Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Girl Who Waited

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Girl Who Waited 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 didn't The Doctor, Rory and Amy just meet at the TARDIS at the start?

They didn't know how the doors in the hospital operate, so they had no idea Amy might end up in a different place by using the same door, and therefore they had no reason to go back and meet at the TARDIS.

• The creators of the facility; who put great effort into making a comfortable environment for it's patients, never thought about the constant horror it would induce when the medical protocol states that the handbots should swarm on mass in order to treat someone who doesn't want treatment.

The only thing they didn't anticipate is that a human would wander into their facility. For the people they expected, there would be no good reason for anyone to avoid treatment. Almost anyone who did try to avoid treatment would be immediately sedated by the single handbot. If someone actively resisted to the point where you need a swarm of them, the choice is between scaring them or letting them die.

• The facility is a medical emergency quarantine for terminally ill people to live out their lives in an entirely seperate and compressed time stream relative to our time stream. It is a medical facility with mastery over monumentally complex powers, yet it cannot be trusted to correctly identify that a patient has only one heart. Or indeed whether or not treatment would be antithetical to it's cause.

If it is assumed to be a closed system - only the planetary inhabitants involved - that makes a degree of sense.

Would this "closed system" also explain why the Handbots also didn't realise that she wasn't actually suffering from the plague?

Essentially the premise would be "You are in Red Falls. Only Apalapucians with the disease enter Red Falls. Ergo, you can only be Apalapucian and you have the disease and these things need not be checked."

This is simple engineering. Obviously they were capable of writing the diagnostic software to detect species and presence of the plague. But there are two good reasons not to do so. First, more software means more effort; even if they didn't care about cost, that either means the facility would open later, or something more important would have to be dropped. Second, all software is imperfect. Even if the chances of a false negative are only 1 in a million, if the chances of a healthy or single-hearted person wandering into the facility are lower than that, you've actually made things worse rather than better by adding the diagnostic.

• Amy claims to have learnt the trick of having Handbots feed back into each other on the first day, even though she had been there a week at the very least.

She most likely meant, her first day meeting them.

Plus, she's going off of her memory of something from 36 years ago.

• Though it was not explicitly mentioned in the story, it makes sense to think that the different timelines within the facility form a linear progression. Once an occupant expires, the next occupant is taken in. The timeslices are managed by the factory, and the total timespan can be millenia long. Within a timespan of a century, many patients can be hosted by the facility, all in completely solitarity. Time travel magic ensures that patients taken in at the same hour end up in different timeslices.
  Taken further, probably each section of the facility maintains a separate archive of timeslices, demonstrated by the time-searching-and-linking that occurred when Amy went to the garden. The timeslices of the different sections are managed transparently to provide a consistent and nearly seamless experience to the occupant. This measure enables more optimal distribution of the time, because not the entire facility needs to be allotted to one visitor for their entire lifetime. Within a century, the facility can actually host more patients than their combined lifetime, as long as they are never in the same section at the same time. When they cross a section, and the target section within that same timeslice already contains an occupant, the facility automatically finds an unoccupied timeslice for the target section and provides the portal into that slot.
  Presumably, also the visitors get timeslices, so they each can spend time with their loved ones without having to queue. It's really quite clever, and, kind.
  However, what left me pondering was the question: Didn't the Doctor and Co. effectively sabotage the facility? They took the visiting frustrum (glass) with them, without ever replacing it (and even if they did, it was not placed in the same timeslice as it was taken from), and they also pulled off and replaced some cables. And to lesser consequence, Amy left signs within the engines section.
  Do these acts of sabotage actually not cause consequences, such as the innocent Apalapucian families who visit their beloveds, becoming permanently disconnected from their loved ones, possibly even retroactively?

At first I assumed the plague was over, and the facility was just still running even though it was no longer needed. But there's a scene where we briefly glimpse a number of people zipping by in fast-motion. So yes, the Doctor's minor act of sabotage would have consequences for visiting families. However, that might be something the facility can easily repair. It certainly seems to have no problem dealing with Amy's much larger sabotage in destroying countless handbots. :::Actually I did not think of the handbots as a problem; there never seemed to be shortage of them, and they also seemed to be unconcerned with causality, with all the time jumping. There's no indication that incapacitating any of the handbots would mean that no handbot would be available to treat a patient in another timeslice. Also, there is no "plague is over". It's time travel, remember. Though it is possible that in the world outside the facility there exists a time when there is no more outbreak of the plague or that absolutely everyone has succumbed to the plague and thus nobody ever comes to visit anyone, with the people inside the facility all times exist, past and the future. There is no "no longer". If a patient exists within the history of the facility (i.e. they have a timeslice), they will never "not" exist there unless retroactively erased from the history. And there will never "not" be a time when the patient is linked to their family in their respective Green Anchor, unless sabotaged from being connected, even if the patient's family lived and died centuries ago. Or put another way, within Vlad the Impaler's lifetime there was no single time when he was not alive.

The point is that the Doctor's minor sabotage is presumably no more of a problem that than handbots. Whether it handles the handbots by repair, replacement, or timey-wimey, it can do the same thing with the frustum. The only real danger is that whoever family shows up to use Amy's room next (assuming the rooms are even reused, and assuming "next" means anything) might miss watching part of their patient's life before the facility notices and fixes the problem.

