Right, so, what is it about science as we understand it that makes a space-travelling timelord, and billions of years old spider people possible, but a non-magma-spewing hole to the centre of the earth "miraculous"?
And why, if you dislike it so, do you keep on watching the show?
Well I see Niall's point in that in SF (assuming for a second that DW bears more than a passing resemblance to the stuff) you're traditionally allowed one magical macguffin and everything else has to be logical, or you end up in a freeform fantasy setting where nothing in the story is logical and therefore nothing has meaning or consequences.
However the point of this Christmas special was clearly the emotional stuff and the spectacle and the pace, not the detailed story logic. Torchwood tunnelled under the Thames Barrier. Why? Look, it's just the kind of ting that top secret organisations do from time to time. I'm happy with that. There's a whole to the Earth's core and no magma. Why? Well a wizard an alien did it, and they must have made sure there was no magma spewing up using sekrit alien technology or that wouldn't have been very much use to them, would it?
What did slightly bother me was the stupidity of the plot to force-feed Donna alien particles through a boyfriend over a six month period and not just kidnap someone random. Plus it seemed very easy to do the same to her fiancee in mere minutes at the end - so why did they even need her? (I think I missed some handwave from the spider queen about something having been perfected). That kind of thing niggles me more. The mad super-science not so much.
you're traditionally allowed one magical macguffin and everything else has to be logical, or you end up in a freeform fantasy setting where nothing in the story is logical and therefore nothing has meaning or consequences
The problem for me comes when people are prepared to say "it's alien, it's OK" about, for example, space travel, time travel, regeneration, the sonic screwdriver, Knowing Stuff, all that kind of jazz, but not "the hole doesn't leak magma" and the like. It seems to be a inconsistent demand for realism in the show just to make a point that certain aspects aren't realistic, presumably in order to demonstrate that the show doesn't meet some arbitrary requirements that it's not even addressing.
Well a wizard an alien did it, and they must have made sure there was no magma spewing up using sekrit alien technology or that wouldn't have been very much use to them, would it?
Exactly. I'm really not quite sure why so many people seem to have such a problem with it.
What did slightly bother me was the stupidity of the plot to force-feed Donna alien particles through a boyfriend over a six month period and not just kidnap someone random. Plus it seemed very easy to do the same to her fiancee in mere minutes at the end - so why did they even need her?
Yeah that was very odd. Like you say, the fact that they managed to force feed Lance enough stuff at the end kinda threw the whole "slow poisoning over six months" thing for a curve. And that kind of inconsistency *is* annoying.
It's even more maddening since it served no plot purpose - they still ended up being able to use Donna in the end. It seemed like a weak way to give the fiance an ironic punishment.
I do not see any substantive difference between the inconsistent handling of the Donna/Huon particles part of the plot and the inconsistent handling of the Giant Hole part of the plot. Both introduce a plot point and then generate a plot resolution by changing the rules under which the plot point was introduced. Neither is internally consistent.
by changing the rules under which the plot point was introduced.
I think it's this bit that I'm not getting. How did the resolution change the rules?
Either the hole was spewing magma or it wasn't. It wasn't. It went all the way down to the Space Aliens. So what's wrong with flinging some water down it?
What did slightly bother me was the stupidity of the plot to force-feed Donna alien particles through a boyfriend over a six month period and not just kidnap someone random. Plus it seemed very easy to do the same to her fiancee in mere minutes at the end - so why did they even need her?
The Empress expositioned while they were force-feeding Lance: the slow Donna experiment had established the correct "dose" and now they could do it to anyone quickly.
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.
I actually don't think that Doctor Who is contemptuous of SF. It doesn't give SF that much thought! It doesn't regard itself as SF any more than Buffy does, and if any of its writers says otherwise then they clearly think Lost in Space is also SF.
I think that parma_violets is focusing on small niggles in this quote. I personally disagree that phrases like "The Dark Times" are poor; they serve the same purpose here as in Buffy, and very effectively sketch a kind of Pulp Scientific Romance kind of history. I also disagree that a throwaway gag like the weather device needs sensible technobabble. There are dozens of ways he could have done it, and it has no bearing whatsoever on the story. Likewise the age of the Earth being wrong (I can't actually remember the figure used in the episode) makes no difference to the plot and, hey, maybe the Doctor misspoke. All of these examples seem to me pretty trivial.
