As a series, Doctor Who has been somewhat hit-and-miss with me. I followed it since its revival in 2005 (thanks to some help from my friends, as I had no cable or Netflix access then), but stopped watching sometime around 2012-2013. The tone of the series had gotten a little too clever for its own good, and a little too detached from its roots as a science fiction show, and the general plotting borrowed too much from the whole “puzzle box” / “everything is connected” approach that was more at home in superhero comics. In sum, Doctor Who had adopted almost every gimmick of modern television writing guaranteed to push me away.
I connected more with the original Doctor Who, low-budget special effects and outdated tales notwithstanding. This past summer, BBC and Twitch TV teamed up to broadcast a Doctor Who marathon, showing almost every available episode from the first broadcast in 1963 to the finale in 1989. This gave me a rare opportunity to finally catch up on the series of which I’d only seen parts before this year. 25 years of shows is too much to sum up, but I found a lot to like in those old episodes; the show rarely strayed from its roots, but never felt stale, even toward the end when one could see the show was running out of steam.
The marathon rekindled my interest in the show, and so I picked up the first of the current season on iTunes, the first episode to star Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor. After watching it – and then watching it again – I picked up the season pass. Now, five episodes in, I’m thoroughly enjoying the show for the first time in a long while.
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