Smith and Jones: | ||
 | – | Early on, as Martha is approaching the hospital entrance, her right hand instantly changes position between shots, from hanging straight down by her side to holding the strap of her handbag near her shoulder (just as the "motorcyclist" bumps into her). |
| – | Martha & Stoker's diagnosis of Miss Finnegan (the first patient) is dodgy to say the least. First, Martha suggests a blood test to diagnose Ménière's Disease: unfortunately there is no definitive test for Ménière's — blood or otherwise! Now, you could simply chalk this up to Martha's lack of experience (like the other students), but Stoker doesn't correct her mistake, instead he starts going on about the patient eating too much salad and diagnoses her with "salt deficiency". There is a grain of truth here: hyponatraemia (to give it its medical name) can give you symptoms of feeling unwell and nauseous, similar to the dizziness Miss Finnegan complained of... and there are several possible causes of hyponatraemia — but, surprisingly, lack of salt in the diet isn't one of them! |
| – | No less than four goofs arise from Martha's examination of the Doctor: first, she puts her stethoscope on backwards (the earpieces are meant to point forwards). She's also seemingly a bit of a cheapskate: the medical experts in the audience have informed me that she's using a very poor-quality stethoscope, of a kind more often used by nurses to take blood pressure — since you can't hear that much through them. Thirdly, making it really impossible for her to hear anything, instead of applying the stethoscope to the Doctor's bare chest like you're supposed to, she listens to the Doc's pulse through his pyjama top...! Oh, and lastly, Martha examines the Doctor from the left-hand side of the bed: another no-no according to usual practice. Curiously, Stoker doesn't call her out on any of the above, only mentioning her failure to read the patient's chart first.
[Perhaps we can forgive Martha's mistakes on the grounds of her being a student. Nobody said she had any chance of passing her exams!] |
| – | Given the care the production team normally take to disguise the Cardiff locations when they're passing for London, it's a little jarring to see Martha's sister standing outside a branch of the Principality Building Society — as the name suggests, you'll only find these in Wales! |
| – | Martha's delay in turning around to see the "upwards" rain is forced and unconvincing. Both her sister and her colleague Swales are telling her "Have you seen the rain?", and Martha is standing right beside a window, but all she does is say "why's everyone fussing about rain?" and seemingly forces herself to keep looking away from the window until the script says it's time to turn around. |
| – | During the "earthquake", as Martha and Swales are are thrown around the room, you can definitely see Swales's knees on display, demonstrating that she must be wearing a skirt. But once the tremors subside, she's clearly seen to be wearing trousers! |
| – | When Martha first sees the lunar landscape, watch her reflection in the window as she exclaims to Swales "We're on the moon!" Her reflection's lips don't move as she speaks, and in fact her reflection doesn't move a millimetre, even as Martha moves her head slightly while talking.
[Furthermore, it's pretty unlikely that when suddenly seeing a lunar landscape through a window, your immediate reaction would be "We're on the moon", rather than "What joker's hung a picture of the moon outside the window??"] |
| – | After the Doctor gets dressed, while he's asking Martha if there's a balcony or veranda nearby, a dodgy edit makes Martha instantly transition between bending over, then standing up straight, then bending over again. |
| – | When the Doctor and Martha open the doors to the patient's lounge balcony, Martha opens the door on her side very wide and lets go of the door handle. Cut to the reverse angle: instantly the door is noticeably less open and she's holding onto the handle. Cut back to the front and it's wide open again, with the handle about 2 feet away from her hand. |
| – | Right after that, when Martha and the Doc step out onto on the balcony to survey the lunar vista, their heads are lit up beautifully by some yellow backlighting. While it looks nice, it raises a couple of problems: First, the light seems to be coming from behind them, but when we switch to the reverse angle, the back of their heads aren't lit in the same way. And even when the lighting is visible, stop and think for a moment: where exactly is it coming from? It doesn't appear to be the correct angle to be coming from inside the hospital (and all the interior hospital light nearby is white rather than yellow), plus in long shots of the building elsewhere in the episode, we don't see any security lights or other external sources of yellow light. |
| – | So the hospital still has electricity despite being on the Moon, not to mention Earth-style gravity. OK, both of those could have been supplied by the Judoon (like the forcefield) — but it doesn't really make sense that they'd go to the trouble of supplying power, and gravity... but no air?! |
| – | Both Miss Finnegan and Martha refer to Stoker as "Mr" Stoker when he should be called Dr Stoker. In UK hospitals, the title "Mr" is reserved for surgeons, but Stoker is clearly depicted as a non-surgical consultant. |
| – | The shot of the ant-like Judoon marching out of their ships is pretty impressive, but sadly the ships are totally out of scale with the ships we then see in the shot of the Judoon walking towards the hospital doors. |
| – | The Judoon have been shopping at Camden Market, judging by the New Rock boots they're wearing! |
| – | When that bloke smashes the vase over the Judoon's head, the Judoon captain says: "Plea: guilty!" before vapourising him. But the poor fella didn't enter a plea! Shouldn't the captain should have said "Verdict: guilty"?
