Cafe Society hasn’t existed that long, let alone threads about Doctor Who on the Straight Dope.
Oh right, sorry. Didn’t realise your perspective was so narrow.
People complaining about people complaining about the science being bad are really getting old, too. They are not going to change either. There are things you can put up with as fantastical elements, and there are things that are so dumb and wrong you just have to speak your mind about them. There’s a vast difference between that and flat out threadshitting a show, and if you (in general, not you DigitalC personally) can’t get over that, they’re not the ones who should move on.
Anyway… so the trees are magically gone again, but what about all the damage they did? How are people going to just forget when HEY, the zoos are emptied out (I assume more than London had a zoo affected by this), statues are toppled, etc. Granted, it beats the alternative of solar flare to the face, but it’s just getting to be lazy writing to expect this sort of thing to always be forgotten by the entire planet time after time.
Not as bad as Kill the Moon, but not among the best this season. There were little bits and pieces that were amazing, and I really did enjoy those, but as a whole it kinda failed.
Well, yeah, but my problem (and, I think, most people’s problem) with Kill the Moon wasn’t exactly the science. Bad science is a Dr. Who tradition. Sure, ignoring, say, conservation of mass was a bit more obvious than usual, but it would’ve been fine. It was the fact that you had this incredibly elaborate plot setup - moon, egg, Earth, Dr. “letting humanity choose,” having a vote, yada yada yada, which built up to a climax: to push the button, or not? It was a moral dilemma, carefully framed by the surrounding episode. And then, at the last minute, everything is saved and no one has to die, whoop-de-doo. Everything fell apart in a glurge of flowers and sunshine. The problem was the storytelling.
As for this one, I have a feeling it was written by taking a bunch of cool scenes and trying to come up with a plot to string them together. The writer wanted the Doctor being annoyed by a bunch of kids pressing buttons in his TARDIS, a possibly schizophrenic girl being “tuned to another wavelength,” the idea of humanity’s inbred fear of forests, saving trees, etc, etc. Now, you could probably take one or two of these ideas, expand and enrich them, and make a great episode, but instead they decided to cram them all in and have the show make no sense.
One last thing: as a person who was once a young child annoyed by crappy children’s lit, no, being “one for the kids” is not an excuse for a bad episode. Not that I think the episode was bad, but in general, I’d just like to say that good writing for children has the capability of being even more honest and engaging than adult stuff.
(Oh, and a girl who turned into a hydrangea? I feel like there’s a really great joke to be made out of that which I can’t quite find . . .)
I think my biggest problem with the “bad science” is that, in basic storytelling, you get one impossible element. In this episode, it was that a forest mysteriously grows worldwide overnight. If that had been the grand mystery, I don’t think as many people would have had an issue with it. The forest appears, and our episode tries to figure out why/how/who, etc.
The problem is that Doctor Who tends to layer these impossible elements on top of each other. While I’m willing to accept a worldwide overnight forest as the central premise of the episode, it’s hard to then accept 1) the trees can communicate in a way totally undetectable by any physical means, 2) a girl can hear that communication, somehow, 3) the communication looks like glowing fairies, 4) the girl’s sister turned into a bush, 5) the trees can willingly control their oxygen output, and somehow absorb oxygen, 6) a flash burst of oxygen exploding in our atmosphere somehow HELPS us, 7) some trees have fruit and nuts, and this is never developed upon, and 8) all the other bad science.
It’s too much. Most of extra elements don’t even really advance the story, they’re there to fill a few minutes of screen time. The Moon episode also went heavy with impossible elements. A tightly-focused story that sticks to one impossible element is the basis of most Doctor Who episodes. Lately, they seem to have forgotten that.
You know, I didn’t get the vibe at the end that the sister had been “turned into a hydrangea”…I kind of interpreted her reappearance as a runaway finding her way home because of the crisis, waiting at the door for mum and sis, and being revealed at that moment because the hydrangea went away with all the other magical trees.
But perhaps I’m just too forgiving of bad writing after an hour of Jenna… 
Okay, remember the Fourth Doctor episode “Seeds of Death”? At least I think that was the title. It was the one with the Krynoid, the monstrous giant alien plant. The Doctor handled the problem by having the Brigadier drop major-league weedkiller on it.
Bet now he’s thinking, “Wow, I could’ve had Earth’s magical trees fight it out with the Krynoid.”
Now, that’s a battle scene I’d like to see.
I think this was one of this season’s weaker episodes. Clara, who’s much more familiar with the TARDIS, should have stayed behind with the kids. Mr. Pink should have gone with the Doctor. And I used to be a teacher, and if two teachers were taking a class down the sidewalk, forget a mysterious forest, one teacher a;ways lead the line and the other followed it!
