Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/The Two Doctors

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This page is for discussing the ways in which The Two Doctors 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 is the Second Doctor using the console room from the Fourth Doctor era?
if we're talking production wise, it's because they didn't have enough money to recreate the first tardis, but in universe, when the doctor received the stattenheim remote the remote changed the console room into one that look likes the Season 21 console
The TARDIS has more than one console room, and each console room has a variety of settings or desktops. The TARDIS console room was seldom exactly the same in successive stories anyway.
The Production team has a very small budget. It would have cost too much to build an original Troughton console, for the length of time it is on screen.
  • If the scientists aren't Humans or Androgums then what are they?
They could be other species working on the station.
They are said to come from the "Third Zone". There are plenty of species in Doctor Who who outwardly resemble humans, the scientists are obviously one of them.
  • The Sontaran scout ships are called battle cruisers by the space station's computer.
The computer may not have any other information on Sontaran ships.
The size of the ships is not apparent on the screen. All Sontaran ships may be built to the same unimaginative, functional pattern, regardless of size (with the possible exception of the anonymous vessel they use to sneak their advance forces onto Gallifrey in "The Invasion of Time").
  • Despite being a recluse, Dona Arana is able to supply Shockeye with a current list of Seville restaurants.
Being a recluse means living alone away from others. It does not mean never going to town for supplies or to enjoy the occasional special meal.
  • Dastari and the Androgums apparently speak English (according to the Dona Arana's comment on meeting them) despite being aliens who have never visited Earth before.
The invasion party may have been studying Earth communications in preparation for their landing, and selected English as the most prevalent lingua franca without realising it would not be widespread in the specific location they had chosen (though that does not say much for Chessene's supposed strategic brilliance).
This is the reason for Season 6B theory.
An alternative explanation might be derived from the implication in "The Deadly Assassin" that the Doctor, even during his period of exile, was working for the Celestial Intervention Agency, who seem to act somewhat outside the normal boundaries of Time Lord law.
While the Season 6B idea is now pretty widespread, this was not the reason at the time. First, it was explicitly stated in The War Games that this sort of technology did not exist then. Second, when the Third Doctor was sent on missions for the Time Lords, why did he never receive a Stattenheim Remote (and those were hardly top secret "Season 6B" covert opearations)? Mark of the Rani explicitly states that the Stattenheim Remote Control is a new invention. Then, when the Second Doctor sends out his distress signal, it is not picked up by Pertwee or Davison or Tennant, but by the Sixth Doctor at that precise moment in time. Time Crash will later tell us that when a Time Lord jumps a time track and meets his future self, his body visibly ages(but goes back to its proper appearance when he returns to his own timestream). Which is all saying that the Second Doctor is working for Time Lords from the Sixth Doctor's era, not his own. Presumably, when this is over, he will be returned to his own timestream, with memory wiped.
  • So what is and is not true about what the Sixth Doctor said about the time capsule, when he knew he was being overhead by the General? He seems to imply to Jamie that he was making a lot of it up, but his actions seem to imply that what he said about needing to prime the cabinet was all true.
Most of it was true, with the exception of the fact that he had sabotaged the machine.
  • The Sixth Doctor hearing the Spanish church bell ring, as he linked minds with the Second Doctor while on the spacestation, might give him the location and approximate distance of his past self from it, but not a compass direction - i.e. Is the Second Doctor being held north, east, south or west of the bell? So how does the Sixth Doctor know where on the search radius to land the TARDIS?
A combination of logical deduction to eliminate certain areas that the Doctor would consider unlikely; and a lucky guess based on what's left.
When the Doctor meets Oscar Botcherby, and the latter refers to the three "survivors" he saw, the Doctor comments rather ruefully that Botcherby has sighted three people who the former has been looking for "for a long time." There is no reason to suppose that the very convenient landing close to the hacienda and right next to Oscar is the TARDIS' first landing in Spain that day; they may have spent a few hours circling Seville, establishing that something like a plane had been heard roaring low overhead, before this time running into a pair of eyewitnesses who've actually nearly seen the landing itself.
  • Would Jamie really have reverted to such a feral state after having been abandoned on the station... and then recover his civility so quickly?
Well he is from the eighteenth Century, when a person needs to survive, there is no limit to what they will do, plus he just saw his greatest friend, the Doctor being killed (or so he thought) and that's bound to cause some psychological problems, and its implied the stuff the doctor gave him, helped bring him back to normal.
  • The concept of the Sixth Doctor slowly becoming an Androgum makes no sense. If what happens to the Second Doctor affects the Sixth then, the Sixth Doctor would not have gotten to this stage of his life - i.e. meeting Peri, coming after his own self, and everything else in between. The whole course of his life would have changed.
