My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

When you think about it, ‘Doctor Who’ should really have ended in 1966. After all, the star of the series was involved in protracted and angry disputes with the show’s producer, and was also suffering from the first visible symptoms of the arteriosclerosis that would take his life less than a decade later. Sure, the show was doing well in the ratings, but it’s pretty rare that success like that survives replacing the star of the show. Admittedly, ‘Doctor Who’ had already replaced its entire supporting cast at least twice by the time Hartnell finally left, with no apparent loss of support (primarily due to strong viewing support for the Doctor’s recurring antagonists, the Daleks–it’s no coincidence that Troughton’s first outing was against the iconic pepperpots)…but really, there was no reason to ever believe that recasting the Doctor was going to work.

Especially because it was written into the series. The show has been around for almost fifty years now, and is on its eleventh actor to “officially” play the part; as a result, we’ve become so accustomed to regeneration as a concept that we’ve almost forgotten what an extraordinary handwave it is. “Oh, yes, I just changed my entire physical appearance and personality. We aliens do that every so often. Weird, huh?” (Speaking of things that are no coincidence, it’s only after regeneration is introduced that the Doctor’s alien physiology becomes a serious plot point. Hartnell’s “alien-ness” was primarily a matter of attitude, a cultural identity; with Troughton and afterwards, he becomes an alien with unusual racial abilities.)

What’s striking about this is that when you look at most of the American cult series who’ve taken a run at the Doctor’s longevity (…well, “taken a run” is putting it generously. The only shows to really come close would be ‘Stargate’ and ‘Star Trek’, and that’s if you decided to treat every single one of their spin-offs and relaunches as a single show. But we’ll consider anything that ran more than three seasons, the point at which ‘Doctor Who’ was forced to retool to account for Hartnell’s absence…) It’s amazing how many of them are set up better than ‘Doctor Who’ was to continue without their stars. All of the ‘Trek’ series are ensemble shows built around the crew of a Starfleet vessel; they even tease us, in the Season 3 finale of ‘Next Generation’, with the idea that Picard might be pensioned out/killed off as a result of the Borg crisis and Riker might become the captain. Such a thing would have been audacious, but would it really have been any more daring than replacing a 58-year old grandfatherly inventor with a 46-year old cosmic tramp?

‘The X-Files’ actually did make use of its series format to replace one actor with another, but only late in the series run and only out of necessity. It’s worth asking if they could have extended the show by making the switch sooner and getting the audience used to the idea that nobody was safe from the sinister conspiracy, or whether it would have gotten the series canceled that much quicker as fans who were really watching for the emotional dynamic between Mulder and Scully gave up on the show.

And ‘Buffy’ actually introduced first one, then a second, then a whole friggin’ raft of potential replacements, only to have them all serve as foils for the lead character and demonstrate, in one fashion or another, that Buffy Summers is special even among special people. Certainly, you could argue that the show was about Buffy in specific and not about Slayers in general, and that the creators weren’t interested in extending the show just for the sake of extending it…then again, you could also argue that the show was about transitioning from teenager to adult through making the metaphorical high school experiences into literal confrontations with the forces of evil, and the creators certainly seemed to be interested in extending that show just for the sake of extending it.

Even a series like ‘Heroes’, which was explicitly designed to have a sprawling, ever-changing cast, had problems adding people to it in later seasons…then again, it seems like the later seasons had a lot of problems beyond just “adding new characters that caught the audience’s interest.” But ‘Heroes’ does provide a particularly illuminating example of the problem that cult shows have when they try to outlast their actors, and the reason that ‘Who’ is not in much company as it heads to the 32-odd season mark.

Namely, that series don’t like changing their core dynamic, and do so only a) grudgingly, b) out of necessity, and as a result c) through desperation and not design. The concept of Agent Doggett was, at its heart, “Oh shit David Duchovny just served us walking papers what are we gonna do now?” The dynamic of Season Six of ‘Buffy’ was less, “Let’s do a meaningful and sensitive arc about how Buffy will cope without adult mentor-figures,” and more, “Um…Tony Head wants to go back to England. How do we work with that?” The actors who came in for the later seasons of ‘Heroes’ were working with a plot arc that was already flailing around for relevance, and were cast by producers who were trying to cast new roles while managing the day-to-day production of a complex series. These changes were reluctant, and frequently rushed.

Whereas ‘Doctor Who’, by this point, had already (as previously mentioned) changed its entire cast twice. The producers were very comfortable creating new characters to travel in the TARDIS, and the show’s format had shown that it could adapt to such changes. Recasting the Doctor was just the final step in a process that had begun with ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, a process that showed that the concept, not the ensemble, was the star of the show. In that light, it’s not too surprising that the show made it through the transition with barely a bump.

