"Imaginative" is often a short distance from "irrational," and Doctor who crosses that line a lot -- sometimes you can forgive it, and sometimes it is unforgiveable.

Nobody has mentioned "Love And Monsters" in this thread, and a lot of Who fans hate it, but I think it is great and the silliness can be forgiven because it is intended as comedy. Watch that episode and you have to think, "No, Star Trek could never do anything this outlandish."

But you have cited cases where Doctor Who has gone too far in being "imaginative," because it ends up being ridiculous without any comedy intentions. The Ood are a completely impossible species, logically. A slave race incapable of doing anything unless they are told to do it. No species like that could evolve. If a species like that started to evolve on a planet, it would quickly die off. And as much as I love "Blink" for a lot of reasons, the Weeping Angels species is another example of an "impossible species." Completely frozen in place if anybody looks at them? Even others of their own kind? And the reason they do what they do to people? Give me a break. Just ridiculous stuff. And you mention "Gridlock." People live in flying cars for twenty years stuck in a traffic jam and act like it is the most natural thing in the world, especially when there had not been anything like that before on New Earth? Imaginative surely, but also an amazing insult to the audience's intelligence. This is the kind of stuff that gets people calling Doctor Who a "children's show," and I really hate hearing that criticism, because I think the show is OTHERWISE quite adult.

Doctor Who unlike Stargate is not just watched just by Sci-Fi fans but by large numbers of non Sci-Fi fans.

The problem this causes is that if Doctor Who decided to go to alien planets more often and used the Stargate Method (Which in Britain would mean mountains, quarries and a few wooded areas). The general non Sci-Fi audience of Doctor Who would laugh at it as bring silly as alien planets would not look like that.

As for Star Trek their alien planets looked like the areas around LA so not much different from Stargate.

As for Doctor Who they would have to spend huge amounts of money to create realistic looking alien deserts and mountains that would be acceptable to the non Sci-fi fans (whose only experience of Sci-Fi is Star Wars) that the BBC could not afford it.

So unless someone can come up with a much less expensive way of creating realistic looking alien planets we are stuck with it as it is.

I agree to an extent. There's a great episode of Star Trek Voyager which basically deals with the shows obsession with explaining everything with technobabble. I think that's the weakness of the Star Trek series - that everything has to be explained and appear logical.

Doctor Who doesn't have that limitation. Real science doesn't interfere with good story telling. Some people may think that's a bad thing. I think its a good thing. Time Travel is, after all, impossible. So the whole basis of the show is impossible. So why not just go with the impossibility of the science in Doctor Who and use it to the best advantage.

Yes but most Sci-Fi stories borrow from other stories. There are very few original stories left to tell. In fact I can not think of any at the moment.

It is technically true that American broadcasters don't DIRECTLY finance the budgets of ANY shows they have. They pay a fee to the independent producer, and USUALLY that fee is less than the budget of the show, which is why producers need to sell re-runs if they hope to make a profit. But after Showtime dropped Stargate and Sci-Fi picked it up, the show's budget did decrease, and it was noticeable on screen, with more obviously-low budget episodes mixed in with the CGI-and-action-heavy episodes. Producers set budgets based on the money they are getting from the TV channel airing the show.


Yes, I know Stargate did it too. It just sounded to me like Camera Obscura didn't think Doctor Who was doing that. All shows re-dress sets to make them look like new sets. It is standard practice in the TV industry, to save money AND time.



Well, it's the economics. I'm sure American channels would all like to get their revenue from a mandatory license fee like the BBC. So much easier than having to beg for money from advertisers. As more and more channels have popped up in American television, giving viewers more choices and fragmenting the audience, fewer viewers watch any one show at one time, so advertisers pay less than they used to for ads. How were the networks going to make up the lost revenue? By selling MORE ads per one hour. 30 years ago, a "one hour" show on American TV lasted 51 minutes, with 9 minutes of commercials interspersed throughout the hour. Over three decades, that 51 minutes has steadily decreased to where it is now, 42 minutes. Americans accept the ads as the price of having "free TV," and accept the increased number of ads as the price of having 100 TV channels. Americans are astonished when they hear about the British "license fee," and can't believe that British people don't riot over such a thing. Different cultural atttitudes.

Horses for courses, I suppose. I don't view my opinion as nonsense OR silliness - it's my opinion, after all, and it would be rather odd if I disagreed with it...

I've seen a huge amount of sci fi, too, and find British sci fi in the vast majority of cases to be far more imaginative and better written despite (or perhaps because of?) having considerably lower budgets.

And I'm not just talking about Who - If asked to watch each episode of all the sci fi shows ever made in order of preference, I'd watch the entire runs of Doctor Who, Blake's Seven, Star Cops, Sapphire and Steel, Quatermass, HGTTG and Ultraviolet (and that's just off the top of my head) before I even thought about watching a single episode of any Amercian sci fi show, not just Star Trek.

Maybe it's just a different perspective on life, the Universe and everything, depending on your national perspective? (I'm assuming you're in the US.)

I tend to find American sci fi in general, and Trek in particular, pompous, arrogant, militaristic nonsense. In large part, that's because they're cursed with large enough effects budgets to not have to bother with piffling trifles like believable plot resolutions...

