Farscape is a very soft sci-fi, but it has a mostly consistent world that mostly follows its internal logic. It has muppet aliens and the supernatural along side more traditional TV space tropes, but the narrative makes sense as presented, and it doesn’t do much to hurt your suspension of disbelief.
Doctor Who is the opposite of consistent. It makes shit up as it goes along and isn’t even consistent in the kind of bullshit it’s throwing at you. It can be tropey nonsense, comedy overriding reality, fairy tale reasoning that breaks down when you try to think about it to much, or whatever other idiocy it feels like being today. Instead of building a world that you can understand, it basically just says “don’t worry about it, assume we already did the boring set up stuff, and just run with the fact that plastic can be alive and chasing after people because that’s what we’re doing this week.”
And that there are apparently several alien species concurrently living underneath London at any given time.
This is explains why the people I know who love Doctor Who liked Star Trek: Picard. If you can suspend your disbelief for Doctor Who, Picard had some crazy scenes that felt good in the moment but kind of locally breaks reality and seems kind of stupid in the broader context.
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.
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.
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.
I think the comedy duo aspect was part if a reason that David Tenant/Catherine Tate were so engaging to watch
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.
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”.
I guess the question is “What Who have you watched?”
For my money, peak Who will always be Tom Baker. Yes, it’s absurd, he knows it’s absurd and leans into it.
Baker FTW. He understood the assignment: Gandalf-Bugs-Mr-Bean, saving the universe with absolute pacifism and a crumpled bag of jelly babies.
The remake in the new format completely destroyed the character archetype, and turned him into a forced-whimsy action hero with a side of self-pity.
Make mine Pertwee. The Barry Letts era is the most consistently good the show ever was, or likely ever will be. There were some individual Tom Baker stories that were better under Hinchcliffe and Williams, and some that were much worse *coughs* JNT *coughs* . Perhaps one of the hazards of Tom Baker’s long tenure. 😆
