Many self-appointed "experts" go to town on the umpteen errors in Doctor Who's long and frequently illustrious history. Some point out the reel-to-reel computers featured in several early episodes supposedly set in the future. Others laugh at unzipped costumes or fluffed lines or criticise wobbly sets, shadows cast on backdrops and unconvincing use of CSO. Still others single out technical errors in the scripts. More-often-than-not, these critics have had the benefit of growing up in an age of hi-tech production values. When most of Doctor Who was made, computers were huge, room-sized monsters that used reel-to-reel magnetic tape for data storage, because microchips, floppy discs and CD-ROMs hadn't been invented then. The BBC, unlike almost every other TV production company in the world, has always had to rely on licence fee revenue for its income. Costumes and sets frequently had to be bodged up on a shoestring. Reshooting fluffed scenes was frequently out of the question due to the high cost of video tape. The people who wrote Doctor Who scripts were professional writers, they weren't professional astronomers, physicists, historians, geologists or archæologists. Many of the so-called gaffs in Doctor Who are there for a reason; scientific ignorance, budgetary restrictions, bad script-writing, actor's errors etc. Others, however, are real clangers (unlike the real Clangers the Master was watching in The Sea Devils which are actually knitted puppets) which could have been avoided with a little bit of thought.
What's in a Name?
The Doctor always called himself "The Doctor", sometimes "Doctor John Smith" and once, in The Highlanders, "Doktor von Wer". Somehow everybody called him "Doctor", dropping the definite article even if they weren't aware "The Doctor" is actually a title and not a personal name. Primitive societies like those in 100,000 B.C. and The Face of Evil would not have a linguistic equivalent of "The Doctor", so should automatically assume it was his name and not omit the definite article.
"Doctor Who" is the title of the show, not the name (or title) of the character. Although it was listed in the credits as "Doctor Who" until the end of Series 17, the character is "The Doctor". This rule was only breached once (twice if you include The Highlanders), when super-computer WOTAN announced "Doctor Who is required" in The War Machines. "Doctor Who" was the name of the character in the two films and the "TV Comic" strip.
The Wall of Lies (Marco Polo)
Polo was accompanied by his father Niccolo and uncle Maffeo throughout his 17 year sojourn in Kublai's Empire, and although they may well have been in the Pamirs in 1289, they would have been travelling away from China as emissiaries for a Mongol princess who was to marry Kublai's great-nephew Arghun, the Il-Khan of Persia. In fact some sources claim most of the journey was made by sea and took some two years to complete. Modern popular belief often confuses Kublai's Empire with that of his grandfather, Chingiz (or Ghengis). Indeed, Barbara the history teacher gets her facts wrong when she states Kublai "conquered all of Asia". Whilst Chingiz's empire stretched from the Pacific to the Black Sea, it had split into four separate empires after his death and Kublai's bit only covered modern China, Mongolia and parts of southern Siberia, whilst his only conquest was of the Sung Empire of southern China in 1279. The Pamirs were in territory ruled by the Chagatai Khanate - which had fought a successful war of independence against Kublai ten years earlier - as were the cities of Samarkand and Lop, in which case Polo was already beyond Kublai's direct jurisdiction and so could not have been being prevented from returning home.
Peking (or Beijing) was called Khan-balik by the Mongols, Cambulac by Europeans and Dai-du (or Ta-tu) by the Chinese. It didn't become Peking until the native Chinese Ming dynasty kicked the last Mongol emperor out in 1368 and built a new capital on the ruins of the old city.
Kublai had four wives of the "First Rank" and undoubtedly several of the "Second Rank", none of whom appear to have been referred to as Empresses.
Ping-cho claimed to come from Samarkand which, then as now, was populated by Turkic people who spoke an early form of modern Uzbek, a language related to Turkish. Chagatai government officials, one of whom was supposed to be Ping-cho's father, were usually either Mongols or Turks. Yet her name and appearance is Mandarin Chinese, a people who were regarded almost as second-class citizens by the ruling Mongols.
John Lucarotti's script was based on Polo's own account of his travels which, in the style of the day, was highly romanticised, historically inaccurate and probably written by the mysterious Rustichello of Pisa anyway.
Nonsensorite (The Sensorites)
When Maitland's ship is drawn towards the Sense-Sphere, Ian states it is nineteen miles to the nearest point of impact, yet the whole of the planet is visible on the screen, suggesting a distance of many thousands of miles. At the same time, Carol and Barbara give a velocity reading of Mach 3 rising to Mach 4. The Mach scale is the ratio of the velocity of a body to the velocity of sound in a fluid medium such as air or water. It can't apply in space as there's no fluid medium for sound to travel through. Nor is it a constant value. Mach 1 is 760.98mph at sea-level at a standard temperature of 15°C and atmospheric pressure of 1013.2mb, but falls to a constant 659.78mph above an altitude of about 36,000 ft. If the Mach readings given by Carol and Barbara refer to the speed at which the Mach scale becomes a constant, the ship would have smacked into the planet less than ten seconds after Ian announced the distance from impact. Maybe he meant nineteen thousand miles?
The Sensorites are capable of telepathic communication, have very poor eyesight and yet rely on visual symbols on their uniforms for identification. Surely a truly telepathic species would be able to identify each other simply by recognising each other's minds?
Not Quite a Land of Fear (The Reign of Terror)
Robespierre's "Reign of Terror" was not a ruthless purge of French nobles and royalists instigated by a fanatical tyrant. In fact Robespierre wasn't even the official Head of State, as the position didn't exist, merely one of several leading lights in the Convention, the parliament set up to govern the French republic in 1792, in charge of the Committee of Public Safety, the body set up to safeguard the Revolution against potential counter-revolutions and foreign invasion. The "Terror" was the popular name for the Law of Suspects, designed to outlaw provincial farmers hoarding grain in order to sell it on the black market whilst people in the cities faced starvation. It was run by a Revolutionary Tribunal which had the power to execute all those suspected of hoarding grain or aiding the foreign armies that were threatening to invade at any moment. Robespierre's colleague, the notorious "Ange de Mort" Louis Saint-Just, dispatched more people to the guillotine than Robespierre did, and in contrast to the rather sensationalist scenes depicting cartloads of aristocrats being delivered to the Place de la Révolution and guillotined by the dozen, there were usually only two or three such executions a day.
Robespierre's downfall was due more to political infighting between members of the Convention than public opposition to the Terror. In fact there was a sizeable public protest against his arrest, but not enough to prevent his execution the next day. And he was shot in the jaw by a police officer in the Luxembourg prison, NOT by an angry soldier in his office during his arrest.
Napoleon Bonaparte was in Italy at the time of Robespierre's downfall, being relieved of his command and publicly disgraced after refusing a posting to the Vendée shortly after. His first brush with politics came in 1795 when he helped defeat a royalist uprising, after which he spent four years in Egypt. It wasn't until 1799 that he was asked to lead a coup against an increasingly corrupt Directoire, the body that had succeeded the Convention as the French government in 1795. The rest, as they say, is history.
Lost in Translation (The Reign of Terror)
In episode six Prisoners of Conciergerie, Ian remembers Webster's dying words as being "Barras", "something about a meeting", and "The Sinking Ship". Unfortunately, Webster's actual last words to Ian in episode two Guests of Madame Guillotine were "Jules Renan" and "the sign of 'Le Chien Gris'".
The Dalek Mastercock-up (The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
The whole point of the Daleks invading Earth is to remove its magnetic core and replace it with a power unit which will enable Earth to be piloted around the galaxy. However, not only is the plan itself utterly illogical (for instance, why is it so important for the core to be magnetic if it's going to be removed?), but the consequences would be totally disastrous for the Daleks themselves. Leaving aside the potential risk of splitting the planet wide open (as in Inferno), as soon as Earth left the warming influence of the Sun, not only would the oceans freeze up but its entire atmosphere would as well! As Daleks appear to need to breathe oxygenated air in order to survive, they would instantly suffocate. As they later used the sub-zero ice caves on Spiridon to keep an army in cryogenic suspension, the far colder temperatures of deep space would render them totally inanimate as well.
Nero's Fiddling (The Romans)
Although by all accounts a little on the tubby side, Nero was only 27 in 64 A.D., not approaching middle-age as suggested by the casting of the 41 year old Derek Francis. He was nowhere near Rome when the Great Fire started, although he did rush back to help fight it, and never employed an official court poisoner - although he was probably responsible for the murder of his mother Agrippina and first wife Octavia, as well as forcing the suicides of his teacher Seneca, the poet Lucan, his "Master of Taste" Petronius, and his most able general Corbulo, plus kicking his second wife Poppaea to death after she complained about him coming home late! Although he enjoyed singing, it's not recorded whether he also played the lyre.
The Doctor and party were supposed to be resting up at a villa near Assissium, known today as Assissi. Assissi is some 70 miles from Rome, yet the Doctor and Vicki set out to make the journey on foot, which would take around twenty hours non-stop!.
