Explanatory Note: Just to put things in context, I was a huge Doctor Who fans as a kid, up through Tom Baker’s majestic run back in the ’80s. However, my familiarity with the subsequent Doctors and the show’s continuity before it was cancelled in 1989 is rather more spotty. If you don’t know what a Time Lord or a Dalek is, you may wish to move on.]
I’ve just watched the first eight episodes of the ‘second season’ of the recent Doctor Who revival (which helps explain why I haven’t gotten most posting done). This is the season which saw actor David Tennant taking over for the quickly-departed Christopher Eccleston.*
[*Eccleston is the winner of a “You Ass” award, citing as his reason to leave after one season that he “didn’t want to be typecast” in the role of the Doctor. Dude, you signed up to play friggin’ Doctor Who, which is along the lines of playing James Bond. How could you have not considered the typecasting issue in the first place?]
I must say, the Doctor is running perilously low on regenerations, especially since it seems that Paul McGann’s one appearance as the Doctor, in the 1996 American pilot movie shown on Fox, is considered cannon. By my count, Tennant is the 10th Doctor, and as I recall, Time Lords get twelve regenerations, for a total of thirteen lives. The Doctor has been burning through these rather precipitously of late.
Of course, they will cheat this. The new run of the show has established that the Doctor is the last of his kind, the Time Lords having all been wiped out in an apocalyptic war with the Daleks. So I imagine they will say something like, now that he’s the last one, the Doctor has unlimited regenerations.
Anyway.
I have to admit, I like Tennant’s Doctor more than Eccelston’s, although the latter was probably the best since Tom Baker’s legendary run in the role. Eccleston’s blue collar yob wore on me a bit, I must admit. And while the new Doctor is as courageous and justice-oriented and, ironically, humanitarian as ever, I like the fact that Tennant’s Doctor also has a bit more edge. “I’m so old now,” he warns one adversary. “I used to be so full of mercy. You get one warning. That was it.”
The new Doctor can also be amusingly arrogant, although that’s not completely out of character for the Doctor of the past, either. “This is my lover, the King of France” the Doctor is told upon meeting none other than the 18th Century’s King Louis. “Yeah?,” he sniffs. “Well, I’m the Lord of Time.”
Still, I’m remain at least partly offput by producer Russell T. Davies tendency to mold the show in a ‘mod’ fashion, as if his central theme is “This isn’t your father’s Doctor Who!” The Doctor should seem rather (literally) timeless, but Davies’ Doctors are both rather aggressively of the here and now. Just the manner in which they dress seem s designed to make them fit into present day England, which is a change right there. Not that they need to go as far as Colin Baker’s eyebleed-inducing Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, but whatever. And are those glasses the Doctor now wears for reading an affectation? I suppose they’ll say his eyes were messed up during his most recent, problematic regeneration.
I don’t know, although there is much I really like here, the apparent goal for Davies of being Doctor Who’s Joss Wheden, with the Doctor suddenly full of trivia about punk rock and pop culture and the occasional trendy Brit-Lib sneer at Margaret Thatcher (really, all the murderous dictators on all the planets he’s met, and Margaret Thatcher bugs him?), just doesn’t do it for me. There are ways, I think, I making the show ‘relevant’ that don’t include Buffy-izing it. And to be fair, Davies aims at and hits quite a few of those marks, too.
I have other nitpicks, however, including the fact that while the omnipresent CGI work has opened up vast new vistas in storytelling, it’s still rather hit and miss. Modern audiences, no doubt, prefer bad CGI to bad practical effects, but I’m rather old school, I’m afraid. Still, that’s purely a matter of taste. Admittedly, the practical effects even back in the ’80s run of the show were often wincingly bad, and the CGI never drops to that level, even at its cartooniest. Still, Doctor Who was never about the special effects, which may be part of why I feel the CGI is overused.
Still, unlike in the American pilot film, the vastly upgraded effects work isn’t used as a substitute for storytelling. And while there are mediocre episodes in the modern run, many chapters are terrifically good. Davies evinces a deep knowledge and obvious love for the show’s history. This is particularly manifest is the wonderful episode “School Reunion,” in which the Doctor is reunited with probably the most popular Companion ever, Sarah Jane Smith. (And wow, does actress Elizabeth Sladen still look good.) Sarah Jane ran about with both the third and fourth Doctors—the two best, or at least most definitive, ones—and remains the benchmark for the Doctor’s sidekick characters.
This brings up what I consider to be the most problematic aspect of the new run, however. The one thing that Davies really seems to have adopted from the American pilot film is the idea that the Doctor is, in fact, ‘romantically involved’ with this companions. Or at least the female ones, I guess. Maybe. Certainly the vast bulk of the Doctor’s companions have been females, anyway.
I *really* don’t dig this, however. I’m sure Davies would say “C’mon, we always knew the Doctor was boffing those assistants, don’t we?” Well, we always *joked* about it, anyway. However, actually having the Doctor romantically and physically entangled with his companions is…creepy. First, of course, because he’s another species. (Yes, I know, look at Star Trek. Still.) Second, because he’s not just picking up traveling companions, then. He’s picking up sex partners. Frankly, I thought the notion vulgar in the American movie, and am if anything less pleased with it now that it’s officially part of the actual chronology.
