Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/World Enough and Time

You are exploring the Discontinuity Index, a place where any details or rumours about unreleased stories are forbidden.
Please discuss only those whole stories which have already been released, and obey our spoiler policy.

This page is for discussing the ways in which World Enough and Time doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

Remember, this is a forum, so civil discussion is encouraged. However, please do not sign your posts. Also, keep all posts about the same continuity error under the same bullet point. You can add a new point by typing:

* This is point one.
::This is a counter-argument to point one.
:::This is a counter-argument to the counter-argument above
* This is point two.
::Explanation of point two.
::Further discussion and query of point two.

... and so on. 

• Mr. Razor mentions "an expedition to floor 507, the largest of the solar farms." A solar farm generates electricity from sunlight. Light inside a ship would take power to generate in the first place. Collecting it to generate power does not make sense.

He was revealed to be the Master, perhaps he was lying for a good story.

The episode opening reveals that there are levels that appear to have artificial sunlight. Plus there are windows to the outside shown.

• Why is Bill not just instantly converted like the rest of the patients are? Why is she spared that fate for years?

The episode makes clear that Bill needed to be strong before undergoing the procedure, which took time. It's also made clear that the Master waited until the Doctor and Missy were in the elevator before arranging for her to be converted.

• What exactly does Missy's umbrella do? No way she threatens people with it for show.

This will probably be revealed later. This being Missy it could be a ray gun.

See The Doctor Falls, all your answers lie there.

• Why didn't the original crew just return straight up after they adjusted the thrusters? Why stay down there and let themselves devolve to the way their descendants are generations on?

Maybe they did. The thrusters could be on an even lower level, so the time dilation would be much greater (it's exponential). Besides, with a gravity pull much stronger on the "bottom" of the ship, I'm surprised they ever got the elevators working. Perhaps that feat by itself needed a few years of R&D to achieve. That's just my theory, since we're ignoring the "elephant in the room". It could all be a part of Master's (Missy's) plan, so I wouldn't delve too much into this until the next episode.

• When Bill gets up after her operation, the time-lapse clock shows 2 days, 10 hours, 45 minutes + 17 seconds on the top floor and 365 034 d, 12 h, 31 m + 3 s having elapsed on the bottom floor. Halfway through, as she's mopping the hospital floor, the clock reads 365 433 days at her level (she'd been there little over a year by that point), but the time for the top floor has actually gone backwards. It shows as 2 d, 10 h, 45 m + 0 s, so they've gone back 17 seconds in that time. Is this significant or just a continuity error? (Times on iPlayer are 18:23 and 28:59 respectively).

Brilliantly spotted!

Looks like a continuity error, unless the clock malfunctioned so reset the 17 seconds? May have been faulty that particular day.

Perhaps the minute counter is faulty and stuck on 45?

• How is Bill able to walk with no problem, when her spine was replaced?

It was her heart, not her spine. Also, it takes her months to be able to walk freely. It is sci-fi: their healing methods are beyond our comprehension.

The big blast whole in her body destroyed her heart, and took out a chunk of her chest and spine. Sci fi or not, she wouldn't be able to walk straight away! She's be in a wheelchair!.

She has been recovering for months though, plenty of time to heal.

And, yet she got up and walked straight away. No physio at all. She would have had to learn to walk again!

As stated, it is sci-fi if cyber tech can enabler to walk, it can.

• Brilliant episode! One observation though. If the Mondassians are months ahead of what is happening on the top deck why do they immediately sense a human presence and why do the elevators reach the top so quickly in real time?

They immediately sense the human presence because they have years to do so. Think how they view the Doctor via the camera. From their perspective the human life signs have been there quite awhile. And also since the lifts move away from the Black Hole their relative time grows or decreases exponentially. Going from the bottom to the top the lifts should actually be getting there faster than normal since relative to someone on the top they'd fly through the lower floors quicker. They still take some time to get to the bottom of the ship relative to the Mondassians but because the lift is moving towards the black hole it gets there a lot quicker than the 1 minute = 1 year (hence why the Master had Bill converted as soon as he was aware the Doctor was in the lift). There is no "real time" so to speak. All of the time is real, it's just relatively different.

• If the Doctor knew that time was moving slowly at their end of the ship than the other why did he spend so much time lingering on the top floor instead of immediately going to save Bill, since time will be going so quickly for her.

Seems like he was waiting for the right chance to disarm Jorji, because as soon as he flipped him out, he headed straight for the lift.