Giant Invertebrates (The Web Planet, The Green Death, Planet of the Spiders, The Ark in Space)
The reason insects and arachnids don't grow to gigantic proportions on Earth is because they would be crushed by Earth's gravity and atmospheric pressure. In other words, the likes of the Zarbi, the Menoptera, the Wirrn and the Spiders of Metebelis 3 could only survive on low-gravity worlds, which neither Vortis nor Metebelis 3 gave any indication of being. The giant fly in The Green Death wouldn't be able to get airborne either. Its wing area would need to be increased exponentially in relation to its body mass to generate enough lift. Simply scaling up the fly's dimensions wouldn't be enough. The overall wing area would have to be increased by the square of the enlargement factor. For example, if the fly was enlarged by a factor of ten, the wings would need to be enlarged by a factor of a hundred. As the giant fly was far more than ten times the size of an ordinary fly, its wings would have had to be truly enormous, which would in turn demand more muscle power, thus adding to the body mass, thus demanding an even greater wing area and so on ad infinitum. In other words, it would be scientifically impossible for the giant fly to fly.
Insects of the Hymenoptera Family, which includes ants, bees and wasps, generally base their society around a single fertile female. This was recognised for the wasp-like Wirrn in The Ark in Space but sadly ignored for the ant-like Zarbi in The Web Planet.
Richard the Lyingheart (The Crusade)
The Crusade depicts King Richard I as being fiercely English, utterly chivalrous and heroic, and respected by his fellow Crusaders. In actual fact he was French through-and-through and hated everything about England and the English, regarding his position as King of England merely as a way of putting him on an equal footing with King Philippe II of France, who was technically overlord of Richard's territories in Normandy, Aquitaine and Anjou. He was responsible for the unwarranted massacre of the entire population of a Moslem city - including women, children and elderly people - and was despised by both French and German Crusaders. His reason for joining the Third Crusade was not entirely in keeping with the official Christian desire to retrieve the Holy Land from the "Saracen Hordes" either. His main aim was to wrest the Kingdom of Jerusalem from Guy de Lusignan, the second husband of his distant cousin Sibyl, who many regarded as being unfit for the job.
Love Letter in the Sand (The Crusade)
The letter to Saladin Richard dictates is clearly written in 20th Century English. The language of the English court at the time was Medieval French.
Vikings and Saxons (The Time Meddler)
The use of the terms "Viking" and "Saxon" is both incorrect and historically inaccurate. Vikings were the Norse pirates that ravaged much of northern Europe in the 8th and 9th Centuries and the term had died out long before 1066 with the establishment of Denmark, Norway and Sweden as sovereign kingdoms. All three nations had adopted Christianity before the end of the 1st Millennium, so their armies were unlikely to take liberties with members of religious orders or pillage religious buildings.
The term "Saxon" for the English-speaking people of England had died out by the early 7th Century, several Northumbrian, Mercian and Wessexan kings adopting the title "King of the English" long before Edgar of Wessex was crowned "King of England" in 973. Moreover, the people of Northumbria were a mixture of Anglian and Danish stock and therefore extremely unlikely to refer to themselves as Saxons, whose 6th Century ancestors conquered and settled the south of England not the north.
Sven is a Swedish name, the so-called Vikings in the story were Norwegian. Sven should have been called Svein. It might look similar but it's pronounced differently.
The Exploding Planet (Galaxy Four)
It is physically impossible for an ordinary Earth-type planet to explode without the aid of artificial stimuli - such as several cobalt-salted nuclear devices planted in strategic places or a mad-scientist drilling through the planet's crust. However, the un-named planet in Galaxy Four has three suns, the combined gravitational influence of which may well cause the planet to break up, as will happen to Neptune's moon Triton in a few hundred thousand years time. In reality, though, this would happen long before plantlife had had a chance to evolve on the planet's surface.
Katarina and Sara - Companions? (The Daleks' Masterplan)
In the days before Doctor Who became a subject of intense study by assorted anoraks (i.e. before 1981), the list of the Doctor's companions read like this (in order of appearance):- Barbara, Ian, Susan, Vicki, Steven, Dodo...and so on up to Romana. Then someone (probably Jean-Marc Lofficier) decided that two characters from The Dalek Masterplan qualified. The question is, why? Neither Katarina nor Sara Kingdom were mentioned as companions in the Radio Times 10th Anniversary Special or Hulke & Dicks' The Making of Doctor Who, and both were killed off after a handful of episodes. Katarina lasted a mere five episodes, or a matter of hours in the timescale of the narrative (the time it took to travel from Troy to Kembel and on to Desperus), and her death had been decided before the part was cast. It's true she travelled in the Tardis, but only once, as did several other characters over the years, none of whom have been regarded as companions. Yes she appeared in two separate stories but, at the time, she was seen as appearing only in five consecutive episodes, as Altos and Sabetha had done in The Keys of Marinus. Sara Kingdom lasted a little longer, nine episodes (or no more than a few days in narrative terms), and experienced no less than seven journeys in the Tardis. But her death too had been pre-ordained. With the exception of Jamie and Nyssa, every regular companion was intended to last until the character was ready to be written out or the actor/actress involved decided to leave. Whilst the length of Sara's stay may be an excuse to include her as a companion, why isn't Lieutenant Carstairs from The War Games - who appeared in ten episodes - also included? Sara Kingdom can no more be regarded as a companion than, say, Hugo Lang (The Twin Dilemma) or Duggan (City of Death), or any of the many other characters who performed a "companion's" role in a single story. The strongest argument against Katarina and Sara being classed as companions has to be the fact that neither producer John Wiles nor story editor Donald Tosh saw them as being anything more than single-story characters designed to bridge the gap between Vicki and her eventual replacement.
Uniformly Indestructable (The Daleks' Masterplan)
Whoever made the uniforms for Space Special Security agents was onto a winner. Whilst the Daleks' Time Destructor ages Sara Kingdom to death, her uniform remains intact, at least until Steven accidentally reverses the Time Destructor's field.
The Chaplette Inheritance (The Massacre)
Steven wondered if Dodo was descended from Anne Chaplette because, a). she looked similar, and, b). she had the same surname. Self-appointed experts have pointed out that she couldn't have been because Anne would have changed her surname on marrying and having children. Have they never heard of illegitimacy?
The Sun Goes Nova (The Ark, Frontios)
It's something of a comforting fantasy to believe that humanity will be around forever - at least for long enough to witness the eventual destruction of planet Earth by the Sun's death throes. Unfortunately, it is just a fantasy. Barring a totally unexpected stellar accident, it is highly unlikely humanity will be around to witness the Sun's final moments.
The Sun is estimated to be roughly halfway through its 9 thousand million year lifespan (or 9 billion if you prefer American values). Modern humans have only been around for 250,000 to 1 million years (depending on which expert you believe), or around 0.00007% of the Sun's estimated lifespan. The average lifespan of mammalian species is around 5 to 10 million years (about 0.0008% of the Sun's estimated lifespan), which means that humans as we know them will either be long extinct or would have evolved far beyond our recognition well before the Sun begins its final countdown, as would all the animals featured in The Ark.
According to recent research, all plant and animal life on Earth will become extinct within the next 600 million years, nearly 4 thousand million (billion) years before Doomsday, leaving only bacterial lifeforms behind. And even they will die out many millions of years before the Sun self-destructs. In other words, Earth will be a totally dead planet orbiting a Sun not much different from the one we know now for an unimaginable length of time after the human race has died out.
Don't Shoot the Scriptwriter (The Gunfighters)
As with most historical capers, The Gunfighters leans towards "orthodox" history, which is more-often-than-not incorrect as it is "written by the victors". The Clantons weren't outlaws, they were legitimate land owners, Pa Clanton having established his ranch before the town of Tombstone was founded in 1877. The Earps, by way of contrast, were relative late-comers. Virgil was appointed town marshall in 1880 and immediately recruited brothers Wyatt and Morgan as Special Deputies, not the other way round as claimed in the script. Although technically on the right side of the law, the Earps were responsible for a number of illegal acts and had several murder charges filed against them by the Clantons.
The details of the famous gunfight are also suspect. Warren Earp wasn't killed by the Clantons before the shoot-out, he was merely wounded. He didn't shuffle off his mortal coil until 1900. Bat Masterson and Johnny Ringo both left Tombstone several days before the shoot-out, whilst Pa Clanton was killed over two months earlier, reputedly by Mexican bandits in the Guadelupe Canyon. Billy was the only Clanton to be killed at the O.K.Corral, Ike lived until 1887, Phineas until 1905. On the other hand, three definite participants in the shoot-out, Tom and Frank McLaury, who were both killed, and Morgan Earp, who wasn't, are totally absent from the story.
Kate is played by Sheena Marshe as a blonde with a "Western"-style drawl. In reality, Kate Elder was dark haired and probably had a slight Central European accent, as she spent the first ten years of her life in her native Hungary.
You Know My Name (The Savages)
The Doctor is known to the Elders only as "The Traveller from Beyond Time", yet Jano calls him "Doctor" before anybody else has actually had a chance to tell him.
