It's Matt Smith, it's Matt Smith!!!!

Today the BBC announced that 26-year-old Matt Smith would be replacing David Tennant as the Doctor on Doctor Who in 2010. My reaction, and I suspect the reaction of almost everyone, seems fitting.

Who?

- Sid

We'll go with "incestuous" for this one.

Over the last few years, television science fiction series have become oddly...recursive? incestuous? - you know, I couldn't find a term that was appropriate. I refer to the practise of casting both guest spots and ongoing roles using actors who have appeared in other shows. Ben Browder and Claudia Black from Farscape ended up on Stargate SG-1, as did Robert Picardo from Voyager, (who then moved to Stargate Atlantis, along with Jewel Staite from Firefly); James Marsters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a recurring role on Smallville and a guest spot on Torchwood, and Anthony Head did one on Doctor Who; Andreas Katsulas from Babylon 5 showed up on Enterprise; and in the great recursive coup of all time, Richard Hatch returned to Battlestar Galactica.

But somehow all of that seems to pale against recent events from Doctor Who. Rumour has it that David Tennant, the Doctor, has recently started dating Georgia Moffett, who appeared in an episode of Doctor Who entitled "The Doctor's Daughter" in the titular role of the Doctor's daughter. Just to make the situation a little weirder than it already sounds, Ms. Moffett is actually the daughter of Peter Davison, who played the fifth incarnation of Doctor Who. So, just to clarify that, they cast the daughter of the fifth Doctor to play the daughter of the current Doctor, who then decided to ask her out. I realize that there's nothing actually wrong with any of that, it just seems odd, somehow.

- Sid

"Tonight, when they asleep, I gonna escape..."

Donna: "And I tried, I did try. I went to Egypt - I was going to go barefoot and everything. And then it's all bus trips and guide books and don't drink the water and two weeks later you're back home. It's nothing like being with you. I must have been mad turning down that offer."

The Doctor: "What offer?"

Donna: "To come with you."

Doctor Who, Partners in Crime

"I never fully understood the label of "escapist" till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, 'What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and most hostile to, the idea of escape?' and gave the obvious answer: jailers."

C. S. Lewis, On Science Fiction

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, yesterday I was able to download the premier episode of the fourth season of Doctor Who, featuring the return of Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, the eponymous Runaway Bride from the second Christmas Special. I have to confess to mixed feelings about the new episode, but it does point out an interesting perspective on fans of science fiction and fantasy.

The new Doctor Who episode, Partners in Crime, ostensibly deals with yet another threat to Earth, this time in the form of diet pills that convert first fat and then the rest of the body into alien "children". As plots go, it certainly doesn't measure up to the standards set by previous episodes, but to be honest I don't think it's intended to. The alien Adipose are simply an excuse for the Doctor and Donna to reunite and strike sparks off each other. And there are definitely sparks, there's obviously a strong chemistry between the two actors that gives their scenes an over-the-top energy.

However, I'm a bit worried that this season will suffer because of that very energy. The scene where the two see each other for the first time is certainly funny, but again, it's an over-the-top funny, and I'd hate to see the writers get distracted by that aspect of the relationship.

My concerns may be premature, though. There are some very good (and completely serious) bits describing Donna's dull and meaningless life, and an excellent scene wherein she tries to explain that lack of adventure to the Doctor as being the reason why she's been looking for him in hopes of joining him on the TARDIS. (Which, by the way, the Doctor obviously views as a mixed blessing.)

One of the criticisms levied against science fiction and fantasy over the years has been that they are "escapist" genres, although why that would be a bad thing I have no idea. In this case, it is literally escapist, in that Donna has fixated on the idea of exchanging her boring life for one of adventures in time and space with the Doctor. In the context of the episode, her determination to find "the right man" is considered to be admirable by her grandfather*, and pointless by her mother.

However, in the context of the real world, everyone watching the show has made the same decision that Donna has, although hopefully not to the extent of being unemployed and living with their mother. On a weekly basis, we've decided that we would rather vicariously travel the universe with an alien than, oh, do dishes or watch a hockey game.

