The British bloggers will instantly recognize this title; I am interested to know how widely known this is outside the confines of the British Isles. Anyway, for the uninitiated, Doctor Who is a cult British sci-fi TV series that has lasted on and off since the early 1960s. It follows a time travelling “Time Lord” who jets about the universe in an old blue Police call box with a series of pretty companions. To handle the change in actors playing the Doctor, every so often the time lord would experience a sort of death and a new doctor would be reborn. My formative experience was with the Doctor played by Jon Pertwee and then Tom Baker.
The series was distinguished by its tiny production budget and consequent cheesy special effects, wise-cracking and often camp dialogue, and extremely loyal following. Enough 14 year old boys found the implications of time travel and the possibilities that the inside of a box could be larger than the outside to be sufficiently profound that the fan base sustained itself.
That is until the end of the 1980s when the show finally collapsed… until the Spring of 2005 when it was revived. The DVD of that complete first series (first of the revived show) has just become available in the US, and the second series has just finished playing in the UK. I assume it is available on BBC America. I watched 13 episodes with my kids in three days.
The revived series has a much bigger production budget, some inventive ideas, a far more feisty (dangerous, gender-laden word) companion for the Doctor, and some of the worst dialogue in the history of the series. As usual, one can treat this as entertainment, or as a signifier for the angst of the age in which it is made, or both. Each era of Doctor Who focused upon somewhat different themes: invasion by aliens; technology run amok; incompetence of civilian authorities and so on. The revived series is big on media and corporate manipulation, and has some nice anti-Blair touches. I particularly enjoyed an episode when reality shows (Big Brother, Weakest Link) are played and those who lose or are evicted are killed with an annihilation beam.
I always felt that the original Star Trek was made by political scientists (highlighting the themes of race relations, deterrence, and colonialism) while the Next Generation version (which I hated) was made by natural scientists (highlighting issues of technology, bio-engineering, etc). In similar way, Doctor Who reflects cold war and post cold war anxieties, but from the perspective of a small post-imperial power.
More importantly, the Daleks return (and can fly — refuting the classic joke about their inability to take over the universe if confronted by stairs) along with a host of familiar enemies.
I was a Who fan, Tom-Baker era, which showed up in America in the later ’70s. Came on Friday evenings at 6–a horrible damn time–on our local PBS, and I’d have to fight each week to ensure that I got the tv (fighting news and my sister’s Little House fetish) and that we weren’t doing some (dumbass) family event. I hated the cliffhangers–’cause I never knew week to week if I’d be able to catch the follow-through.
I haven’t watched the new ones. There was something decidedly wonderful and British about the show: very sincere, yet never taken too seriously; lousy special effects, but actual thought put into the quasi-scientific shenanigans (whether time wrinkles or the peculiarities of multi-dimensional space). As a young geek, this hit me a lot harder than Star Trek; beats me why. Then I lost interest after Close Encounters, when I picked up a serious parapsychology itch (and fell in love with The Night Stalker and Project Blue Book and other pre-X-Files sorts of fun).
I really like Christoper Eccleston, the current (but apparently already on his way out) Dr.; he played the return of Jesus (who shows up in Manchester, I believe) in a neat British miniseries, and he’s always popping up to good effect in Danny Boyle’s films. But I’ve yet to see the new Who… I’ll have to put them on the list.
Chris, fyi, not that you’ll want to read any, but there is this whole huge series of Dr.Who novels, not adapting as much as free-range riffing off of the premises of the show. I ran into them because of the Kennedy project… there’s a nice one called _Who Killed Kennedy?_ which posits that a Who-affiliated scientist, having saved Kennedy from assassination, which leads to the rise of terrible dictatorships and the imminent end of the world, must travel back in time to kill Kennedy. (There are a whole lot of great wacked time-travel JFK stories, and this is one of my favorites. Other fictional personalities also had their hand in JFK mythology–Columbo solves the assassination in one novel; Sherlock Holmes pops up in another [I forget how]. And of course the X Files had all kinds of fun with Cancer Man’s involvement…) All of which is digression. But I’ll tie back to Chris–if Star Trek is a poli-sci fantasy, and NextGen hard-sci, then time travel fictions often veer into history and historiographic territory.
Interesting about the novels, especially the Kennedy story. In the first episode of the new series Rose (the new companion, played by Billy Piper) tracks down a guy who claims to have found lots of evidence of a person named “The Doctor” who keeps popping up throughout history. He has a blurred picture of Christopher Eccleston taken from the crowd along the route that Kennedy’s car was taking in Dallas. My guess is that the scriptwriters wanted to play to the hard core Doctor Who fan base and played off the novels.
BTW, I have been wanting an opportunity to ask this question of you, Mike: have you seen a movie called “Executive Action” about the Kennedy assassination? I came across a reference to it somewhere, but it is not at Netflix and I could find only one review in English at IMDB. Is it worth seeing?
I love that — it might be a fanboy nod for Who fans, but it could just be part of the JFK trope. It’s a generic convention to use some footage from Dallas… time travel stuff often uses JFK less for the specific political/social resonance than simply for its standing as a cultural referent for “History.”
About that film: not really worth a lot of trouble–the movie has Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan, but it’s a pretty direct adaptation of a conspiracy theory hatched by a guy named Mark Lane. Not particularly gripping or persuasive as theory, and the movie seems more feverish, more an interesting historical piece than a good flick. (But then I find JFK to be interesting as psycho-drama, not as a film. In fact, I haven’t liked a Stone film after Salvador.)
Good JFK assassination flicks? Flashpoint, a reasonable little thriller about two good ol’ boy cops (Treat Williams and Kris Kristofferson) who come upon the corpse and stash of a second gunman. The best is easily Winter Kills, a black comedy which runs through every conspiracy theory around then hatches a neat new one, with Jeff Bridges and John Huston. More recently, a small-budget flick did a pretty good job making you sweat, with yet another second gunman coming out of the woodwork — Interview with the Assassin. Oh, and Bubba Ho-Tep, just for the elaborate flair of its ridiculous conceit… fun to watch.
I’d recommend all of the above. Executive A is worth a gander if you run into it, but otherwise, no major thing to track down. And there are other flicks out there, but I’m not sure any are interesting to anyone but me.
i have not watched any episodes of any series of dr. who–though references abound in much of the other stuff that fed my anglophilia in college years. i cannot imagine, however, that any of it could be more entertaining than the premise of the viz. comics parody-strip, “dr. poo”, which is subtitled “travelling through space and time, trying to take a shit”–or something like that. as you can probably tell, it writes itself.
The Sci-Fi channel started showing season 2 of Doctor Who last night.