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Doctor Who: the Whole Damned Thing
Feb. 28th, 2010 12:56 amWe live in a time of transition. A time of transition from the Age of Rusty to the Age of the Moff. And, yes, being showrunner of Doctor Who is the best job in the world. I remember thinking that years ago, long before the Age of Rusty. (As an adult; as a child, I wanted briefly, when I was about nine, to be an actor so that I could play the Doctor - somehow though, I don't think I was ever going to David Tennant. Lawrence Miles, perhaps). Anyway, at any time of transition, our thoughts naturally tend to the past as well as the future. And I needed a personal project. So at Christmas I started one. Which is to watch every episode of Doctor Who in order. Or at least every episode available on DVD. Which is most of them. There are something like 750 episodes of DW, of which something like about 650 exist in the archive. At 4-5 episodes a week, that's about three years' worth. Not all existing episodes are available on DVD, but I suspect they will be the time I get through the ones that are (I had an email yesterday from Amazon saying that "The Space Museum"/"The Chase" has been dispatched to me, which is good as the official release is 1 March, and I finished watching "The Web Planet" on Friday night). So, OK, not precisely in order. There will be some backfilling. I know there are audios and reconstructions, but at least for the time being I will make do with what's the DVDs). Still, it will be possible to get some idea (a pretty good one) of the evolution of DW.
The most important point to make about watching DW in order is that we can't watch it in the way that people watched it when it was first broadcast, especially people who were nine years of age. We know a great deal about the Doctor now that people in the mid-sixties. The Doctor is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, a member of the most powerful race in the universe, and that he is no ordinary Time Lord, but (perhaps) the most great one of all, the sole survivor (or one of the very few survivors) of the devastating Time War. That he has two hearts, is hundreds of years old and periodically regenerates (and is limited to twelve regenerations). That Time Lords may not reproduce in anything like the way humans do thus that Susan may or may be not in his granddaughter (in something like the human sense). That the mortal enemy of the Doctor and (the Time Lords) is the Daleks. And that it is the TARDIS that is responsible for virtually everyone in the universe speaking (BBC) English. All these things we take more or less for granted today. But few if any of them were even dreamt of in 1963.
Of course, there are many other things that the modal viewer in 2010s brings to the table today that the modal viewer in the 1960s did not: mobile phones, the Internet, (non-clunky) electronic devices that never breakdown, attitudes to class, gender, sexuality and race, global geopolitics, the world technoeconomic system and Britain's place in it. And as hard sf readers: molecular nanotechnology, artificial general intelligence, faster than light and time travel in an Einsteinian universe, "cosmography" (by which I mean developing picture of the Earth as embedded in deep time and deep space within the dynamic and evolving Solar System/Milky Way Galaxy/Local Group/Virgo Supercluster/universe/multiverse), life on other planets and its likely form and evolution, the Technological Singularity. All these things colour our reaction to what we see. It is very hard not to try and retcon the stories in terms of what we know now about the Whoniverse, the universe (or multiverse) and the course of cultural and technological history over the past five decades. And there is, I suspect, going to be plenty of that over the next couple of years. Even as a child, it is was obvious to me that continuity in DW wasn't something to be searched for too assiduously. And yet people have spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to create a consistent timeline for DW. We might wonder why they bother, but the truth is everything is a case of trying to find meaning in the Sea of Story. If everything is possible (or, rather, if everything has happened or can happen), nothing matters. If we are to be honest to the original creators (and viewers) of DW, we have to try and treat the programme, difficult though it is, within the context that it was made and seen. It won't be quiet, it won't be safe and it won't be calm, but I'll tell you what it will be: the trip of lifetime.
The most important point to make about watching DW in order is that we can't watch it in the way that people watched it when it was first broadcast, especially people who were nine years of age. We know a great deal about the Doctor now that people in the mid-sixties. The Doctor is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, a member of the most powerful race in the universe, and that he is no ordinary Time Lord, but (perhaps) the most great one of all, the sole survivor (or one of the very few survivors) of the devastating Time War. That he has two hearts, is hundreds of years old and periodically regenerates (and is limited to twelve regenerations). That Time Lords may not reproduce in anything like the way humans do thus that Susan may or may be not in his granddaughter (in something like the human sense). That the mortal enemy of the Doctor and (the Time Lords) is the Daleks. And that it is the TARDIS that is responsible for virtually everyone in the universe speaking (BBC) English. All these things we take more or less for granted today. But few if any of them were even dreamt of in 1963.
Of course, there are many other things that the modal viewer in 2010s brings to the table today that the modal viewer in the 1960s did not: mobile phones, the Internet, (non-clunky) electronic devices that never breakdown, attitudes to class, gender, sexuality and race, global geopolitics, the world technoeconomic system and Britain's place in it. And as hard sf readers: molecular nanotechnology, artificial general intelligence, faster than light and time travel in an Einsteinian universe, "cosmography" (by which I mean developing picture of the Earth as embedded in deep time and deep space within the dynamic and evolving Solar System/Milky Way Galaxy/Local Group/Virgo Supercluster/universe/multiverse), life on other planets and its likely form and evolution, the Technological Singularity. All these things colour our reaction to what we see. It is very hard not to try and retcon the stories in terms of what we know now about the Whoniverse, the universe (or multiverse) and the course of cultural and technological history over the past five decades. And there is, I suspect, going to be plenty of that over the next couple of years. Even as a child, it is was obvious to me that continuity in DW wasn't something to be searched for too assiduously. And yet people have spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to create a consistent timeline for DW. We might wonder why they bother, but the truth is everything is a case of trying to find meaning in the Sea of Story. If everything is possible (or, rather, if everything has happened or can happen), nothing matters. If we are to be honest to the original creators (and viewers) of DW, we have to try and treat the programme, difficult though it is, within the context that it was made and seen. It won't be quiet, it won't be safe and it won't be calm, but I'll tell you what it will be: the trip of lifetime.