"Escape" - it's an interesting description of what we're doing, and as C. S. Lewis points out, strongly suggests imprisonment.

As I've mentioned in an earlier post, my family did not have a lot of money when I was growing up, and I have to wonder if that was in any way a factor in my interest in science fiction and fantasy. I wonder if there are any statistics connecting low income with a desire to escape into another world? The stereotype of the socially inept SF geek is firmly established in the cultural matrix now, but which comes first, the chicken or the egg? I think that it's perfectly logical for someone who is being beaten up at lunchtime on a daily basis to want to escape, to seek refuge in a completely different universe: The Lord of the Rings, where the hero is small and weak, Star Wars, with its boyish saviour of the day, and so on. Spiderman's alter ego, Peter Parker, is a science nerd, and Captain America was originally someone so weak and skinny that they couldn't get into the army. Harry Potter? Adopted kid who lives under the stairs.

Part of the reason for my childhood interest in science fiction was because my mother was a fan, although I doubt if she thought of it in exactly those terms - I think that my mother would have found the term "fan" to be an inappropriate designation. I suspect that for her, science fiction was most definitely an escape, a gateway to a more interesting place than the one where she'd ended up. Considering that she had relocated from England to Toronto, and then to Muskoka, I sometimes wonder if my mother had spent her whole life trying to escape.

Coincidentally, she used to say that if a UFO landed in the yard, she would jump on board. Mother, this posting is dedicated to you - hopefully you would have seen a kindred spirit in the Doctor's new companion.

- Sid

* Donna's Grandfather made an appearance in the 2007 Christmas Special as a news stand operator, but when I saw him again in Partners in Crime I thought to myself, "Wait, who is that?" The character of Wilfred Mott is played by Bernard Cribbins, who, in addition to his numerous other film, stage and television appearances, co-starred with Peter Cushing in the 1966 Doctor Who movie, Invasion Earth 2150 AD. I can only hope that they'll write in a reference to that- after all, Sarah Jane Smith made a guest appearance, why not police officer Tom Campbell?

Antici.....(say it).....pation.

Boxing Day in Vancouver - well, everywhere, I suppose, although I'm not certain of the internationality of the concept - and I'm sitting here at the computer watching BitTorrent struggle with three different downloads of the 2007 Doctor Who Christmas Special, guest starring Kylie Minogue. In theory, at least one of them will be finished by lunch...perhaps leftover turkey and David Tennant? 

- Sid

Postscript: Lunch was in fact spent watching the Christmas Special. Not a great episode when compared to some previous scripts, although Kylie did a reasonably good job and was an acceptable romantic interest for the episode. Considering that the entire episode took place on a ship called the Titanic, it was really more of an homage to The Poseidon Adventure.

"Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff."

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

The Doctor, Blink

Time travel stories, I love a good time travel story. Obviously this would make me a strong candidate to be a Doctor Who fan, although I freely admit to having been in and out over the years. Recently I've been downloading episodes of the current season that have been posted by English fans, and in spite of a couple of shaky concepts they're doing some quite nice stories. (Hopefully this blatant confession won't result in a lightning raid by BBC copyright commandos. Given that I'm in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is damn near the other side of the planet from England, I should be safe unless they have some kind of agreement with the CBC black ops teams. But I digress...)

The most recent Doctor Who episode is entitled Blink, and deals with the sort of time travel opportunities that are parodied in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey - decide to use your time machine to go into the past to set up things so that you win a fight in the present, then go back to set things up after you win the fight. In this case the Doctor gets sent back in time without the TARDIS, but sends messages to someone in our time to get it back - and then gets the information he needs to set things up after everything is resolved, but before it takes place in his personal timeline.