The Missing World Cup (The War Machines, The Faceless Ones, The Evil of the Daleks)
No less than three stories are presumed to be set in July 1966 (when The War Machines was originally broadcast), but there is no mention of the biggest sporting event to be held in London for 18 years then taking place, i.e. the World Cup which England went on to win. Sir Charles Summers mentions July 12th (as being a Monday when, in 1966, it was a Saturday), which was the day after England played Uruguay at Wembley and the day before Mexico played France. The other matches involving those four were played in London during the time the events of The War Machines are supposed to take place, yet no mention is made of the fact, there are no foreign football supporters roaming the streets and no flags or posters on display anywhere. The 12th July fell on a Monday in 1962, when the Post Office Tower was still an architect's dream, and 1973, when it was no longer new.
Oh What a Night! (The War Machines)
It is highly unlikely that the discovery of a dead down-and-out's body in an empty warehouse would be reported in a national newspaper, especially as the discovery had to have been made when the 'papers were already being printed. It is extremely unlikely that WOTAN would be able to recruit large numbers of workers, commandeer and equip several workshops across London, acquire enough materials and components to construct at least two War Machines (complete with monogrammed packing cases), and then build and test those War Machines in just a single night.
Mondas Sucks! (The Tenth Planet)
The Tenth Planet is a cracking story but involves a hugely flawed bit of scientific nonsense. Just how does a small rocky Earth-like planet like Mondas absorb energy from other planets and living beings? Earth generates magnetic energy from its core whilst everything on the surface gets energy from the Sun. Living things such as ourselves get energy from eating other living things, whilst we as a species generate energy from decomposed living matter (coal, oil, gas) or from natural sources (wind, tides, solar and nuclear energy). No inanimate object such as a planet can absorb more energy than is directed at it. It is physically unable to extract energy from living beings. Mondas's gravity may well affect a small spaceship in Earth orbit but, by then, its affect on Earth would have manifested itself as well, in the form of tsunamis, hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, none of which were mentioned in the script. The notion that a nuclear explosion on Mondas could turn it into a mini-sun is also ridiculous. There have been hundreds of nuclear explosions on Earth since 1945 and Earth is still a rocky planet.
It is reported that Hawaii is being threatened by a hurricane. As hurricanes only occur in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans and Hawaii is in the Pacific, it should be a typhoon.
We now know that the story title itself is incorrect. However, when it was written (1966) and set (1986), Pluto was still officially the Ninth Planet.
Quick Change Artist (The Tenth Planet, The Power of the Daleks)
The Doctor's first regeneration is truly memorable, not least for the fact that not only does his body change, his clothes do as well. S'pose it saved all that messing about trying to find a suitable outfit in the Tardis wardrobe!
The Gravity of the Situation (The Moonbase, The Seeds of Death, Frontier in Space)
We all know from TV coverage of the six Apollo Moon missions that normal walking is virtually impossible on the Moon. So how come all the inhabitants of the three lunar bases featured in Doctor Who appear to be unaffected by the Moon's low gravity? Doubtless the regular personnel could have been wearing heavy boots, but the Doctor and his companions seem to be wearing their usual footwear.
May the Forces be With You (The Faceless Ones)
DI Crossland claims he and Gascoigne are from (New) Scotland Yard. New Scotland Yard is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, which covers the Greater London area only. Gatwick Airport, where the action takes place, is in Surrey and is policed by the Surrey Police. In other words Crossland would have no jurisdiction and shouldn't be operating without a Surrey officer present. This is a common error usually made by London-based writers or writers from abroad who automatically assume New Scotland Yard is the headquarters of all U.K.police forces.
Despite managing to film at Gatwick Airport and get several shots of VC-10 airliners landing and taking off, the production team was unable to do the same with RAF aircraft, so stock footage of a jet fighter was used. Unfortunately, the person responsible for finding the film failed to realise the aeroplane featured was an Italian Air Force Fiat G-91, an aircraft Britain's RAF never used.
Life's a Gas (The Ice Warriors)
The Doctor postulates that ammonium sulphide will poison the Ice Warriors because the Martian atmosphere is composed mainly of nitrogen. Doh! It's Earth's atmosphere that is mainly nitrogen (78%) whereas Mars's atmosphere is 95.3% carbon dioxide.
The Enema of the World (The Enemy of the World)
Leaving aside the fact that this story is a shambolic mess in the midst of a series of classics (Troughton's dual performance excepted), with characters popping up on opposite sides of the world almost instaneously, people kept prisoner in corridors "because it's easier to guard", and crucial pieces of action taking place off screen, the biggest boo-boo has to be the sub-plot of erupting volcanoes in Hungary. Not only does the Eperjest Tokyar range not exist, there haven't been any active volcanoes in central Europe for millions of years, certainly not as recent as the 16th Century as claimed in the script.
The Diverted Meteor Shower (The Wheel in Space)
It is stated that the Perseid meteor shower has been diverted towards The Wheel, and Earth, by a star in the M13 Hercules Cluster going nova. As M13 is a galaxy some 34,000 light years away from Earth and the Perseids are a cloud of meteoroids in our own Solar System, it would have to be one almighty nova - due to the countless gravitational forces between M13 and the Milky Way - and been caused at least 34,000 years before the time of the story. In actual fact, Earth has been hit by the Perseid meteoroid shower every year for as long as human history has existed, usually between July 27th and August 17th. If a nova in M13 could affect a cloud of meteoroids in the Solar System, it would have a severe affect on Earth as well.
The Fact of Fiction (The Mind Robber)
The infamous pirate Blackbeard is portrayed as a character from fiction. In actual fact Blackbeard was the real life Edward Teach who lived from around 1680 to 1718.
Rocky Horror Show (The Krotons, The Hand of Fear, The Stones of Blood)
Living creatures made from rock or crystal have featured in science fiction ever since scientists first discovered the structural similarities of carbon and silicon. Unfortunately, the concept of silicon-based life is a scientific impossibility due to the rigid construction of silicon atoms.
The Seeds of Doubt (The Seeds of Death)
On Earth, the Doctor and Professor Eldred dig out Eldred's rocket from cold storage, have it fuelled for launch and manage to persuade Radnor of the benefits of rocket flight to the Moon. Meanwhile, on the Moon, Fewsham struggles to repair the T-Mat system. The first would take several days, the second would only appear to have taken a few hours. Does time move more slowly on the Moon or what?
Silurians, Eocenes or Jurassicans? (Doctor Who and the Silurians, The Sea Devils)
The Doctor finds Dr.Quinn's globe, identifies it as showing Earth around 200 million years ago and states it was during the Silurian Era. The Silurian Period (not Era, the Silurian Period forms part of the Paleozoic Era) ended more than 410 million years ago when the most advanced land animals were large millipedes. 200 million years ago was in the middle of the Early Jurassic Period when mammals were about the size of shrews. In The Sea Devils, the Doctor (or writer Malcolm Hulke) attempted to correct this error by stating the Silurians (and their aquatic cousins) came from the Eocene Period. Unfortunately, this too is wrong. The Eocene Period lasted from 53 to 36 million years ago, i.e. after the dinosaurs were wiped out, and was dominated by mammals and giant birds, not reptiles which had been reduced in number to the species we have today. The reference to apes in Doctor Who and the Silurians is also misplaced as apes did not evolve until the late Oligocene Period, approximately 33 million years ago and over 30 million years after the age of the reptiles.
The Doctor's use of the term Homo reptilia as the scientific name for the misnamed Silurians is also incorrect. Homo, meaning "Man", is a genus belonging to Family Hominidae of the Order Primates of Class Mammalia of the Phylum Vertebrae. When naming species, the first part of the official name, e.g. Homo, is exclusive to its genus, whether it is a mammal, a reptile or a daffodil. It cannot be used for species in other Families, Orders, Classes or Phyla. Silurians (sic), being reptiles, belong to a totally different Class altogether.
Whatever the dinosaur was in the caves it wasn't a Tyrannosaur, as they didn't live in prehistoric Britain. Although, of course, the Silurians (sic) could have had one imported before they went into hiding.
Psycho Killer (The Mind of Evil)
The Mind Parasite in the Keller Machine uses fear to kill people. So how come a man who is frightened of drowning ends up with water in his lungs whilst another who is terrified of rats is found covered with scratches? If it frightened someone to death who was afraid of being shot, would there be bullet holes in their body? Illogical, Captain.
Colonists in Spatial Anomaly (Colony in Space)
The calendar which shows the date to be Tuesday, 3rd March, 2472, is two days out. The 3rd will be a Sunday, Tuesday will be the 5th. And who made the calendar anyway if the colonists left Earth over a year earlier?
The reel-to-reel tape recorder used by Morgan is wonderfully anachronistic. The first cassette and cartridge tape players/recorders were invented some eight years before this story was made and were already being sold in Britain. Maybe IMC had a sideline in antiques? Just as chronologically challenged are the colonists' rifles. These appear to be standard late-20th Century weapons which would, by the story's setting, be at least 500 years old. It would be tantamount to the first European settlers in Australia being armed with 14th Century gonnes.
The Master calls the enquiry a "tribunal". Tribunals tend to be made up of three or more people, hence the name.
Continuity Gone Westland (The Sea Devils)
The helicopter sent out by Captain Hart to rescue Jo and the Doctor is a Westland Sea King when it leaves HMS Seaspite. By the time it reaches the seafort, it has been mysteriously transformed into a Westland Wessex. Maybe the Royal Navy had a fully functioning Tardis?
