Deep Breath: | ||
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| – | After the T-Rex bursts into flames, the Doctor jumps from the rooftop onto a tree, and after falling through the branches, dangles upside-down from the lowest branch and finally drops onto a horse pulling a stagecoach below, quickly wielding his sonic screwdriver to make the coachman let go of the reins.
All very exciting, but where does the Doctor get his sonic from? His hands were clearly empty while falling through the tree, and even if his nightshirt had pockets, it's implausible that the sonic would have stayed put while the Doc tumbled through the tree branches. |
| – | And furthermore, as the camera cuts to a wider shot showing the Doctor riding away on the horse, there's no sign of any trees that would have overhung the horse and coach! |
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| – | After Clara gets thwacked with the newspaper, we next see her coming downstairs immaculately coiffed and gowned in late Victorian attire. How many 21st century women would be able to do all that — pin and braid their own hair, and sort out their own petticoats, corset and bustle — completely unaided? (Jenny had been downstairs and there's no sign of any other staff in the house apart from Strax.)
[Well, she is the Impossible Girl, after all!] |
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| – | The Sontarans are basically humanoid. So how can Strax be confused over the difference between Clara's eyes and mouth when he's the owner of said body parts himself?
[Sorry to ruin an amusing comedy moment!] |
| – | The mirror the Doctor finds on the ground is clearly meant to be a glass mirror (it's even been shaped to look "broken"). But when he wipes it with his sleeve, it flexes like the cheap piece of 21st century plastic that it is. |
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| – | Vastra describes spontaneous combustion as people "simply exploding", which is incorrect. Victims of spontaneous combustion simply catch fire (as the T. Rex did). No explosions involved! |
| – | In the restaurant, the Doctor plucks a hair from Clara's head and drops it to the floor to prove there's no air movement in the room (hence no breathing). Yet the candles on the tables can clearly be seen to flicker in the breeze!
Not to mention that the candles themselves would cause air movement due to the heat generated by their flames. [Hasn't Moff heard of convection currents?] |
| – | When the Doctor pulls off the cyborg waiter's face, there's a huge blue flame burning inside. Isn't it an awfully big flame to be kept inside a human-sized head? Looks like it'd burn a hole in the top of his bonce! |
| – | If the "rubbish robots from the dawn of time" have survived on Earth since the reign of the dinosaurs, why did the spontaneous combustions seemingly only start in London recently? (The newspaper article only mentioned four cases to date.) |
| – | Why are the other automata outwardly perfect while the Half-Face man is — well — half-faced? It's especially odd since he's the one out in public scouting for body parts.
[Way to avoid drawing attention to yourselves, bad guys] |
| – | If the androids are all centrally connected (with the Half-Face Man as the "control node") why would holding one's breath fool them into thinking you were one of them? |
| – | Since Clara is able to summon Vastra & co. by using her prearranged codeword ("Geronimo"), why didn't she use the codeword earlier when she was first threatened by the robots? |
| – | When Vastra and Jenny do their Cirque-du-Soleil descent down the lengths of fabric, the fabric should have been left hanging there, but instead it immediately falls to the ground behind them. This implies they installed some clever mechanism at the top to release the fabric at the precise moment they reached the bottom. Sounds like a lot of hassle — why would they bother? Surely much better to leave the fabric hanging there, to aid their escape later on? |
| – | As the Half-Face Man escapes using the restaurant chair, isn't it shockingly convenient that there's a giant handle on the bottom so the Doctor can hang on to? And when the chair reaches the top again, surely it closes flush with the walls and floor (to disguise the fact that it's not an ordinary seat). So how did the Doctor get back into the restaurant when he would have been effectively trapped inside the shaft, dangling from that handle?
[It's Doctor Who. There's always an air duct.] |
| – | Why do the cyborgs go to the bother of making their escape balloon out of painstakingly-harvested pieces of human skin? This episode is set in the late Victorian era — in other words, about 100 years after the invention of the hot air balloon. Why not use the same readily-available materials that hot air balloons of the time were made from? (Typically a lightweight fabric such as silk or taffeta) |
| – | As the police stand outside the restaurant watching the "skin balloon" take off, you'll notice two things that don't belong in Victorian London: a road surfaced with tarmac (a.k.a. asphalt), and a pavement festooned with the distinctive white spots of trodden-on chewing gum.
[Yes, I know that natural chewing gum has been around in various forms since ancient times, and also that modern-style flavoured chewing gum was invented in the US in the 1860s. However, it didn't become popular worldwide until after World War II, so its appearance in 19th century England is still an anachronism!] |
| – | As the balloon rises into the sky, the "escape pod" underneath looks awfully small and windowless considering that it's supposed to contain the entire dining room of the restaurant (as we see in the next scene with the Doctor confronting the Half-Face Man — and getting him to look out of the window!) |
| – | The first shot of the balloon in full flight shows it passing over the dome of St Paul's moving eastwards. (You can tell because the distinctive two towers of the cathedral's West Front are on the left side of the screen). However, a minute later when the Doctor tells the Half-Face Man to look out the window, they're approaching Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament in a southwards direction, and therefore have also inexplicably jumped about a mile and a half westwards from St Paul's.
[Did the wind change direction? Twice?] |
| – | When the Doctor holds up the silver tea tray to let the Half-Face Man look at his reflection, the cyborg steps forward for a closer look — but his reflection doesn't move. |
| – | When the Doctor pulls open the doors of the escape pod, the interior shot shows them open at a 90-degree angle to the entrance. In other words, they should still be visible at the sides of the doorway when viewed from the outside (especially their giant protruding handles). But in the next few shots looking in from the outside at the Doctor and the Half-Face Man fighting, no trace of the doors can be seen. |
| – | Also in the same scene, there are a few moments during the Doctor's fight with the Half-Face Man where it's painfully obvious that the blow-torch on the cyborg's hand has a fake flame made out of blue paper...! |