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.
