I love the absurdity of Farscape, but I do not accept the absurdity of Doctor Who. I will die on this hill. I do not understand the absurdity of Doctor Who. Why am I wrong?
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.
I'm unsure personally, but a lot of the blame definitely falls at the feet of Chibnall. I hope that when i watch the newer stuff I'll be more impressed.
I dropped Dr. Who after Peter Capaldi was done. Partially because Moffet's awful writing with Clara as the sidekick and partially because the BBC wouldn't put newer episodes on US Netflix for years
I loved Capaldi. Hes my favorite Doctor. I missed the premier of the Chibnall era so I was just gonna wait until the entire season released so I could binge it, but then I heard the reviews and stopped watching for a few years. I need to return to it now though.
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.
It was supposed to be a history education show. Travel through time and learn about history. They dropped that by story 2 where they go to an alien planet and meet the Daleks.
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.
Honestly I wouldn’t even call doctor who science fantasy. It’s just pure fantasy set around space travel and aliens. There’s absolutely nothing science about it, and they really don’t even try to make it seem that way. Anything that should have some sort of science explanation is just hand waved away, and thus internally inconsistent. The dr who universe is basically full of magic. Magic potions, magic wands, magic enemies, magic travel boxes, magic immortality, etc.
I think the sonic screwdriver is about as close as they have ever come to trying to explain any of it, and they basically only did that to point out the (rather absurd, story-necessary) limitations of the thing. One still has no actual idea what it can do or how it can work, just what it usually does and what it can’t do (sometimes and/or probably).
I agree actually, but the screwdriver is sciencey, and TARDIS does mention spacetime in a way lol.
Imo, the only reason it gets listed as sci-fi is that there wasn't anything else to call a time travel show back when it started getting popular. Iirc, it was originally intended to be a history exploration more than anything else.
Battlestar Galactica might start as sci-fi but ends up as science fantasy. At some point a character comes back from the dead, becomes an angel, and much of the original mysticism becomes literal.
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".