It's my opinion that the fact the tadpole doesn't crawl out when our characters die isn't a plothole. The issue is that the game makes a point of showing us that this happens and then the characters don't comment on it. I think that if the game is going to show us a scene of this happening, then the characters should talk about that scene. It's the obvious solution-not necessarily good, but obvious-and the fact no one voices it does make it harder for the players to tell if this is a mystery the game is presenting, or a mistake in writing that hasn't been accounted for.
I think another issue is that it's currently kind of hard to know how *canon* party character death is. Typically in most games, it's assumed that anytime the player or companions die in gameplay, it's non-canon and usually it's established early on that that's not the case. And typically in those cases death is either a specific aspect of the story, or accounted for at least in the endings, and by the lack of presence of a companion in the case of crpgs with a permadeath option. But here we get a specifically in-story way to bring back companions, and Gale's death is an outright plot point. However the possible death and resurection of other companions goes unremarked upon. We don't even get a sense of how resurection, which is a fact of the setting, is viewed in the setting so we can actually know if that sort of nonchalance is typical.
