Headscratchers / Doctor Who 2016 CS "The Return of Doctor Mysterio"

• So it turns out there's been a guy with powers equivalent to Superman living on Earth for all these years... Which begs the question, what the heck was the Ghost doing when the Sycorax, the Cybermen, the Daleks, the Sontarans, etc., tried to conquer Earth? You'd think some of those world domination attempts could've gone a bit differently if there was a invulnerable flying man who can lift a spaceship with one hand protecting Earth?
  • Maybe Grant was still keeping his "Do Not Use Your Powers" promise at that point, and only ceased after one too many incursions.
  • Most of those threats would have had just as much impact on New York as anywhere, so The Ghost had his hands full with rescuing people back home and didn't get the chance to track down their sources.
  • Maybe that's why the Doctor stays in England and never bothers protecting the US? The Ghost already has it covered.
  • The above explanation would apply to some of the crises, the ones that lasted only a short period of time and were limited to the UK, but not to all of them. For example, during the Year That Never Was, the entire planet was made into a dystopia for year. So why didn't the Ghost fly into the Master's fortress in the sky and defeat him? It would've been easy for a guy who can lift spaceships with his left hand.
    • In that particular case, presumably the Master discreetly tracked down and neutralized as many such potential challengers to his power as possible before openly taking over the Earth, e.g. figuring out Grant's identity and taking his loved ones hostage. For menaces that attacked en masse or globe-spanning effects like Atmos or the instant worldwide forest, either the sheer number of enemies meant the Ghost barely made a dent in their forces or Grant didn't have the brains or time to puzzle out what was behind them.
    • Another possibility re: the Master and the Year that Never Was is that Grant was one of the vast majority of the Earth's population affected by the Archangel Network's mind control signal. After all, Jack was affected by it, and he's a human with a superpower and known associate of the Doctor. And Grant didn't have a visit from the Doctor (because the Doctor had yet to meet him) helping him to snap out of it.
    • Superman stays out of Britain
• When we see the alien brains in their jars, they are whole, intact specimens. However, for their head flip trick to work, the aliens would have to separate their bodies in half. Are they singular organisms (which they seem to be, given that they refer to one another in such a fashion, like "brother" and "my colleague in the jar." Or are they colonies of organisms, similar to certain types of sea life?
  • The Doctor describes them as "peripatetic central nervous systems", which implies a greater degree of mobility than the ones sitting in the blue jars display. Possibly they only look like complete brains when they're sleeping, or curled up small for ease of transport. What look like the convolutions of a brain could be tendrils that can uncoil and slither around inside a host body, Colony Sarff-style. If the drones on the spacecraft are any example, their surgeons don't just do a brain transplant, they hollow out the entire "vehicle" and fill it with blue gunk, which the recipient can freely move about inside.
  • They may not actually be brains, but masses of pale tentacles that can curl themselves up so they look like brains. They were only folded up that way in the jars so they could pass for inert laboratory specimens.
  • Just because humans keep their brains in their heads doesn't mean that's where the Shoal install themselves inside a human body. Much roomier accommodations in the torso.
• As the Harmony Shoal have no limbs outside of stolen bodies, how did they first start getting put in bodies to begin with?
  • They may be artificial organisms, originally created as spies and/or infiltrators by another alien species that did have manipulative appendages.
• If the aliens are constantly looking for new bodies to inhabit, why is the number of brains in the lab increasing? Where did all those extra brains come from?
  • More arriving from space to aid the colonization effort? But then again, bear in mind that the only reason we know more are arriving is because of what "Doctor Sim" told Brock to get his attention, and may well have been a ruse to get Brock deeper into the room where he would "tap the glass", allowing Sim to block his exit.
  • If they're only mimicking the shape of human brains, but are actually more pliable than we see, they may have left some actual brains from their victims in jars so they could double-check that they were accurately imitating such organs.
• How did the Doctor restore Nardole after he was in Hydroflax for over 20 years?
  • After cutting his head out of Hydroflax's body, he could have jumped back to where Nardole's body was left, since Hydroflax never checked on it.
  • Given that Nardole is to be a recurring character in Series 10, and it had already been announced by Steven Moffat that his story would unfold across the season, presumably this is something left intentionally a mystery for now.
  • Over the course of Series 10, it's revealed that Nardole's new body is a patchwork of robotics and bodged-together organic bits and pieces, like lungs the Doctor got on sale somewhere and a hand Nardole won in a card game.
• The Doctor at no point gives any kind of impression that he's encountered the Harmony Shoal/Shoal of the Winter Harmony before, even though he did, in "The Husbands of River Song". If you watched this episode without seeing "Husbands", you would never guess that the Doctor's seen the Shoal before. This is rather out-of-character for the Doctor, who usually tends to mention if he encounters something or someone he's seen before, even if that first encounter was offscreen. What gives?
  • It's implied that he's fresh coming off a twenty four year honeymoon with River that was capped by her death. Maybe he's preoccupied, mentally speaking. Another possible cause is that Harmony Shoal didn't make a big enough impression. Considering how big the Doctor's Rogues Gallery has become by now he sincerely forgot about the C-List villains.
  • It's not as if he'd learned that much about Harmony Shoal from their first encounter, either. He only heard a variant of the name mentioned once in "Husbands", as if it were a cult rather than an alien invasion force, and he didn't even know they were brains in stolen humanoid shells at the time. Heck, for all we know he's seen people with diagonal scars across their faces dozens of times before, passing them in the street on all sorts of planets, just like he keeps randomly running into blue people: the Doctor just never came into active conflict with them until these two Christmas specials.
• Being a fan of superhero comics including Spider-Man, wouldn't Grant know that there is already a villain named Mysterio? I understand it's a meta reference to what the show is called in some Latin American countries, but when Grant says that's what the Doctor would be called in a comic book, it feels like One-Mario Limit should be at play here.
  • There are also two characters with Atom in their names.
  • "Mysterio"/"Misterio" is also an album title, a movie title, and the ring name of multiple Mexican wrestlers. It's not as if it's that hard of a name to come up with.

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