• Speaking of Jorj. His actions are very strange. He is safe. The Cybermen are only after humans. He is not human, so why does he feel threatened when he discovers that Bill is human?

He probably doesn't know what the creatures wanted with the humans, and therefore couldn't be sure that they wouldn't turn on him this time (he seems too scared and/or unintelligent to reason it out, at any rate).

• The ship of the colonists was built by the Mondasians. The blue cleaner said that there were no colonists on the ship yet. Does this mean that the ship was flying to the freezing Mondas with its sick inhabitants, until it hit the gravitational field of the black hole? Or was he flying to some colony of Mondasians? And how can this story be combined with AUDIO: Spare parts with Fifth Doctor?

It is a huge coincidence that the Cybermen on Mondas, and on the Colony ship look identical. Its also another huge coincidence that they fully evolved Cybermen on the ship are identical to Petes Worlds Cybermen! But, Moffat has previous. The Cybermen in Closing Time evolved from 10th Planet Cybermen. Something has gone wrong with time! I always felt it would have made sense for the ship to go to Mondas to collect the dying survivors/Cybermen and they went to Telos, whilst the others used Mondas to get to Earth. But, none of this is explained in the story itself!

The doctor does say that cybermen are an inevitable part of human evolution. So I guess the designs are too. Either that or the Master intentionally designed them after recognizable cyber men models.

Do they actually say the Mondasians built the ship? We are told by Missy it is heading to Mondas!

• The way the black hole is explained and used in the story seems to suggest that time is being accelerated at the bottom of the ship. But that's only true relatively speaking. In fact it's the top of the ship that has massively slowed down time. The place where the Master and the cybermen are is moving at real, or close to real, time compared to the rest of the universe. So isn't it a little odd that in the thousands of years that this episode takes place during, nobody else heard the distress beacon and investigated the ship?

Maybe, as soon as the master saw the Tardis land on the ship, he immediately set up some kind of perception filter on the ship, thus nobody landed on it.

Actually both you and Moffat are wrong. Time would be slower nearer the black hole and faster the further away you get. However if we take the explanation we are given in this episode, then time is being sped up at the bottom of the ship. The top of the ship, like the rest of the universe, is too far away from the black hole to be significantly affected and so relative to the rest of the universe (which is also far away from the black hole), only two days have passed since the ship first became stuck.

Eh. I'm not wrong. I just said the same thing as you. The place where the Master was actively working for much of the episode is moving at the same speed as the rest of the universe. Hence my confusion since the plot works as if it's the inverse. The top of the ship where the Doctor starts off (whether it's the top or bottom is actually irrelevant) is the section that's closer to the black hole.

• How is it that the apparently unremarkable rifles on floor 507 can incapacitate the patients, but Jorji's cool holey gun is insufficient to fight them off?

The patients on Floor 507 were mentioned to have been there from the first expedition on Operation Exodus, implying they are the first of their kind, thus not as strong as the later models that would have been able to reach Jorji's floor.

• During the reveal that Mr Razer is indeed the Master, he says he disguised himself because he would be recognized as a former Prime Minister referring to the events of Last of the Time Lords. However, as is revealed in the same episode, the year in which he was Prime Minister never happened and therefore his disguise is unnecessary.
  • The year during Last of the Time Lords never happened, but the events in the preceding episode still did, including Saxon publicly killing the president of America.

• I think that there is a big plot hole in the "World Enough and Time". The main thoory of the episode is that time slows the closer you get to a black hole as gravity increases. This in turn causes time to pass more slowly on the upper floors because they are closer to the black hole. However, the artificial gravity appears to be set at 1G throughout the entire ship. This would counteract any black hole induced time time dilation effects. This would mean that time should pass at the same rate for all the floors of the ship no matter their distance from the black hole. Unfortunately this would destroy the premise of the show, the death of Peter Capaldi and his Re-generation into Jodie Whittaker.
  • Well for artificial gravity to counteract a black holes gravity the ship would need to simulate the gravitational pull of a black hole on every level, but in the reverse direction of the real black hole, which I'm guessing would either take huge amounts of power/be impossible. Doesn't help that artificial gravity like they show in movies isn't real, only centrifugal force works, like spinning a bucket full of water around in a circle without the water coming out, but for a spaceship. But the ship doesn't spin downwards, so the artificial gravity has to be some sci-fi made up stuff. Regardless, I don't -think- artificial gravity, real or fictional, would counter space-time being warped, even if the ship could somehow match the forces of attraction.