Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn’t do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.
Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn’t even consistent in the kind of bullshit it’s throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says “don’t worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that’s what we’re doing this week.”
And that there are apparently several alien species concurrently living underneath London at any given time.
Well they all live at different depths and do occasionally fight/ally when they’re at the same depth…
Well that be the best argument I have ever heard for why I should chuck out my preconceived notions and join my life partner in LOving Doctor Who.
This is explains why the people I know who love Doctor Who liked Star Trek: Picard. If you can suspend your disbelief for Doctor Who, Picard had some crazy scenes that felt good in the moment but kind of locally breaks reality and seems kind of stupid in the broader context.
Season 3 of Picard was pretty good. I’m not a fan of Dr Who though.
Farscape was barely sci-fi. It verged hard into science fantasy, where the science part was essentially magic in space.
Doctor Who is pure science fantasy. But it’s science fantasy more akin to star wars (which is part space opera, part science fantasy) where there’s a certain degree of internal continuity, even when canon is thrown out the window or just retconned. For Dr who, the consistency is in the fact of time travel, and the doctor being a much more potent creature than they seem on the surface.
The absurdity of the doctor is that it’s an excuse to run around, utter technobabble, and tell some surprisingly interesting stories that would otherwise be unrelated. That patchwork is likely why you can’t/won’t accept the absurdity of it the way you can with farscape where it’s more ensemble character driven.
Doctor who relies on the doctor/companion characters being your “in” to the story. The farscape characters are the story itself. It’s closer to more firmly sci-fi sci-fi like Babylon 5, or the second Battlestar Galactica in that regard. But it also does the situational drama the way star trek did it, to some degree. That is what gives farscape its charm; it pays homage to science fiction tropes, with puppets lol.
Now, modern Who does a bit more character work here and there. There’s a little less of the one-off episodes, sprinkled with the usual recurring villains, and the long term story arcs are centered more on each companion/doctor grouping than the older Who.
Sometimes, even as a Who fan from the eighties, watching Tom Baker grin and give his wink-and-a-nudge joy to the silliness of it all, the absurdity can be hard to accept. Not impossible! I do accept it, but there are times where I have to choose to do so lol. But Pertwee was peak absurdity, imo. Even K-9 can’t match that era.
Where the absurdity of modern Who falls a little flat is how all the companions end up having a portion of their run basically being part of a comedy duo that tells inside jokes. They become fast friends with the doctor, and the writers have them riffing off of each other like Abbott and Costello, no matter what the rest of their personality is like. You could probably pick a more accurate comedy duo with some thought, but that’s the best my tired brain can do lol.
Point being that the absurdity is sometimes shoe-horned in as a way to make it feel like the companions and the doctor have spent all the time in between episodes having other adventures. But it’s off screen, so it feels forced too often.
Battlestar Galactica might start as sci-fi but ends up as science fantasy. At some point a character comes back from the dead, becomes an angel, and much of the original mysticism becomes literal.
Yeah, it did go all woowoo lol. But at least it was sciencey woowoo?
Honestly I wouldn’t even call doctor who science fantasy. It’s just pure fantasy set around space travel and aliens. There’s absolutely nothing science about it, and they really don’t even try to make it seem that way. Anything that should have some sort of science explanation is just hand waved away, and thus internally inconsistent. The dr who universe is basically full of magic. Magic potions, magic wands, magic enemies, magic travel boxes, magic immortality, etc.
I think the sonic screwdriver is about as close as they have ever come to trying to explain any of it, and they basically only did that to point out the (rather absurd, story-necessary) limitations of the thing. One still has no actual idea what it can do or how it can work, just what it usually does and what it can’t do (sometimes and/or probably).
I agree actually, but the screwdriver is sciencey, and TARDIS does mention spacetime in a way lol.
Imo, the only reason it gets listed as sci-fi is that there wasn’t anything else to call a time travel show back when it started getting popular. Iirc, it was originally intended to be a history exploration more than anything else.
Thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed your write up.
I think the comedy duo aspect was part if a reason that David Tenant/Catherine Tate were so engaging to watch
It worked very well with them
I guess the question is “What Who have you watched?”
For my money, peak Who will always be Tom Baker. Yes, it’s absurd, he knows it’s absurd and leans into it.
Baker FTW. He understood the assignment: Gandalf-Bugs-Mr-Bean, saving the universe with absolute pacifism and a crumpled bag of jelly babies.
The remake in the new format completely destroyed the character archetype, and turned him into a forced-whimsy action hero with a side of self-pity.