Atlantis (The Underwater Menace, The Time Monster)
Whilst The Underwater Menace could conceivably be set in an Atlantean colony that survived until the late 20th Century, the civilisation seen in The Time Monster is not Atlantis, it is the Minoan civilisation of Crete. This was proposed as the inspiration for Plato's description of Atlantis when discovered in the late 1960s and quickly gained popularity amongst archæologists and historians, despite the fact that Crete is not a continent equal in size to Africa and Asia combined, as Plato claimed Atlantis was, and does not lie in the Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, as Plato said Atlantis did.
It's Bigger on the Outside (The Time Warrior)
How on Earth did UNIT soldiers get the Tardis through an ordinary door into the Doctor's dorm in the research centre? The Doctor's labs in the various UNIT HQs had either double doors or a removable partition wall. The research centre is supposed to be an ordinary country house with single doors and solid walls. The Tardis is larger than your average wardrobe and, unlike most modern wardrobes, doesn't come apart so you can get it through doorways. Just as mysterious is how Irongron's men managed to get Linx's ship into the castle cellar without taking out half the wall or even denting the ship's bodywork.
A Lack of Military Intelligence (Invasion of the Dinosaurs)
The vehicle carrying stolen furs that the Doctor "borrows" just happens to be an Army Land Rover complete with military licence plates. Now, either one or two soldiers were involved in a bit of part-time looting, or someone forgot to hire a civilian vehicle for the scene.
The Power of the Daleks (Death to the Daleks)
In The Mutants (aka The Daleks) we learnt that the Daleks were powered by static electricity. This remained an accepted fact throughout every subsequent Dalek story. Static electricity is a form of energy, yet the Daleks were able to function normally on Exxilon despite the fact the City was supposed to drain energy from everything within reach - spaceships, torches, laser guns etc. At one point Sarah asked why the Daleks weren't affected by the power drain. We are still asking.
Censored TransMat (Revenge of the Cybermen)
Sarah is transmatted down to Voga after being injected with an alien poison by a Cybermat. According to the Doctor, the transmat would recognise Sarah's human molecules and separate and reject the (non-human) poison molecules. However, as clothing fabrics tend to be made of non-human molecules, how come Sarah, Harry and everybody else who used the TransMat didn't arrive on Voga stark naked? Imagine what it would've done to the Cybermen!
Anti-Matter or Doesn't Matter? (Planet of Evil)
With the remoteness of Zeta Minor emphasised by the Doctor and Salamar amongst others, you would expect Sorenson's expedition to have travelled to the planet under their own steam. After all, it's not as if the team would have been able to hitch a ride home on a passing spaceship as Zeta Minor is nowhere near any existing commercial routes. If that is the case, where is the expedition's ship? There's no mention of it at all, not even a comment that it was lost or destroyed. Seeing as the Morestran Space Service has busted a gut getting a rescue mission out that far, it would be extremely unlikely anybody else would have transported Sorenson and his team all the way to the edge of existence just to use up valuable fuel returning home with an empty ship.
Wardrobe Malfunction (Pyramids of Mars)
When Sarah shows off the dress she's found in the Tardis wardrobe, the Doctor claims it is one of Victoria's. Unfortunately, in addition to being totally different in style and colour to the only genuine Victorian dress Victoria brought on board, i.e. the one she was wearing in her first adventure, it also happens to date from Edwardian times.
"I'm from 1980..." and other chronological cock-ups (Pyramids of Mars, The Web of Fear, The Invasion etc.)
Episode 2 of Pyramids of Mars features Sarah and the Doctor rabbiting on about Sarah coming from 1980. In The Web of Fear, Professor Travers says it is forty years since his previous meeting with the Doctor in The Abominable Snowmen, which Anne Travers claims happened in 1935, whereas Julius Silverstein says he bought his Yeti from Travers thirty years previously. In The Invasion, the Brigadier says it must be four years since he and the Doctor first met, which implies it is 1979. In Spearhead from Space, the Brigadier says he hasn't seen the Doctor for several months.
Are we seriously expected to believe that all the events of Jon Pertwee's era are supposed to have taken place in less than twelve months? Liz clearly worked with the Doctor for some time, Jo for far more than a year. Jo left UNIT some weeks or months before the Doctor met Sarah. The car that delivered Liz to UNIT HQ in Spearhead from Space was a fairly new looking Ford Zephyr, registered between 1st January and 31st July 1967, yet we are expected to believe this story was set sometime around late 1979/early 1980. The cars seen in The Invasion were around six years old when filming took place, but would've been nearly twenty years old if we believe the date claimed. Mawdryn Undead claimed the Brigadier retired from UNIT in 1976 and was immediately slated by hordes of self-appointed experts for contradicting Pyramids of Mars (which is far from being technically faultless, see below), one of whom actually claimed the Silver Jubilee t-shirts being worn by the extras in the 1977 scenes were to commemorate the 1981 Royal Wedding! Doh! He obviously didn't hear Tegan mention the Silver Jubilee several times, unless he thinks "Silver Jubilee" is Aussie slang for "Royal Wedding"!
A calendar is seen in The Green Death for February 1972. However, both the milk wagon driven by the Doctor and an ambulance that turns up at Llanfairfach Colliery in the same story were registered between 1st August 1972 and 31st July 1973, which means the calendar is out-of-date. The calendar seen in the fake pub in The Android Invasion claims the date is Friday, July 6th, which would mean the year is either 1973 or 1979. Then again, this could've been another Kraal cock-up, like the cashtill full of freshly minted coins all bearing the same date.
The cause of all this confusion over dates is a simple breakdown in continuity. The Invasion was supposed to be set several years beyond 1968. Unfortunately, all the following UNIT stories were clearly set in the present day, i.e. between 1970 and 1975. Pyramids of Mars was the only subsequent story to adhere to The Invasion's dating. If it comes down to a simple majority decision, twenty UNIT and UNIT-contemporary stories far outnumber the two that claim a near-future setting. It would be safer to assume, therefore, that it is The Invasion and Pyramids from Mars that are incorrect in their dating than the nineteen between Spearhead from Space and The Seeds of Doom plus Mawdryn Undead. Of course, a cynic would suggest the real reason most self-appointed experts prefer Pyramids of Mars's dating is the fact that Pyramids of Mars was the first story to be voted "Story of the Season" (sic) by members of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, many of whom went on to write most of the non-fiction books about Doctor Who.
Get this. Travers was an old man working under extreme pressure. He could hardly be expected to remember exactly when he met someone half a lifetime earlier. The Brigadier was a military man working for a semi-secret organisation. Would he openly blab about when something that had undoubtedly been hushed up took place? Sarah was a journalist. We all know what they're like with the truth! Interestingly, Terrance Dicks' novelisation of Pyramids of Mars, published in 1976, doesn't mention 1980 at all!
I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass (Pyramids of Mars)
When Ernie Clements shoots Marcus Scarman from outside a closed window, we hear the sound of the shotgun blast before we hear the sound of breaking glass. If Clements had shot through the window, we would have heard both sounds almost instantaneously. If he had broken the window first, we would have heard the breaking glass before the blast. Either way, the entire pane would have shattered. Yet, when we see the window afterwards, there is a nice neat hole in it.
Mars calling Earth (Pyramids of Mars)
The Doctor suddenly remembers that the time-lag for radio signals travelling between Mars and Earth is two minutes, giving him that time to set up a temporal trap for the newly liberated Sutekh. He needn't have worried. The distance between Earth and Mars differs wildly between 34 million and 249.7 million miles. At their closest Earth and Mars are just over 3 light-minutes apart, which means all electro-magnetic waves (including light and radio) take just over 3 minutes to travel from one to the other. At their furthest they are 22.3 light-minutes apart. Not since the dim and distant past (several hundred million years ago) have Earth and Mars been just two light-minutes apart. In addition to the fact that both planets are constantly rotating on their axes so the same parts of each planet don't face each other all the time, their respective orbits around the Sun also make a constant direct radio link between Earth and Mars impossible, as for part of the time the Sun is between the two, causing not only a physical barrier but also massive electro-magnetic interference. The only solution would be a relay point somewhere above the Sun at right-angles to the orbital planes of Earth and Mars. Even then this would have to be beyond the Sun's gravitational influence to prevent it being forced into an orbit of its own, which would lead to further breaks in the link between the two planets. When Pyramids of Mars was written, the remotest known object in the Solar System, i.e. the furthest body bound by the Sun's gravity, was Pluto, which at its nearest to Earth is 4,308.4 million miles (4.3 billion to Americans) away, or a shade under 4 light-hours. When you consider the recently discovered planetoid Sedna is some 47 thousand million miles or about 70.5 light-hours away, is merely the nearest detected object in the theorised Oort Cloud and is still within reach of the Sun's gravitational pull, that distance would have to be truly astronomical, which means the Doctor could have hung about for about a fortnight before setting up Sutekh's time tunnel into infinity.
