Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Crimson Horror

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Crimson Horror 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 did Edmund end up in the Doctor's room? He should have been throwed in the sewers because he wasn't alive like the Doctor, he was dead.
• How did Mrs Gillyflower create such advanced technology (Rockets, Presevation chambers) with 1893 technology? Sure its stated she's a genius (a Chemistry genius though) but isn't it a bit stretching it she can make things that are decades ahead of the time?

I assumed mr Sweet was sentient and taught her things from the Silurian era.

• How did Stax get the top of the tower so quickly?

Strax, bad as he may be when it comes to social interactions, is still a skilled Sontaran warrior and could probably think of a good tactical method of quickly ascending the tower. Also, considering all of the weaponry that he mentions having at times, it's entirely possible that he had some sort of grappling device.

The method is also left unrevealed, possibly as a bit of a joke.

• If it was really Gillyflower who experimented on her daughter causing her go blind, not her drunk husband as she claimed how exactly did she convince Ada?

The poison probably wiped Ada's memories, so she (Ada) believed the lie that the drunk husband was to blame.

Additionally, the poison was probably administered very subtly.

She could still have been hit, I suppose, just that it wasn't that causing the blindness.

Gillyflower has obviously been working on this project for a long, long time. I would assume she developed the antidote before bothering with building the Sweetville project. Most likely, Ada was fairly young when her mother experimented on her, and doesn't have good, reliable memories of her own. So she believed her mother when she was told the drunken father story.

Related to this, the episode does strongly imply that Ada is not completely mentally stable, so she might have been convinced of certain things.

• How did Ada get the Doctor into the secret room without anyone noticing? And keep him for so long without anyone finding out?

Well, I doubt the Doctor was in the room for much more than a few days.

• How long has Gillyflower been planning this? To build a building and a town it must have taken years, and to set it up to her specifications must have taken a long time, plus she already has enough survivors to quickly skip to the end, but everyone treats Sweetville as if its a new thing.

This is 1893. You'd be surprised what people could get away with in the days before the Internet.

• For all her plans of rebirth, it never seems to occur to Gillyflower that a poison capable of wiping out all life on earth, would poison the waters and lands for years, (unless it had a very short sell by date, in which case how does such a little leech produce so much?) Six months hardly seems a reasonable rest phase.

Gillyflower had developed an antidote to the poison, so presumably she would give it to her workers after reviving them. Or perhaps being poisoned and then revived has the same effect as an antidote.

But what are they going to eat or live off? If the animals are all dead, and the lands poisoned how does she expect them to live. Or does the poison only affect humans? (Unlikely considering it existed before humans evolved.)

• If the poison makes her workers loyal, then how did she get the workers in the first place?

She still recruited them via her meetings and preaching. It wouldn't be too hard to find a few who actually believed her and shared her vision...

• Strax and Vestra seem way too calm about people knowing there true identity, considering how intolerant the Victorians were to there fellow humans, do they really think its a good idea to show there are monsters walking about?

...And who would believe anyone who saw them?

• How would the children come across Clara on the web, and how would they just assume it's her and not photoshopped or some-one who looks like her? Also, why would Clara give in when they threatened to tell Dad? That blackmail wouldn't work as their father wouldn't believe her. Photos (which can be faked) of a woman who resembles her would not be proof that it was her, just some-body simmalar looking. Plus how would they come across her in the first place, and how would they search for more? It is unlikely you would find her by pure chance and how would you search for her face on the Internet? It is extremely doubtfully they are ALL co-incidences.

They did see the Doctor before, right? Even if it's a lot of luck to actually find all those pictures, the presence of both Clara and the Doctor is too much to ignore.

Unless their father assumes that they (or whoever he thinks made the pictures, as it could be anyone who knows Clara; she could lie and say she has a friend who does stuff like that for fun) Photoshopped the Doctor onto the picture as well.

It might not be a case of luck in finding the pictures. Google, for example, has a search engine that searches using uploaded images. It's possible they fed a photo of Clara into such a search engine and those pictures showed up.

• When did the Russians start taking photographs of the interior of their submarines and/or their crews?

Why wouldn't Soviet submariners have personal cameras? Either it was a picture taken by an individual mariner published decades later or an official Soviet Navy photo declassified after the fall of the USSR.

I doubt they would be allowed to bring personal cameras on board the submarine. There was a concept of military secret in USSR and the interior of their submarines definitely was one. Even if somebody managed to sneak a camera on board, they would not dare to take pictures in front of the crew. Anybody could turn them in for breaking the law and a person with the camera would be regarded as a traitor of the country. Besides, even if there were a photograph, it most certainly would be black-and-white. There were not so many cameras which could took colour photographs in USSR in 1983, mainly because it was hard to get the necessary chemicals to develop a film. Also, the writing in the corner of the photograph is in English, not in Russian.

That's a bit of a fallacy. There were plenty of color cameras in the USSR in 1983; not everything was backwards in the Soviet Union. And soldiers are human -- it wouldn't have taken much to smuggle a camera on board, or this could even have been some sort of official photo, or even one taken with the Doctor's own camera.

Why, someone taking a camera on board is almost as preposterous as someone taking a personal cassette recorder and a collection of illegal music on board

Exactly! It was very likely Prof. Griskeno's camera.

• If the rocket took off right next to the Doctor and Clara, why didn't they burn from the heat of the engines?? and why didn't the factory burn down??

We don't know how powerful the blast off was, or what kind of protection/shielding the tower had.

• What was the Doctor's purpose in taking Clara 3 to Victorian London? Why did the TARDIS either fail in the transit or deliberately reroute them to t'North?

Although not explicitly stated (because he's still being secretive towards Clara about her alternate lives), presumably he took Clara there to see if it would cause latent memory or some other reaction in here regarding her Victorian 'self'. As for why did the TARDIS not take them where they planned...well, it's about 50 years too late in the series to begin asking that ;-) Simply put, the TARDIS does not always go where the Doctor plans - as he mentioned in the episode. As stated in The Doctor's Wife, she takes him where he needs to go, and obviously that's where he needed to be.

Exactly. The TARDIS knew about Gillyflower's plot and put the Doctor there to stop it. And also probably to prevent him from learning about Clara's origins prematurely.

• Vastra's veil more transparent than it apparently is.

Surely this can be explained as a deliberate production choice? Namely, the veil is more transparent for the viewer than it is for the characters so that we can see the actress' facial expressions.

Wardrobe fails aren't unique to the 21st century.

It's also strongly implied that Vastra rather enjoys making "monkeys" uncomfortable. In fact she more or less says outright in Deep Breath that she wears the veil out of contempt anyway.