10 Doctor Who Plot Holes You Didn't Realise Were Actually Solved

Any long running science-fiction or fantasy series is bound to run into plot holes sooner or later. When you have multiple writers all working in a completely fictional universe, wires get crossed, narrative details get forgotten, and stories end up contradicting each other (or themselves) at one point or another.

And all of these things are twice as likely when a show is as long-running and has as chaotic an attitude to its lore as Doctor Who. Sometimes new stories change established details out of the blue; sometimes, completely unrelated narrative threads collide in unpredictable ways; and sometimes, events that should be permanently world-changing have to be downplayed just to keep everything relatable to the average audience.

Occasionally, an episode will even end up contradicting itself, whether due to details getting lost between script drafts, or overly-enthusiastic editing.

And yet for all the chaos, complexity, and contradiction, Doctor Who isn't quite as careless with its lore as people sometimes think. From seemingly insignificant lines of dialogue that massively shift the status quo, to years-later explanations of older episodes, here are 10 Doctor Who plot holes you didn't realise were actually solved...

Steven Moffat has always had a knack for intricately-constructed stories that play with time travel, with episodes like The Girl in the Fireplace, Blink, and The Big Bang all garnering huge acclaim.

His timey-wimiest though has to be Heaven Sent, where the Doctor is trapped and endlessly reliving the same experiences for billions of years. It’s such an interesting and well-executed premise that it’s really no surprise that it was immediately recognised as an all-time classic upon its release.

And yet for such a tightly-wound script, there’s one large detail fans have pondered over since broadcast: if everything in the Confession Dial constantly resets, how is the Doctor able to (very slowly) punch his way through the diamond wall? Shouldn’t it reset too, along with everything else?

The answer, it turns out, is a rather straightforward one. As Moffat himself points out in an interview, the diamond wall isn’t inside the confession dial at all; it’s the exterior wall. It doesn’t reset because it’s the container inside which the resetting happens.

This also gives an indication as to why the Time Lords considered a metres-thick wall of solid diamond a reasonable investment. If they want the Doctor to remain trapped inside their torture dimension you might as well make its walls out of something he could never break through.

After all, who’d be crazy enough to spend infinite lifetimes punching diamonds with their bare hands?