The Bad Science of Doctor Who

[TommyR01D]

Last year I made similar threads for Voyager and The Next Generation, now it's time for this franchise.

To prevent this from going off course, I will lay down a few constraints from the start:

• No dismissals of the premise of the thread: Yes, we know it's a TV show. Yes, we know it's science fiction. If that meant details weren't worth dissecting then there would be little point in having a forum at all.
  
• Travel through time, dimensional transcendentalism, lots of inhabited planets, teleportation, regeneration and various other staples are obviously necessary for Doctor Who to work. You can point out specific instances of them being used badly or their implications being misunderstood, but the simple fact of their existence is off-limits for this discussion.
• In general Doctor Who tends to be a rung lower than Star Trek on the Mohs scale, so a little more leniency can be given to this franchise than to that one in terms of scientific accuracy. Still, that does not mean that egregious howlers can go undetected.

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In 1973's Planet of the Daleks (statistically the most likely title for a serial) , the aggressive Spiridon plants spray that outside of the TARDIS with a thick sap, which then forms a hard shell that locks the Doctor inside. He worries about the air supply, and finds his emergency tanks are empty. He almost suffocates before the Thals arrive to break off the sap and drag him out.

Now just wait a minute - the TARDIS is a space-ship! Shouldn't its outer shell be airtight anyway, with the oxygen supply recycled internally? Even if that failed, the vessel's interior volume is enormous, sometimes apparently infinite. It should be a long time before the occupant has to resort to wheeling the cylinders out. This sequence of events only makes sense if the TARDIS really is just a police box and draws its air from outside, in defiance of everything seen before or since.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

It would be a shorter thread if you asked what science in DW is accurate.

however, and I say this as someone who likes the dramatic aspects of Kill the Moon, the moon being the egg for a giant space chicken gaining mass out of nowhere and being able to immediately lay a new egg in orbit a minute after it’s own birth so future episodes showing the moon don’t have a continuity problem takes the cake for me.

inaccurate science rubs me wrong more when it tries to present to be extra sciency.
And there was a lot of talk about physics in that episode.

 

[Marc]

It would be a shorter thread if you asked what science in DW is accurate.

however, and I say this as someone who likes the dramatic aspects of Kill the Moon, the moon being the egg for a giant space chicken gaining mass out of nowhere and being able to immediately lay a new egg in orbit a minute after it’s own birth so future episodes showing the moon don’t have a continuity problem takes the cake for me.

inaccurate science rubs me wrong more when it tries to present to be extra sciency.
And there was a lot of talk about physics in that episode.

You realise that everyone who'd manage to forget that episode will now want to hunt you down till the of time

 

[The Wormhole]

The opening scene of The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe where the Doctor spends several minutes outside in space without a spacesuit and doesn't even hold his breath. This gets compounded several years later in Oxygen when they try to present a realistic depiction of exposure to the vacuum of space. Which also compounded the silly space helmets from Four to Doomsday which left the face completely exposed.

 

[TommyR01D]

Given the pre-established design of the Ood, I would not have gone for a land of snow and ice as their primary habitat. It's quite jarring that the humans have to wear thick coats yet the bald Ood just have thin overalls. In particular you would expect their handheld hindbrains and dangling facial tentacles to freeze over and possibly drop off.

 

[diankra]

Watch, or rather listen to, the Wheel in Space. The Cybermen destroyed a star so they could get take over a space station when it's hit by the radiation from that stellar detonation.

About as insane as any physicist forced to follow it.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Watch, or rather listen to, the Wheel in Space. The Cybermen destroyed a star so they could get take over a space station when it's hit by the radiation from that stellar detonation.

About as insane as any physicist forced to follow it.

Almost as ridiculous as making stars go supernova to change their gravity signature to tweak the path of a weird space ribbon.

