Bigger isn’t always better, as these excellent lower budget sci-fi stories show.
Waning: contains spoilers forDeep Impact,MoonandEx Machina.
Ad content continues below
Bottle episodes are, of course, not confined toStar Trek.
And all because the team needed to save some money on this particular episode.
(Notice a theme there?
Both films feature a very small number of characters trapped together in an isolated space.
Both are also pretty downbeat (be afraid of both AI and big corporations!)
And both benefit from their budgetary limitations.
Even a comparatively lower budget on a bigger film can result in increased quality.
Because of the budgetary constraints,Deep Impactcould not spend as much time on big visuals.
King of the low budget TV shows for most of its run, though, is of courseDoctor Who.
Sometimes, this was definitely a bad thing.
But for many years the revived show took the low budget into account when writing.
This is not restricted to the revived series either.
The Edge of Destruction is a short serial set entirely on the TARDIS and featuring only the main cast.
And like Midnight, it is an excellent story.
Of course, were not saying there is anything inherently wrong with big budget science fiction.
