10 Times Doctor Who Broke Its Own Canon

Solving the question of whether Atlantis is a genuine lost city or a fictional creation is an easier proposition than squaring Doctor Who's three – yes, three – contrasting portrayals of Atlantean society between 1967 and 1972.

While script editor Terrance Dicks and producer Barry Letts could be forgiven for not having seen Doctor Who's first depiction of Atlantis in the 1967 serial The Underwater Menace, the Atlantean inconsistencies between The Daemons in 1971, and The Time Monster in 1972 – stories that were both overseen by Letts and Dicks – are a little harder to forgive!

So what exactly happened to Atlantis in the Doctor Who universe? Well, The Daemons states that it was a failed experiment by Azal and his fellow godlike beings, who sank the city as a punishment. This doesn’t necessarily contradict The Underwater Menace, which reveals that the fish-god-worshipping Atlanteans survived the submersion and lived on into the 20th century.

Things get more complicated in The Time Monster, which relocates Atlantis from the Portuguese islands the Azores, to the Greek islands of Thera. This version of Atlantis is destroyed when the Master unleashes the titular Time Monster, a creature known as Kronos.

If we’re generous, continental drift and the timey-wimey nature of the Master’s plot could explain some of these inconsistencies.

But there’s no escaping the fact that The Time Monster clearly forgot that The Daemons had already offered an explanation for the destruction of Atlantis. And even more bizarrely, there was only a year between these two stories!