jetpack_monkey | Your Stupid Minds! Stupid! Stupid! Or, RTD Thinks We're All Going to Become Idiots

A rant on Doctor Who (2005).

Watching old!Who, one is struck by the resilience of the human race. Time and time again they are invaded -- Daleks, Cybermen, Autons, Julian Glover -- and time and time again they fight back. Sure the monsters are cheesy and the storylines often half-cocked, but there's a spirit there. You understand why the Doctor is so damned fond of Earth.

Along comes RTD and his brand-new version of Doctor Who and it looks shinier. The acting is better (while The Doctor himself is traditionally well-acted, the same couldn't be said for supporting roles in the old series), the effects more dazzling, the storylines sharper, and the characterizations far more concrete. All-in-all, everything's improved, right?

Well, everything except the human race. In new!Who, human beings are bloody idiots and they get dumber as the years go on. In all major invasion stories set in the present ("Rose", "Aliens of London/World War III", "Christmas Invasion", "Army of Ghosts/Doomsday"), the people of Earth cower and panic under alien attack. It's always the Doctor's ingenuity that saves the day (or his companions, but there's the suggestion that the rules of human stupidity don't apply to them). When they seek scientific knowledge, in the case of the Guinevere space probe or the Ghost Shift, they are punished for it (admittedly, the Ghost Shift was poorly motivated).

On the alternate!Earth, the entire telecommunications network the world over is owned by a single man who plugs information directly into the brains of the people, and only a handful of rebels bother to ask why. You're telling me nobody tries to introduce a competing product? That Cybus Industries just owns the market wholesale? Where's the open source community gone? Everybody just sits down and accepts it. Gosh, it's so nice to not have to innovate anymore. Thank you, Cybus!

Moving ahead into future civilizations -- in "Dalek" we see a man who owns the entire Internet, a wheeler-dealer who, again, owns the entire market share on a major aspect of communications... and nobody cares. We're given the impression that nobody actually *knows*.

In "The Long Game", a single entity owns the news. All of it. Everybody just accepts it. The Doctor has to show up and explain in very small words to the civilization that it's not a good thing. The rebel faction that shows up seems ridiculously unorganized, sending a single operative onto Satellite Five with no backup.

In "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways", we're informed that after Satellite Five goes down, the news just stopped. Okay, what? There's an entire rebel network out there, apparently, and they don't take to the airwaves? Entire governments collapse, incapable of starting their own information services? Have people become so insipidly lazy that those who are ostensibly in charge can't muster the initiative to do anything more than run bread and circuses while everything dies around them? The human race has either grown intensely stupid or it's grown intensely lazy with a side of intensely stupid.

Okay, fine. Something's got to evolve some billion years later on New Earth, right? Nah. First, Cat Nuns grow diseased humans for experimentation and apparently no government authority required them to keep the architectural plans for their building on file, nor did anyone ask why there was such a huge discrepancy between the interior of the hospital and the exterior ("smaller on the inside").

Then, "Gridlock" shows us people who spend decades on a motorway, under the hope that they'll arrive somewhere nobody's seen in all those years. Nobody's heard from the police. That recording they're subjected to must have repeated at least one in all those years. Nobody questions, nobody asks. All forms of mass communication are controlled through a central authority and everybody just shrugs and continues their drive into oblivion. Nobody pulls off and goes home. Nobody seeks an alternate route that doesn't involve a cramped metal box. Worse, the Face of Boh has the power to keep a really complex traffic jam going for decades, but he doesn't have enough to open a few doors and turn off the pitch controls? And why was it that he had to wire himself into the city in the first place? Oh yeah, because the idiots upstairs drugged themselves into oblivion. If "Big Brother" can survive to the year 200,000, surely somebody in the year Five Billion Something had seen Serenity (was I the only one thinking that the cat nun should've just said "It was the Pax" while explaining the situation to The Doctor?).

The only real respect the human race gets is in the past, where they can face down werewolves, take on "blue elementals", and figure out complicated electronics with absolutely no training.

So, my question to you, Mr. Russell T. Davies, is this: why the lack of faith? Why are humans increasingly easy to lead as we "progress" (as it were)? Is it that making the human race more intelligent, more complex makes stories harder to write? Is coming up with back story beyond "look, external force drags human race along by their nose" really that hard? If it is, why not just dodge the question a bit and set some more stories on alien worlds? It worked brilliantly for Tom Baker in stories like "The Pirate Planet."