I agree more with your comments about magical plot devices. It's just that it doesn't seem inherently crazy to me - in the context of the DW universe - that powerful alien SUPERSCIENCE could drill a really stupidly deep hole to the centre of the Earth which did not spew magma (hell, the Daleks did exactly this in the original series). This is stupid science and a plotting convenience but hardly a magical deus ex machina because it sets up the problem rather than solving it.
And having set up the problem - a really stupidly deep hole with aliens at the bottom - what exactly is so illogical or inconsistent about flooding the aliens at the bottom using the previously established river overhead? Or using the previously established remote controlled bombs to do it?
Aside on the age of the Earth, I checked the tape and he does say "4.6 billion years" which isn't that wrong as a view of Earth formation (given that the web ship is supposed to have accelerated the accretion process; IIRC the 4.6 figure corresponds to the time when the body is fully accreted.) I couldn't find any reference to figures like "trillions" as others have referred to.
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.
And I'm still not seeing why scientific realism is important for some of those things, but not others.
Stories are emotionally satisfying because they play out situations to a conclusion.
Well, no. Stories are emotionally satisfying because of their emotional content. They're narratively satisfying because they play out to a reasonable conclusion. But I think that's difference of opinion is fairly symptomatic of the different ways we approach both stories and life in general :-p
As for what parma_violets says, well, frankly I couldn't give a good goddamn if the show doesn't take sci-fi concepts seriously; not do I care what genre it's "supposed" to be a part of, so that argument doesn't really hold for me. And if that's also your argument, then maybe you understand why I've had such a time trying to work out why the science behind the hole to the centre of the earth matters so much - because to me it really, really doesn't.
As for what parma_violets says, well, frankly I couldn't give a good goddamn if the show doesn't take sci-fi concepts seriously;
Read his post again -- neither does he, and neither do I. What matters is that the show takes the concepts it uses seriously on its own terms. And "The Runaway Bride" didn't.
Read his post again -- neither does he, and neither do I
OK, two things; first up, as far as I can see, he does. I could be wrong, of course - I have a history of Reading It Wrong. But it certainly reads as if this is a problem for him. And secondly, if you don't think so, why bother quoting that part of the post?
What matters is that the show takes the concepts it uses seriously on its own terms. And "The Runaway Bride" didn't
I have no idea what you're saying here; it doesn't seem to relate to anything you've said in this thread. So there's things in the show that aren't plausible science; so what? How is that the show "not taking seriously the concepts it uses on it's own terms"? I would have thought that's exactly what it's doing.
We're meaning different things by the same words, it seems. Let me try again.
Who needs to take the concepts it introduces seriously to the extent that (a) they make sense within the established continuity of the show and (b) the consequences that flow from them make sense. In addition, it would be nice if they did not violate known physical principles to the extent that the audience is expecting any character with GCSE science to be doing a double-take.
The Hole and the way it is handled is a problem because it violates (b). If the Hole goes to the centre of the Earth, there should be a big explosion when you start opening it at the bottom. If there isn't an explosion due to Magic Alien Tech, you have used up your Magic Alien Tech card for that plotline, because if the Magic Alien Tech can be rolled out to solve any plot problem, I get bored. Further, if you have a Hole to the centre of the Earth, you have to factor the length of the Hole into subsequent plot development -- you can't pretend it's not 6,000km long. (Which they do, because 1. anything at the other end of a 6,000km hole is not an imminent threat, and 2. emptying the Thames into something that size isn't going to make a noticeable difference to anything.) But the Hole isn't the only element of the episode that's handled in this way -- there's the Huon particles, and oh, pretty much every emotional arc in the piece, except for possibly the Doctor's. Everything happens because the plot requires it to, not because it develops logically from previous events.
I also object to the Hole on aesthetic grounds, because it just makes me feel like RTD is being lazy.
1. anything at the other end of a 6,000km hole is not an imminent threat
We don't really have enough information about the aliens to make this assessment, I would argue. Maybe they're all on hoverbikes. ;-) Or can teleport up the tube like their queen once awake, unless drowned first. I appreciate that proper SF would have bothered to explain how this was going to work, but in a James Bond underground-base-style denouement it's enough that we know the aliens are going to pose a threat once they get out, and that whenever they arrive it'll be really really bad.
2. emptying the Thames into something that size isn't going to make a noticeable difference to anything
It won't fill the hole. It could certainly fill the spaceship at the bottom of it, which I assumed was the point.
there's the Huon particles,
The Huon particles are, I agree, arbitrary and problematic. They bother me a bit more than the stonking big hole.
and oh, pretty much every emotional arc in the piece
emptying the Thames into something that size isn't going to make a noticeable difference to anything
Gentlemen, here are the facts.
