10 Hilarious Doctor Who Mistakes You Definitely Didn't Notice

2. Cable Chaos (Partners In Crime)

Doctor Who David Tennant Midnight green screen mistake
BBC

Partners in Crime is such a wonderful feelgood episode that its flaws are easy to overlook, although this one's quite a biggie, so it may bug you on rewatches.

Poor Donna Noble is thrown in at the deep end from the second she tracks down the Tenth Doctor, with Miss Foster and her gun-toting goons chasing the pair onto the roof of a building, forcing them to escape in a window-cleaning cradle.

This plan goes well at first, until Miss Foster uses her sonic device to destroy one of the cradle's cables. As you can see from the image above, this is the left cable when looking at the building, or the right cable from Foster's perspective.

However, that's not the cable she cuts, as can be seen a few seconds earlier, when she aims her sonic at the opposite side of the cradle.

Doctor Who Partners in Crime cable mistake
BBC

This is one of the biggest continuity errors in modern Who, and you have to wonder if it could've been avoided by flipping certain shots, as was the case with Big Ben.

Hilariously, writer and then-showrunner Russell T Davies points this mistake out on the episode's commentary track, resulting in director James Strong feeling rather embarrassed. Dick move, Russell. Dick move.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.