{"id":4883,"date":"2010-07-24T19:54:54","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T19:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2010\/07\/24\/why-i-cant-take-doctor-who-ser\/"},"modified":"2010-07-24T19:54:54","modified_gmt":"2010-07-24T19:54:54","slug":"why-i-cant-take-doctor-who-ser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2010\/07\/24\/why-i-cant-take-doctor-who-ser\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Can’t Take Doctor Who Seriously"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was miserably swampy for most of the day today– when it wasn’t actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment– so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of the new Doctor Who<\/cite> on BBC America, which was pretty much a perfect distillation of why I can’t take the show seriously, despite the rave reviews of many people I know.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s not just that every single episode introduces an alien menace that the Doctor knows all about already, either because it was featured in some pior incarnation of the show, or because the writers imagine some backstory in which he met them before. And it’s not just the way that a green LED and a little beeper can magically do anything that the plot requires. Or the way that everyone he encounters quickly decides to go along with whatever plan he suggests, despite the fact that he acts like a babbling lunatic. What really prevents the show from rising about kitsch for me is that they don’t appear to have thought through the entire premise of the show.<\/p>\n

The bit that really sealed it in the particular episode I was watching, which involved lizard-people living deep beneath the earth, was when one of the just-introduced characters had to effectively sacrifice himself because there was no way to use the magic lizard-people technology to cure him of his poisoning before an explosion of some sort trapped them in the underground city of the lizard-people, which they were about to escape from in their time machine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It takes a special kind of dumb to construct a plot that relies on a ticking-bomb scenario when your main character is the owner of a time machine. And yeah, fine, mumble garble technobabble, maybe they can’t jump forward or back in small increments. But the episode had previously established that the lizard-people had been living underground with their magic technology for millions of years, and once the heros escaped in their time machine, they were planning to go into hibernation and wake up a thousand years in the future. Throw the sick guy in the time machine, and escape the explosion by jumping a thousand years into either the past or the future, and get the nice lizard-person to heal him then.<\/p>\n

Fans of the show will probably respond that this was a bad episode, not representative of the best of the series, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, every time I watch the show, I see the same sort of stuff. Even one of the Hugo-nominated episodes from a few years back had this problem. The Doctor conducts a romance of sorts with a woman in 18th century France, while he’s trapped in a spaceship in the distant future, looking in on her through time-portals that turn up at different points in her life. In the last visit, she’s either really old or recently dead (I forget which), and he sheds a few tears over the end of their romance, then climbs back into his time machine<\/em> and never sees her again.<\/p>\n

If anything, the show is slightly less interesting to me than it was back when I used to catch Tom Baker episodes, because CGI has gotten cheap enough that even the BBC can do reasonable visual effects. The plots didn’t make a lick of sense back then, either, but they no longer have the kitsch value of having villains who are just extras wearing giant papier-mache bull heads.<\/p>\n

The fundamental problem with the show is that it’s really hard to construct dramatic stories when your main character has access to a time machine– as somebody or another observed recently, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure<\/cite> does a better job of thinking through the implications of time travel than anyone in the history of Doctor Who. But really, a lot of the time, they don’t even seem to be trying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was miserably swampy for most of the day today– when it wasn’t actually raining, it was so humid that you expects water to condense out of the air at any moment– so I spent a while sitting on the couch watching tv with SteelyKid. The best kid-friendly option seemed to be an episode of… Continue reading Why I Can’t Take Doctor Who Seriously<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,29,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4883","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop_culture","category-sf","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}