New Doctor Who

First things first: Despite the date, this is not an April Fools entry. Really.

Let me tell you a story: When I was a little boy, I was a huge fan of a certain science fiction television series. I loved the stories, I idolized the characters, and I willfully and happily overlooked the show's shortcomings, especially in the departments of acting and production values. I continued to enjoy the series as a teenager and adult, watching the re-runs over and over (the series having gone off the air).

Eventually news came down that the show was going to be re-launched, with new actors, and although the show would recognize what had gone before, it as going to move the series forward and not feel obligated to recreate the feel of the original. Some fans were outraged or scandalized at this, but I actually thought it was the right thing to do: You can't really go home again, but you can recapture the essential elements that made the show enjoyable to watch. I was looking forward to it.

The new series premiered in the fall of 1987.

And it was awful.

Yes, that's right, I've tricked you: The beloved series from my childhood was Star Trek, and the new series was Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Fundamentally, TNG was the polar opposite of Star Trek: It had better acting, no doubt, and far better production values. But it had no heart or soul. It had no drama or style. Its writing was passionless, self-conscious, bland, and went out of its way to avoid character-based conflict. It was, in short, boring. It did everything but capture the fun of the original series.

Such a fan was I that I stuck out the series through over five seasons, but the damned thing eventually beat into my head that you really, really can't go home again. Especially not when they've bulldozed the home to put up a new highway.

(Fortunately, you can still look at pictures of home, which in the case of television is almost as good as going back.)

Okay, in my childhood there was also a second beloved series: Doctor Who. I grew up in the Boston, MA area and thanks to the wonder of WGBH I was watching Doctor Who before most others in the US had access to it. I dimly remember my Dad watching some Jon Pertwee episodes, maybe circa 1975-76, and a year or two later they picked up the Tom Baker/Fourth Doctor series. I watched it over and over and over and over and over. By high school (1984 or so) they had picked up the Peter Davison episodes, and the advent of cable television meant I could watch episodes from stations in other cities - boy was that ever neat. A friend of mine (a.k.a. this guy) was a huge Whovian and got advance copies of Sixth (and maybe Seventh?) Doctor episodes, which he loaned to me. (And boy, you haven't lived until you've watched NTSC-format videotapes recorded off of PAL television sets by setting a camera up in front of the TV and recording from the screen. Well, okay, maybe you have.)

I never really had the fannish bug about Doctor Who that I had about Star Trek, though. While I found the characters admirable, none of them fell into the same category as Kirk and Spock. While the writing was very good (how many series sustained 10 years of excellence the way Doctor Who did from 1973-1982?), few stories stand out as among my very favorite on television. Yet still I watched it over and over and over.

And I was sad when the series went off the air in 1989, although the series was long past its prime by that point, having produced maybe only three or four good stories since 1982. (Happily, the final story aired, "Survival", was one of these, warts and all.)

But I never really became part of Who fandom. I haven't read the novels (ask me sometime about my disdain for media tie-in novels; or don't, see if I care), I haven't really followed the news. I did watch the wretched-save-for-the-lead-actor Fox TV-movie in 1996 (well, okay, the opening credits were pretty neat, too). But I never strongly wished the series would come back. Maybe because of the drawn-out death throes it had gone through. (Seven years of suckage is longer than most series last, after all. [Insert Star Trek: TNG joke here.])

Okay, enough teasing: Most of you probably know that in 2004 the BBC announced that they'd be bringing back Doctor Who in 2005. "Series One" aired last year, and I read the blogs my various friends and acquaintances who had gotten hold of bootleg copies of the episodes. The word was that the series was quite good.

At WisCon in 2005, I met a pair of visiting English fans, Chris and Penny Hill whom I went to lunch with. They said that they'd been talking to someone who had said he'd heard that the series was not really very good and had not done well, and I said that I'd heard just the opposite. And Chris said (word to the effect) that the series was quite good, and that it had done better in the ratings than the BBC had ever imagined it might do. I think it was at this point that I started to get excited to see it.

