Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Doctor Who and the Silurians

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This page is for discussing the ways in which Doctor Who and the Silurians 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 do the Silurians want to destroy the Van Allen Belt? It doesn't do us any good at all, and is actually harmful to Earth satellites. They'd actually be doing us a favour! Have they really confused it with the ozone layer?

They've been under the Earth for a long time. In trying to get their bearings in this brave new world, they may have mistaken the Van Allen Belt as something useful to homo sapien technology or advancement. Not to worry, they'll know better next time.

Actually, it is now known that the Van Allen Belts help protect Earth's atmosphere from high-energy particles which would eventually destroy our atmosphere.

• The vision impairment of the injured Silurian changes between episodes.

The worse the injuries take hold the more impaired the Silurian's vision is. The Silurian isn't human. His vision is different from a human being's, and there is nothing to suggest that it's an impairment. His point-of-view seems to suggest that Silurians can see out of their "third eye".

• It was raining when Dr. Quinn arrived but it wasn't raining when the search for the "thing" began or before Dr. Quinn arrived.

It started raining in the interim.

• Further, Quinn arrives in the barn with a wet coat. But in the next shot, in the same scene, his coat is bone dry.

Due to living in Derbyshire, Quinn has smartly invested in a quick-dry coat. The real question is whether he went for nylon or polyester.

• The name 'Silurian' is a misnomer, as scientifically-minded viewers pointed out. The creatures could not have come from the Silurian Period, as reptiles had not yet evolved. In The Sea Devils the Third Doctor acknowledges the error by saying the Silurians should be called Paleocenes. But this is incorrect as well, for the Paleocene Epoch marked the beginning of the Age of Mammals.

The Doctor estimates at that time when they may have been from. The fact that mammals were becoming dominant during the Paleocene Epoch doesn't mean the "Silurians" couldn't have been there as well.

Also, contrary to popular belief, the Silurians were NOT named after the era.

In-story, they were, and this is explicitly stated by the Doctor. It is true however that the name was chosen by the writers because it sounded cool. The 'Silurians' were contemporaries of the dinosaurs (they have a dinosaur 'pet'). But the dinosaurs were dead by the Palaeocene.

In The Hungry Earth the naming problem is neatly avoided.

No it's not; in fact, it's horribly compounded. The Doctor says they're also known as Eocenes (making the Palaeocene problem even worse, since the Eocene is the period after the Palaeocene, when the mammals really took over), and then says they're more accurately referred to as Homo reptilia. They're clearly not a species of Homo, a genus of mammals (in particular, humans) that descended from Australopithecines about 2.3 million years ago, so 'Homo reptilia' is nonsense.

They also use the term 'Earth reptiles' at some point. (This was the favored term for the Silurians, and the Sea Devils and various other species, in the NA novels.) This isn't inaccurate, but it's horribly vague (lizards and turtles are also 'Earth reptiles'—for that matter, biologically, mammals and birds are also subclades of reptiles), the word 'Earth' doesn't add anything at all, and it's insulting in the same way as calling us 'apes'.

The best term in that episode is probably 'lizard men', which doesn't attempt to be accurate at all, and therefore doesn't fail in any way.

"Homo reptilia" is a poor name by the rules of taxonomy, as they can't possibly be members of the mamalian genus Homo. But the term translates as "Reptile men" which is a good name in itself. Probably best to say that Homo reptilia is a good layman's term for them but a bad scientific one.

The Doctor Who universe is not strictly speaking the same as ours. It is entirely possible that within the Doctor Who universe reptiles evolved earlier on Earth than ours, but there is little discoverable fossil record of them.

• The Doctor states that he's thousands of years old, which is inconsistent with the Second Doctor's statement of being only 450 years old soon after his regeneration (there's no indication the Second incarnation lasted for thousands of years).

The Doctor may have been exaggerating, or basing his age upon the relative age of the Silurians. The Doctor has been caught out lying about his age (TV: The Ribos Operation), and age can be interpreted many different ways when you are both a time traveler and an alien.

He may be referring to his life span.

• The Moon was formed long before life started on earth and it did crash into the earth in the first place. So it couldn't have been the reason the Silurians went into hibernation.

The Moon has never impacted on Earth. A planet the size of Mars collided with Earth and the debris created the Moon.

There has never been any reference to that effect anywhere in "Doctor Who". In the real world, the actual time and cause of the moon coming to be Earth's satellite is still unknown.

The Silurians state (in ep. 5) it was the impending impact of a "small planet" which would destroy the atmosphere (which, by coincidence, has been determined to be pretty close to actually what happened). The Doctor makes the mistake of interpreting this as the capture of the Moon (at the time of broadcast the Moon's origins were poorly understood)

When the Silurian leader tells the doctor why the Silurians hibernated, as they feared the approaching disaster of a small planet heading for Earth. The Doctor states it must have been when the Moon first approached the Earth and went into orbit around the planet. Since the 1970s scientists have now theorised that a planet did indeed approach Earth and crashed into our planet long before any life existed. This major event did create our Moon from the debris that the impact caused. Therefore, the explanation given by the Doctor is very probably incorrect. Rock samples tested recently from the Moon have also proved that the compounds are the same as Earth, therefore, giving the theory a basis in fact. I also consider this to be a production error in the original script to state unproven information in statements made by a character such as The Doctor, who, if capable of time-travel and knows the history of the Earth would not have made such statement as fact in the first place.

The Moon being drawn into Earth orbit was one of the theories of its origin at the time. (The movie 'When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth' ends with the Moon entering orbit.)

Doctor Who liked to be on the cutting-edge of historical theory. The concept of Pangaea, which is utilized in this story, still wasn't widely accepted in 1970. Similarly, 1981's Earthshock (TV story) says that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid hitting the planet. This hypothesis was first suggested in 1980. This did become widely accepted (except now it's suspected to have been a comet, not an asteroid), unlike the theory that the moon just got caught up in orbit. When nabbing brand-new theories and stating them as fact, we can't expect them to get everything right.

• I got this theory. The Brigadier's actions in destroying the Silurians helped start the Time War. If he'd made peace with the Silurians, they mighta enhanced the technology; thus preventing the Dalek plague from working... therfore zero Dalek invasion of Earth..... therfore zero reason for the Daleks to make time machines to hunt the Doctor..... therfore zero provoking the Time Lords to try and prevent their origins, only to cause Davros to survive, thus improving them which leads to the Time War ones. All beginning coz the Brig chose to try genocide. Actions have consequences. How'd you tyhink he react to finding this out?