Ask Lemmy

Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn't do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.

Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn't even consistent in the kind of bullshit it's throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says "don't worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that's what we're doing this week."

Farscape was barely sci-fi. It verged hard into science fantasy, where the science part was essentially magic in space.

Doctor Who is pure science fantasy. But it's science fantasy more akin to star wars (which is part space opera, part science fantasy) where there's a certain degree of internal continuity, even when canon is thrown out the window or just retconned. For Dr who, the consistency is in the fact of time travel, and the doctor being a much more potent creature than they seem on the surface.

The absurdity of the doctor is that it's an excuse to run around, utter technobabble, and tell some surprisingly interesting stories that would otherwise be unrelated. That patchwork is likely why you can't/won't accept the absurdity of it the way you can with farscape where it's more ensemble character driven.

Doctor who relies on the doctor/companion characters being your "in" to the story. The farscape characters are the story itself. It's closer to more firmly sci-fi sci-fi like Babylon 5, or the second Battlestar Galactica in that regard. But it also does the situational drama the way star trek did it, to some degree. That is what gives farscape its charm; it pays homage to science fiction tropes, with puppets lol.

Now, modern Who does a bit more character work here and there. There's a little less of the one-off episodes, sprinkled with the usual recurring villains, and the long term story arcs are centered more on each companion/doctor grouping than the older Who.

Sometimes, even as a Who fan from the eighties, watching Tom Baker grin and give his wink-and-a-nudge joy to the silliness of it all, the absurdity can be hard to accept. Not impossible! I do accept it, but there are times where I have to choose to do so lol. But Pertwee was peak absurdity, imo. Even K-9 can't match that era.

Where the absurdity of modern Who falls a little flat is how all the companions end up having a portion of their run basically being part of a comedy duo that tells inside jokes. They become fast friends with the doctor, and the writers have them riffing off of each other like Abbott and Costello, no matter what the rest of their personality is like. You could probably pick a more accurate comedy duo with some thought, but that's the best my tired brain can do lol.

Point being that the absurdity is sometimes shoe-horned in as a way to make it feel like the companions and the doctor have spent all the time in between episodes having other adventures. But it's off screen, so it feels forced too often.

I guess the question is "What Who have you watched?"

For my money, peak Who will always be Tom Baker. Yes, it's absurd, he knows it's absurd and leans into it.

Yeah, Doctor Who is really far fetched and bizarre, but all the shows are fiction. Doctor Who doesn't even try to explain the fictional part. It's not a requirement, but makes some things difficult to accept.

An extreme example of the opposite would be Star Trek, which offers at least one explanation for most fictional things like they can accelerate that fast because "inertial dampeners" or "the neutrino emissions of the tricorder scan affected it".

You're not wrong. You just don't have the absurdly strong nostalgia goggles that are required.

(fwiw: I don't get it either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

New Who tends to run on Bugs Bunny logic but also wants you to take it seriously. Try some old Doctor Who if you can handle very bad effects. Early Tom Baker or the Jon Pertwee stuff at least tries to make sense.

Also they often have the doctor have to work at the problem and have a plausible solution. Now it's just I pushed the radiation in my shoe.

Back then the sonic screwdriver was just a high tech swiss army knife. The doctor would use it to open panels and rewire things. These days it's a do anything magic wand.

I grew up watching New Who. I never got into Classic Who. Part of it is just that you love the characters and eventually learn to accept that the universe is big and wacky shit happens. The Doctor usually has an idea of whats going on, and that's all you really need. Imo the audience is like an auxiliary companion; we're along for the ride and learning wtf is going on just like whoever's with the Doctor. Our minds can't always comprehend what's going on, but thats okay. We'll figure out a way through and sometimes even save the day ourselves. And at the end of it all we might be a little closer to the Doctor than a normal person, and we can use that to save the world when the Doctor is off saving another one.

ETA: Also the Doctor is a wonderful character. I love everything except the Chibnall era because no one there understood the Doctor. I really really wish we had someone else as the first female doctor because I think it could've been great but instead we got someone who gave more ammunition to the sexists. The Doctor's character has so much depth and mystery and demonstrates an ideal of humanity in the same way Star Trek does. I think one of the best examples of this is in the 50th anniversary special with the Doctor's monologue at the end with the two boxes. I'm paraphrasing, but, "at the end of the day all wars end with what people should've done from the beginning: talk. If people just sat down and talked it out all could be resolved without a single drop of blood. The war you fight will only invite someone to fight another war against you." I'm horribly butchering it but it's a really beautiful speech. It's not a perfect response to all injustice but nothing ever will be. Eventually we just have to stop and move forward if we ever want to see a brighter future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCYobBjA1kk

Same for me but with Dune/Star Trek vs Star Wars. I don't get Star Wars and refuse to accept that lightsabers are a real weapon.

Different target audience?

You like what you like, idk why you have to be wrong about it. If you want insight into yourself on why you like this and not that, then therapy is where to go.

And I shall die there with you, friend. It all comes down to the quality of the writing.

Opinions on Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Sounds like maybe what you don't like is British humour.

i think a lot of great points have been made in this thread, but it's also worth saying- you can't be wrong about what you do and don't dig!

it's been about 25 years since i seen it, so i don't remember; when was farscape absurd?

same

It sorta depends on the genre. It was initially supposed to be sorta a science education show but they abandoned that quick.

Farscape was so underrated. I love that show.