the Gunfight are likely not a fixed point in time and can be altered.

• In the ballad, 'earning your gunfighter's wings' is anachronistic, the phrase being coined in WWI.

It is possible (if unlikely) that a future version of the Doctor or another time traveller wrote the ballad, or perhaps it's just a big coincidence.