Doctor Who boss explains continuity mistakes in show
Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies has addressed the show's most famous continuity mistakes.
With any show that has been on the air for 60 years, there are bound to be storyline details that are overlooked or continuity errors that pop up. That's especially true for a show with a time-travelling police call box!
In his recent BAFTA event Russell T Davies: A Life in Pictures (via The Radio Times), the showrunner explained how he's willing to write new adventures that could clash with previous events in The Doctor's life.
"It's destroyed Atlantis three times in its history, and if someone came to me tomorrow with a great story about the destruction of Atlantis, I'd do it again," he explained.
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"In the 1960s, with William Hartnell, they went to Troy and did the wooden horse... that so wouldn't stop me doing Troy and the wooden horse again now. I'd do it again now.
"That's not a spoiler — I'm not doing it! But you'd just put in one line, 'Oh, a glitch in time, we're here again'."
There have been too many continuity errors to count in Doctor Who over the decades — but as Davies mentions, Atlantis has been destroyed three different times in its continuity
In the show's early days, The Second Doctor was responsible for the fall of Atlantis in "The Underwater Menace", whereas the alien Azal would later blame The Dæmons for Atlantis' demise in a 1971 story.
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The third time around, The Doctor and Jo Grant narrowly avoided the destruction in "The Time Monster" when the beastly Kronos devoured the lost city.
Many of these types of mistakes have made it into Doctor Who in the ensuing decades, including discrepancies on how to kill the Weeping Angels or the long-disputed theories about The Doctor's actual age.
But, time can be altered so Doctor Who is always one line of dialogue away from resolving even the messiest of continuity errors. An example is in last year's special, "The Giggle", where the Toymaker accused The Doctor of making "a jigsaw" out of history before the game-changing bigeneration.
Doctor Who airs on BBC One in the UK and Disney+ elsewhere. Classic episodes of Doctor Who are available on BBC iPlayer in the UK.
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