Trust me. I am aware of Doctor Who. I have been watching it a very, very long time. I still do. I also know about the rules on British Television, and whatever your, or my, subjective opinion may be about ‘scary’, I know what it can and can’t show, what it can intimate, and what it can be explicit about.
I'm sure you think that's true, but the record shows that the themes you're complaining about have been a staple of Doctor for the last ten years now. So either you're misunderstanding what the standards are, or you're misunderstanding how they're being applied.
Or both.
Objectively, Doctor Who is less violent than DSC.
Objectively? It is not. Just counting the acts of violence on both shows, you find they are either neck and neck or Doctor Who is slightly ahead for its first ten episodes. And this before you consider that Discovery has never depicted a person being literally turned inside out by a nanorobot swarm as the parts of a gas mask grow out of the lining of his throat and eventually consume what's left of his face. That was SEASON 1, dude.
I don't know what the hell is going on with British Television, but if you're trying to make the case that Discovery has shown us ANYTHING as disturbing as "The Empty Child" then you are truly and deeply warped.
Context is everything. Who is family viewing.
Because a carnivorous airborne swarm that looks exactly like shadows on the ground but will literally strip you to a skeleton in three quarters of a second is perfectly okay for kids, but a blimp apparently made out of human skin is too damn far...
British people are weird as hell.
That, I think, is a mistake. It should be, because that was one of Treks strengths. Who merely illustrates when moving away from that can be a mistake (roughly speaking, 1985, and again in about oooh...2014? 2015? Thereabouts..it hasn’t really got back on track for audiences under about 12 yet.) and the effect that has on audience.
Okay, let's cut the bullshit here: the thing that had an "effect on the audience" was the negative reaction to some of Moffatt's creative decisions and the general incoherence of the "Hybrid" storyline, plus Peter Capaldi taking an exceptionally long time to find his groove as a Doctor persona (he dabbled with "Cranky old Scott" which failed to really land and then switched to the slightly more interesting "Hipster Doctor" with the guitar and the glasses, which also sort of failed to land). Moffatt's storylines in the Capaldi era came off as meandering and unfocussed, both internally and as a series, which annoyed fans and made the show alot harder for casual viewers to follow.
In truth, the "horror" aspects of the series are and have always been its strongest points. The Weeping Angels, the Vashta Narada, the Silence, the Ood, these are all remembered for their weirdness and also for the emotions they evoke when they go bad and come after you. Doctor Who is monster theater more than anything else and it really always has been. What's been alienating younger fans is the brooding/depressing tone of the writing itself, something FAR more subtle than is indicated with your idiosyncratic obsession with "violence." Doctor Who is and has always been rather violent and disturbing, but only under Baker and Capaldi did it also become
grim.
Violence, kids understand. They get violence, they expect it. Little boys imitate it and even glorify it because they're boys, they're stupid like that, it's how they're wired. But show those same little kids a story about a man deliberately manipulating his best friend into committing a minor war crime as an abject lesson on the Machiavellian nature of the universe... that hits kids below the belt. Because while they expect the world to be violent and scary, they also expect it to be FAIR, and The Doctor being an asshole and getting away with it disturbs people on a far more primal level. 12-and-unders don't like
grim, but then nobody really does except for goths, cynics, and people who managed to get through Atlas Shrugged without developing an aneurysm.
Discovery is many things -- violent, humorous, exciting, sometimes even a little bit sexy -- but it is far from grim.
