The New Who?
I dunno. Last night, Eileene made me watch Doctor Who again, one of the episodes that “Mike might like.” Not so much, as it turned out.
The most recent incarnations of the show—and the Doctor, for that matter—are significantly better than they used to be. The show is enjoying a renaissance akin to the facelift Star Trek got when it returned as the Next Generation, for much the same reasons. A lot of credit goes to the writers. They’re at least as good as, probably better than, earlier writers, and they enjoy the particular advantage of having grown up loving the show. Writing for the series isn’t just a job; they have been given license to add to a sacred part of their childhood, and their dedication to making the show everything they possibly can shows. Actors, too, although the difference is subtle. But in the final analysis, I think just as much credit has to go to the increased budget.
A bigger budget obviously means better special effects, which is vital. Today, there’s some blue-screen moments and some obvious CG and some death rays not quite in line with their ray guns, but it’s enough to get on with, for a willing audience. Nothing like running past the same Styrofoam rock a dozen times or so while pretending to be in an incomprehensibly vast labyrinth of caves, or a blood-sucking monster that’s clearly nothing more than a puddle of congealed rubber cement, as the show used to offer.
A bigger budget has an even more profound impact on Doctor Who than gee-whizzery, however: the plot elements actually make more sense. Here’s why: all science fiction must bow periodically to the limits of possibility imposed by actual production. If the story includes a war involving the deaths of millions, you’re going to have to limit yourself to some cut-and-paste CG, or a half dozen representative soldiers buying the farm while death noises come from off-screen, or best of all let the whole war happen off-screen after which someone just comes in and talks about it. Cheap butt-splice “teleportation” has been improved with CG, but it’s still not perfect. Maybe your robot needs to talk in a robotic voice, just to make sure the audience gets it. Compromises must be made, and the smaller the budget, the more egregious the compromises. Star Trek did it. A lot. Star Wars did it. Lost in Space did it. Doctor Who did it, too.
But Doctor Who was particularly shameless about it, and that’s saying something in comparison to the original Star Trek and Lost in Space. Cheap sets affected the plot, invariably for the worse. The show lacked realism, not only in the depiction of natural law, but in the behavior of the characters, who, constrained by dirt-cheap sets, had to act in a manner consonant with the stage, rather than television. The aliens would really have to ham things up because you couldn’t understand their electronically distorted voices otherwise. Alien invasions regularly began in abandoned shale quarries, instead of somewhere socially significant like London or somewhere geographically significant like the north pole, because shale quarries were cheap to film. Villains placed hapless companions in “minefields” instead of proper death traps because land mines need no visible props at all—and, although the music rose to a fever pitch of anxiety, what you actually saw was a couple of actors in silly outfits mincing across an empty field. The Doctor finds himself confined in a cell without bars; the only restraint is some rubbery smudges which he declares will chop his limbs off if he moves too quickly. He therefore is able to escape by simply walking out of the cell ve-e-ery slowly. And because none of this made any sense, the show would wave its hands and explain it away with nonsensical technical buzzwords.
Gene Roddenberry wasn’t shy about pulling nonsensical technical buzzwords out of his ass, either, when he’d painted himself into a corner and needed a dues ex machina. (“The resurrection chamber was able to work twice on this particular subject because of, uh, distortions in the quantum space-time continuum caused by Spock’s half-Vulcan metabolism.”) When he was stuck for an idea, he’d start with a gobbledygook premise. But, on his good days, he’d try some actual science fiction, usually of a social science nature: what happens to a world that eliminates disease, or how would we recognize radically different life forms, or what might happen if you change the past? The effort counted for something. Unfortunately, Doctor Who, to my mind at least, usually starts with a gobbledygook premise, and just goes downhill from there. An alien arrives in his own time machine and rapidly hatches a plan to steal the Doctor’s time machine, which will somehow make him omnipotent, bwa-ha-ha! Apparently, his own time travel isn’t good enough, or the Doctor’s time machine doesn’t make the Doctor omnipotent enough to stop the alien, or something. “Life energy” isn’t just a metaphor, but an actual energy force stronger than, say, a nuclear bomb, or the actual energy one could get from total mass-conversion of a living organism. Yeah, sure. When it comes to time travel, the nominal focal point of the program, the Doctor simply shrugs and tells the audience (via lectures to his companion) that it’s really complicated, so they shouldn’t bother trying to understand it. It got so that the audience pretty well took that attitude towards everything.
That tradition continues today. The show is a lot glossier, the acting generally better, and the writing waaaay better, and that counts for a lot. Unfortunately, even the good episodes, the ones Eileene thinks I will like, are full of twists that don’t even make sense once the half-baked justification is offered, and the actions of the characters involved at the time, who haven’t heard the half-baked justification at that point don’t make sense, even in that slipshod way of science fiction for the masses. So I’ll just take a pass for now. If I get the sci fi urge, I’ll dig up some Gregory Benford, who I’ve neglected; I’ve pretty much wrung Niven dry. Better yet, I’ll probably stick to non-fiction.