For a long time, Doctor Who has been a stalwart expression of Hollywood’s undying love for sci-fi fantasy. The BBC series may have launched to a relatively smaller audience market, but it quickly grew in both fandom and ratings after the show’s unique story arc found a foothold in pop culture.
But despite the audience’s growing love for the cult-classic sci-fi show, Doctor Who suffers from one glaring shortcoming that was as prominent when it first launched in 2005 as it is today. And while the Doctor has shed his visage time and again and his companions have changed through the years, the showrunners behind Who refuse to change one troubling aspect in its creative structure.
Doctor Who – a relic of the future?
Hollywood has always been driven by the power of imagination. But as genres like science fiction and fantasy came into play, the quality of film escalated drastically from old and dusty Westerns to epics like Star Wars and Avatar. Pioneers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg further raised the market for special effects and visual dynamics with films like Jurassic Park.
By the 21st century, CGI and VFX had become almost synonymous with the film industry. The cinematic quality of a movie was based and judged on its use of visual effects as directors began to increasingly rely on the tool to make their filming process and post-production editing easier.
It comes as a surprise then to see how one of Hollywood’s most classic shows, Doctor Who, can still suffer from wonky graphics even today while films from nearly 30 years ago bear shockingly better CGI. However, Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, may have already solved this particular mystery. In an interview with The Daily Mail, Capaldi claimed:
With Doctor Who, we don’t really have enough — everything on Doctor Who falls to pieces, all of the props fall to pieces and the costumes have to be stuck together with duct tape and velcro and stuff […] I like the kind of B movie… kind of cobbled together quality of it. There’s never really quite enough money, but the ideas are often very special.
While Doctor Who may be the farthest thing from a B-movie, Capaldi may be right in claiming that the show’s strength lies in its storytelling rather than its low-budget props and low-quality CGI aliens. Doctor Who may have become a cult classic in its own right, but no amount of 21st-century technical evolution can fix the Time Lord and his wonky, VFX-allergic alien rivals.
Showrunner Steven Moffat further elaborated on the issue in an episode of Sitcom Geeks, saying:
That (was) the big challenge of Doctor Who… running the risk of looking as cheap now as it did (during the original series), compared to what the rest of TV is doing, unless they put a whole lot more money into it. A show that generates as much money as Doctor Who should be getting more of it back, frankly.
Given that Doctor Who is produced by the publicly-funded BBC, it becomes difficult for the creative team to conjure up believable monsters with a large-scale budget on screen.
Doctor Who takes a page out of the history books
In rare cases, Doctor Who has employed an unnervingly simplistic ideology in its storylines – we fear the things we cannot see. This method of scaring the audience has been in practice for nearly a hundred years. Films from the silent era and early talkies relied heavily on jarring sounds and an interplay of light and shadow to create a distorting effect of monsters lurking in the dark. This is what made horror one of the first and most profitable genres in Hollywood.
With the audience’s imagination filling in the void where the monsters should have been, filmmakers have successfully delivered cult-classic thrillers like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). Even today, films like Bird Box, The Blair Witch Project, and The Mist use the concept of monsters hidden from sight as a weapon of horror.
Accordingly, some of the best Doctor Who episodes have not been grandiose wars with interdimensional beings in faraway galaxies but alien monsters that we never saw coming – literally. With its shoestring budget, Doctor Who took the audience for a joyride in episodes like Blink, Midnight, Silence in the Library, and Listen, where the enemy was not a real, tangible figure, but one that was never there at all.
The latest season of Doctor Who is currently streaming on Disney+.
This post belongs to FandomWire and first appeared on FandomWire
