pubs
Most of science fiction is magic in the end: you make an assumption for
the purpose of illustration (usually of a social or political issue),
and as long as everything around it follows in a reasonable manner, you’ve got a successful gimmick.
Doctor Who has never been any different; the difference is that its key
assumptions, on a long-term basis, tend to be more for dramatic than
hypothetical purposes. To provide solutions rather than ask questions.
The sonic screwdriver exists, for instance, to resolve any physical
impasse. Davies has had fun with this and, flying in the face of JNT,
has made it even more of a panacea. (Note Boom Town and the
teleportation.) This is fine because this one magical assumption allows
us to skip the obligatory procedurals (that frankly have little to do
with story) and go more directly from cause to effect, on a narrative
level.
The TARDIS has always been another magical device. It works how it
needs to work to do what the writers want to do. That Davies is having
more fun with this than earlier writers and producers just follows his
whims and — frankly — the demands of the modern format of the show.
And of modern standards in storytelling.
That montage at the start of Rose tells all, really. In two minutes we
know all we need to know about her, and all we really get are setup
shots. It would be pointless to fill in the blanks, as that’s not what
the story’s about. We get all we need to know from what we’re shown,
and we can fill in the rest ourselves. Take that, expand it, you have
Doctor Who in a nutshell. All Davies has done is boil it down. And in
most places, it’s effective in the end. If you really need
explanations, you can make them up on your own. Fans are good at that.
They’re kind of irrelevant to the purpose of the series, though.
Thus concludes my review of Metroid II.
Ha ha, excellent trick you pulled there, making us thing you were talking about Dr. Who when you were actually talking about Metroid 2… OR ARE YOU?
I know the truth… you’re really talking about Guild Wars!
Doctor Who has never been any different; the difference is that its key assumptions, on a long-term basis, tend to be more for dramatic than hypothetical purposes.
This is true of most TV and movie science fiction; with very, very few exceptions, the visual media stuff is just looser logically than the hardest of print SF. To some extent this is forced by the constraints and conventions of the medium. Some print SF fans hate that, and in the endless definitional games that go on in places like rec.arts.sf.written you’ll see people trying to define science fiction to exclude almost everything that shows up on TV.
I used to have problems with it myself since, unusually for people of my generation, I really mostly approached science fiction initially through books. I think I’ve only become truly reconciled to it in the past ten years; read stuff I wrote in the mid-Nineties about Doctor Who and you’ll see that I was kind of contemptuous of it based on what I’d seen.
man, i’m really jonesing for dr. who; we’re on dialup right now :/
It’s true. I focused on Doctor Who because I was talking to Doctor Who fans, who were moaning to no end about a couple of instances in the new series where episodes were solved through “magic” devices.
I must say I think Doctor Who works better in this respect than, say, Star Trek, in that it doesn’t bother to pretend it’s hard sci-fi. It’s drama, with a few gimmicks thrown in to give it an interesting range. It is, however, aware enough of sci-fi to satirize it on one level or another — in that understated British way.
If you’ve a region-free player (or can hack one you do have), the Region 2 DVD boxed set will be available in a couple of months. If not — though I have seen no annoucements to the effect — I’m guessing it’ll get released here a few months after that.
It’s a good series; final episode just finished broadcast as I wrote the response above this. Two more series have already been commissioned, incidentally — so there are another twenty-eight episodes coming over the next two years.
I only talk about games I haven’t played when I feel I might as well have played them.
I have access to Guild Wars, and I’m curious about it. Will investigate eventually.
Carrying forward with what has been suggested:
Hard sci-fi is about the science — about saying, “if we had [x], then look at [y] and [z] we could then conceivably have and how that would affect society”. In print you can be as specific, expository and pedantic as you want.
Television and movies are about showing people, period, and it follows that anything in those mediums is bent around drama and life. Trying to teach science-within-a-story is ineffective to the point of silliness.
So, for TV science fiction, the sci-fi should be a plot device to enable the drama — not a substitute for it; Doctor Who seems to get this right whereas as Star Trek often doesn’t. When the choice is between
(a) misrepresenting the science with half-truth oversimplifications,
(b) wasting my time with nonsense technobabble, and
(c) just saying “it’s magic” and moving on to the interesting stuff,
…I know what my preference is.
Most of the issues faced in Doctor Who that may be critized on sci-fi grounds in fact stem from what one can infer as being character choices. Davies has made the wise choice of focusing on conveying a sense of the principles of how the Doctor’s world works, rather than making up specifics. This has the added bonus of, in many cases, leaving things vague enough for the viewer to assume (with greater certainty) that the characters would have a perfectly competent reason for questions of “why didn’t they just do [x] instead of [harder, but plot-enabling y]?”; it turns questions like “why didn’t use the doodad from episode #113?” into something dismissable like “why doesn’t Batman use a gun?”.
I like the magic, I like the vagueness, I like the sense of wonder and emotional understanding it conveys — instead of the dry deconstruction I’d be left doing if it was over-explained. I find that the best, most dramatic, and most convincing parts of any TV episode work are those things that were written into it but are never mentioned outright — instead, simply hinted at only as much as is needed to bring the thought to mind at the appropriate moment for dramatic underscoring and whatnot.
(Related idea: in teaching, it’s far more effective to lead the student to realize the idea for himself than it is to simply describe the answer at the start.)
i hope it gets released here soon.
i just discovered that the scifi channel is picking up firefly… i still can’t figure out what went wrong with dr. who.
I got lost a lot in Metroid 2. :(
I haven’t seen the new Doctor Who, but if it interests you that its a Drama first and a Scifi show second, then you’d probably enjoy the new Battlestar Galactica series (the two part miniseries you can skip). The show pretends to be scifi with all of the spooky cylons that have become human simulacra, and then presents a show that has nothing to do with Scifi, except for the fact that they’re in space. They might as well just have been ships on a flooded earth and you’d of gotten the same show.
I’ve heard some good things about it.
Sci-Fi has had its head up its ass since around 1999. Shame, as early on it used to be so quirky. I mean, they went out of their way to revive MST3K. Then the woman who ran the USA Network took over.
Yeah. Starting to clear up a little now, isn’t it.
You were supposed to. Sort of.
Getting lost is the best part of that game.
Well, see. There you go. She’s only halfway there. Her mind’s been opened, she’s developed this thirst. She’s become alien, in effect. Out-of-touch. Selfish as all get out. That’s why Mickey and Jackie are there; to show us this. The series is getting more and more critical of her as it goes along.
I’m inclined to think Davies is going somewhere with this. We’ve had the upward swing of her character arc. Now we’ve got at least one more season for it to come back down again. For her to learn who she is, what it means to be human, how to bring all of this stuff she’s learned and seen into the context of everyday life. How to simply enjoy what you’ve got.
So far, she’s just been spoiled. She couldn’t appreciate what she had, so she’s been shown what else is out there. The moment she becomes truly big is when she allows herself to be small.
This running psychology is what really holds me in the new series. It’s kind of poststructuralist in the way that it changes our perspective, as viewers, in order to change the meaning of all that we once considered familiar. To look for something deeper, more significant to life, underneath the veneer of the series. It is in that sense that it works as successful sci-fi for me. People are looking in the wrong place when they complain about the “magical solutions” and lack of other worlds. That’s not what makes sci-fi. It’s what all of that means.
It’s not untrue!