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

One of the most regularly-occurring plot holes in Doctor Who history has been the human race’s general obliviousness to the constant alien invasions happening in contemporary Britain.

You’d think a world that has seen Cybermen climbing out of manhole covers at St Paul’s cathedral, dinosaurs walking the streets of London, Daleks transporting the Earth halfway across the universe, and dummies murdering innocent shoppers two separate times would have evolved into a society quite a bit different to ours. Yet no matter what, modern-day London (almost) always looks pretty much as you’d expect.

There have been some token efforts to clear this up over the years, usually involving implications that UNIT (and later Torchwood) are covering up any traces of alien activity to keep our knowledge of extraterrestrial life a secret, but these have never been particularly robust. There’s even a moment in Remembrance of the Daleks where the Doctor lampshades this, commenting on humanity’s “most amazing capacity for self-deception.”

It also doesn’t help that the show can be occasionally inconsistent with who remembers what – most modern day companions have never heard of a Dalek, but their invasion in The Stolen Earth forms an important part of Adelaide Brooke’s backstory in The Waters of Mars.

It wasn’t until Series 5 that we finally got an explanation that stood up under any amount of scrutiny, when the Doctor attributes humanity’s convenient recurring amnesia to the all-consuming cracks in time. It’s an easy explanation granted, but when you’re trying to explain away the world’s population forgetting ghosts turning into Cybermen and a giant metal robot stomping about the place, the fabric of time and space being fundamentally fractured feels a bit more appropriate than “the military hid the evidence and claimed it was a gas leak.”