Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?

On 28 May, 00:58, tom...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 27, 7:44 pm, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:





pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 27 May, 01:28, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
pbow...@xxxxxxx wrote:
On 26 May, 20:25, Elvis Gump <elvisgump...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The Master wrote:
On Fri, 23 May 2008, Elvis Gump wrote:
No, Doctor Who is seldom realistic sci-fi, time-travel not
withstanding, though it could be.
Well, if you really want to get specific, why does the Doctor always
land on a planet with earth type gravity, with earth type air?  Why
don't they ever get sick from alien microbacteria?  Why don't they ever
land on a planet with three times the gravity?  Why don't they ever land
on a planet with more Helium in the air, so they talk funny the entire
episode?
Many of these things have been cleverly covered in the new series with a
few lines of dialogue, such as the TARDIS translation circuit, or the
nano-med things to aid in protecting form harmful pathogens in the first
season WWII episode.
Don't think the Doctor uses them, though.
It wouldn't seem so by how he explained them and their function without
saying "And I use them too", but it's rather one more bit of unrealism
and over-simple scifi story telling to never mention the problems that
alien biospheres would pose to humans. Trek for example glossed this
over for the most part unless it was explicitly part of the story,
showing the actors washed with light in a rather bogus "decontamination"
process that failed utterly I think in the first instance it was ever
show in "The Naked Time".

Ah, but if they used effective decontamination procedures they
wouldn't be able to roll out all the stock 'crew infected by deadly
disease' stories.

It's an ongoing problem in drama, epecially scifi to how you have
characters that are armed with invincible technology one minute and then
get clobbered from behind the next minute. That happened to Cap'n Kirk
and crew a lot to get them into some action.

The Doctor on the other hand has always almost seemed to relish getting
taken captive so as to wind up in the heart of the enemy or villain's
lair to get a better look at what's going on. It probably reached an
apex with Tom Baker who seemed to enjoy it with relish that he was
captured most of the time.

The only time I recall the Doctor ever went someplace specific at the
start of a story were the searches in the Key To Time season, the rest
of specific destinations come about because of having to dash someplace
specific once the story is underway. Well, save for I guess when in the
new series he took Rose to see the end of the world, or when he took
someone home and such.

He's done it quite often in the original series - The Unquiet Dead,
The Shakespeare Code, Aliens of London, Empty Child (chasing Jack's
space junk), Fires of Pompeii, The Sontaran Stratagem and others - and
has sometimes been pulled off course (Dalek, The Doctor's Daughter,
Utopia).

I'd forgotten some of those, but I was basically referring to how the
Doctor chooses or rather perhaps doesn't choose some of the times and
places he goes to.

I would expect that at least in this season with Tate, that Donna would
get to ask "Why is it we never land someplace nice and nothing bad
happens in the first two minutes we get there?"

I liked Rose's comment in "The Impossible Planet" - "Well, if you
think it's going to be dangerous, we could always go somewhere else".

I have to say that's among my least favorite stories of the new series.
Like Douglas Adams used to describe himself I too am a radical atheist
and find demon and devil plots silly beyond the pale. I hate
supernatural explanations and stories.

It's funny to notice the humans all say "For Gods sake!", gods being in
the plural, yet Moore concedes that having a character say "Take your
pound of flesh and move on" referencing Shakespeare stays because
there's really no good way to rephrase that we the audience would
understand.
One thing that always struck me about that was that the Cylons from
the start (and later Baltar) always talked about God, singular, and it
wasn't until this season that any of the Colonials seemed to catch on.
Okay, Leoben was trying to give himself away in the pilot, but
otherwise it's a bit clumsy of them to profess belief in only one god.
I've always wondered if this is going to pay off that when they get to
Earth and surely the Cylons will follow that somehow this leads to the
developement of both mono and polytheism on Earth. I don't think they
are going to wind up finding modern or future Earth, but rather Earth of
the distant past pre-history and loose all their ships and advanced
technology when they get here somehow.

What I wonder is why no one has thought to ask "Why do the Cylons want
to get to Earth?" - or for that matter to think "Uh, oh, the Cylons
want to get to Earth too - we'd better bugger off somewhere else or
they'll wipe out Earth as well as us" (which is presumably what
Starbuck as harbinger of death is all about).

Phil

One of the speculations I've read is that Baltar will become the basis
of the Jesus mythology with the 'one true god' stuff, though I think
that's probably going to piss off a lot of religious people if they went
that far with it.

It's and imperfect reality they've created with the Cylons where they
just accept that there's these final six Cylon models or how they take
many of the things the Cylons say at face value. No one seems interested
in who the Cylons are that are running the show or where the central
command is and so on. Or why there need only be as few as 12 models. Or
why no one asks if the returned Starbuck is a clone of the original
rather than a Cylon? Or if the Final Five are just being gas-lighted
into thinking they are Cylons when they might not be. Or how the Cylons
who seem to be impossible to distinguish from humans can 'transmit'
their consciousness across light-years to their Resurrection Ships with
no apparent apparatus. Or how  Boomer can stick a fiber optic cable into
a vein and communicate with a computer. And so on.

There are many other details like that which are silly beyond
explanation, like when they do silly things like showing Vipers land in
weightless space as though they were airplanes trying to trap on a
seagoing aircraft carrier I get very disappointed in their technical
homework. It's not even a detail that would matter to audiences who
probably don't have a clue about how airplanes trap on carriers vs how
spaceships dock in weightless space.

The great fear I have is that the whole storyline will simply fall apart
under the weight of questions like that that aren't wrapped up or
explained in a satisfactory way.

But like I said, it's very hard to do what they have tried to do which
is make up a whole complete world with all the rules that go with it.
What they have managed to do though is interject a lot of drama though
it couldn't help but get ludicrously soapy in the process.

It's really hard to create a whole new 'reality' in sci-fi for a series
and Doctor Who has largely taken a pass on it with very little concrete
about the Doctor which has worked in it's favor and setting the bar or
scientific plausibility as low as possible. A lot of what I find
distasteful about this has probably contributed to it's success with
most viewers who don't know much science or care in the first place.
--
Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Now this is partly why I'm sceptical about progressing any further
past the opening BSG miniseries.

It's mostly pretty good even now, but the writers would probably
rather the miniseries hadn't happened - there's a lot they've had to
ignore, change or retrofit to make it consistent with the main series.

Phil
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?
    ... land on a planet with earth type gravity, ... Don't think the Doctor uses them, ... Earth and surely the Cylons will follow that somehow this leads to the ...
    (rec.arts.drwho)
  • Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?
    ... land on a planet with earth type gravity, ... Don't think the Doctor uses them, ... Earth and surely the Cylons will follow that somehow this leads to the ...
    (rec.arts.drwho)
  • Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?
    ... land on a planet with earth type gravity, ... Don't think the Doctor uses them, ... Earth and surely the Cylons will follow that somehow this leads to the ...
    (rec.arts.drwho)
  • Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?
    ... land on a planet with earth type gravity, ... Don't think the Doctor uses them, ... Earth and surely the Cylons will follow that somehow this leads to the ...
    (rec.arts.drwho)
  • Re: Is Doctor Who "realistic" sci-fi?
    ... land on a planet with earth type gravity, ... Don't think the Doctor uses them, ... Earth and surely the Cylons will follow that somehow this leads to the ...
    (rec.arts.drwho)