17 users responded in this post

Subscribe to this post comment rss or trackback url
mygif

Doctor Who: a series about an intelligent alien who travels in a blue box that bigger on the inside with a broad range of companions who get to share his extraordinary adventures.

Sorry if that was a run-on sentence.

ReplyReply
mygif

If you can’t accept that a Dalek or an Ice Warrior isn’t something familiar and acceptable, something you can fit into your worldview by negotiating with them or threatening them or ignoring them, they will probably kill you. The only chance you have to survive in ‘Doctor Who’ is to keep an open mind, to accept that the universe is bigger and stranger and more wonderful than you previously imagined, and to believe the facts when they’re right in front of your face, even if they’re not pleasant.

There’s a really interesting tension in these two sentences; it’s a tension that runs through the whole show. Is there anything smaller, or more familiar, or less wonderful, than the assumption that difference needs to be crushed and destroyed? And yet this is also the story Doctor Who presents to us, over and over and over again.

ReplyReply
mygif

“the Doctor isn’t really what the series is about at all. It’s about the people around him. The Doctor is a catalyst, an agent of change, and the show ‘Doctor Who’ is about the way that people deal with him”

In other words, Doctor Who is an example of the “Wandering Hero” format of TV shows (and a lot more rare for all TV now than it used to be).

In some wandering hero shows, the hero is a more or less ordinary person who has no choice about wandering (The Fugitive, Quantum Leap), but in ones like Doctor Who (also “Have Gun, Will Travel,” and “Stingray”), he is an extraordinary person who wanders (or takes on clients, the point being there’s a different setting and group of secondary characters every week) by choice.

Either way, the hero is always the unchanging constant, and each episode is much more about the impact of the hero on those he meets.

ReplyReply
mygif

what do rebels, criminals, and spiritual/religious people see him as? Or has that subject not been touched as much?

ReplyReply
mygif
Gareth Wilson said on May 4th, 2013 at 4:51 pm

I’ve often wondered whether the modern Doctor Who could do a straight historical story. No interfering aliens, just the main characters interacting with people in the Neolithic, or ancient Rome, or whatever. Of course the Doctor himself counts as an interfering alien, but he usually has a opponent who’s just as alien. The closest I can think of is the Doctor investigating whether Jesus was some kind of alien being with resurrection powers. You could make an interesting episode even if he turns out he actually wasn’t.

ReplyReply
mygif

Except the new series (at least from season 2 or 3 onward) IS all about the Doctor, to a fault; and Moffat’s run has only exacerbated this. I don’t agree with a lot of what Lawrence Miles says, but his critique that the new show turned the Doctor into a fetish object was pretty spot on.

ReplyReply
mygif

[…] John Seavey at Mightygodking dot com writes about how Doctor Who’s core theme is about how people react to change—those who adapt well are rewarded and those who do not are punished. […]

mygif
BunnyM said on May 5th, 2013 at 7:37 am

Well said, Rbx5. This is part of why I loathe the new series and don’t watch it.

See also: Focus on main characters rather than episode plot(s), romance between the Doctor on his companions (!!!) and generally the change in format from the 4 weekly episodes to the one per week episode format.

I’m glad a whole lot of people like this new version, especially given this means the old version gets some much deserved frest attention, but this new version is very much Not For Me.

ReplyReply
mygif

@ Gareth Wilson,

It doesn’t happen much for more modern stories, but it happened quite a bit more for the early years of the program, especially during the William Hartnell years as the Doctor.

“An Unearthly Child” focused on cavemen; “Marco Polo” had, well, Marco Polo; “The Aztecs” was about white dudes in “native” makeup (well, not really, but…); Heck, one of the more desired lost episodes, “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve”, was about the Doctor and his current companion debating on whether or not to save some folks from a time-locked event.

In contrast, 45 years later or so, “Fires of Pompeii” happens.

ReplyReply
mygif
supergp said on May 5th, 2013 at 3:06 pm

Buffy is about the problems you encounter as you grow up.
Doctor Who is about rationalism and hope overcoming (almost) all obstacles.
Star Trek is about how humanity can make moral choices.
Highlander is about….guys fighting with swords?

