Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Stolen Earth

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Stolen Earth 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.
  • It is not explained how the Daleks know of Harriet Jones.
If they know of Torchwood and UNIT, then they know about Harriet Jones. They are an advanced race and most likely would have done some research into the planet to find out about military bases etc. so would therefore know about Earthen politics.
  • At the end of DW: Turn Left Bad Wolf was on the TARDIS. It's not there now at the beginning of this episode.
They've travelled to Earth, just as Rose needed, so there is no need for the message to be there anymore.
  • If Dalek Caan broke into the Time War, why did he not save millions of other Daleks to build a greater Dalek empire for Davros?
Dalek Caan is only one Dalek and it took all his ability to save Davros - ultimately, sacrificing his sanity to do even that.
  • When Harriet Jones transfers control of the sub-wave network to Torchwood, the map circles an area in Swansea, not Cardiff. '
There is no indication to suggest that the area circled has anything to do with the transfer of control. Furthermore, there were several identical scans of seemingly random areas on the screens in the background of most shots of the computer earlier in the sequence. Alternatively Harriet Jones may have been in Swansea.
  • When Jones' sub-wave system seeks out those who have worked with the Doctor, only the companions of the Tenth Doctor are singled out, not other past companions and/or acquaintances who might have worked with previous incarnations.
The subwave network only seeks out those that have the capacity to contact the Doctor; other companions such as Tegan Jovanka or Ian Chesterton do not have this ability or the possession of a superphone.
Alternately, there's no indication that either Ian or Tegan are alive, or on Earth, as of the time of this story.
  • Donna indicates she has no idea what regeneration is, even though she was present when Martha mentioned it in DW: The Doctor's Daughter.
Neither Martha nor the Doctor went into detail about what regeneration was.
  • Why did Harriet's computer screen turn off just because she died?
Harriet was standing in front of her computer when three Daleks fired on her, so the computer was likely destroyed by the overblast.
  • If Rose asked her "Control" to lock on to the TARDIS and transport, why did she end up at the other end of the street?
Control is likely to be in Pete's World, so it did quite well to get her into the same street as the TARDIS.
  • The death of Harriet Jones belies the comment of the Ninth Doctor stating that she was destined to serve three terms as PM and lead Britain into a new golden age (DW: World War Three).
According to the Doctor, some events are fixed and others are in flux.
  • Television, mobile phone and satellite communications continue to work, even though by rights when the planet moved anything in orbit should have been lost.
When the Daleks moved the planet, satellites were moved as well.
  • Without the Moon, there would be huge earthquakes, tsunamis and landslides. The Earth would quite literally fall apart. There is no indication the Moon is taken with it, and it is proved that it isn't in the next episode.
The Moon does not hold the Earth together - gravity does that. While the pull of the Moon does influence tides and if it were to move closer to the Earth it would indeed trigger earthquakes and such, its absence would not.
Maybe, but the absence of the moon would have devastating consequences on other things that benefit the earth, like the magnetosphere. What's more likely, from the episode, is the way in which the planets in the Medusa Cascade automatically align in a new pattern, once they're all present. Earth simply enters a new gravitational pattern that has the same net effect as if the moon were still present.
  • This episode is set in 2009, with hundreds of Daleks invading Earth. Not to mention the previous encounter in Doomsday, how does Henry van Statten not know of the Daleks in the 2005 episode Dalek, set in 2012?
The Dalek and Cyberman invasion was put down to terrorists drugging the water supply with psychotropic drugs. This is inconsistent with the number of deaths, and also doesn't explain the ignorance of the events of The Stolen Earth/Journey's End. History can change, so the version seen in "Dalek" may have been rewritten. Also, there is precedent for major characters to somehow "miss" major events such as this witness Donna's comments in The Runaway Bride regarding the Cybermen/Dalek and Sycorax invasions or as his "Metaltron" never spoke until the Ninth Doctor encountered it, van Statten may simply never have known it was one of the same creatures that moved the Earth.
  • If the Earth has changed co-ordinates how is Rose able to find it?
Pete's World may have a spatial and temporal connection with the Doctor's Earth.
  • Why did the Cardiff rift move with the Earth? Shouldn't it have stayed behind the way the TARDIS did?
The Cardiff rift is locked on a fixed point of the Earth and is dragged along with it as the Earth moves. Otherwise it wouldn't stay in place as the Earth rotates around its axis or revolves around the Sun.
  • The TARDIS stayed in place even when the Earth moved. But in The Impossible Planet the TARDIS fell down after the floor was removed.
When the planets were stolen the Earth's atmosphere was also moved despite not being physically attached to the planet, suggesting that anything within a set area was taken with the Earth. In contrast, the TARDIS was just obeying gravity - if the floor is removed, you fall. His TARDIS might not have been fixed to the ground at that point.