It's a matter of proximity, and that these two points in the Doctor's life are in the same time zone. Additionally, the Sixth Doctor had just recently made a psychic connection with the Second Doctor.
  • Many viewers were shocked by the Sixth Doctor killing Shockeye in so direct a manner. This was completely contradictory to the characters of the previous and future regenerations. Other Doctors had killed before, but in self-defence or by accident. But the Sixth Doctor directly kills a humanoid by pressing a cyanide-soaked handkerchief to his face.
This isn't the first time; see below for other examples.
Bearing in mind Shockeye has made a concerted effort at devouring both Jamie and Peri for no better reason than culinary curiosity, even the Doctor might be excused for warming to the concept of justifiable homicide.
The Doctor is acting in self-defence, as Shockeye is chasing him with the intent to kill him - not to mention having killed Oscar, tortured Jamie, and attempted to kill Peri. The Doctor has killed in similar circumstances before - see almost any story involving Daleks.
Not to mention "The Brain of Morbius," in which the Doctor killed an admittedly appalling human being (Solon) with cyanide gas, that very disturbing scene in "Genesis of the Daleks" in which he effectively water-boards Davros by tampering with his life-support system, and his deliberately hurling Magnus Greel into his own torture device. Season 22 is certainly violent, but one still gets the impression that if it had only been produced and edited by the equals of Hinchcliffe and Holmes, only Mary Whitehouse would have cared...
  • Stike implied that the self-destruct mechanism on his ship would wipe out the surrounding area, including the hacienda. But when it did go off, it only resulted in a minor explosion, too small and far away from the hacienda to do any real damage.
That's fine; Stike either lied or was at error.
Deleted dialogue had Stike ordering Varl to fetch two Mezon blasters from the ship, which means that he planned to kill Dastari and the Androgums with the Mezon blasters and only ordered Varl to set the ship to self-destruct because he didn’t need it anymore now that he had the Kartz-Reimer module.


To be a clone, there has to be an original, clearly in this case Stike and Varl weren't cloned from the same original Sontaran, while (at least) most of the ones in the The Poison Sky were.
A "clone race" doesn't mean everyone is identical. It means everyone is cloned. There would hardly be much point in differentiating rank if everyone is identical. No doubt, there are different categories of clones, each produced for different purposes.
Possibly certain clones are conditioned in vitro to generate different ranks and specialisms (as in "Brave New World"). Taller commanding officers would make a certain sense (They would be more visible in confused battlefield situations).
The one thing everyone criticises in this story is the height of the Sontarans. However, they are racially "nasty, brutish, and short" due to evolving on a high-gravity planet; which makes sense, and means that the initial source of clones, and the bulk of the population, are short and squat in comparison with Androgums, Gallifreyans, Tellurians, and other races of that type. The Sontarans have, however, been at war for "millennia" with the Rutan Host, and possess an Empire implied to be fairly extensive. It's extremely unlikely that every clone batch or muster parade, where Linx describes the hatchings taking place, back in The Time Warrior (TV story) happens on Sontar itself.
By the time of Group Marshal Stike- further the best part of an additional millennium into the Sontarans' future than Linx was, many of those clone batches may well have been prepared and hatched off world, on planets with considerably lower gravity, and with the rapid generational turnover implied by a race who consider "nearly twelve" to be a decent lifespan and not a premature death (A Good Man Goes to War (TV story)), even without one of those horrible inefficient "primary and secondary reproductive cycles" to mix and recombine successful genetic tropes, random mutation will have introduced enough change in clone batches such that a) not all Sontarans will be identical, and b) Sontaran clone batches not bred on Sontar will not have the same evolutionary pressure to remain short. If Stike's physical build is, in fact, weedy, gangling, and vaguely feeble looking by classical standards of Sontaran "fitness", it would in fact go some way to explaining a certain amount about his personality and Major Varl's frantic efforts to get people to respect his superior.
  • Shockeye is betrayed and shot by Chessene, but the next time he sees her he seems to have completely forgotten and goes back to being her loyal servant.
It's possible that the shot gave Shockeye damage to the brain, which means he probably forgot about the betrayal
  • Peri was so cowardly to scream when Jamie attacked her in his madness when she can easily clobber him. And she and Jamie doubted their Doctors thus nearly dooming all to Sontarans and Androgums. And Peri ran away instead of defending herself from Shockeye, a primitive beast; whiule Jamie was more concerned about revenge on Shockeye than saving others. How'd you think they react if someone compared them to Androgums and Sontarans; and point out their doubt nearly lent the enemeis victory? And how'd you think they react to finding out the Time Lords including MAtrix Rassilon sued them as pawns in their campaign of conquest?
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