ReplyReply
mygif
Energy-Puking Boy said on May 5th, 2013 at 10:12 pm

I always thought Doctor Who was about collectively envisioning a world where good intentions, intelligence, and nonviolence can always win, in exactly the way it usually doesn’t in real life.

ReplyReply
mygif
Sisyphus said on May 6th, 2013 at 10:00 am

Am I the only one who is really having trouble getting into this season? The second episode was such an obvious retelling of The Beast Below. Except it did it worse, because it seems to me that they want to make Oswin both Amy Pond and River Song, and you can’t do that. You can’t have the girl who waited, who’s full of wonder at the universe who’s also the hard-bitten mysterious know-it-all Mary Sue. Even if you make her a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. In fact, maybe especially if you do that.

ReplyReply
mygif
The Unstoppable Gravy Express said on May 6th, 2013 at 10:38 am

Crimson Terror may have rescued the season for me. It’s been all kind of “meh” since Clara (dating back to Asylum of the Daleks).

ReplyReply
mygif

The issue with doing a straight historical these days isn’t that Doctor Who always needs aliens in it (though you can make a strong argument that is true). It’s that having the doctor go to the past just to observe without mucking it up doesn’t make for a very good story.

Heck, he mucks up the past quite a bit in the straight historicals. The difference is that he gets sucked into things against his will, either directly or through one of his companions, while he’s trying to watch and stand back. That’s not true for every of the vintage historicals, but it’s still the case most of the time. And now, the Doctor is far more intervenionist as a character. He can still recognize when he shouldn’t (or now literally can’t, with the “fixed point in time” concept) intervene, but it would be far harder to justify him sitting back and letting something happen while he just watched it. So to do a classic style historical, you’d either need to remove any human-only drama so the Doctor’s character remains intact….or keep the drama and shred his character so it felt like a Hartnell serial. Neither one sounds like it would make a good episode.

ReplyReply
mygif
The Unstoppable Gravy Express said on May 7th, 2013 at 1:28 pm

By this point, the Doctor has foiled sooooo many aliens and their plans to eliminate all human life, that I would love to see an episode along these lines:

The TARDIS materializes in, oh let’s say, London of the 1950s. All kinds of strange things are going on, people are vanishing, and it doesn’t seem to add up. The facts even contradict one another.

Eventually the Doctor realizes that there are TWO separate alien threats that have embarked on completely independent plans to wipe out all humans and conquer the planet. They just happen to have overlapped.

“You’re saying that while the Telaxxi were mixing alien plant spores into newspaper ink, so that everyone reading the Sunday supplement would be infected, the Vra’grath were sneaking nanobots into the water supply?”

“Yes, exactly. Sort of a bangers and mash special, except the bangers are the death of the human race, and so is the mash. I never understood bangers and mash.”

(Naturally the Doctor programs the nanobots to wipe out the alien spores.)

ReplyReply
mygif

Part of what makes genre shows lose their focus is character’s complete their thematically relevant arcs, and it’s usually quite difficult to come up with somewhere new for them to go that also fits in to the shows themes. Quite a few british genre shows have solved this by shuffling out their cast when their arcs finish: Misfits and Being Human being the two most recent examples. Dr Who is just the most long running.

ReplyReply
mygif

I’m really going to have to disagree with you on the Buffy one. You’re missing the point of that entire show. Buffy isn’t about Buffy. It’s about empowerment (not just female empowerment). It’s about the struggles of everyday LIFE (I use caps in this case to emphasize, not yell), and how people deal with them (in different ways), whether they get over them (whether they are empowered) or not. Just trust me on this one. I’ve had years to analyze that show, and from what I’ve seen, it’s by far the best series I have ever watched, not only because of its masterfully complex character development but because of the shear powerful simplicity of its premise: empowerment.
In my belief, what Doctor Who is about is merely in the title. It’s about a “doctor” (not just a medical one) who fixes worlds and even people (not just his companions). The title of “doctor” allows this particular “doctor” to find himself, who he truly is and what he truly means (the “who” part of the title). The title, “doctor”, is a vessel for the doctor, a vessel that takes him to new depths (whether it be new people, new character insights, or a new timey wimey thing). The title of the show really is quite brilliant because it contains the show’s true meaning: Doctor Who?

ReplyReply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Please Note: Comment moderation may be active so there is no need to resubmit your comments