The traditional science-fiction style of Frontier in Space makes this 1973 story something of a rarity in the Doctor Who canon. So why has the series presented so few space operas?

FEATURE BY OLIVER WAKE

Science-fiction is a big genre but it can be broken down into a number of smaller classifications, or sub-genres, based on generic storylines or narrative elements. Doctor Who is a big series and across its history has made use of most of these sub-genres, from time travel to mad scientists, monster horror to alien first contact, psychic powers to alternative universes.

Yet what is probably the most popular of all science-fiction sub-genres is surprisingly rare in Doctor Who: space opera. The term was coined by author Wilson Tucker in 1941 as a derogatory label for stories he considered to be second-rate “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn[s]”. He was inspired by the dismissive labelling of US radio serials as ‘soap operas’. The space opera label initially came to be connected with the more action-packed, space-adventuring style of story, and slowly it lost its pejorative associations.

Exact definitions of space opera have shifted over the decades, but there’s broad consensus as to its most obvious characteristics, so let’s stick to those. Space opera is a narrative form in which the vastness of space is exploited to tell large-scale stories. Space operas typically feature lengthy journeys across great tracts of space, and often focus on interplanetary conflict between disparate space-going civilisations, or other more prosaic belligerents. These components make space opera one of the most visually compelling forms of science-fiction, leading to its dominance of the genre on screen. In television alone, we can see this in some of the most popular science-fiction offerings. Star Trek (originally 1966-69), Blake’s 7 (1978-81), Battlestar Galactica (originally 1978-79), Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-81) – space operas all.

But space opera has remained a rarity in Doctor Who, despite the series featuring more than its fair share of spaceships and planethopping. The programme has plenty of examples of conventional spaceflight but it usually lacks the scale to be truly ‘space operatic’. For example, both The Seeds of Death (1969) and The Ambassadors of Death (1970) see the Doctor blast off in rockets of roughly contemporary vintage, but in each case his journey is within the Earth’s orbit – to the Moon and an orbiting space capsule respectively. In many other cases, a space setting is merely a convenient location to play out a story which is otherwise unrelated to space travel, for example The Trial of a Time Lord (1986) and Sleep No More (2015).