Sci-Fi Horror, or: Just Some Doctor Who and Star Trek Episodes I Like on Halloween

I could and should have put more thought into this, but oh well here’s very short stray thoughts about sci-fi horror as a way to make my post on Halloween Dr Who episodes a little more pretentious.

Genres do not have neat boundaries, nor do they need them, but it is interesting to think every now and then what makes a story science fiction. Star Wars is fantasy^*, though some stories set within its world of magical space wizards could be seen as straight science fiction (specifically, Andor).

So what of sci-fi horror? Fantasy or supernatural horror is easy enough to conceive of: Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, demons, Smurfs and other mythical creatures that terrorise us. Likewise non-supernatural horror: Serial killers, stalkers, getting trapped in an inhospitable environment, clowns, and other horrors that can happen. But what of horror that is derived specifically from something scientifically minded?

Of course anything with a sci-fi setting or characters can be a horror by using any of the above. Put a serial killer on a space station and it’s a sci-fi horror. But the sci-fi part itself can be used for horror too.

One of the most common (and perhaps overdone?) examples is body horror, e.g. the recurring fears of technology being merged with the human body turning us into something monstrous.

Enter the Cybermen of Doctor Who, created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis for the story “The Tenth Planet” in 1966. The very word “cybernetics” had only been coined by mathematician and pioneering computer scientist Norbert Wiener in 1948, who defined it as “control and communication in the animal and the machine”. And “cyborg” (“cybernetic” + “organism”) was coined by neuroscientist Manfred Clynes in 1960.

Pedler was a medical scientist, whose wife was also a medical doctor, and had been brought on as a science advisor for Doctor Who during season 3’s “The War Machines”. He was interested in two different ideas which would intersect. First, the rising development of prosthetics and medical technology to replace or aid the function of body parts and organs. Second, excessive adherence to logic over emotion. Gerry Davis encouraged keeping the two ideas together and that’s how we get Cybermen.

Original design of the Cybermen from “The Tenth Planet” with the first Doctor on the left and companion Polly on the right.

Now, it’s a little bothersome to me to see the advancement of life-saving technology turned into horror. Not to mention the over-arching problem sci-fi has with thinking logic and emotion are antithetical and cannot coexist.

But there’s still good horror to be had in the Cybermen. As they’re introduced in “Tenth Planet”, they were nearly identical to humans, but their planet was hurled from the solar system. As it got further and further from the sun, the only way to survive was to replace their bodies with synthetic parts. And ultimately the temptation to tamper with their brains prevailed, and they began altering everything about how they think as well.

So in a sense it’s not just body horror, it’s not just the horror of what an emotionless person could be capable of, there’s a sense of cosmic horror. Eventually our planet will die as well. It’s inconceivable that humans will stay the same for billions of years, it just cannot happen, but no matter what insane luck allows our descendants to carry on, eventually the sun burns out. What might we have to do to carry on? Do we even want to?

Star Trek has the Borg, very similar to Cybermen in that individual Borg were biological organisms that had technology implanted. Major differences are that the Borg are a hive mind, and do seem to reproduce as episodes have shown incubators for babies.

The Enterprise encountering a Borg ship, a massive plain cube, for the first time in season 2’s “Q Who”.

The Borg are introduced in one of the most effectively terrifying Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes: “Q Who” (season 2, 1989). This really excels as both science fiction and horror in my opinion. First, the Enterprise is flung halfway across the galaxy. Sure, the character Q and his god-like powers are pure fantasy, but it’s a useful setup. The universe is gigantic, even in the world of Trek where physical laws are broken to bits and humans can jaunt insane distances in hours, the universe is still mind boggling big.

The Enterprise’s remit, the show’s premise, is exploration of the boundaries of human knowledge, and yet the crew’s never been this far from their home, the worlds they know. And then: the Borg.

Creating truly alien aliens is no easy task. It’s hard to step fully outside our own biases and then build, from scrap, something new. That’s not a bad thing, and Star Trek generally makes do with humanoid aliens that are very similar to us.

The Borg are humanoid, but they’re a hive mind, and are so technologically advanced compared to the humans that they are (at least, in this episode) generally incomprehensible. They’re just there, doing their own thing. The Enterprise struggle to communicate, to understand, to make sense of what they want. And they are incapable of defence.

It’s a really wonderful episode.

Space settings really lend themselves to cosmic horror.

There’s a lot of other avenues for science fiction being useful for horror. Viruses, obviously. Natural disasters. But this post is already too long. Ultimately, much of the spooky episodes of sci-fi franchises like Dr Who don’t derive their spookiness from anything particularly sci-fi, however you define “sci-fi”. Many just lean fully on fantasy, or just renaming magic with technobabble and pretending that counts. And that’s okay! They’re still delightful.

Anyways here’s some Doctor Whos I like to watch on Halloween!