Radius of the earth at latitude 51.5 degrees: 6365.080 km (according to my calculations, based on figures and a formula from Wikipedia) Radius of the hole: 2.5 m (from what i remember) Area of the Thames within London: 2050 ha (Tidal Thames habitat audit) Depth of the Thames at the Barrier at lowest astronomical tide, which we will take as a fairly arbitrary guess at the average depth of the whole Thames within London: 6.1 m (Imray chart C2, based on Admiralty soundings)
So, how much of the hole can the Thames's water fill? I hope it's not too much to interrupt your critical flow to ask for a little bit of GCSE-level mathematics ...
Didn't the story get the formation of the Earth correct to within a hundred million years or so? I'm pretty sure the Doctor said it was 4.6 billion years ago, which is pretty close to the accepted age of 4.55 billion years. I don't know where this idea about hundreds of trillions of years came from.
Also, I thought "Dark Times" was supposed to be understood literally rather than metaphorically: the time before the first stars began to burn. But I've only watched the episode once and I was partially distracted throughout.
Also, I think "Arachnos" was first draft. By the second draft they had become "Racnoss", clearly a substantial step forward in sophistication.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 05:20 pm (UTC)And why, if you dislike it so, do you keep on watching the show?
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 06:09 pm (UTC)However the point of this Christmas special was clearly the emotional stuff and the spectacle and the pace, not the detailed story logic. Torchwood tunnelled under the Thames Barrier. Why? Look, it's just the kind of ting that top secret organisations do from time to time. I'm happy with that. There's a whole to the Earth's core and no magma. Why? Well
a wizardan alien did it, and they must have made sure there was no magma spewing up using sekrit alien technology or that wouldn't have been very much use to them, would it?What did slightly bother me was the stupidity of the plot to force-feed Donna alien particles through a boyfriend over a six month period and not just kidnap someone random. Plus it seemed very easy to do the same to her fiancee in mere minutes at the end - so why did they even need her? (I think I missed some handwave from the spider queen about something having been perfected). That kind of thing niggles me more. The mad super-science not so much.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 06:39 pm (UTC)The problem for me comes when people are prepared to say "it's alien, it's OK" about, for example, space travel, time travel, regeneration, the sonic screwdriver, Knowing Stuff, all that kind of jazz, but not "the hole doesn't leak magma" and the like. It seems to be a inconsistent demand for realism in the show just to make a point that certain aspects aren't realistic, presumably in order to demonstrate that the show doesn't meet some arbitrary requirements that it's not even addressing.
Well
a wizardan alien did it, and they must have made sure there was no magma spewing up using sekrit alien technology or that wouldn't have been very much use to them, would it?Exactly. I'm really not quite sure why so many people seem to have such a problem with it.
What did slightly bother me was the stupidity of the plot to force-feed Donna alien particles through a boyfriend over a six month period and not just kidnap someone random. Plus it seemed very easy to do the same to her fiancee in mere minutes at the end - so why did they even need her?
Yeah that was very odd. Like you say, the fact that they managed to force feed Lance enough stuff at the end kinda threw the whole "slow poisoning over six months" thing for a curve. And that kind of inconsistency *is* annoying.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 06:43 pm (UTC)It's even more maddening since it served no plot purpose - they still ended up being able to use Donna in the end. It seemed like a weak way to give the fiance an ironic punishment.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:25 pm (UTC)I do not see any substantive difference between the inconsistent handling of the Donna/Huon particles part of the plot and the inconsistent handling of the Giant Hole part of the plot. Both introduce a plot point and then generate a plot resolution by changing the rules under which the plot point was introduced. Neither is internally consistent.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:36 pm (UTC)I think it's this bit that I'm not getting. How did the resolution change the rules?
Either the hole was spewing magma or it wasn't. It wasn't. It went all the way down to the Space Aliens. So what's wrong with flinging some water down it?
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 10:49 pm (UTC)The Empress expositioned while they were force-feeding Lance: the slow Donna experiment had established the correct "dose" and now they could do it to anyone quickly.
no subject
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.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 06:39 pm (UTC)I think that
I agree more with your comments about magical plot devices. It's just that it doesn't seem inherently crazy to me - in the context of the DW universe - that powerful alien SUPERSCIENCE could drill a really stupidly deep hole to the centre of the Earth which did not spew magma (hell, the Daleks did exactly this in the original series). This is stupid science and a plotting convenience but hardly a magical deus ex machina because it sets up the problem rather than solving it.