This directly addresses the real question of time travel: can you change the course of events? The two basic philosophies here are that you can't change things in the past because you didn't - commonly known as the Grandfather Paradox - or that it's an open field, in which future events exist in an indeterminate state. (For those unfamiliar with the concept, the Grandfather Paradox is as follows: build a time machine, go back to the past, kill your grandfather at the age of ten. As a result, your father is never born, you're never born, and you don't build a time machine. So you DON'T go into the past, you DON'T kill your grandfather, your father IS born, you're born, you build a time machine... It's easier to assume that the gun must have jammed when you tried to shoot the little bugger, or, in the big picture viewpoint, if you went back in time to kill Hitler before he starts the Nazi party, you'd fail, because history records that he did start it.)

Both of these philosophies have given rise to some interesting stories, although the approaches required are wildly different. The landmark story for the open field approach is Ray Bradbury's A Sound of Thunder. All you need to do is to step on a butterfly while trying to shoot a dinosaur that's going to die anyway, and the result is a slightly but significantly changed future. (This begs a bigger question, which is why anyone with a time machine would waste their, ah, time running tours into the past so that people can shoot T. Rex. If things were at the point where it was that popularized, I would think that flattened butterflies would be the least of your worries.)

The cast-in-stone position is less obviously interesting, simply because it's less exciting. Going back in time with an anthill and coming back to find out that the ants have evolved into the dominant species and destroyed humanity is a bit more of a climactic ending than coming back and finding out that they haven't. The predestination stories tend to read a bit like inverted detective stories, with the characters running around like mad making sure that all the clues are in place to ensure that the crime happens. There's often a loose thread that miraculously weaves back in at the end, just to ensure that all's well historically. A good example of this would be Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog, which is rather like the time travel version of The Importance of Being Earnest.

- Sid

The Good, The Bad, and the Tardis

 

In short, the straw of a manufactured realism with which the sf writer makes his particular literary bricks must be entirely convincing to the reader in its own right, or the whole story will lose its power to convince.

- Gordon R. Dickson

The future depicted in a good SF story ought to be in fact possible, or at least plausible.

- Frederik Pohl

A lot of the definitions of science fiction that I've read tend to deal with what makes for good science fiction - not a bad thing to have definitions that concentrate on quality, although I think that some of the motivation for that sort of definition comes from a kind of defensiveness about the genre, as per Sturgeon's Law. 

For a perfect example of the line that divides good SF from bad SF, let us turn to the popular media - okay, the BBC, but still - and take a look at the reborn Doctor Who. 

In the first season, with the excellent Christopher Eccleston capably filling the Doctor's shoes, there was a two-part episode: The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances. Set in WWII London, the Doctor is presented with the odd phenomenon of an inhumanly powerful child, wandering the streets in a gas mask while looking for his mother. Even odder, the child's condition appears to be contagious - people are mysteriously changing into gas-mask faced entities requesting their mummy. 

This is explained as being the work of military medical nanobots from a crashed spaceship, nanobots that have no idea that the model they are using to rebuild the population of London is in fact a flawed one (people not normally having gas masks for faces, even in London) and the boy's powers being the result of being brought up to alien military spec. 

This would qualify as "good" SF by my standards: an apparently inexplicable situation which is logically explained within the context established by the plot. 

Sadly, David Tennant, Mr. Eccleston's equally gifted replacement, is not always as ably supported by plotline. In The Idiot's Lantern, once again people are falling prey to a mysterious ailment, this time in 1953 London: after watching television, their faces vanish. (I've often thought that might happen.) 

After seeing a sort of corral full of faceless victims, the Doctor finds a room full of TVs, each one containing a missing face. Apparently this is because an alien entity known as the Wire is stealing energy from people. 

What? Why in the world would that cause their faces to vanish? How do these faceless, mouthless, noseless remnants breathe? Shouldn't they all be dead in about four minutes? Sadly, this episode rings the bell for bad SF, where the science fiction element is really just for show, intended to create an interesting visual effect but with nothing in the plot to explain why and how such a thing would happen. 

And, as a postscript to the whole thing, it really does make me wonder if I'd feel safe living in London.

- Sid