Double Trouble (The Android Invasion)
The Kraals based their copy of Devesham and the Space Centre on Crayford's memories. If UNIT had been on the base when he left Earth then the Brigadier would've been there whereas Harry Sullivan wouldn't (he'd not been assigned to UNIT at the time). Why, then, did Crayford's memories omit someone as important as the Brigadier yet include someone he can't have met? How did the Kraals manage to have an android copy of Faraday ready if he'd only just replaced the Brigadier? Crayford can't possibly have met him and the Kraals couldn't possibly have known unless they were monitoring UNIT activities. Why were UNIT at the Space Centre anyway when nobody knew about Crayford's return until just before he arrived? Obviously, the reason the Brigadier was absent was that Nicholas Courtney was unavailable for filming. Surely, for the sake of common sense, it would have been better to write UNIT out altogether for the Earth scenes.
In order to save money filming the lift-off of Crayford's XK5 rocket from Oseidon, the designers decided to use stock footage of a Saturn 5 blast-off. Unfortunately, that meant the words "United States" are clearly seen on a rocket that is supposed to be British and looks nothing like the model of the XK5 seen just before the lift-off scene.
Language Barrier (The Masque of Mandragora and others)
When it dawned on Sarah that she could converse with the Italian-speaking natives of San Martino without being able to speak Italian, the Doctor explained it was a little Time Lord trick he allowed her to share. That's all very well but it doesn't explain how every alien who tried to invade Earth spoke English. Nor does it explain how whenever different aliens met, they managed to converse with each other without the aid of translators. In fact the only aliens who didn't speak 20th Century English were the Zarbi, the Foamasi and the Mogarians. Chrrp, chrrp, chrrrp!
In The Abominable Snowmen, were the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria speaking English or Tibetan? Professor Travers would have had to use Tibetan to converse with the monks, yet it never occured to him that the Doctor and companions appeared to be fluent in the same language. In Marco Polo, Kublai Khan spoke Mongolian, Tegana probably spoke Uighur, Ping-cho should have spoken proto-Uzbek, all the other characters should have spoken any of these or Mandarin Chinese, whilst Polo's native language was Dalmatian. Yet everybody manages to communicate with each other with no problems whatsoever and never stop to wonder which language the Doctor and companions are speaking. How come it never seemed to work when the Doctor and his companions met speakers of German (The War Games), Welsh (The Green Death), Spanish (The Two Doctors) or Hokkien (The Mind of Evil)? And what about all the companions the Doctor left behind on alien planets? Being a Gallifreyan (allegedly), Susan may well have managed to understand 22nd Century English, but what about Vicki? A speaker of 25th Century English ending up amongst a load of refugee Trojans who spoke either Mycenaean Greek or Palaic? Or Steven? Did the Elders and Savages speak English as a native language? See also "Theories of Relative Stupidity" below.
Assassinated Continuity (The Deadly Assassin)
Several concepts introduced in The Deadly Assassin were totally misinterpreted in subsequent stories and became accepted "facts". Artron energy was described by Co-ordinator Engin as a form of mental energy which Time Lords are able to draw upon in times of extreme stress. Somehow, by Four to Doomsday, this had become the energy that fuelled the Tardis. Similarly, Engin described the APC Net as "a matrix of electro-chemical cells". By The Invasion of Time, part of this off-the-cuff description had become the APC Net's accepted name. And just to add to the confusion, the Great Key was a rod of ebonite in The Deadly Assassin. In The Invasion of Time, this was renamed The Rod of Rassilon (ooer!) whilst the Great Key became, simply, a key.
Williams for Hinchcliffe
Possibly one of the biggest cock-ups in Doctor Who history was behind the scenes with the exchange of producers with Target, the show most anally-retentive Who fans "remember" for featuring a topless Katy Manning. Well there was more to it than just being a showcase for half-naked former Doctor Who starlets. For one thing it was a bloody good series, grittier than The Sweeney with a different slant to the black humour, and featured the gorgeous Vivien Heilbron. Meanwhile, Doctor Who was going through a purple patch. Tom Baker was at his peak, an interesting new companion had just been introduced, and the stories were top-class. Then the faceless executives at the Beeb decided to knacker two of their best shows by swapping producers. Philip Hinchcliffe - who still had far reaching plans for Doctor Who - was sent to run Target. Graham Williams - who had overseen Target's development from Day One - moved over to Doctor Who. The result? Utter calamity. Target degenerated into sheer brutality, Doctor Who descended into camp comedy (and a higher than average cock-up rate - see below). It was the worst exchange of personnel since Alf Ramsey replaced Martin Peters with Norman Hunter in the 1970 World Cup quarter-final. Target was axed after a disastrous second series, Doctor Who began its long, slow slide into oblivion.
The Invisible Enigma (The Invisible Enemy)
The Nucleus of the Swarm is referred to as a virus on numerous occasions. A virus is the simplest recognised form of life and is made up of bundles of DNA or RNA wrapped in a coating of proteins. They reproduce by attaching themselves to other lifeforms and releasing their genes into an unsuspecting host cell. Viruses do not lay eggs. Nor do they resemble prawns.
It would be more accurate to describe the Nucleus of the Swarm as a protozoan. These are simple animal lifeforms radically more advanced than viruses, around a fifth of which are parasitic although not all cause disease.
Titan is depicted as having a Moon-like landscape with no atmosphere. In actual fact Titan has a reddish-orange nitrogen/argon atmosphere denser than Earth's, which was detected almost thirty years before The Invisible Enemy was made.
The damage caused by the shuttle crashing into the Bi-Al Foundation is seen before it actually happens.
Cold July (Image of the Fendahl)
The events of Image of the Fendahl are supposed to be taking place on Lammas Eve, i.e. July 31st, yet everybody bar Leela is walking around in winter clothing and the woods are shrouded in banks of nocturnal mist. See also "Seasons in the Sun" below.
The Fifth Planet (Image of the Fendahl)
The Doctor surmises that the Asteroid Belt is the debris left behind after the destruction of the Fendahl's home planet. Even if the Asteroid Belt was the result of a planet breaking up, it would have been a very small planet indeed. If Ceres, Vesta, Eros and the thousands of other named lumps of rock and ice in the Asteroid Belt were somehow stuck together, the resulting "planet" would be less than half the size of the Moon.
Life on Pluto (The Sun Makers)
Pluto is too small to generate enough gravity to enable people to walk about normally or to maintain a dense atmosphere. When The Sun Makers was written, Pluto was estimated to be slightly larger than the Moon, which means its gravity would have been about the same, i.e. around 1/6 of Earth's.
Having six artificial suns in orbit around Pluto would melt the ice that makes up most of the planetoid's structure. All that would be left would be a few lumps of rock and a load of water!
Pluto's largest moon, Charon, wasn't discovered until The Sun Makers was being made, so maybe its absence from exterior backgrounds can be excused.
Suspending the Laws of Common Sense (Underworld)
Newly formed planets tend to be molten rock for several million years and thus totally impossible for human life to exist on (or in). A spaceship caught up in such evolutionary processes would be crushed and possibly vapourised almost immediately. Another boob is the gravity-free centre of the planet. Gravity is the reason the planet has formed in the first place. If there was no gravity at the planet's core it would have remained a cloud of dust.
The inhabitants of the new planet appear to have survived for several thousand years on food processed from basic minerals. Presumably their water comes from ice caught up in the process that created the planet. But where did the cloth for their clothing come from? You can't manufacture that from rocks!
Revelation of the Daleks' Creator (Destiny of the Daleks)
In Genesis of the Daleks, Davros was utterly convinced that life only existed on Skaro. Somehow, despite having been in suspended animation for centuries totally isolated from the rest of the cosmos, he awakes thoroughly cognizent with the concept of a universe full of life. Not only is this totally out of character for the supremely arrogant Davros, and highly unbelievable under the circumstances, but it makes St.Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus seem like deciding to have a red smartie rather than a brown one.
Dry Atlantic Ocean (City of Death)
The Atlantic Ocean didn't exist in Early Devonian times (c.400 million years ago), so Scaroth's ship could not have been where the Doctor claimed. The Atlantic was formed around 160 million years ago when Europe and Africa separated from North America, and is still growing. What is now the sea-bed was once covered up by several miles of Continental Shelf. Also, the Early Devonian landscape would have been far from barren as plantlife was well established by then. So, either the Doctor's theory that Scaroth's exploding ship caused the creation of life on Earth is wrong, or it was much earlier than he said. And if it was Earth before life began, then the Doctor, Romana and Duggan would have suffocated almost immediately. There was no oxygen in the atmosphere until blue-green algae evolved.
Neutron Star Missile (The Creature from the Pit)
Neutron stars are one step away from being Black Holes. Anything such as Erato's ship approaching one would be dragged down to its surface and instantly crushed by enormous gravitational forces. It is therefore impossible to catch one in a net.
"Guest Star..."