Being the right age but not British, I didn’t watch it then. All I know is the making-of TV movie that aired last year, and I’d thought they’d depicted it as airing after school. Thank you for setting me straight.
P.S. Just in case that sounds snarky — its not.
I’m going to take a swipe at the bad-science thing, by analogy.
First, though, let me echo what others said: A good story will help excuse a lot more bad science than a crap story will.
Anyway, analogy. History. “Vincent and the Doctor” is one of my favorite episodes of all time. I love it wholeheartedly.
At the start — well, after the D’Orsay — Amy and the Doctor walk down a street looking for, and finding, the café from Café Terrace at Night. There they encounter van Gogh. He takes them back to his house, the interior of which looks just like the one depicted in The Bedroom.
However, that café and that bedroom were in Arles. At the end of the episode, the Doctor says that van Gogh’s death is weeks away. Van Gogh left Arles a year before that and checked himself into an asylum. Two months before his death, he moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, outside of Paris. There he lived in a small cottage in the middle of nowhere, just as depicted in the episode. But the episode was set in Arles, where he lived in a nice two-story house on a regular city block.
So the history is irreparably screwed up. And I couldn’t care less.
If the episode had included some over-the-top SF nuttiness, such as van Gogh actually being an alien, I’d probably have accepted it (assuming it were handled well).
I’ll accept that level of bad history, and so I’ll accept that level of bad science as well.
But if the episode had depicted van Gogh living in, say, Vienna, and a patient of Sigmund Freud, or showed him fighting in WWI, my reaction would have been quite different. Even if everything else in the episode were exactly the same, the blatant historical inaccuracy would have overshadowed it all. I would have hated that episode. With a passion.
Just as I hate the moon-egg episode that I can’t even be bothered to look up the title of. The “science” in that is so divergent from what we know to be true and so contradictory to the way the Universe works, that the rest is irrelevant. (Which is good, because how is “kill 7 billion people vs. kill one creature” even a choice? And what happened to …. Sorry. That’s is a discussion for the other thread.)
So:
A little bad science = forgivable, even expected
Some bad science in an otherwise great episode = acceptable
Some bad science in a crap episode = No thank you
A whole boatload of ridiculously bad science = angrifying
By the way, the only callback I notices in this episode, if it can be called that, was the ‘they’re monsters from your fairytales/the reason for your ancient fear of the woods’-motif which was present in both The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, where the monster was the origin of the belief in a satan-like evil entity all across the universe, and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, where the Vashta Nerada where said to be the reason for being afraid of the dark. To the latter, there was also the connection in the title.
Was there anything else? It seems like the references have gradually been declining both in number and in scope; where Deep Breath was basically a reimagining of the whole of The Girl in the Fireplace, now there’s only subtle little nods here and there.
The basic dividing line seems to be:
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Handwaved scientimifical bafflegab gets a pass in the context of purely fantastic phenomena that are made of handwaved scientimifical bafflegab in the first place (e.g. space trains on hyperspace tracks).
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Handwaved scientimifical bafflegab does not get a pass in the context of well-understood real-world phenomena (e.g. the Moon, trees).
Can’t help but think of the classic Tom Baker serial, “Ark in Space,” where the Doctor finds himself on a tiny space station housing the last, cryofrozen remnants of the human race, survivors of a future Earth destroyed by solar flares.
Guess the trees got sick of us?
I think it is more basic than that. If you like an episode otherwise you’ll completely turn off your concern over bafflegab hearing it as the filler it is, being too engaged with the story to care; if the ep does not otherwise grab you … BAD SCIENCE!!!
Point being the issue is always whether or not the ep otherwise grabbed you. BAD SCIENCE!!! being noticed is merely a marker for an individual not being otherwise drawn in. I was paying attention to the character interactions on the Moon ep so fast forwarded my brain over bafflegab; some did not react that way. This tree story bored me so I noticed the stupidity of the bafflegab. But the issue was not the bafflegab; it was that the story was not engaging (to me, anyway).
Sometimes, it’s just fun to feel like a little smarty-pants. I mean, I found this to be a fairly charming, if not especially consequential, episode. I bought the basic premise of a planet using natural means to defend itself. I wasn’t bent on poking holes in the science. But when it occurred to me that there was a hole that I could poke, I went ahead and poked it, and briefly got to feel smarter than a big-time television scriptwriter. I’m not, but it was fun to pretend.
Just watched it. So, just to recap, the Doctor nor anyone else actually did anything, right? They just observed, got a bit hand-wavey, and stuff happened?
And there’s no ozone left, and certainly no satellites. The power grid is fried too.
And now we know that Earth’s trees are sentient precogs who can grow in the ocean and disappear at will? Or is that only the fast-growing variety? Sigh.
Yes, definitely a setup episode.
I know this thread is 4 days old now, but I just watched this episode, and oh my days, the fucking ending made me sick.