  • Mr Smith was supposed to make every phone call the Doctor. However, the screen only shows a map of Britain.
The map is not a literal representation of every mobile phone under Mr Smith's control - otherwise there would be a lot more that the roughly 75 red dots we see on the map.
  • Rose and Donna's family are seen to have to phone him themselves without Mr Smith helping them.
The three of them are seen holding their phones and possibly dialing, but their actions wouldn't matter if Mr Smith has already overridden theirs and every other cell phone.
  • Also, there is no way for them to know the Doctor's phone number, as it was not shown on the screen, but sent directly by Martha to Torchwood and Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith does in fact display the number on hist screen, which could easily have also been displayed to the subwave network at that point.
Or, they could simply have been phoning Donna, whose number they would have known. Moreover, Donna could have easily given Wilf the number to Martha's phone at some point, telling him to call it only if there were a real emergency.
  • Why do the Daleks not attack any of the other planets they stole, and if some are populated with alien life, why do none of them take any action?
Presumably, the attacks did happen, but "off-camera". Jahoo isn't populated, Adipose 3 is a nursing planet with little benefit of decimating, moons are rarely populated, and in the Doctor's own words, "Who'd want Clom?". Earth may have been the last taken so the attacks could have already happened, with any populations imprisoned.
  • If Dalek Caan changed history by saving Davros, wouldn't the Reapers come out?
Not if it didn't create a paradox. Further, if the change in the timeline occurred during the Time War, then the Time Lords were around to prevent them from appearing.
  • In DW: The Sound of Drums, it was shown that travelling via Jack's Vortex Manipulator caused considerable discomfort to the user. Despite this when Jack teleports to find the Doctor, he shows no discomfort upon arrival.
The discomfort happens due to travelling through the vortex. Jack only teleported to another position, he didn't actually time travel.
  • In the scene where the Doctor is explaining the Tandocca Scale, the TARDIS can be seen behind them, yet when the Doctor and Donna run off to the TARDIS they are running away from it.
No, they aren't.
  • Technically, when Mr Smith is making every phone on Earth ring to the TARDIS, the signals travel at the speed of light. It would take several years for the signals to reach the TARDIS.
It has been long established that a "superphone" can work through time and space with no time delay, so the speed of light should be an irrelevant consideration.
  • If the Earth is out of synchronisation with the rest of the universe, then how can the phone signal get to the TARDIS?
One of the main reasons Harriet Jones transferred control of the subwave to Torchwood: They could transmit it through the Rift, hence slipping back into regular time.
  • Why didn't Gwen and Ianto use more advanced weapons while fighting the Dalek? They surely have weapons that could destroy a Dalek instead of machine guns.
They don't have much time to go searching for weapons, and they also don't have any previous experience with how resistant Daleks are to bullets. They had already mentioned that they had little chance but would go out fighting - so whatever equipment they used wouldn't have mattered.
  • Martha is talking to Jack using an earpiece, but before she says "Bye Jack" she removes it, then in the next scene she's wearing it again just before transporting.
Having nowhere convenient to hold it, she put it back on again.
  • When Torchwood sends the signal to find the Doctor, the point of origin isn't coming from Cardiff. It's coming from the centre of Europe.
The limits of the Torchwood Rift are never defined for certain. In TW: Countrycide, the Rift expanded to the Brecon Beacons, but this could easily have been width. The Rift could easily have been long enough to reach Europe.
  • In DW: Utopia, the TARDIS jumps to the end of the universe when Jack jumps on the TARDIS, because, as Jack said, it was 'prejudiced' against him. Why does the TARDIS not jump to the end of the universe when Jack enters the TARDIS in this episode?
That may be because this time he was inside the TARDIS, whereas in Utopia he was hanging on to the outside, which no normal person should be able to survive. The TARDIS might have also lost its prejudice since Utopia, especially since he saved it in DW: Last of the Time Lords, this is highly likely as Jack is allowed to fly the Tardis. Or the Tardis may have realised escaping is more important.
  • The Doctor says that the entire Medusa Cascade has been taken a second out of synchronisation with the rest of the universe, rendering the planets inaccessible. However, the nebula clouds can be seen before and after the TARDIS breaks into the Cascade.
The Daleks were using the Cascade as a hiding place for the planets, so leaving the nebula clouds visible as normal was a necessary part of this.
Although the annual suggests that the Time War started out with incidents such as the events in those stories, it also indicates that it later became a full-scale war. The Doctor is clearly referring to the first year of this full-scale conflict, when Davros' ship was destroyed.
Perhaps more to the point, the television production has never been obliged to consider an annual as inviolable when making their episodes.
  • Why is evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins appearing on television to assert that the Earth has moved? Surely an astronomer would be more appropriate?
