Doctor Who

Dundundun, dundundun, dundundun, dundundun,

Ooooo-weeee-oooooo...eeeee-oooooo...

BWAAADADAAAA, DAAAADADAAAAAAAAA...DA-DAAAAA...

If you have no idea what I just did, you need a little more Doctor Who in your life.

How appropriate that the show about a Time Lord from Gallifrey holds the Guinness World Record for "Longest Running Science Fiction Show".  The majority of its current viewers will likely have only heard about the series thanks to the resurgence in popularity following the 2005 revival by Russell T. Davies.





For my own part, I first found out about Doctor Who in what seemed like the least likely place:  an article in a Marvel magazine (sandwiched somewhere between a retrospective on Wolverine and a praise to Jack Kirby).  I remember the article vividly for the picture that ran on the first page.  I'll try to describe it, because trolling the internet for one panel of one Doctor Who comic is like a blind man looking for a black cat in a dark room.  With boxing gloves on.

Basically, it showed the iconic phone box dematerialising, and the effect was communicated with the word "VWORP".  The caption underneath read "Let's do the Time Vworp again!"

If there was ever a way to win my attention while I was in middle school, it was with a classy Rocky Horror Picture Show reference.  The Doctor, featured in another picture in the article, looked very little like his TV counterparts as I recall.  He had a long trenchcoat, some kind of weird hat (helmet?) and I don't recall any companion in the pictures.  Of course, my memory's vague and I've since lost the magazine, so there you go.

This was before my family got internet, so I didn't have much else to go on, but I liked the look of it and the article was interesting.  This was about 1999, so Doctor Who at this point was also "in hiatus" following the disatrous 1996 movie.  As such, I wasn't able to find out much more, but when I saw that Space Channel was broadcasting one of the old William Hartnell originals, I was intrigued to see what it was like.

I can't remember the name of the episode(s) they broadcast, but I'm FAIRLY certain it was "The Web Planet".  I'm fairly confident this is right because I vividly remember the various insectoid races, and the rebellion against the "animus".

Let me tell you now, viewers who have only seen the modern series:  the effects were SO hokey.  Remember, this was a time when the show had barely begun, and they had to work under a very tight budget.  The winged bee people looked like...well...people with great big awkward paper wings, and stripes painted on them.  The weird insectoid artillery guns looked like a group of tightly packed people carrying a cardboard canopy (it probably was, come to think of it).  In short, it looked...ridiculous.

But there was something hilariously charming about the whole thing.  And the struggle for freedom was weirdly engaging.  I remember it was on quite late, like 10PM-2AM (they ran the whole serial), so my attention span lagged towards the end, but it was fun to watch.  I giggled a fair amount at the effects, but I'm thinking that even in the 60s people couldn't help chuckling a bit at the aliens.

From there, my knowledge and viewing of Doctor Who was spotty.  Like I said, we didn't have internet at home until later, and even when we did get it, it wasn't like a lot of people were rushing to upload streaming video of old Doctor Who serials.  So, I kind of forgot about it for a while, until a classmate convinced me to hunt down some Tom Baker episodes.

I did, and it's easy to see why he's the face a lot of Doctor Who purists point to as the ambassador of the series to a North American audience.  Of course, what really took me aback was how DIFFERENT this was from the Hartnell special I'd watched years earlier.  For starters, Tom Baker was considerably younger than Hartnell when he played the Doctor.  There was also (drum roll) colour!  The effects, however, were still preeeetty cheesy.  Again, I was judging it from a 90's / 2000's perspective, and for the Tom Baker time (70's and 80's) I'm sure they were pretty good.

What was really striking, though, was how much GOOFIER it was.  This was probably an effect of Douglas Adams' influence on the show, and while I like Adams quite a bit, I wasn't sure how well it suited Doctor Who.  That being said, I've heard that the Tom Baker years, and some of the Peter Davison ones following, were intended to have a more family bent to them.  I can definitely see that.

Anyway, I wasn't all that impressed to be honest.  Maybe I picked out some bad ones (and finding complete episodes was nigh impossible - I only watched scenes), but Tom Baker's Doctor, while fun, didn't thrill me all that much.

I was a bit disappointed.  It wasn't especially my cup of tea, and since tracking down episodes was so difficult, I didn't put any more effort into finding them.

But for some, unquantifiable reason, when I heard they would be reviving the series and it would air on CBC...I got really, really excited.

I think it was just the right show at just the right time.  There was a void of light-hearted science fiction in the mid 2000s.  The failure of Enterprise was fresh in my mind, I'd lost track of Stargate somewhere in the gap between network changes, and Firefly had been cancelled long ago.

I tuned in for the first episode, with Christopher Eccleston at the helm...

...and I was absolutely blown away.

The style was dark, the characters were terrific, the photography and direction were top-notch.  It retained just the right amount of posh British sensibility that Canadians eat up while mixing in a decidedly American action feel.  There was a lot more fast-paced movement and since plotlines weren't parsed out over several episodes like in the old days, the plots rocketed along.

Audiences ate it up.  North America, Europe, Asia...Doctor Who was back, in a big way.

From here, fans will no doubt know the tale to date.  Instead of declining or showcasing a glaring inconsistency in quality the way some serials were in the original days, the new Doctor Who only seems to be getting better.  Opinions vary as to who "the best" Doctor is (the main war centres on Matt Smith v. David Tennant), but generally speaking everyone agrees the writing and direction has never been stronger.  They boast incredible guest writers like Neil Gaiman, and terrific guest stars like powerhouse dramatic actor Michael Gambon and "that guy!" Bill Nighy.

So why did I structure this review as a weird, personal retrospective, rather than delving into "what makes it great" like I did with everything else in sci-fi month?

Well, that's what Doctor Who IS.  It's the show that has become a key defining part of British culture.  It's the show that's stood the test of time, buoyed by a remarkably loyal fanbase that's grown up with it over decades of stories.  And, as it has evolved and changed, it's become a reflection of cultural generation after cultural generation.

No other show can lay claim to this feat.  True, Star Trek has been on-again off-again in the minds a global audience, and it likely is of greater renown, but the big difference is that Star Trek relied on introducing and building entirely new sets of characters with each different series, and the cumulative total years of those series doesn't add up to the powerhouse of Doctor Who.

When Doctor Who moved on to a new series and a new lead actor, the personality and direction of the show would change, but there were always consistencies.  There is always the iconic blue phone box, the sonic screwdriver, the human companions.  There were always recognizable character traits in The Doctor:  he relies on his wits and his vast knowledge of science, not his fists.  He cares deeply for the universe as a whole, and the fabric of reality.  He feels an odd kinship with humanity.

It's those consistencies that fans latch onto, and it's the adaptability that's grown new ones.  The real joy of flexibility, though, is in the storylines.  Literally anything goes in Doctor Who.  He has a time machine!  It's ALSO a spaceship!  That means anywhere, anytime, anything.  As a writer, I practically get giddy at the mere thought of being given those kinds of constraints.

Doctor Who, in all its incarnations, remains a show bursting with creativity and imagination.  A show like this, with no limits, can only find more territory to explore.  I'm looking forward to enjoying the ride.