Far Future Calling

Distilled from a series of posts to JadePagodaTV concerning The End of the World, and the way the design of Station One is described as "retro":

Even if it is intended seriously, this is still a terribly lazy excuse for things not actually looking futuristic, and I don't buy it anyway. "Retro" is a cultural thing: it's about ironically adopting the styles our (generally still living) ancestors thought looked cool or futuristic. You simply don't get that kind of cultural continuity over five hundred years (when was the last time you saw people clubbing in doublet and hose?), let alone five billion.

Generally, it was the lack of a sense of the extreme vastness of its timescale which I found the biggest disappointment in The End of the World. This is fairly typical of how TV refuses to bring the same rigour to SF as to mainstream drama. You wouldn't see the BBC dressing ancient Egyptians in frock-coats and crinolines because that means "past". Really far futures very rarely even appear -- the only remotely convincing example I can think of being the two-minute long "one million years later" scene in Babylon 5.

Five billion years has been long enough for the Earth to finish forming, develop life, build up coal and oil deposits, cover itself with vegetation, generate organisms who predate on that vegetation, undergo five or six major extinction events, develop sentient, tool-using life and eventually find itself smothered by a civilisation of builders and polluters.

("Retro", by contrast, usually covers the amount of time during which that civilisation has discovered that flared trousers are a bad idea. I'll believe that billions of years are a plausible period to get "retro" over the day I get invited to a Prokaryote Party.)

TEotW expects us to believe that, over the next five billion years, humanity builds some spaceships, develops an innovative approach to plastic surgery, and that's it. As I say, I don't buy it. Even if you read the various "alien" entities as highly evolved forms of posthumanity, that's the kind of thing that one would expect to take tens of millions of years (or much less, given advanced technology), not five thousand million. And even over those smaller timescales, the kind of cultural continuity which gives you "shareholders" and "O'Briens" is simply out of the question.

The future, like the past, isn't a single static setting, and shouldn't be considered as such. The processes which brought us to the present will continue. TEotW gets the larger-scale astronomical and evolutionary processes right, but it assumes the smaller-scale cultural ones don't apply, which is daft. I'd have felt far more able to accept the Doctor's "Nothing ever changes" comment if it had been couched more along the lines of "Your civilisations change and die, but you always come back to the same old patterns: the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots."

I do see the irony here -- I'm usually the one arguing that strict scientific accuracy doesn't matter and that SF stories just need to work on their own terms. I think what irks me is my suspicion that, rather than finding out when the Earth was likely to come to an end and trying to fit the story to the period, Davies wrote the story in a generic setting called "the future", and filled in the numbers once he'd looked them up.

None of which is to say that the episode didn't have some lovely concepts, scintillating dialogue, breathtaking character work etc etc etc. It was, in fact, marvellous... but also flawed.