Doctor Who: Season One

The longest-lasting franchises tend to have rebooting built into their very structure. A fresh-faced James Bond takes over the 007 movies every few years, superheroes die and resurrect constantly, and Doctor Who sheds his current body and dons a new one when he pleases. These franchises can lie dormant for years (16 in Doctor Who’s case, 1996 TV movie excepted), but when someone wants to pick them up again, they’re already ready to go. Fans can’t complain because rebooting was already integral in the show’s DNA, and newcomers have a potential portal into the world with every new update.

As a gateway into the Doctor Who universe, the 2005 series is an effective primer. Beginning its first episode not with the Doctor but with ordinary Londoner Rose Tyler (Billie Piper), the show uses Rose as the viewer’s avatar into the Doctor’s world. Her naïveté enables the writers to play audience catch-up, filling new viewers (like me) in on the rules of the “Whoniverse.” As an actual character, Rose is a winning enough companion, although the show dwells perhaps a little too frequently on her home life when it’s the Doctor’s life that sounds far more intriguing. Christopher Eccleston plays the Doctor’s ninth incarnation, a comparatively “cooler” update, at least in dress, bedecked in t-shirt and black leather jacket as he is. Eccleston brings a kind of cheerful daffiness to the Doctor as he bumbles through time and space, but it’s tempered with flashes of darkness and calculation. The Doctor is, after all, the last of his kind, and when things take a turn for the worse, Eccleston reveals a grimmer, more serious side of the character.    

Although cumulatively, the season is quite good, it’s nonetheless very problematic in parts. I’m referring not to the low production budget or the cheesy special effects (if you watch sci-fi television on any kind of regular basis, you learn to roll with the bad FX punches) but to poor writing and character development. A major problem in the early episodes of the show is the way it expects us to do its heaving lifting for ourselves. Characters who have scarcely met dash into the TARDIS, have off-screen adventures together, and by the time we meet them again, they’ve bonded and we are expected to accept their new, deep friendships. It’s lazy writing, and it makes the characters’ relationships less believable and thus the characters less sympathetic. Fortunately, although more nuanced development would have no doubt made for more involving television, by simply hanging around the characters long enough, we do eventually come to like them and to buy into whatever relationships are supposed to exist between them.

If there’s another major flaw with the new Doctor Who, it’s the ham-fistedly handled themes. The show far too frequently tries to pose moral dilemmas where they don’t convincingly exist. In the sixth episode, the Doctor encounters a member of his oldest group of enemies: the Daleks. Overall, the episode is pretty terrific. Each new reboot of Doctor Who is faced with the unenviable task of instilling in new viewers the utter terror that the tea-kettle-like Daleks are supposed to inspire. On that front, the episode succeeds magnificently, first openly admitting that the Dalek looks ridiculous and then transforming it into an unstoppable killing machine. The issue comes when the Doctor unsurprisingly tries to kill the Dalek, and the show tries to pass this off as a horrifying “thou hast become what thou hast fought against” moment. Only the Dalek is a genocidal maniac and the Doctor is trying to kill it before it can kill anyone else. By that logic, David is as bad as Goliath.  

The season progresses in quality as it goes along, its second half superior to its first. With the “Dalek” episode, Doctor Who hits a stride of greatness that doesn’t stop until four episodes later when the show inexplicably brings back farting aliens (and clumsy moralizing to boot). In that interval of good episodes though, the show demonstrates how great Doctor Who has the potential to be. By far, the strongest arc of the season is a two-part storyline set during World War II. Although I implied I wouldn’t make fun of the show’s production budget, the World War II saga makes such effective use of its special effects, that I wonder if I shouldn’t go harder on the other episodes. This two-part storyline, entitled “The Empty Child,” plops the Doctor and Rose in the middle of the London bombings where something decidedly creepy is going on. A little boy in a gas mask wanders the streets of London like a juvenile Grim Reaper, his touch spreading something more disturbing than death. The boy seems to have supernatural power, taking mental control of electronic devices and vocalizing through them the same eerie question over and over: “Are you my mummy?” Meanwhile, Rose discovers that she and the Doctor are not the only visitors to the time era, as a spacecraft hovers beside Big Ben. Its pilot is the Han Solo-like Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), who is prepared to sell an empty alien medical ship that has crashed in the center of London. The storyline build in intensity as the gas mask boy begins to hunt down the Doctor who races to unravel the mystery behind what’s going on. When the Doctor and Rose finally discover the truth, it leads to an exciting and moving finale to the finest episodes of the season. “The Empty Child” saga exemplifies not only the potential of Doctor Who but of science fiction in general: frightening yet funny; fantastical but scientific; grand yet intimate.

As Christopher Eccleston bows out of his tenure as the Doctor at the season’s end, I hope that the David Tenant era brings with it the intelligence and excitement this first season proved the show was capable of.