And isn’t the whole idea rather grossly exploitative? Good lord, the Doctor’s 800 plus years old, and he’s shagging chicks from another, rather less sophisticated planet who are often barely out of their teens? Yuck. I frankly don’t see much difference between this and, say, a Great White Hunter character from a hundred years ago who would bed an array of Nubians maidens and whatnot. OK, that’s a bit exaggerated of a comparison, but there is a kernel of truth there. Anyway, I’m sure Davies considers this more ‘mature’ and realistic, but again, the Doctor isn’t even human. Sorry, I prefer to leave Time Lord mating out of the equation entirely.
I should note that there are interior justifications for the idea that this in fact marks a change in the Doctor’s character, and that they aren’t necessarily retroactively casting all of the Doctor’s previous companions as lovers. For instance, the American film established the (simply gawd-awful) idea that the Doctor is, in fact, half-human. Since the film is again part of the cannon, I guess that remains true, although as far as I am aware there’s been no further mention of it. (And for good reason. Blech.)
Second of all, there’s the issue of the Doctor now being the Last Time Lord. In fact, to the extent I understand it, the Time Lords aren’t just all dead, but have basically been removed out of Time and Space altogether, so that they never really existed at all. (And they took the Daleks with them, except when the show wants to do a Dalek episode.) Except that other races remember the Time Lords, so…whatever. Still, there’s no doubt that the Doctor’s status as The Last, perhaps The Only Ever, one of his kind would have an incredible emotional and psychological effect on him. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t have filled this void by suddenly making him a sexual being all of the sudden.
Even so, at least Davies deals with these issues after raising them. In the aforementioned “School Reunion,” Sarah Jane and the Doctor’s current squeeze, Rose, circle around each other with the spitting hostility of an ex and a trophy wife stuck together at the same social function. Again, I really don’t think sex had to enter into it to make these scenes work, but still, it’s great stuff.
The episode is otherwise filled with nostalgic delights. The moment when Sarah Jane stumbles across the Tardis is a truly sublime moment for fans like myself. (And believe it or not, it’s actually great to see K9 again. The “We are in a car” scene is hilarious.) Sarah Jane and Rose’s attempts to one-up one another in terms of the adventures they’ve shared with the Doctor is also great stuff.
Still, it’s a particularly nice idea that Sarah Jane would also angrily resent the way the Doctor just literally dumped her back on Earth, without a word, after shepherding her around all of Space and Time.
Her recriminations against the Doctor really add a lot of meat to what could have been just a Joyous Reunion sort of thing.
A lot is made of the ‘ex-wife’ idea, and it pretty much all works. “You can tell you’re getting older,” Sarah Jane observes, “your assistants are getting younger.” And at the end, when the Doctor leaves her a new, improved K9 as a going-away present, there is bitterness mixed in with her gratitude. She says something to the effect of, “Here you are, upgraded and replaced. But then, that’s what he does.”
In fact, there’s a whole thread of sexual and romantic jealousy running through the show’s present skein. Rose Tyler, the Doctor’s present companion and lover,* basically herself dumped her somewhat stolid hometown boyfriend Mickey for the joys of gallivanting through Time and Space. Mickey unsurprisingly resents this, but really, how is he to compete? It’s like Mick Jagger sweeping into some bar and picking up a guy’s girlfriend right in front of him.
Because of this, though, it’s hard not to sympathize with Mickey’s satisfaction when Rose is confronted by the fact that she doesn’t occupy a truly unique place in the Doctor’s affections. Not only does she meet this “Sarah Jane” person (“You never even mentioned her!” she spits; which doesn’t make Sarah Jane very happy, either), but two episodes later the Doctor is inviting another budding romantic partner, and a rather more glamorous one, to join them on their journeys. Only a somewhat convenient set of events removes this direct rival from Rose’s path.
[*Again, though, how is this going to play out in the years ahead. Are we to assume that every future companion is the Doctor’s lover? Will the show devolve into a ‘will they or won’t they’ sort of thing? [Shudder.] Time will tell, but again, this is a might big can of worms Davies has opened. Maybe when they switch to the 11th Doctor they can regenerate that bit out of his new personality.]
Anyway, to sum up, all complaints aside I’m enjoying the new show quite a lot, although of course the quality of the show varies from episode to episode. (“The Idiot’s Lantern” chapter I found particularly lame.) I will say that I find the way Davies’ Doctor keeps bumping into characters from earlier episodes a bit weird, as if all of Time and Space were actually pretty small. And, of course, he tends to bump into beings met by his or Eccelston’s Doctor, not the prior ones, Sarah Jane notwithstanding.
Still, this is part of Davies’ modernization drive, for both good and ill. This includes creating an increasing dense Official Mythology for the show, and involves spin-offs, such as separate shows for the Torchwood Institute (an X-Files type bureau we see becoming increasingly enmeshed with the present Doctors’ continuity) and The Sarah Jane Adventures, a more kiddie-oriented show (as Doctor Who itself once was) for Sarah Jane.
I’ve seen the pilot for the Sarah Jane show—she had also previously had a pilot for another show starring her and K9*—and it was pretty good. A further series, set as the pilot was after the events of School Reunion, are due to hit airwaves soon. Because K9 is (perhaps) to be featured in a stand-alone cartoon show, apparently he will not be a regular part of Sarah Jane’s new program. That’s too bad.
[This was back in 1981 (!), and entitled K9 and Company, which makes Sarah Jane sound like K9’s sidekick rather than the other way around.]
I haven’t seen any episodes of the program Torchwood. With the Sci-Fi Channel and some local PBS station (a nice throwback, since it was PBS that ran the Doctor’s adventures here back in the day) showing Doctor Who, if the ratings are good enough, I imagine Torchwood (geek alert!—and anagram for Doctor Who) will make an appearance here.
