Will Doctor Who’s New Season Suck? Science Says Yes

The following features more spoilery than a truck full of week-old milk orbiting the sun. Beware.

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Doctor Who is coming back this August. If you haven’t seen the just-released teaser, go watch it now. Ultimate swear-bear Peter Capaldi is slipping into the Doctor’s ever-changing slippers and we’re generally fanning ourselves at the prospect of further titillating adventures in relative dimensions. Since its re-boot-magining in 2005, Doctor Who has transcended nerd basements and become a global phenomenon among children and parents, nerds and normals, Tumblrs and whinier Tumblrs.

The 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, aired in 90 countries and 1,500 cinemas in November last year. This August, we rejoin the adventure with a new Doctor and a new season, the show’s eighth. The science fiction fan in all of us, though, should be pausing for thought and wondering: since when did a TV science fiction series run for eight years? Could the curse of seven befall the Twelfth Doctor?

Seven Seasons, Severed Dreams

Modern science fiction shows tend to lay themselves to rest at seven seasons — if they last that long. British science fiction comedy Red Dwarf’s first batch (1988-1993) spanned six series. Babylon 5, the greatest science fiction TV series of all time (go to hell, jerks!) held its own for five seasons.

The same goes for space-based series Earth: Final Conflict; British sci-fi dramedy Misfits; J.J. Abrams-ified X-Files clone Fringe; superhero cash-in Heroes; Stargate: Atlantis and Kevin Sorbo in space, aka Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda. Farscape, the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, Sliders, Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood and Star Trek: Enterprise all limped past the four-season mark, while many others struggled to round out three seasons (SeaQuest DSV, Roswell, The Twilight Zone [1985-89]). Nope, not even going to mention Firefly, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. or Caprica. At all.

Some deserved cancellation, like BBC’s single agonising season of Outcasts, a post-apocalyptic frontier disaster. All the characters were played by a wooden stake, who doubled as executive story editor. Oh, and the handsome guy from Ugly Betty was the villain. WTF?

The Geordi Principle

What happens to a science fiction show as it nears that fateful seventh season? By way of explanation, we could point to a little known and seldom-cited principle that wasn’t really a principle until I said it was just now. During the writing of season seven of The Next Generation, writer (later executive producer of Deep Space Nine and Battlestar Galactica) Ronald D. Moore realised that TNG needed a merciful bullet to the positronic brain, fast. Episode three, ‘Interface’, dealt with an out-of-character Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge (the dude with a glittery headband for eyes). Precis: Geordi temporarily loses the plot because he thinks that his mum survived a horrific, absolutely un-survivable space crash. The once logical-to-a-fault Geordi was now running about the Enterprise believing in ghosts and endangering the crew.

Moore wrote at the time:

I think it was a point where we were in the room and we were talking about bringing Geordi’s mother in, and we all kind of looked at each other and we were like, ‘This is sad. This is the best we can do? Is this the best we can do, is Geordi’s mother?’ It was such a ‘who cares’ idea that we were just sort of, ‘Oh man… This show has got to end’.

Far from a full blown shark jump, TNG still had some good moments left in it, but pushing past seven seasons felt like pushing shit up a monolith. Does the Geordi Principle apply to Doctor Who? Should Doctor Who preserve itself from a long, slow decline and dematerialise into the sunset?

The Time War, And The End Of The Narrative Arc

For season eight (34 if we counting the first run, which we won’t), Doctor Who needs more going for it than self-referential chuckling and assertions that “lots of planets have a North”. When all great tent-pole arcs end, so must TV shows. It’s the fundamental law of narrative.

The Time War, and the Doctor’s precise role in it, was the show’s principal mystery and remnant kernel of science-fiction-y tension. What did the Doctor do? Why is he the only Time Lord left? It was seeded into nearly every episode, in one way or another. It hovered over every tangential character such as the enigmatic Face of Boe, sassy blue monk Dorium Maldovar, and John Simm in his excellent turn as The Master; it all kept eye-rolling fans clinging onto the show while the Doctor began talking to a horse named Susan. The Time War held the series together like atoms hold together you or me. So what does Steven Moffat, show-runner and self-proclaimed King of Doctor Who, do? He explains it away in last year’s Day of the Doctor special.

