[Spoilers] Once you really start getting into the premises and logical extensions of the episodes (i.e. doing criticism), sometimes things break down. Premises can be disturbing because, if true, they’re scary, or they can be disturbing because they don’t make sense. I’ll rank them in a subsequent post, but here’s what I find scary, odd and/or incomprehensible, broken down by episode:
Episode 0: “The Christmas Invasion” (Russell T. Davies): The first thing that’s odd carries over from the Series 1, episode 13: Time Lords are immortal; they don’t have to die, but can choose to regenerate. So why aren’t there more of them? Oh yes, the Doctor killed them all.
Next, there are creatures called “pilot fish” that sense energy emissions, either from Time Lord regeneration or from the Time Vortex, it’s unclear], and travel through space to harvest the power. However, they’re precursors to the Sycorax, but the Sycorax aren’t here to harvest the energy, so why the pilot fish? It seems like they just wanted to use creatures/droids disguised as Father Christmas and Christmas trees to terrify.
There are secret agencies in the world that deal with monsters and aliens. The idea of secret bodies of government keeping people safe is a staple of British fiction (see James Bond, Mission Impossible, the Avengers [not that one], etc.), and will become a theme of the reboot; UNIT (UNified [or United Nations] Intelligence Taskforce) is one, Torchwood will be clarified later. But the idea is, the Doctor comes and goes; the Earth needs more stable protection.
Colonialism–as perhaps an extension of Capitalism–is alive and well in the universe. We addressed the latter in Series 1, but whereas the Slitheen wanted to irradiate and sell off pieces of Earth (killing everybody), the Sycorax want the land, minerals, precious stones, AND to sell half the population into slavery–so which one’s worse?
You can mind-control/hypnotize people through their blood. Blood is powerful in this show, but the idea that it could be used in mind-control is preposterous.
[Some] Aliens have to recognize and obey the “sanctified rules of combat.” The Dalek didn’t, the Gelth didn’t, but who’s counting? Also, the Sycorax leader cheats and tries to kill the Doctor when his back is turned, so this is a very loosely followed convention.
Thanks to Torchwood, the earth is apparently now a Death Star. On Harriet Jones’ orders, five green beams come off of the earth, meet in space and destroy the Sycorax ship. Where have we seen that before? And when will we see it again?
Episode 1: “New Earth” (Russell T. Davies): Apparently, Lady Cassandra O’Brien’s consciousness wasn’t housed in her physical, two-dimensional body (because that would be impossible) but in her brain, which was saved (off to the side). However, her consciousness can be transferred to another human through a “psychograft,” which at first requires a device and a lot of energy (they trip the breakers). Apparently, it’s banned tech that compresses the consciousness of the original host. However, then Lady Cassandra transfers her consciousness just by exhaling on the Doctor? And the later transitions don’t even rely on that!
Genetically engineered and cloned humans will spontaneously develop speech. This one’s a bit old: Either animals (including humans) have a type of species-memory, or it’s the “100 Monkeys effect” where “a new behaviour or idea is said to spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behaviour or acknowledge the new idea” (Wikipedia is about as good as it gets on this one).
The genetically engineered and cloned humans are infected with every known disease in the universe simultaneously, and yet none of these diseases are airborne? The Doctor says, “The air’s sterile,” but how is that even possible?
Episode 2: “Tooth and Claw” (Russell T. Davies): So, precursor to Torchwood, the Torchwood estate has been built as a trap for an alien, werewolf-like life-form. It is passed through bites, is allergic to mistletoe, and turns its host into a werewolf in the moonlight. Later, it explains the strange blood disease of the Royal family, which supposedly began with Queen Victoria.
The most famous diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Noor, which was constantly cut and recut by Prince Albert, was purposefully designed to refract moonlight and force the alien/werewolf back into human form so the guards can defeat it. Both of these premises follow the trend of explaining weird historical phenomena, landmarks and architecture (like the Eye of London, in season 1).
Episode 3: “School Reunion” (Toby Whithouse): Scientists have long sought a “Master Theory” or “Theory of Everything” (ToE), but the Doctor’s universe actually has one: the “Skasis Paradigm,” a theory of time and space. Too bad no one can decode or understand it, which brings up the next point:
Humans, after ingesting Killitane oil, become much smarter, and thus have the capacity to do lots of mental work. That, plus their childish imagination allows them to decode the “Skasis Paradigm.” But apparently, the Krillitanes keep eating the promising students?
The Krillitanes themselves, apparently, can genetically modify themselves to absorb physical traits from other species. That’s perhaps the smartest thing in these episodes. Honestly, what species wouldn’t do that? Except:
Finally, though the oil is described as “Krillitane oil,” it is apparently extremely toxic to the Krillitanes themselves. The Doctor explains that they’ve evolved too far away from their own secretions, but where did the oil come from then? And barrels of it?!? Do they still secrete it, and have to get rid of it immediately? Are they constantly scraping the stuff off themselves (or out of themselves)? Ew.
Episode 4: “The Girl in the Fireplace” (Steven Moffat): We’ve already had the idea of technology misguidedly trying to repair a system it doesn’t seem to understand. In Series 1, it was the nanogenes thinking every human needs a gas mask and to be reduced to a child-like state. Here, it’s ship-repair droids, missing the parts for the repair, and instead using parts of the crew. So the ship is now a cyborg amalgamation. That’s pretty out there.
