10 Doctor Who Plot Holes You Didn't Realise Were Actually Solved
1. How Did The Daleks Survive Journey's End?
The Daleks being defeated by the Doctor only to return the very next series is about as guaranteed as the sun rising in the morning, or water being incredibly wet.
That said, there are some Dalek defeats that are a bit more “final” than others, and there’s arguably none more final than their highly explosive and thorough destruction by the Metacrisis Doctor at the climax of Journey’s End.
It may seem a little odd then that the Daleks almost immediately show back up in Series 5’s Victory of the Daleks. And there’s no use chalking it up to time-travel shenanigans – these Daleks are explicitly shown to be the last of the army from Series 4’s finale. So what gives?
The solution
to this is actually briefly visible in Journey's End. When the Metacrisis Doctor “maximises the
Dalekanium power feeds”, the episode cuts to show the Dalek fleet
exploding in space. But if you look very
closely, you can actually see a single ship slipping off out of the shot. This ship is confirmed by RTD to be the same
one that reappears in Victory of the Daleks!
With RTD on the way out of Doctor Who he decided to extend a Dalek-shaped hand to his successor Steven Moffat, to give him a built-in reason why the pepper pots could survive. Wasn't that nice?