It’s a totally different take on Dr who compared to the ones from 2005, and the pacing is sooo slow, but sit back with some jelly babies and enjoy.
Make mine Pertwee. The Barry Letts era is the most consistently good the show ever was, or likely ever will be. There were some individual Tom Baker stories that were better under Hinchcliffe and Williams, and some that were much worse *coughs* JNT *coughs* . Perhaps one of the hazards of Tom Baker’s long tenure. 😆
Found the Doctor Who nerd. pounce on him my lovelies.
Yeah, Doctor Who is really far fetched and bizarre, but all the shows are fiction. Doctor Who doesn’t even try to explain the fictional part. It’s not a requirement, but makes some things difficult to accept.
An extreme example of the opposite would be Star Trek, which offers at least one explanation for most fictional things like they can accelerate that fast because “inertial dampeners” or “the neutrino emissions of the tricorder scan affected it”.
Ah, yes, the legendary Star Trek Technobabble
You’re not wrong. You just don’t have the absurdly strong nostalgia goggles that are required.
(fwiw: I don’t get it either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
New Who tends to run on Bugs Bunny logic but also wants you to take it seriously. Try some old Doctor Who if you can handle very bad effects. Early Tom Baker or the Jon Pertwee stuff at least tries to make sense.
Also they often have the doctor have to work at the problem and have a plausible solution. Now it’s just I pushed the radiation in my shoe.
Back then the sonic screwdriver was just a high tech swiss army knife. The doctor would use it to open panels and rewire things. These days it’s a do anything magic wand.
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I grew up watching New Who. I never got into Classic Who. Part of it is just that you love the characters and eventually learn to accept that the universe is big and wacky shit happens. The Doctor usually has an idea of whats going on, and that’s all you really need. Imo the audience is like an auxiliary companion; we’re along for the ride and learning wtf is going on just like whoever’s with the Doctor. Our minds can’t always comprehend what’s going on, but thats okay. We’ll figure out a way through and sometimes even save the day ourselves. And at the end of it all we might be a little closer to the Doctor than a normal person, and we can use that to save the world when the Doctor is off saving another one.
ETA: Also the Doctor is a wonderful character. I love everything except the Chibnall era because no one there understood the Doctor. I really really wish we had someone else as the first female doctor because I think it could’ve been great but instead we got someone who gave more ammunition to the sexists. The Doctor’s character has so much depth and mystery and demonstrates an ideal of humanity in the same way Star Trek does. I think one of the best examples of this is in the 50th anniversary special with the Doctor’s monologue at the end with the two boxes. I’m paraphrasing, but, “at the end of the day all wars end with what people should’ve done from the beginning: talk. If people just sat down and talked it out all could be resolved without a single drop of blood. The war you fight will only invite someone to fight another war against you.” I’m horribly butchering it but it’s a really beautiful speech. It’s not a perfect response to all injustice but nothing ever will be. Eventually we just have to stop and move forward if we ever want to see a brighter future.
I think Jodie Whittaker could have been a good doctor but like Peter Davison she was a doctor with a bad show runner and bad writers.
I’m unsure personally, but a lot of the blame definitely falls at the feet of Chibnall. I hope that when i watch the newer stuff I’ll be more impressed.
I dropped Dr. Who after Peter Capaldi was done. Partially because Moffet’s awful writing with Clara as the sidekick and partially because the BBC wouldn’t put newer episodes on US Netflix for years
I loved Capaldi. Hes my favorite Doctor. I missed the premier of the Chibnall era so I was just gonna wait until the entire season released so I could binge it, but then I heard the reviews and stopped watching for a few years. I need to return to it now though.
Same for me but with Dune/Star Trek vs Star Wars. I don’t get Star Wars and refuse to accept that lightsabers are a real weapon.
I mean, the basic premise of a lightsaber is pretty simple. You have some incredibly powerful power source, a blade made out of super hot plasma, and a magnetic containment bottle in the shape of a sword.
The reason they bounce off each other is the magnetic containment fields bashing into each other.
And I shall die there with you, friend. It all comes down to the quality of the writing.
As long as you remember that crackers don’t matter.
You like what you like, idk why you have to be wrong about it. If you want insight into yourself on why you like this and not that, then therapy is where to go.
Different target audience?
I do not think so.
i think a lot of great points have been made in this thread, but it’s also worth saying- you can’t be wrong about what you do and don’t dig!
Opinions on Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?
Sounds like maybe what you don’t like is British humour.
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