FEATURE: EXPLAINING MOFFAT PLOT HOLES

Your Plot Holes will be answered...

Angel #1: Wait. Stop. Don’t dematerialize. My nose started itching.

Angel #2: Talk about bad timing.

Angel #3: Suck it up Angel #1.

Angel #4: Yeah. We still have 15 years before the lights go out.

Plot holes are little inconsistencies in stories that tend to be very annoying. The reality is: All writers leave plot holes in their work or result in plot holes in someone else’s work. Normally this isn’t intentional. One of the main complaints against Moffat is the fact that his stories are riddled with “massive” plot holes. As a fan, I also tend to see a mistake every now and again, but after a little thinking, those mistakes I thought I saw were actually strokes of Fridge Brilliance. 

I am going to unravel some of the “massive” plot holes in this article. As I am not a magician, I won’t disclose the answers to all of them, merely the ones I don’t consider plot holes while a lot of other people do. I will start at the beginning with the episode Blink. For some elements of this article, I will be incorporating aspects of my Weeping Angel article. 

What happened to the four Angels once the light bulbs burned out?

The Angels are free. The lights will eventually go out or they will drain its electrical energy as the Angels feed on all kinds of energy and then leave the house. It’s as simple as that.

How did the Angels get hold of the TARDIS key in the first place?

The Doctor has been known to hide the key on the TARDIS itself, but that answer seems impractical as the Angels were searching for the TARDIS while they had the key in their possession. The more logical answer would be that the Angels got the key off the Doctor or Martha when they were zapped back in time. 

How come the images of the Angels in Sally Sparrow’s Weeping Angel Survival Guide that she gave to the Doctor didn’t become Angels?

Answer: THEY DID! It is very odd that the Doctor and Martha would suddenly meet four Weeping Angels on Earth without some kind of explanation as to why they are there in the first place. The events in Blink form part of a predestination paradox which is a stable time loop so it isn’t harmful to the Angels. All the pictures in Sally’s guide become the Angels that trap the Doctor and Martha in the past. So in a way, the Angels are a paradox of their own making. They literally made themselves!

So why didn’t the Doctor try to stop the events from happening?
The logical explanation for this is that the Doctor knew this story was a predestination paradox from the moment Sally handed him the guide and was going through the motions from his respective point of view.

The Impossible Astronaut

Why put someone in a spacesuit in order to kill someone else?

The answer can be found in A Good Man Goes to War. The time stamp lists the date as somewhere in the 52^nd century. If River Song was born here, but regenerated in 1969, then the Silence must have access to time travel technology. This also explains why she was put in the astronaut disguise, because according to recorded history, which the Silence read about since they live more than 3000 years after the fact, the Doctor was killed by someone wearing an astronaut suit. The whole event forms part of a bootstrap paradox as the Silence only chose the suit because of what their Intel alleged, yet the only reason recorded history mentions the suit is because the Silence put River Song in it in the first place. In layman’s terms, the idea of why River was in the suit has no point of origin.

Then why need to go to the moon if you already possess time travel technology?

It was never actually stated that the Silence wanted to travel to outer space. The Doctor merely guessed that. A theory is that the Silence had another reason for showing humanity how to space travel. Dorium mentioned that the Silence observe and protect history in a similar manner as the Time Lords, so this might’ve been their way of preserving future historical events.

Asylum of the Daleks

How can Skaro be there in the first place when it was blown up in Remembrance of the Daleks?

Just as The Snowmen is a prequel to a story 40 years ago, the existence of Skaro is a product of a future episode of Doctor Who in which it is rebuilt or undestroyed or something like that. Time Travel makes it possible to see the effect before the cause, so it is very likely that we’ll see the story in which Skaro is brought back somewhere in the future. This however, could take another 40 years as the prequel-sequel thing with The Great Intelligence took roughly that long.

Why didn’t Oswin just delete everything the Daleks ever learned instead of only deleting the Doctor from their minds?

