Comparing Scope on Classic and New Who

That’s the closest title I could come up with to try and convey what I’m talking about here, although it doesn’t quite hit the mark.  What I’m looking at, I guess, is ambition in terms creating aliens and alien worlds.  I haven’t made spreadsheets or anything, so I can’t swear that the pattern is as clear as I think it is, but it is a sense that I get when I compare classic Who with new Who.

There’s no question, of course, that new Who saw the advent of a greatly scaled-up production.  The show was a British institution making its triumphant return to television, for one thing, and while the BBC still doesn’t have the deep pockets of Hollywood, its budget in 2005 was considerably higher than what it had between 1963 and 1989 (not too mention, new Who’s production values have changed a lot in its own lifetime – some of the CGI in series 1 is pretty questionable.)  The new series has been able to serve up increasingly high-quality sets, costumes, and effects.  Yes, we’ve come a long way from the days of monsters built out of tin foil and cardboard.

But here’s the thing:  along with those new production values came, in my mind, a reluctance to do something if it couldn’t be done in a sufficiently-impressive way.  I love me some new Who, don’t get me wrong, and there are a good many stories I adore in pretty much every season.  I’m not disputing that they’ve given us a number of wonderful episodes.  What I’m saying is that, while the show has done great work with what it’s given us, it seems reticent to actually depict alien worlds or design new alien species that are really out there.

There have been a handful of inventive/cool aliens of note (the Ood and the Silence are the first to come to mind, and the Teller from “Time Heist,”) and really, the new series has come up with a lot of new alien menaces.  However, many of these new monsters fall into one of a few categories.  We have aliens that look like animals (the Judoon, Catkind,) aliens that serve as inspiration for real-world myths and legends (“werewolves,” “ghosts,” “witches,”) aliens that don’t have a form of their own per say but take over human bodies (the Family of Blood, the Flood from “The Waters of Mars,”) and aliens that are creepy facsimiles of more ordinary things (the Weeping Angels, gas mask zombies.)

And alien worlds are even thinner on the ground.  The show’s first season has ten stories, seven of which are set on Earth in either the present, past, or very near future.  All three of the remaining episodes are contained within space stations (and two of them actually take place on the same space station many years apart.)  That’s something of a pattern for the show.  On the occasions when we do go to another planet, most, if not all, of the episode stays within the confines of a space base, or a spaceship, or a compound – something with walls, rooms, and corridors that avoids real exploration of an alien environment (barring that, we may roam around more through a human colony on an alien world that just so happens to look mostly like Earth at a particular period of its history, a la “A Christmas Carol.”)  By and large, we get a few sweet-looking CGI establishing shots and then spend the rest of the episode stuck “inside.”  (If I were the companion, I might complain.)  Really, over ten seasons, the main episodes that really venture through an alien world are “Planet of the Dead,” “The Doctor, the Widow, and the Wardrobe,” and “The Rings of Akhaten.”

By contrast, we look at classic Who.  To be fair, classic Who has its share of aliens-take-over-human-hosts stories and wholly-contained-within-a-spaceship stories, but these are things the old series pulls out sometimes, not as a prevailing rule.  The budget may have been next to nothing, but what the show lacked in money, it made up for in ingenuity.  The production design is frequently highly creative, even if it does look cheap.  This is the show, after all, that gave us the Daleks, the Sontarans, and the Zygons, along with plenty of other wild-looking alien races or robots that haven’t made their way to the new series.  Not all of them are winners, and I’ll reiterate that quite a few of them look incredibly cheap at various points of the series (I love that, because they can’t show facial expressions with their rubber suits, a Silurian has to gesticulate wildly so we know that it’s the one who’s talking,) but show was always trying and stretching itself, regardless of whether or not it had the money to do it “right.”  The same goes for alien worlds.  Sure, there are plenty of jokes to be made about soundstage “jungles” or how many alien landscapes look an awful lot like English quarries, but that didn’t stop them going for it.  At times, I feel like new Who gets too wary about being ambitious with its production design.  I understand that money is limited, but if classic Who can give it a go on a budget that couldn’t buy an entire shoestring, why not the new series?  I’d rather have something creative that looks imperfect than a sense that the show isn’t prepared to try.