Then there’s the idea that, though these repair droids can’t find some basic parts, they CAN build a device to punch a hole in time and space to 18th-century France to obtain a single part they need. Honestly, if they can do that, why not punch a whole in time and space to a spaceport? Or a parts warehouse? How about a dry-dock?
Episodes 5 & 6: “Rise of the Cybermen”/”The Age of Steel” (Tom MacRae): Granting the parallel universe theory (which was put forth in Series 1, “Father’s Day”), the Tardis is a living being–grown, not made–as we found out in Series 1 (“Bad Wolf”/”The Parting of the Ways”), and this creature apparently feeds off the energy of the Universe, so, different universe “It’s like diesel in a petrol engine.”
our entertainment technology will be used to take us over. We saw this premise in Series 1 with Satellite 5 in Episodes 12 and 13. There, reality TV was turned into a death sentence, as the Dalek mined individual human cells for candidates for the creation of new Daleks.
Here, in a parallel universe, tech designer John Lumic sells everyone EarPods, an ear-gear device that gives people neural access to the internet, but also allows for their mind control, and later conversion into Cybermen.
Episode 7: “The Idiot’s Lantern” (Mark Gatiss): Ok, here we go again with entertainment technology will be used to take use over. This time, it’s “The Wire,” a being that has converted itself to electricity to escape punishment on its homeworld and is using televisions to consume minds (and faces) and hopefully to reconstruct it’s body (although how that’s supposed to happen is unclear).
Episodes 8 & 9: “The Impossible Planet”/”The Satan Pit” (Matt Jones): Ok, so the big one: Satan was an historical fact in the universe; he’s eternal, and has to be kept on an asteroid, orbiting a black hole–because?!? Why the, “you’ll stay here, and if you try to escape, we’ll chuck you in!” Why not just chuck him in and have done with it?
Then there’s human nature: If there’s something to discover, we’re going to try. Perhaps true.
The Ood are problematic. How convenient, a species that likes to be enslaved. That’s a bit racist in its conception, as Rose points out.
Then there’s the Doctor’s hang-up. That the devil would have had to exist before matter and time. And when was that exactly, anyway?
Episode 10: “Love & Monsters” (Russell T. Davies): I submit: the Abzorbaloff, a being that absorbs people, without itself becoming bigger, and yet they retain enough agency to foil his plans.
Episode 11: “Fear Her” (Matthew Graham): The Isolus: a creature whose technology requires both heat and “emotional strength,” and both are provided by the Olympic torch, as people are caught up in the spectacle.
Oh, and that the Doctor can just jump in, grab the torch run along and light the flame at the games without being tackled by three dozen police or soldiers.
Episodes 12 & 13: “Army of Ghosts”/”Doomsday” (Russell T. Davies): Secret government agencies again–this time Torchwood–are studying alien phenomena to keep Britain safe.
Once again, we see that landmarks are used for nefarious purposes. Here, it’s Canary Wharf, a skyscraper built entirely to reach the spatial disturbance Torchwood wants to study.
The concept of a Void ship, or of the Void period. The void is explained by the Doctor thusly,
The space between dimensions. There’s all sorts of realities around us, different dimensions, billions of parallel universes all stacked up against each other. The Void is the space in between, containing absolutely nothing. Imagine that. Nothing. No light, no dark, no up, no down, no life, no time. Without end. My people called it the Void. The Eternals call it the Howling. But some people call it Hell.
Granting the parallel universe theory (which was put forth in Series 1, “Father’s Day,” and reinforces in this Series in “Rise of the Cybermen”/”The Age of Steel”), the idea that there is there a space between universes, between dimensions is a bit radical. The Doctor says the Void ship exists outside creation, but he previously balked when the Devil said he was outside creation (specifically, preexisting creation), so can we go outside it or not? And where did the Cult of Skaro get it?
Then there’s the idea that the movement into and out of the Void cracks creation, and other beings can travel across that crack–indeed, humans can make the cracks bigger, thus the “ghosts” and the parallel Torchwood teleport devices.
The mind controlling earpieces are back as well, as are the Cybermen. That’s one I missed in Series 1: That we can strip humans of emotions–not just make them cyborgs–to create Cybermen, or that we can focus on the cellular level on a human’s capacity to hate. Which are the “hate cells” anyway? Which are the emotion cells? And yet, the process is incomplete, as Yvonne proves.
The Doctor says he wiped out all Dalek, but the Cult of Skaro keeps coming back like a bad penny. Fine. But where did the Genesis Ark come from? Supposedly, the Time Lords, in their infinite wisdom, created a pocket of space time to entrap millions of Daleks–who may or may not have any food or recreation (or are they trapped in suspended animation as well?)–and encoded it to only open in response to background radiation of the Time Vortex, passed on through touch. So the Doctor didn’t wipe out the Dalek?
But then again, in sucking the Cult of Skaro and all the Dalek and all the Cybermen into the Void, the Doctor does wipe them all out–for good?
As usual, I’ll take comments and suggestions before revealing my favorites. So what’s your vote for the most disturbing premise? Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.
