Who's Next

I'm going to geek out for an entry. But first I wanted to wish my girlfriend Debbi a happy birthday! Her birthday was Tuesday and she's, well, as old as I am. Almost. Which probably comes as no surprise since we were in the same class in high school. We went out to dinner and did a little shopping and generally had a nice evening. We're going to go get her birthday present this weekend, not because I procrastinated (though I did), but because when it came down to it I wanted to make sure what I'd picked out had just what she wanted, so I decided to run it past her first. Turns out I should have just bought it!

Anyway, happy birthday, Debdeb!

Fans among you may have heard that the BBC is reviving Doctor Who as a new series to air in 2005. I'm fairly excited about this news, though after the debacle that was Star Trek: The Next Generation it's pretty easy to temper my excitement about any revival of a beloved TV series. Still, fans who are far more into it than I am seem to think the BBC is making some wise choices, so it's easy to be optimistic.

A sensible question to ask, though, is: Why should we care?

Doctor Who was a product of the 1960s and 70s. As "science fantasy", it contained even less of a science-fictional underpinning than Star Trek. Production values were, um, low. Continuity was barely given even lip service. The stories' quality varied wildly; pick any season and you'll probably find a gem and a honker among the lot.

The show's premise was broad: An alien "time lord" and his human(oid) companions travelling through time and space and having adventures, and often trying to right wrongs. When you think about it, it's actually not that different from Star Trek, actually.

What's the attraction here?

I think when you get down to it, the show had three good qualities, and they were very good qualities to have:

1. The Doctor was both likeable and admirable;
2. The core characters were well-drawn and the actors were above-average;
3. At its best, the writers understood suspenseful plotting and good pacing.

The best stories involved the Doctor recognizing that he had to risk making a great sacrifice on his own part in order to be true to his nature of caring for and helping people. Often this involved having to oppose old friends gone bad, or risking his home, transport or life. Sometimes it involved taking these risks because he himself had badly screwed up and he needed to make amends. Different stories put an heroic, a cavalier, or a fatalistic spin on these events, but that's the crux of what really made it work.

The better stories also took what I'd call a "classic film" approach to their writing: Since the series didn't have a big budget, it relied on clever situations, lots of tension, and snappy and witty dialog to get by. Just the sort of thing that makes 1930s movies worth watching.

I think the series went downhill in the 1980s basically because it lost its heart. In the later Peter Davison shows, the series took a disturbing trend towards just trying to be darker and grosser and less likable, foreshadowing in a sense the "grim-n-gritty" (or some may call it just "glum") trend in American comic books. Few characters were likeable, the Doctor seemed increasingly mercenary, and it all came to a head in the disastrous Colin Baker years, which featured lots of slime (humans being transformed into Daleks!), incomprehensible or unbelievable stories, and a rather unlikeable and unconvincing Doctor.

By the time Sylvester McCoy came on board, it was too late. McCoy was a better comedian, but not a particularly good actor; he never managed to sell the Doctor as a hero like Pertwee, Tom Baker or Davison. The stories were still hard to fathom and the series had by this time lost not its heart but its soul. The inexplicably popular "The Curse of Fenric" was not the series' nadir, but in a way to illustrated how wrong things had gone, as it struggled to make some deeper points about the characters, but used a byzantine plot to get to the point and ended up just being a lot of chasing around after monsters. It confused complexity for entertainment, missing the whole point of (say) the Douglas Adams-edited scripts from the late 70s.

Oddly, the mostly-awful American TV-movie from the 90s at least had a little heart: Lead Paul McGann was the best Doctor since Davison.

It sounds like the "true fans" have been eating up original novels about the Doctor since then, though it sounds like the overall story has taken some weird turns which still strike me as missing the point. Though since I haven't read any of them (and don't plan to), I won't say anymore about it.

In the end, I hope the creators can grasp the crux of what made the series enjoyable, and provide an experience that both old fans and new can enjoy, and I hope they'll keep in mind that "old fans" also include people like me, who loved the TV shows but have no interest in the novels.

But basically I hope they'll be well-written, exciting, and that the new Doctor will be someone whom we, the viewers, can basically admire. We don't need "a new Doctor for a new millennium" or any rubbish like that; we need the likeable rebel who's out to do the right thing. That's not old fashioned, that's just who he is, and we deserve nothing less.

And, of course, I hope it gets exported to the US in a timely manner!