John Nathan Turner was a man with a mission - to drag the show out of the mire Graham Williams and co. had left it in. First thing he did was add two extra episodes (Hurray!). Second thing he did was recruit Adric (Boo!). Then he got rid of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward (Boo!) and K-9 (Aaah!). Finally he took on two new girl companions, Nyssa and Tegan (Hurray!!!). Then he decided to turn Doctor Who into the sci-fi equivalent of The Muppet Show. Every story had to have a guest star, a face known to the millions who rarely watched Doctor Who. Turner claimed this was a response to the many requests he'd had from various celebs wanting to appear in the show. Everybody else knew it was a desperate attempt to raise the show's profile without actually improving anything - such as the quality of the scripts. He got away with signing Peter Davison as the new Doctor because Davison is such a consumate actor, but for many he is still Tristram Farnham from All Creatures Great and Small. What Turner failed to realise is that most TV actors and actresses tend to be remembered for playing certain roles. Whilst Hartnell and Troughton were best known for cinema work, Pertwee for radio and Baker a virtual unknown, Davison was already an established TV face. Making him the new Doctor shattered Doctor Who's integrity and identity because Doctor Who had always relied upon the strength, or otherwise, of its stories and not on how well known its leading actor was to TV viewers. Of course, after that, it was downhill all the way. We had Nurse Gladys Emmanuel as a pirate, the MC from The Good Old Days as Chancellor Borusa, Ken Dodd as an OTT customs officer, Nicholas Parsons as a wartime vicar and Hale & Pace as bored shopkeepers. Worst of all was the casting of dancer and panto regular Bonnie Langford as Peri's replacement, Mel. Whilst the show's credibility may have survived the casting of Tristram Farnham as the 5th Doctor (because Davison was so believable), it took a major battering when someone better known as a rather annoying former child star who grew up to become an even more annoying all-round entertainer was given one of British TV's most sought after jobs on the basis of her hair colour and not her acting ability! By the time Turner realised he'd seriously damaged Doctor Who's reputation and taken on the relatively unknown (and totally inappropriate) Sylvester McCoy as the 7th Doctor (David Dixon would've been a better choice), it was too late. Deprived of its traditional Saturday tea-time slot, mucked about by programme schedulers, mortally wounded by Michael Grade's enforced rest cure and handed over lock, stock and barrel to the "superfan" elite of Cartmel, Platt, Briggs and Aaronovitch, Doctor Who was doomed. The long established regular viewers no longer recognised the show they had watched religiously for over twenty years and were more than a little relieved when it failed to return in 1990. It was like waiting for your terminally ill grannie to die. You didn't want it to happen but you were glad when it did.
Suits You, Sir (The Leisure Hive)
Two agents of the Foamasi West Lodge infiltrate the Leisure Hive wearing bodysuits that make them look like Terran lawyer Brock and his accomplice Klout. Nice idea. Unfortunately, the almost total difference in bodyshape was ignored, leaving us struggling to believe that a short, squat reptile with antennae, whopping great claws and swivelling eyes on the side of its head could pass for a normal human being simply by donning one of these incredible suits. The Master may have managed to get away with wearing a series of rubber masks during the Pertwee years but this was stretching belief to infinity and beyond.
Confused Revolutions (Meglos)
Much is made of the fact that Tigella revolves anti-clockwise, as if that is unusual. Seven of the eight planets that orbit our Sun revolve anti-clockwise (Yes, Eight. Pluto is no longer classed as a planet). However, this only applies if the planets are viewed from what our boreacentric concept of north and south considers to be their respective north poles. Viewed from the south pole, Earth revolves clockwise, as do all the other planets in our Solar System apart from Venus. The concept of north and south is an abstract and depends entirely on which way our distant ancestors decided north should be. A world map published in Australia some years ago made south north and vice versa. In space there is no north and south, or east and west for that matter, so whichever way a planet revolves is largely irrelevant.
Cheesy Wotsit (State of Decay)
Adric asks if Ivo and Marta have some cheese spare. As a native of a planet totally devoid of dairy animals, how would he know what cheese was?
When Saturday Comes (Castrovalva onwards)
After being regularly screened in a Saturday tea-time slot for eighteen years, Doctor Who suddenly found itself moved to two early evening weekday slots. This was partly a response to John Nathan Turner's belief that Series 18's ratings had been affected by ITV screening the glossy American Star Wars clone, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century in direct opposition. The main reason for the rescheduling though, was an experiment to determine whether viewers would regularly tune in to a twice-weekly early evening drama serial in sufficient numbers to make investment in a planned soap (EastEnders) worthwhile, and Doctor Who was chosen to be the guinea pig. Although the move initially appeared to have worked, in as far as boosting overall ratings for the series as a whole, it became apparent that many viewers were missing the second weekly episode by failing to realise it was actually on. What Turner and the BBC execs obviously failed to realise was that viewing habits for weekday programmes are totally different to those for weekend programmes. Saturday tea-time was usually the one time of the week when the entire family sat round the TV together, and when family-orientated shows like Doctor Who could be guaranteed a family audience. Weekday viewing tended to be split between juvenile and adult viewing, with the start of the early evening news bulletins usually marking the change-over point. This is why ITV shows like The Tomorrow People, Sky and Into the Labyrinth, which were every bit as good as Doctor Who, were virtually ignored by adult viewers at the time and almost forgotten today, whilst screening Doctor Who in an adult's time slot handicapped the younger generation who usually had other things such as out-of-school activities and homework to keep them occupied. And, as any TV scheduler worth their salt will tell you, moving a show from an established slot is guaranteed to wreck its viewing figures, NBC's treatment of Star Trek in the Sixties and ITV's chaotic scheduling of Space: 1999 in the Seventies being two prime examples. Although Doctor Who was restored to Saturday tea-time in 1985, it was in the form of 45-minute episodes which proved to be unpopular. The downturn in viewing figures caused by the so-called "Cancellation Crisis" and eighteen month lay-off in 1985/86 led the BBC to return Doctor Who to a mid-week slot which, probably by design, left it competing for viewers with ITV's mighty Coronation Street, a BBC1 slot usually reserved for screening documentaries, current affairs programmes and repeats of old sitcoms, not shows that were under threat of cancellation if their viewing figures didn't improve!
Theories of Relative Ignorance (Four to Doomsday)
There are currently well over 700 different native Australian languages and dialects, and undoubtedly many more that have been extinct for centuries. The chances of a 20th Century European-Australian being able to understand a native Australian language from around 35,000 years ago are so astronomical it is beyond belief. A speaker of modern English would find it difficult to understand the English of a thousand years ago - as demonstrated nearly ten years earlier in Invasion of the Dinosaurs.
The Doctor is hopelessly wrong when he states the Mayan civilisation flourished 4,000 years ago. In actual fact it was at its peak between the 3rd and 9th centuries AD. At the time he claims the Futu Dynasty was flourishing, 8,000 years ago, China was still in the Stone Age. The fictional Futu Dynasty appears to be culturally synonymous with the historical Q'in Dynasty, which lasted from 221 to 207 BC. Bigon merely compounds these errors and creates more by claiming Monarch's first visit to Earth was 35,000 years ago and not 12,000 as guestimated by the Doctor. This would date Monarch's visit to Bigon's Athens to a time before Athens existed and long before Ancient Greek civilisation developed.
Urbanka is located in the galaxy RE1489, yet Monarch has managed to travel between Urbanka and Earth in 2,000 years at sub-light speeds. The nearest real life galaxies to ours are the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Sagittarius Dwarf Eliptical, both around 160,000 light years away from Earth. Even travelling at light speed, a journey from Earth lasting 2,000 years wouldn't get you beyond the boundaries of our own Milky Way galaxy.
The Doctor makes three attempts to spacewalk to retrieve the Tardis from outside Monarch's ship. Leaving aside the fact that he would probably be killed straight away by the intense cold of outer space or by the hard radiation that is everywhere beyond Earth's protective Van Allen Belt (he neglects to wear a spacesuit, just a helmet), why does he keep slowing to a stop before he reaches the Tardis? There's no atmosphere in space, hence no friction to slow him down. One good jump would give him all the momentum he needs. It is possible Monarch's ship is generating a powerful gravitational effect, in which case the Tardis would be drawn towards it anyway, given time.
Wrong World, Wrong Time (Earthshock)
The image of Earth seen just before Adric crashes into it shows the landmasses as they are now, not as they were 64 million years ago.
Earthshock is supposed to be set in the year 2526. The Cybermen manage to identify the Doctor from previous encounters, including the one in Revenge of the Cybermen which took place approximately 500 years later!
Jurassic Parky (Time Flight)
The Doctor states the lost Concordes have landed 140 million years ago during the Jurassic Period, then comments that the Pleistocene Period can't be far away as "there's a nip in the air". The Jurassic Period ended 135 million years ago when the Cretaceous Period started. Earth's ambient temperature then was higher than it is today, meaning there were no ice caps at the poles and no Ice Age just around the corner. It was the age of the dinosaurs for heaven's sake! The Pleistocene Epoch began around 1.8 million years ago, which is hardly "not far away" from 140 million years ago in anyone's book.
Terminal Immunity (Terminus)
How did Nyssa contract Lazar's Disease and not Tegan? Nyssa didn't actually come into physical contact with any carriers whereas Tegan was molested by at least two or three! If it's a question of exposure then surely Tegan, the Doctor, Kari, Olvir and Turlough would've gone down with it by episode 3, which they didn't. Maybe it only affected people who were naturally sweet and innocent?
