The television shows I’ve generally connected with best, those which inspired immediate interest and engagement, have been those I’ve been able to sit down and watch in great gluts of time: usually long after they’re first aired, then syndicated and run in perpetuity. This is how we discovered Buffy, back when we had Foxtel; ‘raging’ Saturday nights were spent in front of the television in Brunswick, huddled under a doona during the winter months, in our draughty townhouse. Before that, in Sydney, we popped DVDs of Star Trek Voyager and DS9 and watched an episode (or three) before going to sleep.
This is a different experience than, say, to watching other shows at the same time everyone else is – The Walking Dead, for example – when we sit down when they come off the satellite ( … or bittorrent …) and then barely before the credits have rolled, I’m there, checking the post-mortems and critiques.
Lately, I’ve been on one of the aforementioned gorges – on Doctor Who. I remember it from childhood, as many of us do, and, like many, it used to scare the shit out of me. So I avoided it, and listened to others rave on with a certain wary distance. It interested me, like epic narratives always have, but I never understood.
Well, now, after knocking over Series One – Four (including all the specials) in very quick succession, I get it.
Mostly.
I get the adorableness of David Tennant, throwing back his head doing his affable “yes, well” dialogue, kicking his Converse sneakers; I appreciate the earnestness of the – underrated – Christopher Eccleston; the mind-bending plots. But the lack of female writers bothers me, as does the Doctor-Companion dynamic. I can’t seem to shake the feeling, no matter how they try to disguise it, that his female offsiders are conceived first as a plotting tool, and the characterisation comes second. They are almost perfunctory. That doesn’t happen in Whedon-verse. They don’t save themselves – that’s for the Doctor to do: Donna gets handed a lottery ticket, Martha escapes a bullet and Rose gets a Doctor-lite in a parallel world. Hmm.
(If anyone disagrees, do shout out. These are pretty raw thoughts I’m spilling here. Convince me otherwise! And mind I’ve not watched Matt Smith as the Doctor yet.)
And for anyone who’s in the mood, here’s a video that spawned a thousand .gifs. Eleven seconds of cute, that I’m guessing will have me pegged as a Whovian, because I’m on YouTube seeking this sort of thing out.