• State of Decay – 4th Doctor – Spooky atmosphere, dramatic vampires, stock footage of bats, eerie synth score. Love it. One of the best for Halloween.
• The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit – 10th Doctor – That’s not how black holes work but hey, Satan!
• The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances – 9th Doctor – Children are creepy. Also, it does kinda work in something that could be sciencey and might deserve its own post some day. Man children are creepy.
• Tomb of the Cybermen – 2nd Doctor – Kinda classic black-and-white horror movie vibes in this one. An ancient tomb, a spooky inhuman villain, a mad scientist. Oh and racism… sigh
• Ghost Light – 7th Doctor – A haunted house and a script that was so cut down for time but which didn’t cut any characters or plots so… good luck making sense of it without multiple viewings.
• The Curse of Fenric – 7th Doctor – Zombie vampires from the sea!
• The Witchfinders – 13th Doctor – Falls apart a bit in the final minutes but starts strong and has a great performance by Alan Cumming as King James
• Knock, Knock – 12th Doctor – Trapped in a haunted house with David Suchet. Excellent.
• Oxygen – 12th Doctor – Space zombies and capitalism. SCARY!
• Horror of Fang Rock – 4th Doctor – Trapped on a lighthouse with a shape-shifting monster and colourful cast of characters. Classic horror setup.

There’s plenty more, and certain Doctors have a higher abundance of spooky than others. Note that the Third Doctor’s “The Dæmons” is not on here because it is a May Day episode. It’s about Beltane. It’s delightfully atmospheric, but it’s for Beltane. But any of season 7 could work for a third Doctor Halloween. “Spearhead from Space” and its mannequins come alive. “The Silurians” with its plague. “Ambassadors of Death” for the spooky astronauts that kill with a touch. And “Inferno”, it’s got everything.

Have a spooky Halloween everyone!

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* Extended Star Wars rant for those with too much time on their hands.

Star Wars is very much designed as a fantasy, it has a focus on magic and wizards. That its set in “space” doesn’t really change this fact, especially considering its version of space defies all known properties of reality— in large part because it is modelled after 1930s adventure stories. That’s why spaceships in Star Wars have to bank to turn, performing all their maneuvers as if still in atmosphere, and why bombers just open their hatches and bombs fall right down (something that happened in both The Empire Strikes Back and The Last Jedi so TLJ haters can shush).

Meanwhile CSI is almost all about using technology to solve crimes, and a lot of the technology in CSI is just plain not real. It’s an extrapolation of what the writers’ happen to (mis)unerstand about science. In a way, that makes CSI a kind of science fiction. Much more so than (most of) Star Wars.

But it’s obviously not just about details. CSI doesn’t intend to be science fiction, even if the writers are fully aware (and they very much are) they’re bending the realities of biology and chemistry to make their scripts work. Framing and focus are also important in defining genre. Another reason that Star Wars is fantasy while Star Trek, which infamously just makes crap the hell up as it goes along, still fits the bill of sci-fi.

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Bad Genetics

I’ve been meaning to do weekly posts about each episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds but it kept getting away from me. This post is about a common theme of these first six episodes: Bad genetics.

First up, I’m overall really enjoying the show. It’s a return to an optimistic vision of the future, and each episode is a new adventure with a new story that feels like the writers are really striving to come up with creative ideas to explore this vast universe. There’s more thanon a few merits to Star Trek: Discovery, you’re not gonna hear me knock it, but we’ve been so long without the episodic model of Star Trek story-telling, one focused on adventure and coming up with new sci-fi ideas on a weekly basis instead of long-form dissection of a single story, that I am so happy with this return to traditional structure for what it can offer.

That doesn’t mean it’s the superior show to other Star Treks on right now, and certainly doesn’t mean I’ve been pleased with every outing… So now that those clarifications are done, let’s dig into the science.

Because…. sigh

Let’s start with the first episode. Great premise, solidly executed, fun cast of characters, bit wobbly overly-centrist politics near the end but that’s par for the Star Trek course. What annoyed me was the bit where they have to go undercover on a planet that’s never made contact with aliens before. To disguise themselves as native to the planet, the Enterprise away team… alter their genes…?

There’s a lot of reasons this is ludicrous. One is that it very much feels like one of those fake solutions tech bros in Silicon Valley come up with for problems that already have solutions. Prosthetics, make-up, concealing clothing, all of these are substantially more practical and won’t be superseded just because a new ideas sounds tech-ier. That’s an annoying trope in sci-fi that’s got to go.

Then there’s the idea that this is do-able at all. You’d have to get into a lot of cells’ nuclei, if not the vast majority, and carefully edit the DNA of each one according to that specific cell’s function.

Then there’s the timing. The desired phenotypes can’t be expressed until the DNA is transcribed into RNA and that is used to build proteins which then do whatever task there is. In the case of large morphological features like the forehead ridges Star Trek aliens always have, you’d be asking tissues that have already taken their shape to re-activate the genes telling them to duplicate and divide in the right pattern to create the new structure.

But what I really want to focus on is a problem across the bloody board in sci-fi: The misconception about what DNA is.