Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Timelash

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This page is for discussing the ways in which Timelash 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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• At the end of this story, the Borad is thrown back in time (to 12th century Scotland); the Doctor speculates that the Borad will become the Loch Ness Monster. This would appear to contradict Terror of the Zygons, which established the legendary creature as a cyborg weapon of the Zygons.

This is possibly not what the Doctor is implying, as he only mentions that the Borad will be seen "from time to time".

And even if both the Borad and the Skarasen were seen on rare occasions, it seems reasonable that they could have been mistaken for the same monster by different people.

• The sudden re-appearance of the Borad, and it's attribution to 'cloning' seems very tacked-on and unconvincing. It would still mean there are/were two distinct Borads running things to begin with. What happened if they disagreed about something? How do we know there were only two?'

Perhaps, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. Beings clones in terms of personality as well, disagreements would have been unlikely.

One would assume that the clone Borad was not given autonomy, but was a puppet just like the Borad's "spokesman" - a fake target should any assassin see though the first pretense and manage to penetrate the sanctum. Evidently the Borad and the "Great Healer" were exchanging notes on master villainy...

• The ruthless tyrant Borad being 'jeered' into falling into the Timelash seems vaguely ridiculous.

Granted, but the Borad is vain, self-loathing (to the extent of spending years cowering behind the robot "spokesman"), and insane, and the Doctor chooses to exploit his psychological weaknesses rather than simply kill him (which, considering he has recently been forced into blasting Cybermen, poisoning Varosians, and suffocating Shockeye, is an understandable choice).

• The way the Doctor dismisses his miraculous re-appearance for the climax after being moments away from death at the hands of the alien missile by simply saying it's a 'little trick' and that he'll 'explain later', is a total cop-out.

Not that it is any excuse for forcing the audience to do the writer's job for him, but long-term fans of the show could have spotted a precedent in "The Armageddon Factor" (episode one), where the TARDIS dematerialises at the very moment that a missile detonates. Presumably, the missile either detonates in close proximity, or on impact with the TARDIS force field rather than the actual outer shell.

• When the Doctor tells Peri that the Kontron tunnel is a 'time corridor in space' she asks 'Didn't the Daleks have one of those?', a reference to Resurrection of the Daleks. However, she wasn't around at the time, and in Revelation of the Daleks she doesn't recognise a Dalek by its appearance, indicating that the Doctor may have told her a tiny detail of a previous adventure but neglected to describe what the main adversary actually looked like.

That doesn't really seem out of character for the 6th Doctor. He could start telling her a story about Resurrection, then digress, or just cut himself off. Or he could just throw that fact in as an aside or even a total non-sequitur in a conversation. "Do humans ever invent time travel?" "Sure, Peri, but not until the 51st century. Other races got there much faster--the Daleks had time corridors less than 100 years after they went into space--but it took you humans 3000 years to even invent primitive time rings, and blah blah blah."

If you recall, Peri does state she knows about Jo Grant. Also, Izzy Sinclair (one of the Eighth Doctor's companions in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strips) had read about the Daleks before she encountered them in the story Children of the Revolution. Peri also could've asked him about the Daleks after he mentioned them in The Mark of the Rani.

• Why are Borad's androids seemingly hurt my mirrors? It could be a coincidence that both the supervillain is terrified of his own visage, and his androids have a crippling weakness to reflected light, so getting rid of mirrors within his domain would be a win-win, but that wouldn't explain why any combat robot would be built with such a crippling weakness.