Doctor Who (1963)
In my last post I mentioned that I can't really recall learning to read. Similarly, I can't remember a time when I didn't know what Doctor Who was. The Doctor, the TARDIS, companions and British adventures throughout time and space have been a mainstay of my life for...well, for the entirety of it, really.
While I can't remember a time of pre-Doctor Who knowledge I can (paradoxically?) remember the very first time I saw it. The family was sitting down to dinner and my dad was flipping the channels on our old black & white television. He hit upon our local PBS station (WGBH, Channel 2 out of Boston) and there was the Tom Baker "time tunnel" opening sequence. I vaguely recall my dad recognizing the show and telling me it was called Doctor Who, though I'm not entirely sure that memory is correct, as I've never noticed any other evidence that my father had encountered the show before me. That's how I remember it, though.
The title sequence and music caught me immediately. It was creepy and foreboding, promising not just adventure but terror. It produced the feeling of being drawn, inexorably, almost against your will, into something that was going to be both exhilarating and horrifying at once...and that you couldn't have the one without the other.
And then, of course, Tom Baker's face popped up. It had the same effect. He looked imposing and powerful...and scary.
Then the episode began. It was The Sun Makers: Part One. Through it, I was introduced to the three people pictured above and through them, I began to explore a terrible world full of totalitarian bureaucrats, desperate citizens, jaded rebels, death and taxes.
And I loved it. I was absolutely mesmerized. A lot of the appeal was the dialogue. I love words and language and what can be done with them and Robert Holmes, the serial's writer, is a master of the craft of dialogue. Classic Doctor Who never had the biggest budget or the best effects but Holmes' dialogue did such a wonderful job of world building, referencing people, places and events that the show could not afford to depict but which his words prompted my mind to paint in glorious mental pictures. To this day, I have distinct images of in-station fusion satellites, six megropolises and ajacks. None of these are significantly depicted in The Sun Makers, but I can envision them nonetheless. The best stories prompt your mind to tell its own stories and this one led mine to conjure up a whole world.
Some might say this wasn't the best episode to start with, and I do believe there are much better stories one could choose for an introduction to the series, but it captured my imagination nonetheless. The Sun Makers made me love Doctor Who (and hate taxes) at first sight.
A great deal of that was Tom Baker's performance. The casual flippancy of the Doctor, how he'd take everything in stride with a smile and a joke was inviting, but there was an undercurrent of steel behind that. The flippancy was a facade and, while it might fool some of the other characters in the story, it didn't fool me. He also dealt with the problems the episode presented to him using two weapons, thought and words, the very elements stories are made of. Is it really any surprise that I fell in love with the character?
Leela, the Doctor's companion in The Sun Makers, was the perfect counterpoint to the Doctor's approach. Where he was all analytic thought and wordplay, she was all action and instinct. The two complimented each other's approach perfectly. If you've seen or have access to the episode, take a good look at the scene where they prevent Cordo from throwing himself off the building. The Doctor's impressive gift for off-the-cuff gabbing and Leela's skilled use of adept physicality work perfectly, in concert, to save a man's life.
And that's the first major thing I saw them do. They saved a man's life. They didn't know the man. They didn't know why he was about to kill himself. They just knew that he was about to die and they should do something to stop that. Prior to that moment, all I'd really seen them do was make quips and jokes and play chess with their robot dog. The episode had started by establishing how oppressive this world was, then it had shifted into the Doctor, Leela and K-9 joking around in the TARDIS, their "down time" so to speak, but it was that scene with Cordo that told me who the Doctor and Leela really were. They had their flaws, for sure. I'd seen that earlier when they'd been squabbling in the TARDIS. But that was, as I said, "down time." I've always believed that the core of a person's personality, the part that really matters, is who they are when they're confronted with truly important choices. The rest is just window dressing. The window dressing can be important to how well the story works, mind you (and the Doctor's quirks and eccentricities have always been a large part of why I enjoy the show) but, when it's all boiled down, who the character really is hinges on what's left when the window dressing is removed. And when the Doctor and Leela's window dressing was removed, they were people who would not sit back and let something awful happen if they could prevent it. In short, they were heroes.
Speaking of window dressing, they had a robot dog. And a snarky one at that. K-9 doesn't do a whole lot in that first episode except snark, show that he's good at chess and follow his owners (while being followed in return) but the trusty tin dog was yet another strange, eccentric element in this weird new world that I was being introduced to and another reason to become fascinated with it all. Plus, I love snarky dialogue.
And then it ended.
On a cliffhanger.
And just like that, I knew I was going to have to come back the next day to find out what happened. I've been doing that ever since. To the best of my knowledge I was about 4 or 5 when I saw The Sun Makers: Part One so that means I've been doing it for something like 43 years at the time of this writing and I suspect I'll keep doing so for as much of the rest of my life as possible.
The closest I ever came to abandoning Doctor Who was a very brief period during my early teenage years when I was both discovering girls and the show was off the air. Even that didn't last too long. As soon as I discovered that I could go get videos of old Doctor Who episodes, I was back on the Who train again.