John's Crusade (The King's Demons)
The Doctor claims King John should have been in London on March 4th, 1215, taking the Crusader's oath. Presumably this would have been for the Fifth Crusade which, unfortunately, wasn't called until November 1215 during the Fourth Lateran Council. By the time the Fifth Crusade finally got under way in 1217, under King Andrew II of Hungary and Duke Leopold VI of Austria & Styria, John was dead. The novel, written by original scriptwriter Terence Dudley, actually identifies John's "Crusade" as the Third, which ended twenty-three years earlier and involved John's elder brother Richard.
The only Crusades to take place during John's reign were the rather reprehensible Fourth Crusade of 1202-04, the genocidal "Albigensian" Crusade of 1209, and the tragic "Children's Crusade" of 1212, none of which involved the English or their king. The English have a curious belief that the Crusades were exclusive to the English. They weren't. Nor were they continuous. Officially, Crusades were a call to arms issued by the Pope in Rome, originally to reclaim the "Holy Land" from Islamic hands, and tended to be dominated by French, German and Flemish monarchs and nobles who had territorial interests in the region. Only one reigning English monarch ever joined a Crusade, Richard I in 1189, and he had his own reasons for doing so (see "Richard the Lyingheart"). John was not a Crusading King and was passionately English, unlike his Francophile elder brother. He regarded his role as King of England as more important than the titles he held in France, unlike his mainly French barons who chose to cling on to their French possessions preferably with English money. Their imposition of Magna Carta on him in June 1215 meant feudalism in England lasted well into the 18th Century, and kept England embroiled in intermittent warfare with France until the mid-16th Century. In fact Magna Carta is far from being the foundation stone of modern democratic government this story, and orthodox history, claims. It was virtually ignored until unearthed by Victorian historians, who exaggerated its importance in a bid to establish Britain as the birthplace of modern democracy. In truth Magna Carta was nothing more than a list of privileges granted by the king to the Church and his barons, including a reduction in the inheritance tax a baron's heir had to pay in order to inherit their birthright. It was not a law and did nothing about the rights, or lack of them, of the ordinary people. It simply enabled the rich and powerful to remain so without interference from the crown.
Five Doctors, Several Unanswered Questions (The Five Doctors)
The Five Doctors was a glorious celebration of twenty years of Doctor Who, bringing together all five Doctors (well, almost), eight companions (sort of), a couple of old friends and a host of old enemies. The trouble was, it was also a complete continuity cock-up.
First of all, where did the 1st Doctor come from? When did he have the time to potter about in the English countryside (as intimated on TV) or go into semi-retirement in a country cottage (as mentioned in the novel) without any of his companions being around? Secondly, the 2nd Doctor clearly remembers Jamie and Zoe had had their memories of their time with him erased by the Time Lords at the end of The War Games, so he must have been lifted out of time after then. However, as anyone who has ever seen episode 10 of The War Games knows, after Jamie and Zoe were returned home, the Doctor was immediately frog-marched back into the trial room to be regenerated and exiled to Earth. Thirdly, as his first three incarnations had already encountered the Master in his Tremas guise, why didn't the 4th Doctor realise what would happen to Tremas at the end of The Keeper of Traken? And finally, it is assumed from the beginning that the Death Zone is on Gallifrey. So why all the talk about Flavia returning to Gallifrey from Rassilon's Tomb at the end? It's no wonder Borusa kept clutching his head!
Sluggish Behaviour (The Twin Dilemma)
Mestor plans to move two planetoids into orbit around Jaconda, reckoning that gravitational forces will tip one if not all three into the local sun and cause a supernova explosion. Obviously the slug hasn't much grasp of astro-physics and nor, it seems, had anybody else involved in this sorry tale. In our own Solar System, all five planets from Mars to Neptune have attracted asteroids into their own orbits in the past, none have gone careering into the Sun. Supernovæ are relatively rare and occur when stars with at least ten times the mass of our own Sun reach the end of their existence. Stars massive enough to end as supernovæ rarely last longer than twenty million years or so - not enough time for intelligent life to evolve on any orbiting planets. A body the size of a planet colliding with a star stable enough to support life-bearing planets would not be enough to spark off a "supernova" explosion. For a start, the intense heat generated by most stars would totally vapourise any relatively small rocky body long before any collision. Secondly, the mass needed to generate any kind of stellar explosion would be far more than that of a mere planet or three. A planet colliding with a star might cause a few gigantic solar flares, but that's all. In other words, Mestor was off his head and Azmael sacrificed his life for nothing.
Making Your Mind Up (Attack of the Cybermen)
How did the Doctor manage to form such strong opinions about Lytton? Their previous encounter in Resurrection of the Daleks lasted all of thirty seconds, neither spoke to the other, and Lytton actually saved the Doctor's life. Four connected adventures and one regeneration later, the Doctor not only knows Lytton's first name and planet of origin, but is convinced he is a ruthless amoral mercenary working for both the Daleks and the Cybermen.
Un-Luddite-like Behaviour (The Mark of the Rani)
The Luddites were organised bands of weavers and textile workers who, in the period 1811-1816, deliberately destroyed machinery they believed threatened their livelihoods in the textile-manufacturing areas of Lancashire, West Yorkshire, the East Midlands and Lanarkshire. They were not ordinary workers intent on wrecking all machinery just for the sake of it. Miners, for instance, were more than happy with the introduction of machinery down the mines as it made their lives a whole lot safer and far less arduous.
Mission Implausible (The Two Doctors)
The second Doctor and Jamie drop Victoria off somewhere to study graphology (presumably between The Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep), then go to the Chimera space station on a mission for the Time Lords. However, as anyone who knows the state of play during the second Doctor's tenure will tell you, this is utter tosh. Firstly, before The War Games, the Doctor was most reluctant to contact his people because he was on the run from them, which had been a fairly clear concept throughout the show's existence. When he was forced to get in touch in The War Games, he was unceremoniously dragged into court and put on trial. He didn't become a "special agent" for the Time Lords until his third incarnation, and Jamie certainly knew nothing of the Doctor's origins until the end of The War Games. Secondly, the Doctor's inability to control where and when the Tardis travelled to was another of the founding principles of the show. For him to be suddenly able to take Victoria to wherever she went, travel to Chimera and then from 20th Century Seville back to wherever Victoria was, totally contradicted everything we'd been lead to believe since day one. If the Doctor was able to control the Tardis, and was secretly working for the Time Lords, then the whole of the first six years is nothing more than an elaborate lie. I prefer to think that it is The Two Doctors that is an elaborate lie. A pox on it! The fact that the offending story was written by someone who'd been heavily involved in Doctor Who since the late-1960s only adds insult to injury.
Herbert Wells (Timelash)
It is claimed that young Herbert is a teacher. In 1885 (when he is supposed to have encountered the Doctor and Vena), he was apprenticed to a draper in London. He didn't become a teacher until after he had gained degrees in zoology and geology at university in 1888, and even then he was a university teacher - he left his first wife (his cousin) in 1894 to marry one of his students!
Marble Arch (The Trial of a Time Lord)
It is extremely unlikely that relics from the 20th Century would survive the ravages of two million years of natural decay and erosion. Paper decays after only a few hundred years so certainly no books would survive that long.
Future Echoes (The Trial of a Time Lord)
The big problem with setting stories in any particular character's future is that it throws up all kinds of problems concerning foreknowledge and causality. The thing to remember here is that the Doctor on trial in episodes 9 to 12 is watching and commenting on an adventure in his own future. This implies, therefore, that the Doctor seen on the APC Net screen is fully aware that he has already witnessed everything that is about to happen onboard the Hyperion III. Yet not once does he give any indication whatsoever that he has an inkling. Yes, we know he is bound by strict Time Lord ethics regarding the changing of history but, having already seen the outcome on the courtroom screen, he would have at least mentioned the fact, if only to himself surely? Of course, the entire adventure could just have been a ficticious invention planted in the APC Net by the Valeyard, in which case the Doctor should have been able to have it declared false evidence. Then again, if it didn't actually happen, why did he get stuck with Mel as a companion? Was she also a ficticious creation of the Valeyard designed to torment the Doctor and, eventually, Sabalom Glitz? Which leads us to the logical conclusion that if Mel was ficticious, then so too was Ace, the Doctor's seventh incarnation and everything that happened after The Trial of a Time Lord (which would make some sense). Or is it simply a case of two scriptwriters trying desperately to concoct a devilishly cunning plot from somebody else's ideas with a filming deadline looming and overlooking one blindingly obvious aspect of time travel, that if you know the future already you can change it. Quite simply, there are so many holes in this particular script's logic that just trying to work them all out can lead to a severe migraine. Nurse, my medication please!
Kangs Ware (Paradise Towers)
Okay, so Paradise Towers was populated some years before the eponymous story by the Caretakers, elderly women and the Kangs, whilst all the "In-betweens" went off to fight a war. The Kangs are supposed to be teenaged girls, which means they would have been infants when they originally arrived. So who was supposed to be looking after them? Surely no society would conscript women with young children, so where are the Kangs' mothers? Shouldn't the Caretakers have gone off to fight as well? They're hardly doing essential war work. And who made the Kangs' distinctive outfits? Nice idea, very poorly thought out.
