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"Doctor Who" Addict

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Contributed by: Gina Grate on 10/14/2006

When I was about 6 or 7 years old, an aunt introduced me to a British science-fiction show airing on PBS called Doctor Who. It was a strange, low-budget, frequently over-my-head and frightening show that I couldn't get enough of, even though most of the time I didn't know what was going on.

I fell in love with Tom Baker's incarnation of The Doctor. He was funny, enigmatic, at moments compassionate and others totally unsympathetic and harsh. He was unpredictable and seemed to have a perspective larger and more experienced than any human -- which made sense because he wasn't human, and he traveled the breadth and depth of time and space in his time travel machine the same way we hop on airplanes to fly from state to state without thinking much about it. He had also lived about 3,000 years because he was from a race of Time Lords.

I still can't believe at 6 years old that I had any interest in the show or even was able to comprehend the characters' complexities and their nuanced relationships.

I am 30 now and I haven't seen the show since the mid 80s. I can't remember much about it, except the theme song, a traveling companion named Sarah Jane Smith and that I loved it.

So I was surprised to discover an all-new resurrection of that long-running series airing on the Sci Fi channel early this year. I was skeptical whether a modern take on the show could be any good. I was afraid they'd sex it up (the Doctor was always very close but on a Platonic level with his female traveling companions), and reduce it to something silly and out of touch with the original series, which ended around 1989 in Britain after airing since the early 1960s.

I can't believe how addicted to the new show I've gotten. I watched the entire 2005 series starring Chris Eccleston as a magnetic Doctor running around in a black leather coat (I thought they were trying to make him into a punk Doctor but he turned out to be pretty true to the mythological character's personality and strange and rapid mood changes). In fact, I've watched each episode multiple times.

The Doctor's relationship with his 19-year-old traveling companion, Rose, is especially fascinating.The Doctor needs a smart, curious human with whom to travel (he quickly gets lonely traveling the universe by himself). That's always been part of the show's formula. Rose is bored with her mundane life working at a mall, having no direction and no goals. She looks forward to nothing but wants so much more. When she gets the chance to see the universe, she jumps at it. He's seen too much, done too much, and seen so much death that he often misses the importance of individual lives, of people's feelings. Rose, as a human with a small human perspective, challenges and balances him out. That's what I've always loved about the show.

I was upset when I learned Eccleston had quit after just one season. David Tennant, who played Barty Crouch, Jr. in Harry Potter IV, took over the role. I was skeptical whether he could top Eccleston but just 3 episodes into this season, I'm convinced. He's great!

On this Friday's episode, they brought in Sarah Jane Smith (his old traveling companion from the years I watched the original series) and she saw him again for the first time after decades of not knowing where he was or if she would ever see him again. She'd seen the universe, encountered hundreds of fascinating alien species, faced death countless times and lived to tell the tale, while knowing one of the world's most fascinating people. But the Doctor unexpectedly ditched her on Earth without saying goodbye. I can't imagine how hard it would be to try to take up your old, mundane earthly life after having seen and done all that. Sarah points that out to the Doctor and confronts him about leaving her like that. He admits that having lived 3,000 years, he outlives all his friends and couldn't face watching her age and die while he had to live on.

Rose, meanwhile, realizes that Sarah Jane Smith's fate will be hers someday, and wonders whether she should continue traveling with him.

Well, I don't need to ramble about the show forever. My main point in writing this blog is that I don't know a single other person who ever watched the original Doctor Who show, and I'm the only one I know who watches the new series now (with the exception of my fiance who is nice enough to watch it with me sometimes). As a result I don't have anybody to talk to about one of my new favorite shows.

So, if there is anybody else out there who is into Doctor Who, drop a comment on here and tell me your favorite Doctor, and if you like the new series and why or why not. I don't remember the original series enough to compare them, except that today's special effects often seem as cheesy as the old show's, with the exception of some cool CGI stuff here and there.

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