Review: Doctor Who Season One

The residents of Experiment House were some of the lucky few in the USA privileged to watch the new series of Doctor Who. The science fiction show airs practically everywhere else in the world -- including South Korea, for Pete's sake -- but due to the apathy of American broadcasters, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

How did we acquire our copies of the program? Well, every Saturday evening between March and June we would hear a wheezing, groaning sound coming from the back yard of Experiment House. By the time we would get out there to investigate, the source of the noise (whatever it was) would be gone. But we'd find a DVD of that week's episode and a jelly baby sitting on the steps. I bet you have stuff like that happen to you all the time.

I've been a Doctor Who fan since I first watched it on WOR-TV back when I was a fifth grader in 1978. I've read the books. I own the DVDs. I even have a complete run of the American comic book that Marvel put out in the mid 80s. I just say that so you have some perspective on my fan geekiness -- even though the program had long since disappeared from television (and the public consciousness) it was still something I very much enjoyed.

The wait for the new series was almost unbearable. But strangely, when I received the premiere episode, Rose, I was almost afraid to watch it! I remember thinking, what if it sucks? In other words, what if the BBC took something I have dearly loved for almost thirty years and bungled it up? (Think The Phantom Menace...)

I was pleased to discover that the new series was a worthy successor to the original series. The story telling was much more mature, the special effects were great, and Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper made engaging leads. Experiment House is a busy place, but for 45 minutes every weekend everybody stopped to see what The Doctor and Rose were up to this week. What follows is my ranking of the first season by order of preference:

#1. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
It always amazed me that the classic series never did a story set during the London blitz. Writer Steven Moffat corrected that omission in his two-parter and proved what a great backdrop it made for an exciting story. This was the highlight of the whole season for me, with the perfect balance of horror and humor, action and character development. I'm afraid of the bombs, Mummy became the catchphrase of the my son for weeks after. I'm so happy to hear that Steven Moffat is writing a story for season two!

#2. Father's Day
The new series continually pushed the boundaries of what constituted a Doctor Who story. Perhaps no single episode illustrates this so much as Father's Day. I can't imagine anything like this being attempted in the classic series. A show that was equal parts Twilight Zone and X-Files, Rose goes back in time and saves her dad from dying, only later to discover the disastrous consequences to her actions. Milking the tearjerker ending for all it's worth, Billie Piper steals the show.

#3. Rose
Rose, the episode that (re)started it all, has been criticized by some fans as rushing to a quick climax. (If I had a dime for everytime a woman criticized me with the exact same words, too -- bada-bing!) Some people don't seem to comprehend that Rose wasn't really about an Auton invasion at all. That was just the backdrop to the real agenda: introducing a new generation to The Doctor's world through the eyes of an average person. Take for instance the careful buildup to revealing the interior of the TARDIS, rather than just the "it's bigger on the inside than the outside" speech that sufficed in the classic series. In the weeks leading up to the premiere I wasn't sold on the leather jacket wearing Doctor, but I found that I "bought" Christopher Eccelston's performance from the second he appeared on screen and never gave a second thought to what he was wearing. A splendid premiere.

#4. Dalek
Everyone knows that The Daleks are baddies numero uno, but as an American who missed the Dalekmania of the sixties I could never quite comprehend what the big fuss was all about. Writer Robert Shearman showed me by demonstrating the horrifying destructive force of just one solitary Dalek in this "base under siege" story. I have to confess that I'll never look at the villains quite the same way. And when a whole army of Daleks appear at season end, I didn't need The Doctor to tell me that this was very bad news indeed.

#5. Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways
I'll admit it -- we Doctor Who fans are even bigger geeks than Trekkies. So you can imagine how I loved every second of the final two-parter of the season. The Daleks, with their menace recently reasserted, drew more from their TV21 comic strip version than anything ever seen on the TV show. From the spoof of reality TV to the Dalek massacre on Game Station, everything seemed designed to allow fans to get their "geek on." Christopher Eccleston, we hardly knew ye!

#6. Aliens of London/World War Three
Series One excelled at making The Doctor's universe more "real." This two-parter was the one that finally showed the aftermath left in the wake of a person disappearing off the face of the earth with The Doctor. It's not pretty. The "proper" adventure concerned farting aliens, a spacecraft clipping Ben Ben, and a cameo by A Pig In Space. This is the one that had my son saying BEST EPISODE EVER and if I were eight, I would have agreed.

#7. The End of the World
Following on directly from the premiere episode, The End of the World has many wonderful moments: Rose having a borderline freak out by being surrounded by so many aliens, hints about The Doctor's past, and how The Doctor and Rose console each other at the end. This episode demonstrated to me just how different this new series was going to be in its storytelling: The Doctor and his compainion weren't superheroes -- they were real people.

#8. Boomtown
A Slitheen returns in this lighthearted romp. Was I dreaming or did The Doctor and company really gadabout like the cast of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer?

#9. The Unquiet Dead
This tale of the walking dead in eighteenth century Cardiff was enjoyable enough, but nowhere near the classic that many fans make it out to be. It seemed like an attempt to recapture the gothic episodes of the 1970s, but the fast-paced action seemed out of step with the atmosphere. (Lamont and my daughter disagree with this review citing The Unquiet Dead as one of their favorite episode of the season.)

#10. The Long Game
This was my least favorite story of the season, despite the fun of seeing Simon Pegg as a guest star. Oddly enough, The Long Game was really all I was expecting from the new series: The Doctor lands at wherever, finds some injustice, sets it all right and leaves. The Long Game isn't bad by any means -- it just suffered from being stuck in amongst so many other gems that it just came off as a pedestrian runaround.

The first season of Doctor Who far exceeded my expectations. Despite my ranking of preferences, I can honestly say that there wasn't an episode I didn't enjoy in some way. I can't wait to see what the production team has planned for season two!