If you re-watch the situation, you’ll see it was a split-second decision and that a reasonable human being would have had tunnel vision and only be concentrated on saving the one person who they believe can rescue them. Plus, if the Daleks are empty, what’s the point of them being a villain on this show?

How did the TARDIS show up on the Parliament if the Doctor was captured and brought there by Daleks on their spaceship?

How do you think the Doctor got to Skaro in the first place? The Daleks have known the Doctor for almost 2000 years. They know about his TARDIS and what it looks like. Its perception filter would no longer work on them. After his capture, they located it and brought it along.

Then why did the Daleks just leave the TARDIS on the floor while the Doctor was away instead of sending it to their labs to be examined or reverse engineered?

Logically, this was the intended plan after the Doctor was destroyed along with the Asylum. Oswin said she wiped every piece of knowledge the Daleks had of the Doctor, so presumably that would include knowledge of his TARDIS.

 The Angels Take Manhattan

How does knowing your own future fix it?

Think back to Series 6. The Doctor’s death was fixed. Whether he witnessed it; read it or got it from a fortune cookie – He did not cheat fate. Everything happened the way history recorded it. The “Doctor” was seen on Silencio before an astronaut killed him, exactly as he read it in Let’s Kill Hitler.

Why didn’t the Angels zap the Doctor or River in this story?

The Doctor and River are both extremely complicated events in time; their relationship even more so. In the story it is explained that Angels are vulnerable to paradoxes, so digesting either one of them would be like food poisoning for an Angel. 

So then why did the Angels zap the Tenth Doctor back in time in Blink?

Back then the Doctor hadn’t met River Song yet. They weren’t engaged in a paradoxical relationship. Plus, the Angels in that story weren’t interested in the Doctor’s potential energy, merely his TARDIS. Zapping him back 30-40 years ago was just their way of keeping him out of their scheme.

How is it possible the Angels moved while they were looking at each other at the end of the Doctor and River ‘run’ scene?

The Angels, as have been shown before, feed on various sources of energy. This energy, which includes electrical which is what the light bulbs hanging over the Angels in that scene is filled with is what the Angels drained off-screen as it would’ve been tedious to show the audience something they should already know by this point.

Why didn’t the Statue of Liberty attack anyone nor do anything in this story?

Giant living statue on Main Street! What else are you going to look at?

How did the Angel zap Rory away in full view of Amy?

Rory was blocking her view of the angel in that scene. When Amy decided to let the Angel zap her away, she blocked the Doctor’s view of the Angel. Since River wanted Amy to go, she presumably just closed her eyes during this event.

Why didn’t the Doctor or River ever think of going back and saving Rory and Amy? River could’ve used her Vortex Manipulator, couldn’t she?

For this, I will show you what an actual gravestone is meant to look like. 

As you can see, there are two vital pieces of information lacking, namely the date of birth/death. I will opt to the fact that the lower part of the gravestone is blocked by the camera, but it is very obvious from the scene that when Amy thought of this scheme, she and Rory weren’t going to give the Doctor any clue as to when and where they’d been sent to so it is reasonable to assume that there is no date of birth/death so there is no way to link when they were sent back to. For all we know, Amy and Rory were zapped back a hundred plus years and had already been dead fifty years before the Doctor ever read the gravestone. Time travel is great, but you first need to know when you’re going to.

As you can see, most of Moffat’s plot holes are just delayed explanations or something he considers we should know by now or common sense. I will however admit there are actual plot holes, not just in his stories, but in every writer’s stories. Russell T Davies’ stories, especially The Next Doctor, The Waters of Mars and Journey’s End were riddled with contradictions until Moffat introduced us to the Cracks in Time. Some believe that the Time War is the begin-all-end-all of fixing plot holes, so I do not understand why the same logic cannot be applied to Steven Moffat’s plot holes (those that exist) when he tried to clear up RTD’s mistakes with his arc, whether intentional or not.

Back to the point, I do not make a habit of analyzing plot holes as most of the above I get a moment or two after they are revealed and don’t look like plot holes to me. To this author, the above makes perfect sense, although the same cannot be said for some of the readers.