He also partially ‘solved’ the problem of current companion Clara’s ‘impossibility’, thus placing her in perilous need of actual characterisation. From this point on, in terms of a grand unifying arc, there’s nothing on a ‘fate of the universe’ scale to hold on to. What vein of plot could be as as rich and fertile as the Time War? Everywhere The Doctor goes, everything he does has to have some kind of purpose, like a Chekhov’s planet. Without it, Doctor Who is a glorified anthology series. Find The Doctor’s mum, anyone?

Science Fiction’s Modern Era

The modern era of science fiction TV took root in the early 1980s. In 1981, UK audiences welcomed the first TV adaptations of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Day of the Triffids. Two years later in America, the V miniseries signaled science fiction’s shift into prime time. Dealing with a race of extra-terrestrial ‘visitors’ silently taking over the Earth, it stood as touchstone for serious and intelligent science fiction programming, using the genre to explore humanity’s current problems through parable. It was true ‘science fiction’ in opposition to ‘genre-lite’ sci-fi shows, which science fiction’s crankiest uncle Harlan Ellison defined thus:

Sci-fi is a debasement…sci-fi is one of those horrific crotchets. It’s not even a real phrase. It diminishes anything. It’s like referring to the feminist movement as ‘fem-lib’. I suppose all Spanish literature would be ‘spic-fic’ or all Jewish literature is ‘kike-fic’. It’s all intended to diminish and makes it easy for people to dismiss it.

TV science fiction’s next greatest leap forward was in 1987 in the return of the Star Trek franchise, starting with Star Trek: The Next Generation. (TNG) It proved hugely successful, earning 58 Emmy nominations and winning 19 times during its seven seasons in first-run syndication. The Next Generation‘s darker, moodier brother Deep Space Nine also chalked up seven seasons (1993-1999.) So did its far-flung, fan-service happy sister Voyager. (1995-2001.) Are we seeing a pattern here?

The Federation’s triumph over the Dominion spelled the end of Deep Space Nine. The conclusion of the epic Shadow War on Babylon 5 should’ve closed the door on that series, only for cable network TNT to deliver a last-minute reprieve (and a surprisingly decent fifth series). Battlestar Galactica has an end. Even shitty Voyager has an end. They all have to end. They must end to make way for fresh new shows.

The Next Wave

Yes, contrary to popular belief, TV science fiction hasn’t died, forgotten in an abandoned rescue pod. Right now, we’re being treated to the third season of Showtime Canada’s time travel/police procedural Continuum, featuring Rachel Nichols as out-of-her-time conflicted super-cop Keira Cameron. She’s TV science fiction’s best female lead since Voyager’s Captain Kathryn Janeway, and the show is binge-watch-and-lose-your-job good.

Mind-bending clone thriller Orphan Black returned in April this year for a second season, another offering from the Great White North.

US cable channel SyFy’s second season of science fiction western and MMORPG tie-in Defiance will premiere this June, with Aussie Grant Bowler playing the eponymous town’s dashing lawman. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either.

Further along 2014’s horizon is J. Michael Straczynski’s mysterious new collaboration with the Wachowski siblings. It’s called Sense8, and it’s a Netflix exclusive. These scatterings of shows may not amount to even a hill of beans, but as the great J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5) points out, television executives are generally hostile toward science fiction, despite its proven selling power. Good TV science fiction requires the double miracle of grabbing hands being kept both out of the till and out of the script books. The fact we have real choices that aren’t Star Trek spin-offs? That’s bucking one hell of a stubborn-ass trend.

Doctor Who could still amaze us, despite labouring under a big cloud of theoretical ‘meh’, but maths tells us that we shouldn’t be too optimistic. Fans should rightly beware of science fiction shows lurching towards its eighth season — doubly so, considering that the series could have been laid to rest last year, with everything wrapped up as neatly as the Eleventh Doctor’s bow-tie. As it stands, we’ll just have to wait ‘til this August to see if the spirit of Geordi’s mum ruins everything.

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