Posted in: BBC, Disney+, Doctor Who, TV | Tagged: doctor who, Supernatural

Doctor Who Has Been Flirting with The Supernatural For Years Now

Doctor Who has always flirted with supernatural elements - usually with a pseudoscientific element - but now it appears the brakes are off.

Doctor Who is considered Science Fiction, though the writers have always played fast and loose with those perimeters. It's more like Science Fantasy, so they could fudge things to just have stories to fill airtime. What the series does best has always been to scare kids (and some adults), and it does that with more than just scientific monsters like Daleks and Cybermen but also ghosts, zombies, vampires, and supernatural creatures. A big chunk of Doctor Who stories are haunted house chillers, even if they are not always ghosts, or if they are ghosts, there's usually a scientific answer for them. And it's done that loads of times.

The most popular and successful period of Doctor Who was the 1970s, when the series took on gothic horror elements. Science is just a way to explain how things work or seem to work, and Doctor Who certainly happily leans into that old Arthur C. Clarke saying, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." That's how the TARDIS interior and the sonic screwdriver work, but you could just as easily see that they work through "magic!" It's how a lot of things work in Doctor Who and, for that matter, Star Trek when you take away the technobabble. The Star Trek shows still employ a Scientific advisor. Doctor Who stopped having a Science Advisor on staff in the 1960s.

British culture, in general, has always had a complicated relationship with the supernatural. More people than you expect believe in ghosts. British and Celtic folklore has been full of pre-Christian, pre-scientific figures and ideas. Vampires, fairies, elves, gnomes, changelings, demons, ghosts, goblins, mysterious black dogs, witches, sooner or later, these ancient figures will – and should – find their way into Doctor Who. It's all about finding new stories and new ways to tell them, after all. Russell T. Davies has declared that the new series in the Disney+ era will have fantasy in the story, not just Science Fiction. He did this by having the fabric of Reality blur so the laws of science have become malleable, enabling goblins to show up as in the recent Christmas special and even the presence of faeries and magic in the still-debated episode "73 Yards". Wouldn't it be fun to have dragons, elves, orcs show up in Doctor Who? Why not? And more ghosts and haunted house stories certainly wouldn't go amiss.

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