Looking back, I see why the show captured my imagination so thoroughly, given the things that I loved. From other stories, read to me late at night by my father, I'd already learned to love dialogue and wordplay and heroics. I'd also learned to love stories in general and the myriad worlds that stories could spirit me away to.
And Doctor Who, at its very core concept, is a story making machine. It can take you anywhere and tell you any kind of story. And it can do it with a smile and a wink and the endless promise of more stories to come, arguably an infinite amount of them.
Of course, in those early days, I don't think I quite understood just how broad Doctor Who's storytelling palate actually was. I started out believing that Tom Baker, Louise Jameson and the voice of John Leeson were the only regular cast the show would ever have (or had ever had.) To a small extent, I was disabused of that notion pretty quickly. WGBH, at that point, only seemed to have the series up through the end of The Invasion of Time and then it snapped back to Robot, the beginning of the Tom Baker era of the show.
WGBH played Doctor Who in kind of a loop, Monday-Friday at 7pm. If I was going to miss an episode, it was most likely going to be on a Friday. I grew up on an island and weekend trips to the mainland to visit my grandparents happened on a fairly regular basis. If I was lucky, we'd get to their house before 7 and I could catch the Friday night episode, but that often wasn't the case, especially once I got old enough for school and we had to wait until both that and my parents' work for the day were finished before we could leave.
Because of this, I managed to miss Robot: Part One during that first WGBH shift backwards (and the next few for that matter) and thus Tom Baker remained the only actor I associated with the role of the Doctor for quite a long time. Originally, I think I just assumed that Leela had departed, he'd picked up Sarah Jane after that and K-9 was gone because he'd left at the end of The Invasion of Time. There were, of course, giveaways that I was watching an earlier portion of the show (not least of which was that Tom Baker simply looked younger) but, because of my age, I didn't pick up on those. WGBH went through the "Tom Baker Cycle" a few times, slowly expanding how far it got (presumably as new seasons were created in Britain and sold overseas.)
The next time around, they blew past The Invasion of Time and into the Key to Time season, introducing me to Romana. By this point I was starting to pick up a better sense of the order these stories generally came in. I remained blissfully ignorant of the concept of regeneration, though. I somehow managed to miss both the final episode of The Armageddon Factor and the first one of Destiny of the Daleks so Romana's change didn't enlighten me on that score. If I remember correctly, I think I concocted some sort of notion that both Romana and Princess Astra must have been near death at the end of The Armageddon Factor and the solution must have been for Romana to inhabit Astra's body.
I recall being very surprised by the change in the credits when The Leisure Hive aired. I don't think I really had a concept of television seasons yet, but there was an obvious dividing line between the previous "time tunnel" episodes and this jazzy new "starfield" set of them. I also recall congratulating myself on guessing, ahead of time, that the villain behind the scenes in The Keeper of Traken must be that freaky Master guy that had given me nightmares back in The Deadly Assassin.
And then Logopolis happened. Tom Baker, my childhood hero, THE Doctor, fell from a great height, said something portentous to his three relatively new companions...and turned into someone else.
I confess that I had absolutely no idea what to make of this at the time. As I've mentioned, the whole concept of regeneration had managed to pass me by. (I'm reasonably sure that I'd self-explained away the faces in The Brain of Morbius by saying the Doctor was being forced back through his ancestry.) This change made little sense to me, none at all, if I'm honest. Plus, I somehow managed to convince myself that Logopolis: Part Four was the end of the series entirely, as if Doctor Who had chosen to finish on a note of absurdity, like The Prisoner, which I'd recently seen (but by no means understood. I was still flabbergasted that The Prisoner hadn't ended with Number 6 actually escaping. Ah, youth.)
It didn't help that the family took a trip right after this, causing me to miss the beginning of Peter Davison's run. I recall not being terribly bothered during the trip because I assumed that WGBH would snap back to the beginning of the Tom Baker run again and that, when I returned, I'd be seeing familiar stories of the Doctor/Sarah/Harry variety.
But that wasn't what happened. When we returned and I went to watch the show, the starfield opening was waiting for me, only with this new, younger, blond face instead of Tom Baker's. When the episode began (Four to Doomsday: Part Two) there was the man who'd appeared at the end of Logopolis running around with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, calling himself the Doctor and having an adventure I'd never seen before.
It's tough to remember how I reacted to this. It's tempting, given my later love of the entirety of Doctor Who, to say that I took it all in stride and rolled with it, but I'm pretty sure I didn't like it at first. Davison played the Doctor very differently from Tom Baker. In particular he seemed so much more serious than his predecessor. (It took me years to appreciate how much humor there actually is in Davison's era, to notice that Davison's jokes are just a lot more subtle than Tom's more blatant approach.) And he didn't even have the Doctor's scarf. How could you be the Doctor without the scarf? (Or at least a Sherlock Holmes outfit?)
