I feel like I'm saying the same thing over and over again.
There is no difference in terms of inherent plausibility. The difference is the position those things occupy in the story. Time travel is the premise of the show, the miracle you buy to get to the story; the hole is a plot device for this episode, a miracle you allow for the sake of this story; and the resolution of the hole, the Thames swirling down it, is an authorial convenience. Stories are emotionally satisfying because they play out situations to a conclusion. If the conclusion can be whisked out of a magic hat by the writer at the last moment, as it was in this episode, with no consistency with what has gone before, why should I care about the rest of the story?
I've established before that I'd never want Doctor Who to become Asimov-style hard sci-fi, but at the same time it has to take its sci-fi concepts seriously, even if they are only a varnish for the horror and adventure ideas underneath. Unfortunately, the science fiction in 'The Runaway Bride' isn't just dismissive, it's actively contemptuous of the genre it's meant to be a part of. Russell getting the creation of the Earth wrong by several hundred trillion years is one symptom, but the thinly-imagined jargon used to explain the Doctor's weather device, among others, is a thumb in the audience's eye. "The Dark Times"? "Arachnos"? These things may as well come with a note saying "GOOD FOR FIRST DRAFT - MIGHT WANT TO THINK OF SOMETHING BETTER FOR THE SECOND PASS".
And why, if you dislike it so, do you keep on watching the show?
Because the flaws are of execution, not inherent to the concept.
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Date: 2006-12-26 06:19 pm (UTC)There is no difference in terms of inherent plausibility. The difference is the position those things occupy in the story. Time travel is the premise of the show, the miracle you buy to get to the story; the hole is a plot device for this episode, a miracle you allow for the sake of this story; and the resolution of the hole, the Thames swirling down it, is an authorial convenience. Stories are emotionally satisfying because they play out situations to a conclusion. If the conclusion can be whisked out of a magic hat by the writer at the last moment, as it was in this episode, with no consistency with what has gone before, why should I care about the rest of the story?
Maybe someone else's words will be clearer.
And why, if you dislike it so, do you keep on watching the show?
Because the flaws are of execution, not inherent to the concept.