Forum:Stolen earth/dalek continuity error

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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.

"Continuity error" is a term somewhat difficult to ascribe in the Whoniverse, because of the central, time-traveling premise of Doctor Who. The Doctor does actually change the progression of time, because in some cases it is "in flux" (DW: The Fires of Pompeii). It's also been noted that it's not a "strict progression of cause to effect" (DW: Blink) We shouldn't expect that what we see in an early episode will necessarily be true by a later one.

The relationship between Daleks and the world hinges largely on Rose (and, later, Martha and Donna). It is easiest to understand what's going on by looking at the companion's timeline. Rose meets the lone Dalek with the Ninth Doctor in 2012. That Dalek dies. End of story. Except that we discover that the Emperor has, in a similar fashion to that lone Dalek, fallen through the "cracks" of the Time War and ended up in our relative future. Rose destroys all these Daleks. Next she, the Doctor and Mickey fall into the "Pete's World" universe. Their dance between dimensions, along with the two Torchwoods' later ramblings, fractures the walls between realities. This allows the Cult of Skaro to meet Rose in 2008. These Daleks become known to the broader world, which would seem to be a continuity error with Dalek. But it's not. History, through Rose's travels, has gotten re-written. Therefore, both episodes, and the later Stolen Earth, are true. From Rose's perspective, it's perfectly true that in 2012, Van Statten had a Dalek and he didn't know what it was. But then, at a later point in Rose's life in 2008, the world meets the Daleks in a big way. Meanwhile, Dalek doesn't account for the fact that Daleks were visibly present during the construction of the Empire State Building.

Do Doomsday and Stolen Earth likely change the events of Dalek? Should the many accounts of the construction of the Empire State Building have mentioned the Daleks? Of course. But the fact that Dalek ignores these events is not a continuity "error". It's just a possibility of time travel. As we discover in The Unquiet Dead, Rose can die in the 19th century, despite the changes this would cause to the time line. Time is mutable, is "in flux" at certain points. Likewise, Katarina can die in her far future, and Susan and Vicki leave the TARDIS in what is their own personal past. Vicki must certainly have died centuries before she was born, and her unrecorded adventures as Cressida must certainly have had some kind of influence on the development of human history. Are these continuity errors? No. They're just examples of temporal paradoxes (or timey-wimey-ness), both of which are simply a part of the programme. As we learn in Turn Left and Father's Day, most of the time, these changes to the timeline are automatically assimilated by the time-line. But if the change is sufficiently big, a whole new reality can unfold. We can reasonably assert that the changes caused by Daleks appearing before 2012 in the objective timeline, but after 2012 in Rose's personal timeline received some natural compensation by the objective timeline. They weren't, like Donna's decision to turn left, big enough deals to unravel the main Earth timeline.

Maybe this means that Van Statten's new "foreknowledge" of the Daleks doesn't change the basic structure of that story. Sure, he now has some idea of what Daleks are, but he's still arrogant and greedy enough to believe he can learn something useful from an individual Daleks. Foreknowledge, in other words, doesn't make him any less stupid. So he still does basically the same stuff, still needs to be rescued by the Doctor, and still gets mindwiped and dumped "somewhere beginning with 'S'". Or maybe those later stories so changed the events of Dalek that now the version we saw actually belongs to "Pete's World". Hell, maybe a Van Statten with greater knowledge of the Daleks was able to inform the creation of the Cybus Cybermen.

You can make up any theories about the objective timeline that you want. But you can't ignore the fact that the show has given us enough "temporal theory" to cover this one. Call it "timey-wimey", call it a loose "progression of cause to effect", call it even the reason the Second Doctor was put on trial. The one thing you can't call it is a continuity error. At the end of the day, the only narrative that really counts is the one that deals with the Doctor, his companions, and their families. That's where our stories happen, and as long as you can trace a logical line between the various stories for our companions, then the world is internally consistent. Indeed, his effect upon the objective time line is precisely why the Doctor got sentenced in The War Games. He's a renegade Time Lord. He creates inconsistencies — change — almost by getting up in the morning. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 05:45, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm still curious why the Daleks in The Chase didn't know that they'd been instrumental in constructing the Empire State Building, and that the 10th Doctor had interfered, and therefore they probably weren't going to successfully exterminate the 1st Doctor there.

Or is that kind of confusion just what they get for messing around with time, just like The Doctor? :) --99.170.146.147 09:21, December 28, 2009 (UTC)

The Cult of Skaro was from a later point in Dalek history from the Dalek point of view. The Daleks from The Chase were pre-Time War and thus had no way of knowing what the Cult of Skaro would later do in the past. What a weird sentence. -- Noneofyourbusiness 20:44, December 28, 2009 (UTC)

A former Doctor Who writer named Douglas Noel something-or-other has a famous quote about the grammatical tense problems resulting from time travel. "Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs." :) --99.170.146.147 02:22, December 29, 2009 (UTC)

Something thats come to light recently about this issue is that the dalek invasion of 2009(or was it 2008 according to that news website from the waters of mars) was essential to adelaide brooke's life and thus the rest of earth's history.So if her interest in space travel was a fixed point in time then maybe the dalek that inspireed her was as well.Although that means that the stolen earth was not a change of history,unless of course it was an established event that history would be changed (that makes your head hurt) --666hotline 20:11, December 30, 2009 (UTC)

Modern day Earth stories are always set a year ahead of their airdate, the thing in The Waters of Mars was quite an obvious misprint. Abelaide herself (in 2059) says the event happened 50 years ago, making it 2009.

I like to think that the lone Dalek was a survivor of the events of The Stolen Earth/Journey's End, or maybe even the same lone Dalek that Abelaide saw. Delton Menace 23:52, December 30, 2009 (UTC)