All those historical figures dropped into the show over the decades are typically there to teach the kids who Madame Curie is. There's education in it. My kids got a lot out of the Demons of Punjab during Whittaker's run and I bet a lot of adults did, too.
"We're turning people into cyborgs" is a lot closer to hard sci-fi than "there's a war between Time and Space."
Well, at least it's not as bad as Kill the Moon. Scientific mumbo-jumbo when it comes to esoteric concepts is one thing, but glaringly ludicrous inaccuracies about things so well-known that even the most casual viewer can see the idiocy is quite another.
And most of it is historically inaccurate, so other than name drops, it’s not really educational in any practical sense.
Don’t mistake me. I’m not defending the war between Time and Space. I’m pushing back against the observably false claim that Who was ever properly educational or in any meaningful way scientifically accurate.
Yeah. It should be more serious and scientifically accurate like Classic Who. Mondas. A hollow earh filled with monsters. Inflatable plastic chairs that eat people. Mannequins that come to life and kill people. Spiders so big they’d collapse under their own weight. Giant single celled organisms. Dinosaurs the size of sky scrappers. Lizard people from the dawn of time. Aliens smart enough to explore the galaxy and conquer parts of it but stupid enough to have a weakness to gold or a literal kill switch in the back of their armor. Mini tanks that are immune to automatic weapons but collapse when hit gingerly with a baseball bat.
And Kill the Moon had both of those in one organism.
Not so gingerly. And it was a baseball bat enhanced by a machine entity that can re-engineer stars.
True enough, but there's a difference between being deliberately fantastical and being comically inaccurate. What makes Kill the Moon bad is that it gets everything wrong about the science while trying to make the science a part of both the puzzle and the dilemma.
If you say so. Doctor Who tends to be both at once.
Why the focus on Kill the Moon? It was no worse than most other Doctor Who episodes. It’s about on par for science in Who. New or Classic.
It's actually pretty notorious. One of the least popular episodes of the time, both among fans and critically, and a lot of reviews cited the scientific inaccuracies as a particular problem.
Because the premise of Kill the Moon would have made life on Earth for millions of years prior to that episode look very different, since the tides and everything else would have been different. And, unless I'm forgetting something, it also should have left the sky permanently without a moon after that.
I’m aware. It’s still about on par for the science in Doctor Who.
So about the same as vast majority of Doctor Who.