And yes, by "no longer needed" I meant that the plague had run its course long ago, so nobody was visiting anymore. Also, I don't think it's true that you can drop in any time and see any patient at any point in their life—otherwise, there would have been no need for the Doctor to use the TARDIS so they could meet Amy at the start of her time there; they could have just asked the facility to do it. (Of course anyone with their own time machine can visit any time they want, but that's subject to the usual laws about crossing your own timestream, etc., which is why the Doctor had to do all that fancy technobabble instead of just going back a few minutes.)

• So, when patients (presumably still with the disease) are "moved" into a "faster" (Red Waterfall) time-stream, the disease remains linked Anchored with the original (Green Anchor) time-stream? If it would kill the patient in "one day" but then this is not the same "day" that the patient experiences?

They don't explain exactly what "compressed timestream" means, but obviously it's supposed to cover this fact. Remember, the Doctor says it to explain the fact that Amy hasn't eaten in a (subjective) week and doesn't feel hungry. In the same way that her hunger only progressed a few minutes in that week, the plague would only progress a few minutes per week. That doesn't explain why her physical aging happens at a normal rate, but without knowing how this "compressed timestream" stuff really works, we can't say whether that's an inconsistency. (There are a few similar cases in the novels—Emily in the TARDIS library in Mad Dogs and Englishmen, the AT storms in Anachrophobia, etc. It's possible that reading those would give a few clues on how this kind of thing works in the Whoniverse—but only if you think Tom McRae re-read them before writing this episode…)

• It does seem that the facility is backwards (or at least the Doctor's explanation of it is). If Two-Streams was built for people suffering from a one-day plague, it'd make more sense to slow the patients' timestream, not the visitors'. With the patients in Red Waterfall going faster, the visitor in Green Anchor will find the patient dead before their eyes in the blink of an eye. If the visitor is in Red Waterfall time and going faster, they can come back to visit the Green Anchor patient for years and years in the short span the patient has left. The patient would also have comparatively constant contact with their loved ones and the medical people would have more time to work on a real cure, if possible.

Time isn't sped up in Red Waterfall, as such. Rather, it is 'compressed' in such a way that the disease still takes one real-world day to progress, but the patient is able to age and have a natural lifespan in that time. This is why Amy and other patients don't need to eat: what seems like weeks to them is just seconds in actuality, so they don't get significantly hungrier.

• If time is compressed in the “red waterfall” areas to the point that patients don’t get hungry, then why do they age?

The simple answer is it doesn't make sense and there's no real way to make it make sense, but clearly somehow it happens since that's what the episode said.

We don't see any actual patients age. Amy ages likely because she was hiding near the engines where time compression was not in effect.

No, actually they imply (if not state) that patients do actually age. The idea is that things like the disease and eating are held steady with respect to time, while the patient actually lives out a full life growing to an old age for loved ones to see. That's the point of the facility. They live a lifetime in a day.

• To merge the timestreams, the two Amys focus on doing the macarena, which Rory references as their first kiss. Surely this contradicts the scene DW:Let's Kill Hitler, in which Mels gets Amy and Rory together? Unless of course, Amy was doing the macarena in her hallway.

Does it? All that happens is Amy realises Rory is in love with her and chases after him, telling him to come back. I don't really see why they would have shown the first kiss as it was more about Mel then Amy/Rory. Presuming it doesn't show the kiss, I don't see any reason to think the first kiss happened right then. That was obviously the start of their romantic relationship. But Amy had just found out Rory loves her after thinking of him as her gay best friend. Rory had been in love with her for about 10 years being her best friend but without making a move. It seems quite likely it would have taken at least a first real date, if not multiple dates, before they got to the first kiss.

Is it impossible to imagine the Macarena happening then? After the incident in Amy's room in front of Mels, Rory ran off feeling absolutely humiliated. Maybe she tried to atone for it by making a public spectacle of herself, and how better to do that than dancing the Macarena in 2009? It's certainly easy to imagine the first kiss happening then: from the way Amy was speaking of Rory in her room, it seems very possible that she already had romantic feelings for him but simply thought of him as unavailable. Discovering that he was not only heterosexual but in love with her may have been the happiest surprise of her life.

• Why not use one of the sonic probes/screwdrivers to disable the robots?

How do we know they would do that? It may have been that same thought which prompted Amy to build the sonic probe in the first place, but if it worked she probably would have used it more often than her sword weapon.

• When discussing the time window, The Doctor says it's very difficult to break through a time window, but that he has never done it. Doesn't this contradict The Girl in the Fireplace in which he smashed through one on a horse?

What exactly is a "time window"? We don't know. Presumably, the mirrors and etc. in "Girl in the Fireplace" were something different. He's not talking about literally smashing through glass.

• If the handbots see through their hands, then how does Rory the Robot see with his hands ripped off?

That's exactly the point; it doesn't see, so it doesn't attack the older Amy.

It has to see something, otherwise it wouldn't be able to hand Rory the glasses. Maybe some important medical programming is connected to its hands, and Amy ruined it when cut off its hands. thus he still can use some other extra sensors, but now it's a mere servant and feels no need to attack/cure anyone, as it has no hands.

Perhaps there are still some sensors left in its forearms to see.

• When did Amy learn how to make sonic probes/screwdrivers and about the mechanics of time?

36 years of nothing else to do and she probably asked the interface for help.

• Wasn't Amy supposed to have been a ganger duplicate at this point? If she were a ganger, it doesn't make sense for her to have aged so much - Presumably, no matter how you look at the time streams, the duplicate would have still been deactivated as soon as "Amy" aged enough to give birth?

This episode takes place after the ganger Amy has been dissolved and the real Amy rescued from Demon's Run.