I think it's also because the way American TV is made is intrinsically damaging to dramatic structure, especially on sci fi shows - every ad break has to end on a mini-cliffhanger, with each one being bigger and more dramatic than the last. This leads to writers only having three minutes to resolve impossible situations and, more often than not, simply throwing the weight of the special effects team at it.

This leads to a HUGE number of Next Gen's episodes ending with Geordi dumping the warp core to cause a nearfield quantum non-actuality field overload in the primary dilithium contrafibularity matrix (or some similar technobabble crap) and thus resolving the problem completely without ever being in danger of making the slightest bit of sense in the process.

(You're quite right about Fear Her, by the way, worst episode of the new run by a huge margin and down there with some of the worst Doctor Who has ever produced... but still better than the vast majority of DS9, Voyager and Enterprise , IMO... at least it has an interesting concept, even if the realisation is pretty poor. And hideously twee. Oh, and Love & Monsters is brilliant. So there.)

That was an interesting debate. Before reading it my thoughts were more along the lines that it was the high budget for Who that to some extent was stifling creativity. The purported higher budgets for american sf shows I believe largely come about from higher costs of production and they tend to spread costs over a season with a mixture of the spectacular and bottle shows. Curiously it's the bottle shows that are often more creative and interesting and it's the spectaculars that fall flat.

With Who there doesn't seem to be so many cost-saving bottle shows as most appear to involve new sets etc which leads to me often feeling that scripts are commissioned in reverse - start with the budget then fill it with enough stuff to spend the money. That was certainly my main feeling about the Xmas show where it had to get in enough new sets, explosions, stunt-work etc to use up the budget the bbc had allocated. I'd like to see a few more on-the-cheap episodes where the writers have to come up with something inventive.

Now, you see, Camera Obscura, early in the thread, pretty much accused me of playing the "Anti-American" card in response to anybody I disagree with, even though I didn't do it with him, but this fellow is an example of what makes it impossible for me to NOT call Anti-Americanism when it rears its head at DS. And how about insane pro-Britishism? Star Cops, for God's sake? How about Crime Traveller while you're at it? There has been a wide disparity in quality among different American sci-fi series over the years, and the same thing is true of the quality of British sci-fi series, and frankly, I think just about every Brit on DS who is fair-minded and unbiased will agree with me on that. Calling American sci-fi bad and British sci-fi good is not a credible opinion on any grounds other than crude "four legs good, two legs bad" reductionism worthy of Orwell's Animal Farm, and as in Orwell's Animal Farm, it is a reductionism rooted in politics and not artistic judgement (the crack about American "militarism" is a dead give-away).


You don't see the bit about my location being "Vancouver, Canada?" I am neither American nor British, so I am not somebody who can be accused of any patriotic bias when it comes to talking about American or British sci-fi, or TV in general. Both countries produce excellent work, work that is crap, and a lot that falls in the middle between the two extemes.


I said that "Love and Monsters" is "great," so why get on my back about that?

You used hating Love and Monsters as a typical Who fan weakness later in the thread. I thought I'd point out that I don't subscribe to that view. Sorry - phrased it badly.

And Star Cops is brilliant. It's a COLOSSAL missed opportunity which, while pissing most of its potential against the wall through the assignment of a COMPLETELY inappropriate and downright idiotic producer, still manages to shine throughout most of its run. Give the show to a Hinchcliffe or a Lambert type, or even Gerry Anderson (whose output I also despise,) just ANYONE with an understanding of either genre (sci fi or detective) and it would still be running today. Give it to a Welsh halfwit who thinks NASA have a weightless room in Arizona and you're never going to reach full potential. The scripts, espeically the dialogue, as always with Chris Boucher, shine through the flaws in production though.

Crime Traveller... was deeply flawed. But mindless fun. And most days I'd STILL watch it before I'd watch Voyager or DS9.

I'm not entirely anti-US TV - I love House, I think Smallville can be vaguely entertaining (when it's not trying to pretend people actually like Lana,) Supernatural can be fun when it plays to its strengths and doesn't get bogged down with unimportant backstory and Heroes is, generally, great. Firefly was pretty good, too, but a little slow.

I just find shows like Trek, Babylon 5 and Stargate, where the show is built around any kind of rank structure, tediously militaristic and quite frequently formulaic. Sadly, that format seems to be the basis of most US sci fi.

Whereas British sci fi is usually more about the brilliant individual. As I prefer that perspective, I naturally prefer those shows. (Someone who loves stories about dogs is more likely to enjoy the best made episodes of Lassie than the pinnacle of Skippy or Flipper, after all.)

If there was an American sci fi show which was about a brilliant maverick (one who DIDN'T resolve every plot by joining forces with the military and blowing the crap out of everything,) chances are I would add that show to my predominantly British list of favourite shows. As there isn't, I can't.

A sci fi version of House would be perfect... In fact, Hugh Laurie as Doctor 11, anyone?

That should have been the point you made, instead of framing it as "America vs Britain." The point you now make about American science fiction being inclined to involve either the military or military-type organizations (like Starfleet Command), while British science fiction has avoided that (Space: 1999 is an obvious exception, and you say you dislike that), is true, and I have seen the point made before, in an essay in one of the Visual Imagination publications a few years ago. But that is still a bias that, as I said in my post above, comes down to politics: you have a bee in your bonnet about the military. I am open to stories that involve military or quasi-military organizations AND "brilliant individuals." I believe most people at DS are.