My dislike of the change came to a head around the time of Kinda: Part One which featured that particularly creepy dream sequence for Tegan. It gave me a nightmare, quite a vivid one, in which I was in Tegan's place, being tormented by the chalk-white figures from the episode. In my dream, however, the Doctor showed up and rescued me. Not this young, blond stranger who'd been pretending to be the Doctor. No, THE Doctor showed up and saved me. Curls, teeth, witty banter, scarf. All the things that made the Doctor the Doctor to young me. My dream was so convincing to my young self that I sat down to watch Kinda: Part Two convinced that the REAL Doctor was going to show up and rescue Tegan the same way he'd rescued me. Tom Baker would be back in the lead role (perhaps he'd been ill, or taken a vacation, I thought) and all would be well in the Who world.
None of that happened, of course. The episode finished with Davison still firmly in the role and the series continued in that fashion. Right then and there, as the credits rolled on Kinda: Part Two, was the moment where something happened for me, both for Doctor Who and for other stories I would explore over the years. I decided to put aside the comparison of the new Doctor to the old Doctor, to stop worrying about which was better, to stop concerning myself with what had changed and to see what this new version had to offer. I might like it less. I might like it more. But I was going to like or not like it on its own terms, not based on whether it was more of what I already liked.
And that's how I've approached Doctor Who (and a lot of other stories) ever since. I ceased treating "they've changed things" as a valid criticism on its own. I started evaluating stories based on how well they did what they set out to do, not on whether they did what what I'd wanted or expected them to. As I continued into the Davison era, I chose to explore what Davison was trying to do with the character, not whether he was doing the same things that Tom Baker did. As someone who loves stories and particularly Doctor Who stories, I think that was one of better choices in my life and it's a philosophy I've expanded from Doctors to companions, seasons, writers, producers, showrunners...really every aspect of storytelling there is.
That's not to say there aren't story types I don't like. I'm not a big fan of rom-coms and my patience for sitcoms is low (though I can think of exceptions to both of those which I think are well-done enough to enjoy.) I have to be in a very specific mood to enjoy horror movies and I pretty much never enjoy horror that revels in sadism or torture. But, by and large, my approach to these story types is to avoid them altogether, rather than exploring and condemning them. If other people enjoy them, then that's all for the better. In other words, I tend to stick with the kind of stories I like.
And I like Doctor Who. A lot.
Luckily, there turned out to be so much more of it than I'd previously thought there was. Tom Baker's era, which is the equivalent in length to how long most shows last for their entire run, turned out to be just a part of a much bigger whole. Once I embraced the idea that someone else could be the Doctor, I began to explore around the fringes of the television show, finding magazines and books and comics and learning that not only was Tom Baker not the only Doctor, he wasn't the first, either. I wasn't entirely sure how many other Doctors there were or what they looked like but I knew there were a few. I recall reading the novelization of The Claws of Axos with a sort of "blank" mental picture of the Doctor's appearance, as Jon Pertwee’s face was not on on the cover. I even learned, ahead of seeing him, that there was a Doctor who came after Davison. Then I hit The Five Doctors in my viewing (divided awkwardly into 4 parts by WGBH), saw the previous Doctors and that was the moment when I knew I had to go back and see it all.
That would, as any fan of Classic Doctor Who knows, be far harder a task than I'd originally thought. But I set out to do it. When I found out about the missing episodes I was disappointed. But then I found out their scripts still existed...and their soundtracks did...and learned about the missing episode recons...and now, of course, a bunch of them have been animated (crossing fingers for more.) I set out to watch and own, in some audio-video experienceable form, every episode of Doctor Who.
And I succeeded. Between VHS tapes and recons I had them all. It took me a while, until autumn of 2004 to be precise, but I got 'em all. The last story I got my hands on was The Sensorites. I had everything. I even downloaded Scream of the Shalka.
What now?
I had just vaguely started to concoct a plan for trying to get all the books, audios and comics (I already had a fair amount) when the announcement came that Doctor Who was coming back in 2005.
This announcement prompted one of my very few superstitions. I try to be a pretty rational guy. For all my love of the fantastic and weird within stories, I've never had any trouble with the dividing line between fantasy and reality. I like many stories about aliens but, honestly, I don't particularly buy into UFO conspiracy theories. If people tell me there's a ghost in their house, I have to fight hard to keep from breaking out laughing at the idea that they believe that. I don't believe in magic or fate or destiny. I believe the world runs on physics, luck or a combination of both.
But I also believe that as long as I own all of televised Doctor Who, more of it will keep being created. It happened when I got my hands on The Sensorites and it's happened every time since then. There have even been multiple times when missing episode finds have occurred right after I completed my collection again. Heck, I associate the returned episodes of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear with replacing my faulty copy of The Happiness Patrol.
I like to think, in a non-rational, completely superstitious way, that this is because Doctor Who is too infinite, too boundless in its potential to be contained, that every time you think you've captured all of it, it expands, that the show, like the universe the Doctor explores, will go on forever.
The rational part of me knows that this probably isn't true. The part of me that first watched the Doctor, Leela and K-9 step out onto the surprisingly urban surface of Pluto believes it anyway because Doctor Who has so much to offer and so much to explore that it feels like it will never end.
So, amongst other things, I'm going to explore Doctor Who here, starting from "a mild curiosity in a junkyard" and going forward to...well, the story hasn't really ended yet, has it?
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