As revealed at the recording of our last live episode, Seven/Religion, here is your homework viewing for Eight/Science, which will be recorded on August 11th at Bar Open in Melbourne (full show details here).
Your homework viewing for the Eighth Doctor is:
- Doctor Who: The Movie
…okay, no surprises there. While we’ll mostly be sticking with discussion of Grace: 1999, you might enjoy listening to some Eighth Doctor Big Finish audio adventures. We suggest:
- The Chimes of Midnight
- The Silver Turk
- Shada
- the BBC7 series beginning with Blood of the Daleks
We’re talking about science in Doctor Who; here are some good (or bad) examples of science and scientists in the show:
- The Daleks (William Hartnell, 1963; seven episodes)
- Terror of the Autons (Jon Pertwee, 1971; four episodes)
- The Masque of Mandragora (Tom Baker, 1976; four episodes)
- Four to Doomsday (Peter Davison, 1982; four episodes)
- The Lazarus Experiment (David Tennant, 2007; one episode)
There’s so much “science” in Doctor Who, though, that we could easily list dozens of other relevant stories; if you’re feeling enthusiastic, you might also want to watch The Daemons, Creature from the Pit, Logopolis, Aliens of London/World War Three, New Earth or The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky. Please share your own suggestions in the comments below!
I’d like to suggest Malcalm Hulke’s “dinosaur” trilogy; Doctor Who and The Silurians, The Sea Devils and Invasion of the Dinosaurs. Having just read Hulke’s novelisation Doctor Who and the Dinosaur Invasion with my daughter (she’s discovered her school library has a stash of ye olde Target novelisations) I was astounded by the complete lack of research that had gone into the writing of the book. Practically every “fact” about the Tyrannosaurus rex and its environment mentioned on pages 75-76 is *wrong* (both at the time the book was written and now) and it reminded me of that whole Silurians/Eocenes thing.
Hulke’s got the time period of the “Silurians” completely wrong (and let’s just ignore that twaddle about the moon, or that there were monkeys 65 million years ago, or that a 65 million year old virus would somehow still be effective against the one group of those monkeys descendants who were causing the Silurians trouble). People wrote in to the Radio Times &/or the production office and complained. So he tried to correct the error in The Sea Devils, only to get it wrong again, closer this time, but on the wrong side of the KT boundary.
Of course it’s a good thing that they went into hibernation, or Adric would have spoilt their day.
Credit where credt is due, Hulke’s novelisation of his Colony in Space/, released as Doctor Who and the Doomsday Weapon, was far better than the TV version…
I find myself wondering if the telemovie had a lasting (bad) effect on new Who, by legitimising the sort of apocalyptic, plothole-ridden, season-ending extravaganzas of both the Davies era (I’m thinking especially of that 27 planet
“I love you Leela”Dalek extravaganza) and the Moffat era (hey, let’s reboot the entire universe. Again!)The poor eighth Doctor was a cipher for all sorts of people who wanted to take Doctor Who and run away with it as far as they could in a direction of their on choice. Think of the many different competing agendas in the BBC Eighth Doctor novels, and how after being dragged in eight(!) different directions at once, the Doctor the got raked over a similar yet different set of coals in the audio adventures.
I think I had a point here once, but now it’s as lost as the thin shred of plot that held the telemovie together.