The Sonic Screwdriver is The Doctor's magic wand. When he needs to do some technical jiggery-pokery, out it comes, and with a flick and swish he's opened a door, scanned a computer or somehow de-teleported someone. How can one device do so many things?
It was recognised long ago that the Sonic Screwdriver had the potential to be overused. That's essentially why it was written out during The Fifth Doctor's run. Even before its destruction it had limited uses and most of those uses could at least conceivably be achieved using sound waves. Opening locks, pulling stuff apart or welding stuff together. These are all things The Doctor could need to do in the process of creating a solution to a problem, but without being the solution itself. The Sonic Screwdriver was a tool to assist The Doctor, and anything he used it for he should have been able to do without it (albeit with more difficulty).
It's just a door handle
Since the reboot however, the Sonic Screwdriver just keeps getting more and more features. It's gone from a Gallifreyan Army Knife to some kind of Über iPhone. Need to remotely control your TARDIS? There's a setting for that! Nasty bite wound on the neck? There's a setting for that! Want to scan for life forms whilst reprogramming an alien computer and diagnosing someone's mental disorder? There's a etc.
To be fair, it's still mostly used for opening locks
You know things are bad when you have to start making up specific exclusions to what it can do. The wooden lock weakness has been around for a while, and is a fun little gag of high-tech foiled by low-tech, but to now have to include "deadlock seals" just to avoid the Sonic coming into play really highlights the issue. It's a bit like Superman being so Super that they had to invent Kryptonite just to give the stories some tension.
It would probably be fine for The Doctor to do most of these things, but using some other device. It could even be a mundane device that The Doctor has supercharged somehow, possibly even using the Sonic Screwdriver to do it. In a way that isn't just randomly waving the glowing end over it, that is.
Can we fix it?
Well this is a tough one. Having already established the increasing range of uses for the Sonic Screwdriver, it would be difficult to suddenly start ignoring them. Equally, the Sonic Screwdriver is a rather iconic part of the Doctor Who mythos, and so attempting to once again remove it as they did in the early 80s could be a hard path. Interestingly, I think the best tactic here would involve first making the Sonic Screwdriver better.
It was established in Silence in the Library that at some point in his future The Doctor gives the Sonic Screwdriver to River Song, but that by the time he does, it is vastly superior to the one The Doctor had at the time. As we are yet to see The Doctor gift his Sonic Screwdriver to River, I would suggest we could see some plot points whereby The Doctor adds "Red Settings" and "Damper Settings" before a later episode sees him pass it on to River. In fact, we recently saw what could have been the "Red Settings" in Cold War, so hopefully they are already moving towards this.
After ridding himself of the Über Sonic, The Doctor could potentially build another, less complex version that doesn't have as much functionality, but can still be used as a tool. In this way, we reset the power level of the Sonic, thereby avoiding the requirement to make more "sonic-proof" doohickies, plus we tie up some of the River Song continuity.
So yeah, I'm not saying there needs to be a list of hard and fast rules for the Sonic Screwdriver, but it does need limitations. It should be just one of the tools The Doctor falls back on.
It's The Doctor that can do anything, not the Sonic Screwdriver.
No comments:
Post a Comment