[And indeed, the captain does say "Verdict: guilty" later on when killing the Plasmavore. Oops, spoilers!] |
| – | Immediately afterwards, when the Judoon captain says "justice is swift", part of his rubber mask (sorry, "face"!) has come untucked from his neck ring. |
| – | Isn't there a massive issue with the Judoon's tracking prowess, or lack of it?
Even when the Plasmavore has the entire universe as a hiding place, the Judoon manage to track her to a single planet, a single city, even a single building. But then they have endless bumbling trouble trying to track her down inside that single building. Does this seem odd to anyone else, or just me? |
| – | When looking for a backup on the computer, why does the Doctor start using the sonic screwdriver on the back of the monitor, instead of going at the PC base unit itself? You know — the place where the information is actually stored! What the Doctor does is like trying to read someone's mind by grabbing their feet...!
[Possibly an even bigger blooper — the idea that even with a sonic screwdriver anyone could extract meaningful information from an NHS computer!] |
| – | When the hospital is transported, Martha is thrown violently off her feet and lots of stuff falls out of cupboards, as you might expect. But later on, when the Doctor and Martha go to other parts of the hospital, they seem remarkably tidy, considering the shaking the whole building must have gotten. This is particularly noticeable when our heroes are getting chased by the Slabs and all the trolleys and equipment in the corridors are upright and lined up along the walls — the manual for the X-Ray machine is sitting tidily on its shelf, etc. etc.
[Maybe the Judoon tidied up as they went around??] |
| – | As the Doctor runs along the corridor towards the MRI suite, the soles of both his feet are visibly black with dirt. Seconds later, as he picks up one of his feet to demonstrate his "bunions", it's much cleaner. |
| – | The MRI suite seems awfully full of trays and hospital trolleys and assorted other gubbins, doesn't it? Miss Finnegan has clearly filled the little control booth with wiring and stuff to boost the magnetic field, but it doesn't seem likely that she'd have put all that other hospital equipment in the room. And if she didn't, who did? You really don't want lots of loose metal objects in the same room as an MRI scanner, even before a passing Plasmavore has increased its magnetic field 16,000 times...! |
| – | Evil Plan Fatal Flaw no. 1: The Plasmavore claims she can "fry the brain-stems of every living thing within 250,000 miles" by using the souped-up MRI scanner. Problem is, a magnetic field of 50,000 Teslas would never be able to kill anyone from that distance — or indeed, have much of an observable effect at all! Even ignoring the distance, you can't even kill someone with a magnetic pulse — at least, not in the way the episode states. Our nervous systems aren't electrical, they're electro-chemical. The only surefire way to kill someone with a magnet would be to whack them over the head with it! |
| – | Evil Plan Fatal Flaw no. 2: Even if we assume for a minute that magnetic fields can indeed "fry" brains, is the Plasmavore going to be safe from the souped-up magnetic field by standing behind a shield only designed to protect you from a standard (feeble) MRI? |
| – | Evil Plan Fatal Flaw no. 3: And never mind the effects of magnetic fields on living creatures, shouldn't the Plasmavore be more concerned about what might happen with the Judoon spacecraft: you know, the ship she wants to get away in? That just happens to be right nearby and made of metal? She'd fry the electronics within seconds! Some escape plan... |
| – | The Doctor's head bounces an awful lot when the Plasmavore drops him after sucking his blood — almost as if it's landing on something very springy rather than the hard floor...! |
| – | After Miss Finnegan assimilates the Doctor's blood, why does the Judoon's scanner register her as a Plasmavore, not a Gallifreyan? Or, to put it another way, since the Judoon can clearly detect Plasmavore blood using their scanner, why do they first think the Doctor was their target?
[Not to mention, how do the Judoon not detect & capture the Slabs? Last time I checked, creatures made entirely of leather don't have any blood!] |
| – | I'm no medical expert, but do MRI scanners really have big red flashing signs on the wall that say MAGNETIC OVERLOAD? If they do, I hope they're somewhere the patients can't see! |
| – | We gave Martha some flak earlier on for committing a few schoolboy errors, but if ever you needed proof that she should pay more attention in class, she doesn't seem to know how to administer CPR! When working on the Doctor, she performs five chest compressions (per heart), then 1 rescue breath, then repeat. Medical students in the UK would currently be taught a ratio of 30:2 (i.e. 30 chest compressions, then 2 rescue breaths, then repeat).
[Granted, she needs to bend the rules when giving CPR to a guy with 2 hearts... but surely not that much?] |
| – | Once the Doctor and Martha are back in London and head to the party, the camera pans down from a full moon. Yet if it's a full moon, the dark side of the Earth would be facing the moon, not the three-quarters Earth we saw from the moon earlier. |
| – | The Doctor's hair keeps changing, especially during the TARDIS scene. Notice that before (and after) he goes into the TARDIS to show Martha he can time travel, his hair is pretty flat. Yet, earlier in the episode when he took his tie off for Martha, his hair was standing up instead.
[Did he put some hair gel on inside the TARDIS... then take it off again??] |