I get unstuck when people say that they think the new Doctor Who is good. The TV program itself is a fairly mediocre production, which lurches from set piece to set piece with some spectacularly bad character development. I think people are so attached to it because it’s one of the few programs that are exist today that you are allowed to be a fan of – you’d look a bit silly in an Eastenders t-shirt, and there isn’t a lot of PM merchandising available at the BBC store. No matter how many letters I write asking for a “Team Eddie” badge set.
This new Doctor Who is guilty of one of the worst things about contemporary TV; it talks down to it’s audience. Whereas really old Who episodes had an educational feel about them, any educational content in new Who is about as didactic as you can get. This isn’t to say that I like old Who a huge amount either; it’s super-clunky and very often boring. What I like about Doctor Who are the things that stray off the accepted TV path.
In the 1960′s, in the first burst of Doctor Who’s existence, the program was very popular. This led to two Doctor Who movies staring Peter Cushing, because there was a common movement of British TV shows being turned into films around that time. The films don’t really follow the accepted story, but all the right elements are there, and I find them amazingly fun to watch.
After the cancellation of the show in the late eighties, the novelisations continued. As there were no new adventures of Doctor Who, writers were allowed to make up their own adventures for the character, which eventually gave birth to one of my favourite ideas in SF: Faction Paradox, an evil time-travelling organisation, who lived in a dimension split off from ours in the spare days caused by the shift to the Gregorian Calendar… complicated? You bet. This is one of those times that even reading the wiki page won’t give you a full rundown.
But that’s what this new Who won’t have: the guts to make things complicated. It doesn’t have the background of Star Trek, or the building of mythology that we saw within Buffy… instead, every episode has a few cursory nods to the in-show history before producing this weeks nifty explosion.
