Does It Fly?
Roddenberry Entertainment
Available wherever you get your podcasts
Imagine you’re hanging out at a bar with your very enthusiastic friends, about two beers in, and someone brings up Star Trek. OK, but the transporter! How would that actually work? What about the TARDIS of Doctor Who — does that thing even make sense? It made for so many good stories, though, right?
That’s the premise — and tone — of the entertaining podcast Does It Fly?, hosted by astrophysicist and “mad scientist” (his words) Hakeem Oluseyi and actress, writer and “pop culture expert” Tamara Krinsky. Released roughly once a week since April, each episode centers on a science or technology concept from a popular sci-fi show or movie. The hosts spend most of 45 minutes pondering how well each concept works — does it “fly”? — not just technologically, but also as an engine for storytelling.
Pondering the real-world feasibility of any given sci-fi tech is hardly a new concept; fandoms have enthusiastically wrangled over this sort of thing for decades (SN: 9/22/15).
Does It Fly? acknowledges its place in this history at the outset. Oluseyi and Krinsky are, respectively, a self-proclaimed nerd and geek, and they emphasize that they’re coming at these concepts from a place of love and joy. Sometimes a little too much. Listening to the hosts’ banter can feel like lurking in a fandom forum chat, and it’s often tempting to fast-forward past that banter to get to the good stuff.
And Does It Fly? has some truly fascinating moments. Oluseyi’s astrophysics bona fides shine when he describes, for example, the quandaries of real-world Star Trek transporter technology, or ponders the feasibility of making Star Wars’ lightsabers by using magnetic fields to contain plasma into a deadly yet portable blade form. (Do lightsabers fly? Oluseyi says nah, not any time soon and probably never.)
Take the transporters, “one of the most iconic conceits in all of science fiction,” Krinsky says. The Star Trek device can send objects across great distances by converting them into energy and then reconstituting them in the delivery location. In reality, the closest thing we have to such a technology is quantum teleportation, in which quantum states of particles, but not the particles themselves, can be transmitted from one location to another. This is not that, Oluseyi says.
The most obvious issue, perhaps, with making a transporter work today is how to first break down an object into its basic units — and what are those, anyway? Molecules and atoms? Electrons and quarks? Even if you could, you’d need an immense amount of storage for all that data — far beyond what current technology allows. And even if we solve the storage problem centuries from now, Oluseyi adds, there’s yet another problem: how to properly record and then re-create all the dynamic data, like memories, that make up a person at any given moment.
The podcast’s interesting twist on sci-fi science — one that this writer particularly appreciated — is the discussion of how an imagined technology does or doesn’t serve the overall storytelling. For example, from a storytelling standpoint, the transporter is central to many of Star Trek’s most memorable episodes, Krinsky says. The device “transports” characters quickly into the action and drives plotlines around everything from cloning to “transporter psychosis.” The many spin-offs of the original Star Trek have also allowed the transporter’s engineering to evolve, showing, for instance, the technological breakthrough of transporting organic and not just inorganic materials for the first time.
Bottom line: Scientifically, the transporter doesn’t fly. But storywise, Krinsky says, “I would say hell, yes!”
The hosts’ cheerful and often unstructured conversation works well when they’re bouncing thoughts around about the physics of time travel, or the tornado-analyzing silver-ball sensors of the 1996 movie Twister, or the neurotechnology in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (SN: 7/19/24; SN: 4/23/24).
But not every fan favorite show or movie is amenable to this podcast’s format. An episode devoted to demonic possession à la Beetlejuice feels uneven and unmoored, largely because there isn’t much science discussed — or really to discuss — on the subject.
Listeners certainly won’t always agree with the hosts’ assessments. But maybe that’s part of the point. Each episode conveys the feeling of jumping into the middle of an ongoing discussion, one that is fully expected to continue after the hosts sign off.
That was my experience during a recent car trip. I listened to the TARDIS episode with my sister, a huge Doctor Who fan. We both enjoyed the mind-bending idea that the show’s beloved, time-traveling blue phone booth mimics a black hole in many ways: It manipulates time; it’s larger on the inside than the outside; and there’s even a hypothetical type of black hole, called a wormhole, thought to act as a portal through space. “Everything black holes do, the TARDIS does,” Oluseyi says, giving the not-a-phone-booth more or less a scientific thumbs-up.
But then Krinsky suggests that the TARDIS is flawed from a storytelling standpoint because the show sometimes flouts its own rules about how the TARDIS works, breaking a golden rule of sci-fi. My sister disagreed. Those logic leaps were fully justified, she said.
Let’s just say, I learned a lot about Doctor Who during that car ride. And as the miles flew by, a good time was had by all.