 

[TommyR01D]

Speaking of stars, the revived era has a persistent problem with times of day and year. Obviously we know (and frequently see) that Christmas specials are actually filmed in the summer, but it seems to extend to the plot and the effects as well: That opening zoom shot (first in Rose, then repeated in The Christmas Invasion and The Runaway Bride) shows sunlight falling on Earth in way that indicates it to be around June, not December. Then we have the Tenth Doctor still being within fifteen hours of his regeneration cycle even though he's made it through yesterday's sunset and into Christmas morning just after the winter solstice. Then in Army of Ghosts & Doomsday we have all those shots of ghost Cybermen appearing, then later disappearing, in front of stock photographs of landmarks around the world, all of which are in daylight simultaneously.

 

[diankra]

That hadn't struck me, but yep, global daylight!

 

[Qonundrum]

"The Ice Warriors" has the Doctor boasting with a facial expression even I can understand, "no plants, no carbon dioxide!" Ugh... (the novelization of the story fixes the issue, so this is probably due to a hasty script moment not caught until after filming, but by then it was too late to fix it.)

"Meglos" just throws in any old science term names, with "hysteresis" being the jackpot here, if not flinging the word "baryon" in tandom with "multiplication" around for a cheap thrill, but at least they're using real names.

Even one season earlier and there's technobabblegarbage like "gravitic anomalizer!" and it's ten times the cringe. Fake science that implies a loosely relatable term (at best) but can't even follow through on that.

"The Twin Dilemma" hoists the idea of placing planets in a different temporal "zone" prior to Jaconda's, in an attempt to keep food plentiful forevermore. But the planets would have be shifting time incessantly, not just a one-off, to have constantly plentiful crops to nom nom with. (Which is a moot point, since the real goal was to cause to crash them in order to launch a million giant snail eggs to infect the galaxy with. At sublight speeds, a single egg - assuming it makes it through an atmosphere (an issue the episode surprisingly addresses since these shells can somehow survive the temperatures and shock of an exploding sun!) - would take forever to get anywhere, assuming it lands anywhere and should a baby snail break out of it, what are the chances it wouldn't be killed off by a local civilization there (should one exist, since the number of habitable planets at any given time...) But nature is chaotic in any number of ways. Even two aquarium fish don't realize their world is in a 30 gallon box but raise 200 eggs' worth of fry anyway.

 

[TommyR01D]

In City of Death Professor Kerensky has invented a primitive time machine, which can cause time inside the machine to pass faster - whether forward or backward - than outside. This is demonstrated by placing an egg inside and showing the chicken hatch, grow to full size, then die, all in a few seconds from our perspective.

The problem here - admittedly far from unique to this episode, or even to Doctor Who - is that the time bubble does not contain a supply of food or water. I'm not sure it even lets air in. Even if the hatching could continue as normal, the baby could not increase its mass and should probably starve to death fairly quickly.

 

[publiusr]

Well, he wanted to use the machine himself...perhaps had nutrients air and waste inserted/removed via transmat

 

[ED-209]

I always thought there was something almost sexual about those plants on PotD.

 

[TommyR01D]

The Impossible Planet has an obvious error in its name - contrary to the Doctor saying "That's impossible!" over and over again, it is possible for a planet to orbit a black hole (albeit probably not that close).

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

The Impossible Planet has an obvious error in its name - contrary to the Doctor saying "That's impossible!" over and over again, it is possible for a planet to orbit a black hole (albeit probably not that close).

Orbit, yes. Suspended above it, no.

 

[TommyR01D]

This one might be more of an engineering problem: in Death to the Daleks, the power drain from the Exxilon city causes the Dalek spaceship - and all others - to shut down, leaving them trapped. The Daleks themselves are not disabled (there's a handwave that they move by telekinesis, which is itself rather problematic), but their death rays do not fire, leaving them to click impotently at the Exxilon archers.

Not long into the story the Daleks have replaced their energy weapons with "primitive" but "moderately efficient" bullet guns, and test them by shooting at a small model TARDIS. How did they invent, manufacture and retrofit themselves with new parts so quickly in a ship whose power has failed?