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Doctor Who Blinded Us with Science and Hit Us with Technology

At its core, the BBC & Disney+'s Doctor Who is about science and the study & understanding of everything. So here's a friendly reminder...

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Oh, what are we going to do while we're waiting for new episodes of Doctor Who to show up? We have more than ten months! Ten months of teasers! Ten months of waiting! Ten months of speculation! Ten months of leaks! Cultural commentator John Higgs has said that the leaks, most of which are made up, are really those fans' essays about what they think Doctor Who should be. That's pretty astute. Doctor Who is many things to many people, but what he's always been about is Science. SCIENCE!

Doctor Who is All About Science! Like We Need to be Reminded
Doctor Who Talks (pseudo-) SCIENCE!, BBC

Yes, the latest compilation video from the BBC on the Doctor Who YouTube channel is a short collection where the Doctor talks about SCIENCE! They like to jump around between eras in these videos. There's the Tenth (David Tennant) showing Donna (Catherine Tate) the very moment the Earth was formed – and a Rachni ship that formed itself as the Earth's core so it could wait billions of years to collect unique cosmic energy. Well, okay, the latter is Science Fiction, but it's still taken off from real science. There's the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi), the first Rock & Roll, Midlife Crisis Doctor of the modern era, talking about The Bootstrap Paradox ("Google it!") and… how a time traveler might go back to the 18th Century to meet Beethoven, only to be shocked to discover Beethoven doesn't exist, so he has to invent Beethoven by publishing his sheet music. Which time traveler could that be? Hmm… Then there's the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) explaining to Leela (Louise Jameson) how the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside through a totally made-up Science Fictional theory: Dimensional Engineering. It's more of a thought experiment than actual Science but hey! Still based on SCIENCE!

Let's remember that Sydney Newman and Verity Lambert (and, as some say, Gerry Davis as the series original Science Consultant) created Doctor Who to educate kids about History (hence the time machine) and Science, then the Daleks and monsters kind of got in the way. Who would have thought Daleks, Cybermen, and killer robots would be a lot more fun? Still, they're based on Science, so that's still a win. Like Star Trek, the show has encouraged a lot of kids to become scientists and mathematicians, so that's a win. The real win, however, is that the show has probably encouraged kids to become writers because if Doctor Who is good at making viewers want to know things, like Science and what happens next. SCIENCE! [Ed. Note: Thanks to Thomas Dolby for the headline inspiration]

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Adi TantimedhAbout Adi Tantimedh

Adi Tantimedh is a filmmaker, screenwriter and novelist. He wrote radio plays for the BBC Radio, “JLA: Age of Wonder” for DC Comics, “Blackshirt” for Moonstone Books, and “La Muse” for Big Head Press. Most recently, he wrote “Her Nightly Embrace”, “Her Beautiful Monster” and “Her Fugitive Heart”, a trilogy of novels featuring a British-Indian private eye published by Atria Books, a division Simon & Schuster.
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