The celebrated Doctor Who screenwriter Malcolm Hulke once claimed that, in science fiction, there are only two stories: “They come to us or we go to them.”
We’ll get to whether that’s true or not presently. First, though, we need to ask a more fundamental question. Is Doctor Who even science fiction in the first place?
Early-1960s BBC drama boss Sydney Newman, arguably the series’ most prominent co-creator, didn’t want it to be. He insisted the programme should be as “rooted in reality” as possible, while early paperwork specified it should be “neither fantasy nor space travel nor science fiction”. But Newman’s Reithian ambition was to be upended after less than a month by the success of the Daleks – after which his diktat that the “outer-space stories must be based on factual knowledge” was jettisoned out of the nearest airlock.