And having set up the problem - a really stupidly deep hole with aliens at the bottom - what exactly is so illogical or inconsistent about flooding the aliens at the bottom using the previously established river overhead? Or using the previously established remote controlled bombs to do it?
no subject
Date: 2006-12-27 11:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:00 pm (UTC)And I'm still not seeing why scientific realism is important for some of those things, but not others.
Stories are emotionally satisfying because they play out situations to a conclusion.
Well, no. Stories are emotionally satisfying because of their emotional content. They're narratively satisfying because they play out to a reasonable conclusion. But I think that's difference of opinion is fairly symptomatic of the different ways we approach both stories and life in general :-p
As for what
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:27 pm (UTC)Read his post again -- neither does he, and neither do I. What matters is that the show takes the concepts it uses seriously on its own terms. And "The Runaway Bride" didn't.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:37 pm (UTC)OK, two things; first up, as far as I can see, he does. I could be wrong, of course - I have a history of Reading It Wrong. But it certainly reads as if this is a problem for him. And secondly, if you don't think so, why bother quoting that part of the post?
What matters is that the show takes the concepts it uses seriously on its own terms. And "The Runaway Bride" didn't
I have no idea what you're saying here; it doesn't seem to relate to anything you've said in this thread. So there's things in the show that aren't plausible science; so what? How is that the show "not taking seriously the concepts it uses on it's own terms"? I would have thought that's exactly what it's doing.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 07:51 pm (UTC)Who needs to take the concepts it introduces seriously to the extent that (a) they make sense within the established continuity of the show and (b) the consequences that flow from them make sense. In addition, it would be nice if they did not violate known physical principles to the extent that the audience is expecting any character with GCSE science to be doing a double-take.
The Hole and the way it is handled is a problem because it violates (b). If the Hole goes to the centre of the Earth, there should be a big explosion when you start opening it at the bottom. If there isn't an explosion due to Magic Alien Tech, you have used up your Magic Alien Tech card for that plotline, because if the Magic Alien Tech can be rolled out to solve any plot problem, I get bored. Further, if you have a Hole to the centre of the Earth, you have to factor the length of the Hole into subsequent plot development -- you can't pretend it's not 6,000km long. (Which they do, because 1. anything at the other end of a 6,000km hole is not an imminent threat, and 2. emptying the Thames into something that size isn't going to make a noticeable difference to anything.) But the Hole isn't the only element of the episode that's handled in this way -- there's the Huon particles, and oh, pretty much every emotional arc in the piece, except for possibly the Doctor's. Everything happens because the plot requires it to, not because it develops logically from previous events.
I also object to the Hole on aesthetic grounds, because it just makes me feel like RTD is being lazy.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 08:13 pm (UTC)We don't really have enough information about the aliens to make this assessment, I would argue. Maybe they're all on hoverbikes. ;-) Or can teleport up the tube like their queen once awake, unless drowned first. I appreciate that proper SF would have bothered to explain how this was going to work, but in a James Bond underground-base-style denouement it's enough that we know the aliens are going to pose a threat once they get out, and that whenever they arrive it'll be really really bad.
2. emptying the Thames into something that size isn't going to make a noticeable difference to anything
It won't fill the hole. It could certainly fill the spaceship at the bottom of it, which I assumed was the point.
there's the Huon particles,
The Huon particles are, I agree, arbitrary and problematic. They bother me a bit more than the stonking big hole.
and oh, pretty much every emotional arc in the piece
Que?
no subject
Date: 2006-12-29 12:31 am (UTC)Gentlemen, here are the facts.
Radius of the earth at latitude 51.5 degrees: 6365.080 km (according to my calculations, based on figures and a formula from Wikipedia)
Radius of the hole: 2.5 m (from what i remember)
Area of the Thames within London: 2050 ha (Tidal Thames habitat audit)
Depth of the Thames at the Barrier at lowest astronomical tide, which we will take as a fairly arbitrary guess at the average depth of the whole Thames within London: 6.1 m (Imray chart C2, based on Admiralty soundings)
So, how much of the hole can the Thames's water fill? I hope it's not too much to interrupt your critical flow to ask for a little bit of GCSE-level mathematics ...
-- tom
no subject
Date: 2006-12-26 11:25 pm (UTC)Also, I thought "Dark Times" was supposed to be understood literally rather than metaphorically: the time before the first stars began to burn. But I've only watched the episode once and I was partially distracted throughout.
Also, I think "Arachnos" was first draft. By the second draft they had become "Racnoss", clearly a substantial step forward in sophistication.