Possibly, more than for any other blog, I need to remind you that you don’t write things like this unless you love a show. “Planet of Giants” is an amazing story and I love it with all my heart. Who could possibly have anything but adoration for a story in which the Doctor saves the whole of humanity without actually interacting with anyone other than the TARDIS crew? Or that has a cliffhanger involving a menacing cat? It survived being cut from 4 episodes down to 3 at the last minute (the DVD reconstruction of the four part version shows just how correct the decision was, even if it did create scheduling nightmares) and has some of the best realised sets in the whole of 60s Who (these days it would be all green screen, CGI and no charm at all). There are, however, huge issues with the science in the story. Some of these issues are obvious, others not so. But are they really insurmountable, or can they be twisted around to potentially give us an insight into how science works in the Doctor Who universe? And, more importantly, if we assume that the Doctor himself doesn’t fully understand what’s happened, could we use it to learn more about the way the TARDIS operates?
To begin with, let’s go through some of the issues. Being miniaturised is seemingly a common occurrence in science fiction, so feel free to apply these issues to any other shows where the leads find themselves x inches tall (okay, major problem with the story, there’s no consistency about the scale and the dimensions are all over the place, so please don’t think I’m going to use a consistent set of numbers either!). Oxygen is going to be a serious issue, suddenly your lungs are going to be totally incapable of processing oxygen molecules as they’re going to be too big for your body to work with. Shrinking someone down suggests that they’ve somehow lost a lot of the molecules that makes them up, so the shrinking process should leave a pool of flesh behind and a shrunken person’s brain should have the processing power of a Love Island contestant on a bad day and the slightest breeze should see them flying off like a feather. If, somehow, none of the molecules are removed in the shrinking process then fine, they retain all their brain power, but if someone is 70kg and suddenly standing on legs that have the dimensions of match sticks, then bones are going to shatter and the pressure on the ground means that you should pretty much plant yourself in the soil with every step you take (imagine standing with all your weight on a drawing pin, point down of course, and picture the effect that would have on the ground). The production tries to get the sound issue correct by trying to make everything a low rumble, but also ends up elongating all the sounds so that the sound of a gunshot takes about one second. It’s also telling that they don’t even attempt to apply any of this to light waves, as that gets into a deeply tricky discussion about wave particle duality and nope, that’s never going to end well. What they definitely don’t seem to get right about sound is that, given how little sound would be produced by someone x inches tall, it’s highly unlikely that they’d produce enough volume to even hear each other unless they were shouting in each other’s ears. Finally, for this brief run through of the issues, there’s the slightly inconvenient fact that the TARDIS shouldn’t work due to changes in the electrical properties of the components changing when the interior is also shrunk down to the small size (which, typically, is an issue that will bookend the season as well in “The Time Meddler” but that’s for another blog). However, the fact that the TARDIS works perfectly and our stars aren’t dead means that there must be some sort of explanation (other than it would make a very short story if they weren’t). To find the answer, we have to look both backwards and forwards to other stories… namely “An Unearthly Child” and “The Space Museum”.
VICKI: Time, like space, although a dimension in itself also has dimensions of its own.
(“The Space Museum” episode 1)
It’s telling that, in “Planet of Giants”, neither the Doctor nor Susan seem overly worried about being x inches tall (other than the problems with cats, matchboxes and the show going woke by highlighting the dangers of pesticides). For me, there’s the real sense that they see it as an inconvenience rather than a threat to their lives.
DOCTOR: The space pressure was far too great whilst we were materialising. The strange thing is that we all came out of it unscathed. It’s most puzzling. It’s a big mystery, my boy. Come along.
The worry, at first, is simply the circumstances under which it happened (which we never really got explained other than a vague comment about something overheating). But combine the Doctor’s brief explanation with Vicki’s line from “The Space Museum” and the flashback in “An Unearthly Child” to Susan demanding that Ian uses all five dimensions to solve a problem and we start to build up our answer. The space pressure isn’t referring to the real world every day usage of the word space, it’s talking about pressure from the fifth dimension. Bring this in to play and suddenly we can handwave our way through nearly all the issues. It also gives us one heck of a getout clause for lots of stories that are ahead of us.
The universe is created (the Big Bang event, we’ll avoid talking about the episode till we absolutely have to) and once it starts to cool down, we end up with quarks, forces and dimensions. We always talk about there being three dimensions in the real world (length, breadth and depth) and we glibly talk about time but can’t access it or move through it at will. So what if Susan is right and there IS a fifth dimension that we haven’t factored into things? In our “real” world, we could exist on the equivalent of just one plane in the fifth dimension and that’s why all our mass exists as we experience it, we exert the pressure that we do on the ground, gravity works the way it does. Suppose though that we have access to some multidimensional time travelling craft and that there was an overheating accident. How about if this “smeared” us sightly due to something in the fifth dimension not lining up correctly and exerting some sort of force on us. Now suppose, and hopefully this isn’t too much of a stretch of the imagination, when the universe was created that the quarks and forces were also created in all of the planes of the fifth dimension. So, our slightly blurred stars have access to oxygen etc that exists on the plane of the spatial dimension that they’re wandering around in (hence they can breathe, talk to each other etc) but their mass is smeared out over multiple planes meaning that (no matter how painful it sounds) some of their mass is on one plane and the rest is on another. This could, potentially, mean that they would be able to walk around normally even though they’re tiny because it’s only their mass that’s in the same plane as the lab bench etc that creates pressure in THAT spatial dimension and that they’re leaving the equivalent of footprints in a different spatial dimension (hey, if “Army of Ghosts” can talk about footprints in other dimensions then it’s fair game as far as I’m concerned). It also explains why none of the TARDIS functions stop working as it’s all still interconnected in the main three dimensions and bits just nudged into the fifth AND it would justify why the seed at the end (from the lab’s three dimensions) slips back to looking tiny once the TARDIS itself returns fully to that particular set of spatial dimensions. If Susan and the Doctor know all about the fifth dimension (just number four the Doctor isn’t too certain about yet) then they’re not going to be too worried, just mildly annoyed.
Of course this isn’t perfect, for example it doesn’t explain why sounds last longer than they should, but this early excursion into a sideways adventure (rather one that was backwards or forwards in time) can be used to bring in ideas that are going to be VERY useful for future stories to make sense. Plus it opens up an interesting avenue of thought for how the Time Lords seem to keep surviving being wiped out, with the irony being that this spatial compression could save the expanded universe…