It's so easy to get addicted to some form of media, especially these days. I can imagine that 10, 20, or 30 years ago, there were fewer pop-culture obsessions to latch onto, and fewer yet more fervent people latching on to begin with. But these days, we have a consistent, constant entertainment overload and I'm just as guilty of letting myself get too inundated with every kind of obsession. As I type this, I'm watching the previews in front of the Cedar Rapids Blu-ray and have Twitter, Gmail, Netflix, and Wikipedia open on my Google Chrome browser. I don't mean to, here or anywhere else, decry how we're losing our focus; I've found that I leapfrog from addiction to addiction within media and this is just another one of those examples.
I'm a moderate fan of science fiction TV and movies. I say "moderate" because while I've enjoyed some of the Star Trek movies and TV series, I've never gone to a convention or considered dressing up like Spock. The same goes for Star Wars: the closest I ever got to true fanaticism there was lining up a few days before The Phantom Menace opened to get tickets for opening day. But I've never been against genre fiction in television, I've just never gotten so sucked in that it dominates my life. That's still the case, but I've crossed another show off my to-do list: BBC's Doctor Who. I never had much interest in Doctor Who, seeing as the old incarnation of the program ended when I was five, and the fact that there was a TV-movie on Fox in the mid-1990s was news to me when I started looking into the show's history a few months back. Even though I enjoy British comedy and a lot of modern sci-fi shows like Fringe and Battlestar Galactica, when the new Doctor Who began airing in 2005, it just sailed right past me. Six years later, enter Netflix Instant.
There's been a lot of heated discussion lately about Netflix, its positives, and its negatives. What with the company upping its prices--a move that sucks for the average consumer, but isn't really that surprising when you think about it--people are reevaluating what they actually use on Netflix. Do people need to have a 2-at-a-time DVD plan plus streaming? (That's my plan, and after some initial hemming and hawing, that's going to remain my plan for the indefinite future.) While Netflix is certainly nudging its consumers to all-streaming, all the time (something that will work only when they have a lot more current material on streaming, and when the quality of the video is far closer to what's available on even a 2-year-old DVD), the streaming plan does work and work well depending on what you find. My wife found the USA show Psych through Netflix Instant, and we've both watched plenty of movies and TV shows that are just easier to get through without having to wait a couple of days for the DVD or Blu-ray to arrive in the mail. One constant with Netflix Instant is that a lot of similar movies or TV shows are there, if they're there at all.
So it is with Doctor Who, which I added a few months ago mostly out of curiosity. I'd read from a few critics I respect that the new version of the show was worth the time, and once the fifth season, which began airing in April of 2010, kicked off, the critical praise was at an all-time high, or so I thought. I added the show to my Instant Queue and, a few months later, watched the first couple of episodes. (You know how it goes: you add something to the queue and, unless it's an immediate must-see, you let it linger, sometimes until Netflix takes it off Instant.) I really didn't know what to expect, so I was mostly bemused by what happened in the first few episodes. Christopher Eccleston, as the enigmatic Doctor, and Billie Piper, as his companion, Rose, were both a lot of fun in what seemed to be mostly just sci-fi as camp, as cheese. Though I'd heard of it, Doctor Who is one of those British shows that was just too British for me to get. "He's an alien...who can regenerate...and travels around space and time in a police box called the TARDIS. O....k." Still, the show was watchable enough in the first few episodes that it kept me engaged, mostly due to Eccleston and Piper, who managed to take themselves seriously enough without losing their humor when fending off threats such as the Daleks.
As it usually goes, there was a moment when I knew I was all in with Doctor Who. I've mentioned it in the past, but with shows like Deadwood, Lost, and others, there's that one ineffable moment when you know you're sticking with a show until the bitter end. There were a few moments close to that in the first season of Doctor Who, such as parts of "The Empty Child," one of the first two-parters in the series, but it came to the second season and a brand new Doctor to cement my love for the show. The episode is "The Girl in the Fireplace," and the concept is deliciously clever: the Doctor is able to interact with Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of King Louis XV, through a fireplace in her room. Somehow, he can enter at one time and then, in what feels like minutes to him, see her once again years in the future. The lovely Madame is being hunted by creepy clockwork androids who want her brain for seemingly nefarious purposes, but what grabbed me was how moving and emotional the episode became. The Doctor, as played then by David Tennant, feels so much and is so devastated by losing this woman even though he spent a few short minutes with her. It's hard enough to make the audience feel for a character throughout a long-running TV series, but it's harder still to do so for a relationship that is created solely for one story. That it happens, courtesy of Tennant, Sophia Myles, and writer Steven Moffat, made me sit up and truly pay attention at the show.
Something that concerned me, and still does--I'm just about to finish up season four and the specials that closed out Tennant's time as the Doctor--is that switching actors as the Doctor or as companions would be detrimental for a simple reason: what happens if I don't like the new person? I got concerned with it when Eccleston's Doctor regenerated into Tennant's Doctor (and having seen not a single second of the last two seasons, I'm concerned still about the change from Tennant to Matt Smith), and I felt the same when Piper left and Freema Agyeman took the role of the Doctor's companion. Change and transition can be good, but I always worry that a show like this can only change so many times before it steps wrong. Concern trolling aside (yeah, I hate doing it, too), none of the changes have turned me off the show. If anything, I've become more and more compelled by the last two seasons of the show, even as the stories get more and more tense, more and more wild, and more and more epic. (The third season's three-part finale was particularly wild and over-the-top, but never in a way that turned me off.)
The second half of the sixth season begins in 3 weeks; by that point, I hope to be caught up. At worst, I'll be caught up with all of season six by the time the finale airs, on October 1. (Quick rant: I really, truly hate when networks split up a show's full season of episodes. It happened with TNT's Men of a Certain Age, which has recently left TV for good, and it's happening with Doctor Who, both on BBC America and BBC One. On the one hand, sure, the show is coming back for another season and remains wildly popular. But on the other hand, are networks that hard up for content that they'd rather stretch a show's season out interminably as opposed to let it run its natural course? Grumble.) I don't know that I'm going to be decking myself like the Doctor anytime soon or putting the TARDIS all over my computer or desk, but I have to admit: mostly due to its charm and emotion, I've become truly hooked on Doctor Who.
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