I watched both episodes of Nu Doctor Who this weekend, and I actually didn’t hate the “Space Babies” as much as I thought going in. The second episode, “The Maestro”, however, is completely insufferable. Russell T. Davies seems to be working without any kind of oversight, and it shows.
I did a full video review of Space Babies on YouTube, but I was thinking about how lazy the world-building was.
The thing about Doctor Who and any Space Adventures of the Week, is every time a new area gets explored, worldbuilding has to be done. Russell T. Davies tried to handwave as much as he could focus on what amounted to a “bottle episode” with Space Babies.
The whole point was to insert a lecture on abortion to the audience, and because of that, it made what actually was an interesting concept fall pretty flat. He had babies talking and moving in electronic chairs on a space station, trapped and afraid of a monster. All of that would have been fine and good, but instead of going the extra mile for worldbuilding how they got there, he just relied on “Oh, I’ll throw in this political message, and maybe people won’t call me on it.”
Science fiction requires deep worldbuilding to be great. In my first drafts of The Stars Entwined (when I had it titled These That Twice Befell) really didn’t have any kind of uniqueness to the aliens. I didn’t develop the Aryshan bondsense between tribes and then the complete telepathic bond of mates until a much later version, which resulted in me having to rewrite the whole novel.
Even though it was painstaking, it was worth the effort, because now I have a rich world to write stories in.
Doctor Who, in this iteration, has nothing. It just has the lecture on abortion and some vague company causing problems in space, and so it doesn’t feel real and falls flat as a result.
Science fiction is about its uniqueness in its world, that sense of wonder, and if you abandon that, you really don’t have much to offer.
I’m working on a sequel series to The Stars Entwined now that’s going to be a lot more on the adventure side and taking care not to make mistakes that Doctor Who is doing on its programming.
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