Dawkins may already have been at the studio and so was able to make an appearance. It may be a small joke by the writers, as Dawkins is here clearly asserting a fact despite a considerable number of other people believing something different (people believe that the planets have appeared in the sky and the Earth has remained stationary), referencing his works and own atheism and the theist argument against him in reality.
It may also be an in-joke for Doctor Who fans, given that Dawkins is married to Romana actress Lalla Ward.
  • Why did Davros feel the need to remove so many cells from his body presumably with such speed that he did not give his tissue time to heal? He could have grown one Dalek at a time while the cell used grew back. Why was he content to leave his ribcage flayed open?
Davros is a megalomaniac obsessed with Dalek superiority, so he would want to create them again quickly. Davros is not a machine nor a Time Lord and has a limited life-span.
  • The subwave network only seems to able to show four people on the screen at any one time (as evidenced by the fact that when Harriet Jones' signal is cut off it is replaced by static rather than the screen rearranging itself to show only three images), so were would the Doctor and Donna have appeared if Harriet Jones had not been killed?
There is no way to evenly divide a rectangular screen into three windows and still maintain an appropriate aspect ratio, so the network kept the fourth window after Harriet Jones dropped out. It should be assumed that if the Doctor and Donna had joined in when she was still transmitting, then the screens would have reconfigured into six windows.
A rectangle can indeed be divided into three and still maintain an undistorted aspect ratio. Just trisect the rectangle with two equidistant lines parallel to the longest sides. The only thing that happens is that you lose a bit of height on each frame. You'd go from one 16:9 frame to three 16:3 frames, which doesn't actually distort the aspect ratio; it just chops the top and bottom of the constituent frames. You'll still be able to see each frame at the proper width. If you set the distance from the camera to the subject far enough away, the person will still show up clearly, and the only thing that gets "chopped" is irrelevant information at the top and bottom of someone's face. No, the reason for the fourth box going to static is clearly narrative. It's done in fourths just so the viewer can easily see that someone's having trouble getting through, and, later, that Harriet had been killed. The question of "what would have happened if Harriet hadn't been killed" is moot, because that's not the way the story happened. Thus this isn't an error or a plot hole. Nevertheless as a matter of speculation, various things could have happened. I think it's less likely that a fifth and sixth square would have split off, and more likely that the square containing the current speaker would have been removed. For instance, when Harriet is looking at her screen, her own image is in the upper left. If the Doctor joined while she was alive, the most logical thing would have been for this "reflective image" to have been replaced. Of course, all this points out the genuine error in the scene, which is that of Rose. Since Martha's technical faults temporarily prevented her from getting in — yet she was briefly represented by static — there really should have been a fifth box all along representing Rose's "technical fault" of not having a camera attached. Still, it's easy enough to get around that by saying the subwave network's software required it to check for the presence of a camera in order to display a box
Real-life videoconferencing software never splits vertically or horizontally into 3 bands like that. For example, if you create a 3-way conference with WebEx, Acrobat Connect, or Citrix Online, what you get is a 2x2 grid of 4 panels with 1 panel empty. (With some software, this is infinitely configurable, but that's still the default.) Likewise, a 5-way conference is a 3x2 grid. You can argue about whether or not that's a good design, but it's clearly the most popular design. And I think it's reasonable to assume that whoever wrote the subwave network's software would do things the same way, either for the same reasons, or just because that's what they're familiar with. (In fact, it looks as if it may have been built on top of Connect, although that would be kind of silly, because you'd have to reencode everything as RTMP streams....)
  • The Doctor was exterminated by a Dalek. If the Time Lords were exterminated by the Daleks during the Time War, then why didn't the Doctor die without regenerating like the Time Lords during the Time War?
The Doctor took a glancing blow from the Dalek weapon - enough to kill him, but not instantly. He therefore had time to regenerate.)
Furthermore, we know nothing of how the Time Lords actually died in the Time War.
  • Didn't the Dalek at the end of this episode contradict the prophecies of Dalek Caan, something that even the Supreme Dalek wouldn't do?
Not all Daleks may have known or cared of Caan's prophecy. It is the natural instinct of a Dalek to exterminate the Doctor on sight. Alternitivly the dalek might not of reconised the doctor as he was standing to its side, and it thought he was just a normal human.


  • When the Doctor arrives at the Shadow Proclamation the Judoon speak in their own language to him, and the TARDIS does not translate.
This part of the conversation is heard from the perspective of the Judoon, who obviously hear the Doctor speaking in their own language.
Another possible solution is that the Doctor has temporarily severed Donna's ability, and therefore ours, to access the translation circuit.
  • When the Torchwood hub is attacked by Daleks, why did Gwen and Ianto not just escape by going up in the lift to the bay?
The Dalek would still find them if they went up the lift, they'd only be delaying the inevitable. Gwen expressed a desire to stand and fight.
  • Why does the Doctor go to London (let alone Earth as a whole) at the beginning of the episode? If it's the end of the universe surely anywhere in the universe could be checked to see if anything's wrong.