Play Some Of That Rock'n'Roll Music (Delta and the Bannermen)
To help create a period feel for the story, several radios are featured playing contemporary rock'n'roll music. In 1959, Britain's three radio stations (Home, Light and Third) were more like today's terrestrial TV channels, featuring a variety of drama, light entertainment and news and current affairs. Only the Home Service was allowed to broadcast recorded music and that tended to be of the classical variety, not rock'n'roll which was regarded as unethical and uncultured by the strict puritanical morals of the BBC. Radio Luxembourg broadcast rock'n'roll music to the UK, but only in the evenings, and reception was notoriously sporadic, especially in regions like south Wales.
Faded Roots (Remembrance of the Daleks, Attack of the Cybermen, An Unearthly Child)
The sign outside the school gates in Remembrance of the Daleks reads "Coal Hill Road Shoreditch Secondary School", whereas in An Unearthly Child it was plain old "Coal Hill School". Also, in Remembrance of the Daleks, the kids are in uniform whilst those seen in An Unearthly Child aren't.
The junkyard at 76 Totters Lane seen in Attack of the Cybermen is totally different to that seen in An Unearthly Child, plus, when you consider that land is at a premium in London, it is highly unlikely that the apparently ownerless junkyard would still be around after twenty-two years.
Seasons in the Sun (Remembrance of the Daleks, Silver Nemesis)
November and December in England are not known to have warm, sunny days and late-evening sunsets. Now, November in Australia...!
Tarnished Portent of Doom (Silver Nemesis)
The claim that the Nemesis statue caused disasters every 25 years after 1638 is utterly preposterous. Nothing of any note happened in 1713, 1738 or 1763, and 1888 was fairly uneventful outside Germany - which is more than can be said for 1848, when the whole of Europe was in revolutionary turmoil, or 1968, which saw student uprisings in France and America, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, increased bombing of civilian targets in Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, all of which managed to happen without the Nemesis being involved.
Golden Death (Silver Nemesis)
It was established in Revenge of the Cybermen that Cybermen were particularly vulnerable to gold dust, which clogged their inner workings and effectively slowly suffocated them (with the emphasis on slowly). Unfortunately, the dismal Silver Nemesis totally misinterpreted this, making the mere touch of gold instantly fatal. So we had the bizarre sight of previously invincible Cybermen being wiped out by gold-tipped arrows and gold coins fired at them by a catapult. How the personnel in Snowcap, the Moonbase and UNIT must have been kicking themselves! Never mind blowing up planets, misusing an expensive weather control machine or firing armour-piercing bullets intended for tanks, simply chuck gold coins at them!
A Cavalier Attitude (Silver Nemesis)
The Doctor mentions that his previous encounter with Lady Peinforte in 1638 also involved the Roundheads, i.e. the Parliamentarian army of the English Civil War. The term "Roundhead" wasn't coined until 1641 when it was applied, as an insult, to a group of apprentices who attacked a small group of army officers near Whitehall. The apprentices responded with chants of "cavaliero, cavaliero", a reference to Charles I's Spanish troopers who were widely believed to be oppressors of all good English Protestants. The English Civil War didn't break out until 1642. Hostilities in 1638 were confined to Scotland between Charles' army and Presbyterian "covenanters".
Ex-Calibre (Battlefield)
Peter Walmsley dates the scabbard in the pub to the 8th Century and links it to King Arthur. Mordred claims Morgaine has waited twelve centuries to settle with Merlin/The Doctor. As this story appears to be set around the end of the 20th Century, the dating is at least two centuries out. "King" Arthur lived around the end of the 5th/beginning of the 6th Century, if indeed he existed at all. The only probable historical reference to him is dated 501 AD. At least the TV original didn't make as many fundamental errors as the novel did!
Thank You For The Music (26th series)
Some people claim that Ghost Light was a classic. Personally I always found it difficult to understand. It wasn't that the plot was pretentiously convoluted or the script full of high-faluting pseudo-philosophical clap-trap, it was the fact that most of the dialogue was drowned out by the music soundtrack.
Like most drama serials, Doctor Who used backing music to highlight the mood of a particular scene or to fill in gaps in the dialogue, and, for most of its history, the backing music remained in the background. In fact some early stories did away with music altogether. However, as the John Nathan Turner era lumbered on to its ignominious conclusion, the background music slowly became more prominent, reaching a crescendo during the last story made, Ghost Light. There are two possible explanations for this: 1/. super-fan appreciation of the resident composers demanded their music was given proper recognition; or 2/. it was an attempt to cover up the fact that the scripts were either extremely obscure, totally naff or both.
The only way to appreciate the intricacies of the later stories is to watch them over and over again. Unfortunately, apart from dedicated fans with video recorders, not many viewers ever go to these lengths. Despite the rise of domestic video recording in the 1980s, television remains an "instant" medium, unlike film. If something has to be watched repeatedly to be understood, it is bad television.
A Policeman's Lot (Ghost Light)
Inspector Mackenzie spent two years in suspended animation after being dispatched to investigate the disappearances of Sir George and Lady Pritchard. Surely it would have occured to his fellow officers to check on his whereabouts when he failed to return? Losing an ordinary constable in the late 20th Century Greater London metropolis might be understandable, just. Losing a high ranking Inspector in a place with only seven houses and nobody doing a thing about it beggars belief.
Checkmate (The Curse of Fenric)
Apparently, the Doctor defeated Fenric in a game of chess in 3rd Century Constantinople. Bit difficult seeing as Constantinople didn't exist until a quarter of the way through the 4th Century. Before then it was an obscure provincial town called Byzantium.
Me Mammy (The Curse of Fenric)
How on Earth did Ace not realise the identity of her mother earlier? She must have known her grandparents' names as well as her mother's, so why didn't she make the connection between a Frank and Kathleen Dudman with a daughter named Audrey earlier? Surely Fenric's influence over his "wolves" didn't make them forget their most basic memories.
Much Too Old (The Curse of Fenric)
Like a lot of things that happened during World War 2, the true story of the mass evacuation of children from Britain's major cities has become distorted and over-romanticised. The first wave of evacuations was organised in late 1939 and applied to children of school age (15 and under in those days) and pregnant women. When V1s and V2s started hitting London in 1944, a second wave was hurridly arranged for the same group of vulnerable people. Many evacuees from the first wave had been drifting back home from around 1941. Jean and Phyllis appear to be in their late teens, around Ace's age, 16, 17 or even 18. They are certainly too old to have been considered for evacuation in 1944 and don't give the impression they've been billeted with Miss Hardaker since 1939. And they certainly wouldn't have been evacuated to a village right next to a Naval base, top secret or not.
"Who are you...? What are you?" (25th and 26th series)
...asks the Master in a scene thankfully deleted from Survival. For some reason, not content with sticking to the established concept of the Doctor travelling through space and time righting wrongs and fighting evil, Andrew Cartmel decided to turn him into some kind of all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful superbeing who'd had a hand in everything from secretly controlling the destiny of the entire Universe to making sure the trains ran on time. No no no no no! We preferred our Doctor to be human (well, almost), to be capable of making mistakes, to be vulnerable, to be precisely what he was when Doctor Who first began, i.e. a mysterious renegade on the run from his equally mysterious people.
The chief culprits for this heresy were Remembrance of the Daleks, which claimed the Doctor had hidden the Hand of Omega on Earth in 1963 - not mentioned in either of his trials; Silver Nemesis, which had Lady Peinforte wittering on about "knowing who he really was"; Battlefield, which claimed he was the real Merlin; The Curse of Fenric, which stated he had been fighting Fenric in all his forms throughout eternity (although this may have been a metaphor); and the afore-mentioned Survival. Turning him into an almighty supreme being who outranked even the White and Black Guardians was a supreme act of folly which totally destroyed the show's credibility. After this, it deserved to die! Mind you, it does tie-in with the theory that the whole of the Doctor's seventh incarnation was a fiction created by the Valeyard (see "Future Echoes").
"Not so well informed" (Radio Times commercial)
Along with the rest of the BBC empire, the "Radio Times" TV listings magazine leapt onto the Doctor Who bandwagon in 2005 with a TV commercial intended to show how well informed you could be if you read the mag. Unfortunately, the rather nerdy geek trying to impress with his "knowledge" of the show manages to get all three of his "facts" wrong. First he claims there have been ten "Doctor Whos". Wrong! Leaving aside the fact that "Doctor Who" is the name of the show not the character, there have been, depending on your viewpoint, eight, eleven or fifteen Doctors (don't forget that Richard Hurndall appeared as the First Doctor in The Five Doctors). Then he says the Daleks were originally called the Mutants. Wrong! The Daleks have always been called Daleks, it is the story now generally titled The Daleks that was originally, and correctly, called The Mutants. The geek then finishes off with the revelation that "TARDIS" stands for "Time And Relative Dimensions In Space". Wrong! As any well informed fan of the original series knows, TARDIS is an acronym for "Time And Relative Dimension In Space".
