Bad Biology in Doctor Who
Aug. 24th, 2004 04:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dreamer_easyRight. I'm going to keep an eye out for bad biological science in Doctor Who and add it to this message. It'll be in the Memories. Contributions welcome.
I'd like to open with TIMEFLIGHT which we are, for some reason, revisiting. Dialogue establishes that Concorde has travelled to 140 million years ago, the Jurassic era, where it's getting cold because the Pleistocene Era ("the Ice Age!") is not far away. The Jurassic Era had been over for four million years and the Pleistocene wasn't due for another 138 million years. Doctor Who seems to really struggle with the timetable of geology, which makes you wonder whether encyclopaedias hadn't been invented when the show was being made.
I'd like to add THE CITY OF DEATH, in which our heroes take a comfortable stroll on the prebiotic Earth, well before there's any oxygen in the atmosphere to breathe. (To be fair, Adams dealt with this when he rewrote the story as one of the Dirk Gently novels.) We hear the figure "four hundred million years" repeatedly for the start of life on Earth, which is at least 100 million years after the earliest known fossils of living things, somewhere in the Devonian period.
I'd like to open with TIMEFLIGHT which we are, for some reason, revisiting. Dialogue establishes that Concorde has travelled to 140 million years ago, the Jurassic era, where it's getting cold because the Pleistocene Era ("the Ice Age!") is not far away. The Jurassic Era had been over for four million years and the Pleistocene wasn't due for another 138 million years. Doctor Who seems to really struggle with the timetable of geology, which makes you wonder whether encyclopaedias hadn't been invented when the show was being made.
I'd like to add THE CITY OF DEATH, in which our heroes take a comfortable stroll on the prebiotic Earth, well before there's any oxygen in the atmosphere to breathe. (To be fair, Adams dealt with this when he rewrote the story as one of the Dirk Gently novels.) We hear the figure "four hundred million years" repeatedly for the start of life on Earth, which is at least 100 million years after the earliest known fossils of living things, somewhere in the Devonian period.