That's where Donna had encountered Rose in Turn Left, so it was logical of him to start there. Also the Doctor likes Earth.)
  • The visual effect used in this story for Mr. Smith is that used before SJA: The Lost Boy. Following his "forced re-boot" in that story, the patterns on his screen are not the same (more "wobbly").
It is unknown how long it was between The Lost Boy and Journey's End, it could have only been a day and Mr Smith, despie being functional is still internally rebooting and has not had a chance to change his image
  • It's strange that the Supreme Dalek wants to make sure the Doctor won't interfere while 27 planets have been stolen and Dalek Caan predicts that his companions will unite against them.
The Supreme Dalek believes Caan to be an abomination, and doesn't believe that everything Caan says will happen).
  • From a logical standpoint, wouldn't only a single phone be able to reach the Doctor's phone, and all others get a "Line Busy" message?
Every mobile phone isn't trying to ring through to the Doctor and speak to him, they are only being used to help him find the Earth.
  • In The Parting of the Ways Dalek saucers demonstrate enough firepower to completely destroy Australia to the point of being barely recognisable in a second or two, yet here their weaponry hardly seems more powerful than a standard Dalek gun set on 'Maximum Extermination'. The Doctor makes it clear that the Daleks are far more deadly here than ever before, and later states that the Crucible's fleet is already more than enough to slaughter the universe, so why are the Daleks using such weak conventional weaponry, especially if their intent is to destroy all human resistance?
They need the Earth intact as part of the engine for the Reality Bomb and they are not concerned with wiping out humanity before the Bomb is detonated, they invade mostly to procure test subjects. Using weapons powerful enough to exterminate landmasses would be counterproductive.
  • When the Daleks find the subwave network has transferred to Torchwood the dalek that first turns round eye stalk is not working momentarily. The eye blacked out.
Dalek "eyes" can focus by opening and closing, much like the lens of a camera. In the past, they have been shown to narrow down to the point of appearing closed.
  • If the Doctor and the gang return all of the planets to their correct locations in space and time, how did most of the events of the series happen? Most importantly, the Adipose breeding planet would not have been lost, so the Doctor and Donna would not be investigating Adipose industries (which would not exist) and therefore would not meet.
Since the Daleks took planets out of time as well as space maybe the Doctor and the others set a time period to send the 3 planets not in the present so they'd send Pyrovilia back in either the 2009 or some time after 79 AD, The lost moon of Poosh sometime after the events of Midnight and Adipose 3 in the present along with all the other planets since Partners in Crime took place in Early 2009
  • Why don't the Daleks use the "Dalek Factor" to turn the earth into a planet loyal to the Daleks? They have used it on earth during the Time War, why not now?
They didn't appear to need it.
  • An episode of The Paul O'Grady Show is seen airing. The episode is set on Saturday, but Paul O'Grady is shown on Friday.
In DW: Rise of the Cybermen, Mickey Smith refers to the idea of an alternative to our world where everyhting is the same but "a little bit different" (i.e. blue traffic lights and Tony Blair never getting elected). It would appear that the Doctor Who world, Pete's World & Donna's World are the kind of world Mickey was referring to. So in those worlds, Paul O'Grady may well air on Saturday.
  • When The Doctor is hit by the daleks death beam, it only hits him slightly. Usually when someone gets hit by a daleks death beam, they die immediately. Why did the doctor not die immediatly?
The Dalek beam only skinned past The Doctor. If it hit The Doctor directly he would of died but since it just slightly touched him he had the power to regenerate instead of dying instantly.
  • How does Captain Jack know about regeneration?
The Doctor informs him about his previous regeneration following Jack's confusion in Utopia.
Perhaps more obviously, Jack has access to UNIT files, which would almost certainly have to detail the nature of regeneration. Harry Sullivan's medical report on the Fourth Doctor alone would give Jack enough information to understand the basics of regeneration. Plus, he witnesses the violence of regeneration, albeit through the glass windows of the TARDIS, when the Yana Master regenerates on Malcassairo.
  • Why does the woman at the Shadow Proclamation tell Donna that there's something on her back? Didn't that creature from the episode Turn Left fall off her and die?
She said "There WAS something on your back".
  • Why did Dalek Caan laugh? Daleks do not have emotions and probably never heard of laughing.
The Daleks are only supposed to feel hate, but 'The Doctor has mentioned before that they may have traces of other emotions (e.g. fear, in DW: The Parting of the Ways). It's possible that hate may only be the almost entirely PROMINENT emotion in Daleks. Caan is also mental, he wouldn't act like a Dalek if he is working against them and is, compltely and utterly, mad.
  • If Martha gave the Doctor her special upgraded phone in DW: The Last of the Time Lords, why does she state that the phone she has now can call any number through space and time?
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