A long time ago, just before I started my freshman year of high school, I fell in love with the British TV series Doctor Who. You know, that ultra-low-budget sci-fi serial about a guy who time-travels in an old telephone booth (well, technically, a police box, but it’s still a variety of phone booth) and encounters all manner of bizarre creatures bent on destroying humanity and conquering the universe?
Anyway, my parents, who had by my teen years seen me acquire and discard any number of fanboy obsessions, didn’t understand it. At least Star Wars had spectacle going for it; they could see its appeal. But what was so appealing about Doctor Who‘s cardboard sets and goofy tinfoil aliens? (I’m not kidding, by the way; there was a storyline in which a transdimensional alien race appeared in our universe as shimmering blob-like things that were very obviously sheets of tinfoil composited into the shot.) I honestly couldn’t tell them what it was that I liked about Who. I’m still not sure I can articulate it. I think maybe its cheesiness actually was a big part of the equation; it lent the show an organic, home-grown feeling, like the sort of thing that a bunch of enthusiastic kids would make with whatever they had on hand. I also liked the Britishness of it, the fact that it was so very different from anything else I’d seen up to that point.
However, teenage love is a fickle thing, and I’d pretty much lost interest in Who by the time I moved on to college. I carried enough of a flame for it that I felt bad when I heard that the show had been cancelled — it’s on record as the longest-running science-fiction series in television history, from 1963 to 1989 — and also when I heard that some of the actors associated with it had passed on. But generally speaking, The Doctor had passed out of my life.
Until just a few weeks ago, when I encountered the new Doctor Who series. I know that I’m way behind the curve on this one — the rest of the blogosphere was talking about the series relaunch two years ago — but better late than never, right?
I’ve seen four or five episodes now and I have to be honest: I’m not sure what to make of this new Who. It’s not a straight-up remake like Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica; it very definitely exists in the same (very loose) continuity as the previous series, and the current Doctor is plainly meant to be an incarnation of the earlier character. (Briefly, part of the reason why the old Who could run for so many years was that it included a built-in excuse for bringing in new lead actors every so often: The Doctor is an alien who can regenerate his body when he’s fatally injured, which results in him taking on a new appearance.) However, the show is much darker and more grown-up in tone — the details still haven’t been revealed in the eps I’ve seen, but there’s been a war since the last time we encountered The Doctor, and he is now the last of his race in the entire universe. He’s lonely and struggling with his own bitterness, qualities that the earlier Doctors never displayed. These traits are reflected even in the character’s more somber costume. Gone are the colorful and even buffoonish outfits The Doctor used to wear; now, he looks like any other tough-guy bloke in dark-colored jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket. And he swears on occasion, too, which is jarring, since the old show was squeaky-clean family fare.
Even stranger is the fact that this new Doctor seems to have some romantic and possibly even sexual feelings for his very attractive young female travelling companion. Such things were positively verboten on the original Who.
The show’s format is different now, too, self-contained 45-minute episodes instead of the old cliffhanger serial format in which a single story would be spread across four or six 30-minute chapters. I think this change is actually something of a detriment, as the stories I’ve seen feel kind of rushed.
Strangest of all, however, is the use of actual special effects. No more tinfoil aliens. Doctor Who now looks as pretty and realistic as any other science-fiction series on television, certainly equal to Firefly, for example. One episode I caught recently showed an alien spacecraft crashing into the Thames River after gouging through Big Ben… and it didn’t look remotely laughable. I can’t over-emphasize how much cognitive dissonance this is causing for me. I keep thinking, “This can’t possibly be Who, can it? It just doesn’t look ridiculous enough!”
Still, something about the new series keeps drawing me back. It’s like bumping into an old school friend and discovering over coffee that, while he’s pretty much the same guy you remember, he’s been through a lot of interesting experiences since graduation day. I imagine I’ll keep watching…
One final thought: I was very, very amused by the last episode I caught, in which The Doctor discovers the final surviving example of his oldest enemies, the Daleks, is being kept in a secret underground military base in — are you ready for this, kids? — Utah! The location is explicitly described as a complex in the desert west of Salt Lake City. The really groovy thing is that there actually is a military base out that way, and a pretty scary one at that. Let’s just say that The Doctor’s exchange with another character in that episode —
D: What’s the nearest city?
van Statten: Salt Lake City.
D: What’s the population?
vS: Over a million.
D: All dead if that thing (the Dalek) gets out!
— carries an extra-special resonance for residents of these parts, since one of our greatest fears is that something stored out at Dugway really will get out. (Dugway Proving Grounds is the nation’s stockpile and testing facility for chemical and biological weapons; an open-air test of something back in the late ’60s killed a bunch of sheep and reportedly inspired Stephen King to write The Stand, about a bioweapon plague that decimates humanity.)