But it hadn't yet been picked up in the US. Word was that the Beeb was slowly getting out of their deals with US public television stations in order to distribute the new series commercially, perhaps via the Sci-Fi Channel. But nothing seemed imminent. Toward the end of last year word was that a DVD set would be released in 2006 in Canada, and soon it turned up as available at Amazon.com in the US.

Finally, word came that the show would indeed air on Sci-Fi this year. Which was very frustrating to me, since my city's basic cable doesn't get Sci-Fi (you have to get the more expensive and otherwise not useful digital cable package for that), which meant I wouldn't easily be able to see it. Plus the release of the DVD set was pushed back from February to summer, after Sci-Fi aired it. Aaargh.

To make a long story short, I've finagled Subrata to make me copies of the series as it airs on Sci-Fi, and this past week we watched the first three episodes.

It is, indeed, quite good.

In tone, it feels more like a 21st century adventure show, feeling considerably less "British" (whatever that means) than the first series. Maybe this is just global blending of cultures affecting television everywhere, I don't know. But with 45-minute episodes and various pop-culture references, it feels akin to shows like Smallville. This isn't a bad thing, but it is kind of weird.

On the other hand, Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor and Billie Piper as Rose feel plenty British, with much thicker accents than almost anyone I can remember from the original series (other than maybe Ace). Being almost completely ignorant of the variety of dialects in England, I have no idea why this is, but they sound quite different from most other English accents I'm familiar with. Again, not a bad thing. After a fashion, the juxtaposition of the American "feel" of the show and the English "feel" of the actors is novel and engaging.

But ultimately it's really all about the writing, and the first three stories are quite good. The opener, "Rose", is very effective at (re)introducing the Doctor and his milieu, and is highlighted by Eccleston's enthusiastic - almost manic - delivery of his dialogue. The second episode, "The End of the World", is both a sort of homage to the first-series "whole bunch of aliens" episodes (not to mention the "everyone trapped in a small space with someone trying to kill them" episodes), and a strong updating of that format, with better make-up, more alien-seeming aliens, and (much) better special effects. The third episode, "The Unquiet Dead" is perhaps the weakest of the three, but also includes some familiar elements: The historical setting, the famous figure as a guest character, the mysterious alien race.

I appreciate that the writers don't go for the cheap homages - how easy would it have been for Rose to meet the Doctor in a junkyard? That sort of self-referential in-jokiness was part of what sunk the first series towards the end. (That said, I do kind of wish the inside of the TARDIS better resembled the classic appearance. The bright white control room was always familiar and reassuring, throughout the series.)

I even more appreciate the gradual peeling-back, onion-like, of the Doctor's background: Who he is, the Time War in his recent past, and the mystery surrounding that. It would be nice if the details are eventually revealed, although not strictly necessary. But I do hope there will be some ongoing development or plotline, as I find these days that most series approach a numbing sense of sameness if there isn't some sense of progress towards some conclusion over time. (This is far and away the main reason I stop watching a given TV series these days. And it's a big reason why Babylon 5 is my favorite SF series ever.)

"Rose" also has a scene where the creators throw down a gauntlet that they expect to be taken seriously: A lengthy, single-shot (so far as I recall) scene with the Doctor and Rose walking from her apartment building to the TARDIS where she's asking him who he is, setting up the show's premise (more or less) and declaring that they weren't afraid to be judged by the quality of their acting or direction. Which, really, is what it's all about. (And Eccleston in particular shines in this scene.)

From a scant three episodes I pronounce this series "very good" (although short of "fantastic!") and well worth watching. If you're overly married to the Doctor in his Pertwee/Baker/Davison heyday then this series may not be for you, but I thought it had the essentials of the series and was entertaining to boot. If that's all it ever proves to be, well, that's not so bad. And if it can manage to be more... well, so much the better.