TV: “Doctor Who” (Introduction)

I’m going to start out with a painful confession: I have never watched “Doctor Who” before starting on in the new series.

I’m sure this marks me as some of deprived child, and people are now wondering about what other hideous things my parents did to me, or in what cultural backwater I spent my misguided youth (Texas).

As I understand it, the various incarnations of “Doctor Who” all have the following characteristics: a charismatic, mysterious and somewhat prickly main character; time travel; obsessed robots with metallic voices; fanciful aliens; overarching plotlines; and “sidechicks”. Quite frankly, I should have been tracking this show down and watching it every chance I could get!

But I didn’t. I have vague recollections of it occasionally being on late at night on my local public television station, but it was very inconsistent and not something to which you could get attached. This was before there were things like a bazillion cable channels, including some devoted to science fiction. This was also before you could find old videotapes at the local video store.

However, things have changed. Now there’s Sci-Fi channel and Netflix and conventions and downloadable videos and website and flash-based previews and wikipedia episode guides and if you want to know anything about a show you can find it out in a second and have episodes at your door in a day.

So, it’s time for me to experience “Doctor Who”. What better way to start than with the latest series, especially since multiple episodes were nominated for the Hugo for best Short Form Dramatic Presentation. I’ve started in on the series, and am about five or six episodes into it. More thoughts later.