Which makes the transition to the UNIT era, with ‘Spearhead From Space’, even more surprising. But that’s a discussion for later…

I signed up for Netflix last week and they have tons of Star Trek and dinosaur shows.  I am at peace.

I decided to go through the Star Trek: Voyager episode listings and found one I don’t remember ever seeing, which I guess is appropriate because it’s called “Unforgettable,” and it’s about the crew meeting an alien woman who claims they can’t remember meeting her before.  It’s a weird thing for me to realize there’s a Star Trek episode I’ve never seen before, because I miss the style and format of the TV shows and this is as close as I’m going to get to bringing it back.

Unfortunately this episode sucks turds.

The concept is not so bad.  Kellin is a Ramuran bounty hunter who visited the ship a month ago to recover a fugitive, and after she left the crew were made to forget about her in the interest of Ramuran security.  Only trouble is that Kellin fell in love with Commander Chakotay, so now she has fled her society (the same high crime the earlier fugitive had committed) to seek asylum on Voyager.  She’s there to continue her romance with Chakotay, but this just makes Chuckles all the more suspicious of her story.  (Given Chakotay’s history with women I don’t blame him.)

The main problem is how they explain this memory-erasing stuff.  Voyager‘s sensors can barely detect a Ramuran ship, even when it’s heavily damaged, and its transporters can only get a lock on Kellin for about two seconds at a time.   (The transporter works fine on her when Chakotay goes down there and holds her in his arms, so I suppose it works best when it’s feeling sentimental.)  The Doctor can scan her with his medical tricorder, but the readings disappear from the computer almost as soon as he takes them.  Fortunately, the Doctor can diagnose her injuries with a simple visual analysis.  Mind you, the Doctor is a tricorder (albeit an overgrown, huffy one), so his eyes shouldn’t work any better than his instruments.

Kellin explains that non-Ramurans are unable to form long-term memories of their experiences with Ramurans–once she left, the crew forgot about her within hours.  Let me pull up the transcript:

CHAKOTAY: Is this done through technology? Telepathy?
KELLIN: It’s a factor of our biology. You see, our bodies produce a sort of pheromone which blocks the long-term memory engrams of others.
CHAKOTAY: Is that why the tricorder can’t scan you? Why we couldn’t get a transporter lock?
KELLIN: We’re impervious to those sort of devices.

I want to point out here that Chakotay is asking if a pheromone could interfere with the ship’s sensor readings.  You might think this line would be delivered with sarcasm: “So your scent kept us from detecting your life signs through the vacuum of space?”  But no, Robert Beltran is deadly earnest when he asks these questions–he’s concerned about the well being of their new guest and the mystery threatening his ship, and he wants to learn everything he can, so he just wants to be sure he knows what this pheromone can do.

None of this, of course, explains why the crew can’t remember talking to each other about Kellin.  For example, B’Elanna doesn’t appear in this episode, so presumably she’s down in engineering the whole time and only hears about all of this secondhand.  Maybe the idea is that Kellin is sweating all over any place she goes, so once she visits the mess hall the whole crew will inevitably be contaminated.  I don’t know.

Does the pheromone erase all short-term memories that occurred during Kellin’s presence?  Does the crew not remember doing anything at all that happened while she was aboard?  Or do they remember everything except that this nice lady was standing around the whole time?  I mean, let’s face it, Chakotay had sex with her.  When he recalls the events of that evening, is it just a blank or does he remember jumping on top of empty space and having an awesome jerkoff session?  Let’s say he gloated about it the next morning to Paris and Kim.  I wonder how they remember it after this episode is over.  “What’s up, broskis, guess who played with himself all night long!”

I don’t want to seem like I’m nitpicking the central conceit of a sci-fi story.  I mean, I accept that these people eat and breathe, and other science facts, so I’m perfectly willing to believe there are mindwiping aliens.  If Kellin hadn’t bothered to explain it, or muttered something about chroniton fields, I would have been fine with it.  But the explanation given is profoundly stupid.

I came up with a better setup for the premise in about a minute.  Goes like this: The Ramuran security force is armed with memory-wipey devices like in Men In Black, and computer viruses for purging alien records.  Because they’re so secretive and xenophobic, operatives like Kellin are allowed to interact with outsiders but are required to destroy their memories and records of the interaction.  (There was a Next Generation episode like this, and it worked better than this one.)  If my idea sounds familiar then it’s because you watched this episode, since the Ramurans do have flashy-things and computer viruses.  Which means the whole pheromone business is totally superfluous; it literally adds nothing to the story except plot holes and a reassurance that the people writing Star Trek: Voyager did not give a shit.

