from the department of wasting [world enough and] time

[mr_squiddle]

• Why would you build a planet's colony ship in an entirely different star system, especially when it seems to run on kinetic propulsion and could take decades to arrive?

• How, in the course of piloting that ship from point A to point B, do you just accidentally stumble across a Gargantua-class black hole and end up driving straight into it?

• If you've got inertialess elevators that run both ways at 12,000 mph, why are you trapped by a black hole anyway? You already broke physics.

• If you were trying to drive out of a black hole with a kinetic-drive ship, wouldn't you flip the ship over?

• How is it that when a 400 mile long ship is draped over a gravity gradient steep enough that time at one end of the ship is running some 72,000 times faster than at the other, the ship doesn't just break apart?

• How is it that given the level of technology necessary to build a 400-mile-long interstellar spaceship, no one on board understands time dilation well enough to put up a post-it note as a heads up to the rest of the crew?

• If you've been auditing the Doctor's physics classes for considerable time and have been writing papers on advanced physics for him for a year or more, why does the time differential go straight over your head?

• If you're a crew member on this ship, and you see half the techs ride the elevator down to the engine room and then immediately a bunch of people dragging IVs ride up in the elevator and kidnap all the humans in the remaining crew, why would you arrive at the conclusion that it would be a good idea to kill any humans who happen to respond to your ship's distress call? What exactly do you expect to accomplish by this? Do you think you're saving them from a fate worse than death? If so, why, and why would you not think telling them to escape would be just as good?

• Shouldn't someone have sonicked that gun before it went off? E.G. Missy looking for brownie points?

• Did it ever occur to blue dude to shoot the IV cyberpeople with it instead?

• How do IV-dragging cyberpeople discern the difference between humans and nonhumans?

• How is that a gun that can make a perfectly cylindrical hole in a person doesn't leave so much as a burn mark in the wall behind?

• If you're broadcasting a distress signal and someone shows up in response to it, why not say "Get me the hell off this death ship, I'll explain after we're all out of mortal danger"?

• Conversely, if you're a crewman on this ship and find yourself stuck at the fast end of the time gradient, and for some as yet unexplained reason can't get back to the other end of the ship, why would you think making babies would be a wise decision, especially if the unexplained reason is some undefined monstrous threat above, especially if it's blocking your access to the farming decks?

• If you're a time lord who just pranged a companion, and you can't pilot the TARDIS well enough in a gravity well such that you can't materialize around her in the usual rescue maneuver, why wouldn't you just fly the TARDIS back to the ship just before it got trapped in said gravity well, park in a closet and wait? Time lords can afford to spend two centuries playing pinochle, it's what the episode title is about. So far as the audience can tell, the Master has been on the ship since it launched!

• Come to that, why not teleport Bill out? Getting a lock shouldn't be a problem, not only has she a dingus in her ear (see: "Day Of The Moon"), the TARDIS translation circuit's working fine despite the time differential so there's obviously some existing exploitable connection.

• If you're a time lord willing to donate regeneration energy when you have none to spare to repair a broken wrist, shouldn't saving your hole-punched friend's life be a no-brainer? Alternatively, you've got plenty of time to sling her into the TARDIS medical bay, which is after all billions of years advanced over human type medical technology, so why don't you do that?

• If you're Mondasian Mengele and total cyberconversions are something you're already doing and you've got someone on the slab, why wait?

• If you have the kind of medical technology that can replace a spine, why is pain even a problem to begin with?

• If you're living in conditions of scarce resources but very high technology, why are you dumping pollutants into the air instead of recycling them?

And the answer is!
(FX: drum roll, tearing envelope)
THE MASTER'S EVUL PLANN!Ⓡ
Insane characters, the writer's ultimate get-out-of-thinking card. Now available by mail from a P.O. box in Poughkeepsie.