New Who 12.4 Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror
Sunday, 19 January 2020 20:25![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexJust a few quick thoughts on this week's Who:
1. This series is really interested in inventions and the history of technology, isn't it? After Barton, Ada Lovelace, the hall of Victorian inventors and the MI6 tech in Spyfall and Sylas the brilliant engineer kid in Orphan 55, now we have Tesla vs. Edison. I mean, technology is always central to Doctor Who, but in this series it is being treated not just as a given but something whose very route into existence we should be fascinated by. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.
2. Despite their shared interest in the history of technology, though, this episode and Spyfall depart radically from one another in their treatment of the historical guest stars of the week. I was already unhappy at seeing Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan having their memories of what they had seen with the Doctor wiped; I'm absolutely bloody furious now that the same logic hasn't been applied to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who if anything saw rather more than they did. Is there not some kind of, I don't know, overall story editor whose job it is to ensure consistency in these matters???
3. Yaz looks absolutely amazing in Victoriana.
That is all.
1. This series is really interested in inventions and the history of technology, isn't it? After Barton, Ada Lovelace, the hall of Victorian inventors and the MI6 tech in Spyfall and Sylas the brilliant engineer kid in Orphan 55, now we have Tesla vs. Edison. I mean, technology is always central to Doctor Who, but in this series it is being treated not just as a given but something whose very route into existence we should be fascinated by. It'll be interesting to see where that goes.
2. Despite their shared interest in the history of technology, though, this episode and Spyfall depart radically from one another in their treatment of the historical guest stars of the week. I was already unhappy at seeing Ada Lovelace and Noor Inayat Khan having their memories of what they had seen with the Doctor wiped; I'm absolutely bloody furious now that the same logic hasn't been applied to Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who if anything saw rather more than they did. Is there not some kind of, I don't know, overall story editor whose job it is to ensure consistency in these matters???
3. Yaz looks absolutely amazing in Victoriana.
That is all.
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Date: Monday, 20 January 2020 10:08 (UTC)Particularly because unlike Lovelace and Inayat Khan (who were less likely to do something* for reasons discussed last wek), Tesla and Edison are pretty likely to capitalise on a ride in the Tardis. The state of industrial science in the early 1900's was much advanced over Lovelace and Babbage's time. They had tools not available to Lovelace and Babbage. Tesla had the sort of wide ranging mind that would pick apart the physics he was shown and Edison was explicitly running an innovation factory.
That and Tesla and Edison are post HG Well and his Time Machine, so the idea of aliens and time travel and so is is perhaps more in the cultural milieu in a way that makes accessing capital easier.**
It just seems inconsistent.
*and I'm not entirely sure what it is that Lovelace and Khan might do that is undesirable.
** I can't remember how rich Lovelace was.