Doctor Who vs. Back to the Future Essay

People always love a good science fiction film or show, because even though it can have the same basic idea, they can be completely different. Doctor Who and Back to the Future are two of the world’s most beloved franchises, however, even though they are both based on time travel, they completely different but have some key similarities. Both of these franchises have a basis of time travel. Doctor Who is about an all-knowing alien named The Doctor, who travels through time and space in his time machine called the TARDIS. He is normally accompanied by a friend or a companion that he picks up along his travels. With Back to the Future, it revolves around a seventeen-year old kid named Marty McFly who, after crazy circumstances, winds up taking the time machine his best friend, Doc Brown or Doc, had invented. Marty is accompanied by Doc from different points in Doc’s time line. The extent of time travel is different for these franchises. Time is one of the most complicated ideas in all of history. When it comes to the time travel perspective Doctor Who is much more complicated than the simple Back to the Future model of time travel. In Back to the Future, Marty accidentally goes back in time and stops his parents from ever meeting. Throughout the movie he tries to get his parents to fall in love. When he begins to fail at getting them to fall in love, he starts to fade away. This idea seems to be pretty straightforward. However, you need to take into account the fact if Marty was never born how did he travel back and stop them from meeting. In Doctor Who it goes much more in-depth and time travel gets more difficult to understand. If the Doctor was faced with the same situation as Marty, a paradox would occur and he would have been from a different time stream where his parents got married, and he wouldn’t have faded away. One of the most immense trademarks that define these franchises is the characters. The trademark characters define this genre of film. The Doctor is an alien from the planet Gallifray, who has been traveling for about 900 years. Marty, is a teenager who gets thrown into a time travel with no foreknowledge about the subject. Marty is a naive teenager who doesn’t know the first thing about time travel, whereas the Doctor knows all about time travel, history, science and, most importantly, what not to mess with. Even though they don’t share the same knowledge, their personalities have some similarities. They both show bravery when needed and are willing to rip through time just to help someone dear to them. However, what shines the most about these two characters are their flaws. Whenever someone calls Marty a chicken, he loses all control of himself and does whatever he can to prove he isn’t. The Doctor, on the other hand, has a dark side. If someone breaks the Doctor enough, who is already damaged, he will show no mercy, and that is the scariest thing about him. Even though no one likes them, the antagonist of each franchise is just as important as the protagonist. In Back to the Future the antagonist is Biff Tannen. Biff Tannen bullied Marty’s dad as a kid and continues to bully him into adulthood. With Doctor Who the main antagonist, among many, are the Daleks. They are a robotic alien race that wants nothing more than to destroy anything that isn’t Dalek and will do anything to survive. Both of these enemies only care about can benefit themselves. Neither of them cares if they hurt anyone, or the disaster they can cause in their quest for power or wealth. The Daleks, however, aren’t the same as Biff. The Daleks are very loyal to their own race, whereas Biff isn’t loyal to anyone. In Back to the Future Biff is thought of as a pain that Marty has to deal with whereas when the Doctor has to deal with the Daleks, he is frightened. The Daleks are pure hate and have no sympathy. Biff is a human being so therefore he does have humanity somewhere in him. The science fiction genre is one of the most celebrated genres in all of history. It is so vast and so loved by many. Even though there are so much science fiction, even though some have the same basic idea, they can be so different with a few key things in common that makes it spectacular. Doctor Who and Back to the Future are two enchanting franchises in their own ways, even with both of them revolving around time travel.