Doctor Whom?

Courtesy of Ben, I got my hands on some tapes of the new Dr. Who series. They’ve done right by the ol’ Doc.

Dr. Who has been a fixture in the childhood of the last couple of generations in the UK and Ireland. The show began in 1963, and ran steadily for nearly 30 years. Then it vanished for a while, came back as an American TV movie, and seemed scheduled for a big-screen bow for a few years, but now it’s back on TV. There’s nothing in the new series to say for certain that the original 30-year continuity still holds, but nothing that denies it either. Though if it has been followed, there were some major events taking place in the Who-niverse, since last we saw it.

I didn’t have a TV much when I was a kid, and when I did get one, it got just the Irish TV channels, and not the English ones. So I rarely saw Dr. Who on TV, but I did read all the novelizations in the library. Understand that Ireland was technologically behind the U.S., and the concept of renting videos was a rare luxury that rich friends had.

Anyway, the concept of the show was of a man called only The Doctor, a renegade Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, who, like others of his kind, travelled through space and time in a device called a TARDIS that’s inifinitely large on the inside, and can camouflage itself to look like anything on the outside. As punishment for being a maverick, though, The Doctor’s version had been sabotaged so that it never went exactly where it was supposed to go, and was stuck in the form of a 1950s telephone booth.

The major problem with the new shows is that they’re over in less than an hour. The original series had half-hour episodes, but a story arc that could last as many as 7 episodes, always ending in a cliffhanger until the last one. The mysteries were often as befuddling as those on LOST, but all would be revealed at the end of each arc. That isn’t the case so much in a self-contained episode with no commercial breaks.

Christopher Eccleston nails the character, pretty much. The Doctor has always been a basically friendly type who’s occasionally more excited than he should be by dangerous threats, and a little reckless in his excitement for science. Eclleston has that. All I take issue with is his wardrobe — a black leather jacket over black clothes. Longtime fans may remember that archvillain The Master dresses like this. The Doctor is supposed to be a fashion disaster, throwing together eccentric ensembles cluelessly, ensuring that he doesn’t fit in anywhere.

The Doctor is asexual, which may be why sci-fi nerds love him so much, and nearly always travels with a platonic female companion. This time out, it’s some pop singer named Billie Piper, and I can’t quite decide if she’s hot or ugly. She looks like Agnes Bruckner got a face transplant from Fairuza Balk.

And the music — man, it’s just classic. That same theme tune has somehow managed to sound “futuristic” for some 40 years now.

As for those big continuity changes — it seems the Time Lords are now extinct, as are their most famous foes, the Daleks. Seems a shame to rule them out of continuity, though with time travel, anything seems possible (though it was a “Time War” that wiped them both out, implying out of history too).

The new Who comes to the Sc-Fi channel pretty soon. I recommend it to all fans of the old — the spirit of the thing is intact.