At the end, when Kellin has had her memory wiped and recants her request of asylum, Chakotay is left heartbroken and determined to make sure at least one of them remembers their romance.  So we see him in the mess hall recording a personal log…with pen and paper, so the computer virus can’t get it.  This is at once brilliant–ha ha, those aliens didn’t count on that!–and absurd–why didn’t the aliens think of that, and why didn’t you think of it the first time she left?  Neelix goes out of his way to refer to “those ancient writing implements,” like some eight-year-old who doesn’t think he needs to learn cursive because he has an iPad.  But I have run out of invective, because Voyager has taken me to the limit.

Next time, Neelix, next time.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

It was this or rank all the versions of A Christmas Carol and, despite a hefty campaign, I’m still about six short of doing so.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Recently, Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke embarked on a marathon project, the kind of thing that is only really ambitious for Doctor Who fans: They agreed to watch the entire series. It’s amazing to think about, really; what would be the baseline for fans of most other science-fiction/fantasy show, “Have you seen every episode?”, is considered to be the mark of utter devotion to Doctor Who fans. They’re actually writing a three-book series about their epic re-watch, “Running Through Corridors” (full disclosure: I’ve hung out at cons with Lars Pearson and Christa Dickson, and they’re really nice people and I enjoy plugging their stuff.)

But it’s more complicated even than that. Because if you read “Running Through Corridors”, you’ll notice that they don’t actually watch every episode. They can’t. They listen to audio recordings, they look at still photographs that another devoted fan has formed into a sort of slideshow, and occasionally they’ll view short clips, but for 108 of the episodes they write about in Volume 1, no recordings exist. Think about this for a moment. If you were to define a “true Doctor Who fan” as someone who has actually seen every single episode, they would have to be fifty years old at a minimum (and older, if you want them to have coherent memories of the missing episodes.)

It’s hard, I suspect, for fans of other shows to really wrap their heads around this. Sure, ‘Firefly’ or ‘Star Trek’ gets canceled (frequently, in the case of the latter…) but they can console themselves by watching and rewatching the old stories, creating a shared experience based on the show throughout their fandom. While Doctor Who fans…Doctor Who fandom is generational. Older fans share fond memories of stories younger fans cannot, by definition, experience, and must discuss solely based on received wisdom. (It was even worse in the pre-video days. ‘Star Trek’ might have been endlessly re-run, but there were many Doctor Who stories that were not seen for decades due to a lack of rebroadcasting. Even the stories that the BBC saved, they didn’t decide to show again until home video made it a lucrative moneyspinner for them.)

Which is why Doctor Who fans experience an unprecedented excitement when, as was the case today, new episodes get discovered. It’s not just that there’s more Doctor Who for us to watch; as mentioned, it would take a solid year of two-a-day watching to get through the whole series, and probably several thousand dollars of financial outlay to buy them all. (To say nothing of the books, the audios, the films…I’m not sure how long it would take you to watch “all of Doctor Who”, but suffice it to say we’ve never been short of it.) It’s not even the sense of joy that something we consider to be part of the world’s cultural heritage has been restored. I don’t hold any illusions that Doctor Who is high art, even though I do consider it to be significant and worthy of preservation.

It’s the sense of discovery. For decades, all we’ve ever experienced of ‘Galaxy Four’, visually, is what other people have told us; fans who’ve described it, writers who’ve novelized it, reviews that have discussed it. Most of us don’t even know what the Rills or Chumblies look like; only a couple of still photos exist of either of this episode’s principal “monsters”. (Although, not to spoil, the real monster is prejudice!)

It is exciting, to finally get a chance to see for yourself what you’ve only heard about from others your whole life. Of course, it probably won’t live up to those excited, fannish descriptions; what does? (Certainly not ‘Tomb of the Cybermen’.) But it’s the joy of reclaiming some of the series for ourselves, away from the “fan consensus”, that is unique to Doctor Who and one of the reasons why days like today are such an event. An event that seems unlikely to be repeated; the number of attics and cellars containing lost episodes has to be growing smaller by the day, and these discoveries are rarer and rarer each time. This may be the last…but we thought that last time, too.

I know a lot of people will be remembering Morgan as Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H (or his guest appearance as a crazy general that earned him the role), but this episode of Dragnet (“A.I.D.: The Weekend”) perfectly encapsulates why I enjoyed his Officer Bill Gannon as much as, if not more, than Colonel Potter.  (Sadly I could not turn up the episode with his secret ingredient for barbecue sauce.)  Morgan’s kooky, idiosyncratic Gannon plays off the straightest-of-straight-men Jack Webb so perfectly that any other, Gannon-less incarnation of the show seems pointless somehow.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.