TV Tuesday: Doctor Who's first season!
So I just finished watching the first season of Doctor Who (1963-64) and I enjoyed it even more than I expected to. I know watching all of Doctor Who isn't always going to be smooth sailing, but Season One was genuinely a lot of fun, both in its own right and as a supplement to watching new!Doctor Who. Barbara and Ian, the sensible good-hearted schoolteachers who got themselves mixed up with a grumpy old time traveler and his granddaughter, are always fun to watch, and the Doctor quickly develops into a frustrating and lovable character whose foibles have to be kept in check by his traveling companions (whom he kidnapped in a fit of pique) (but it's all right now; they're friends, mostly).
Some favorite moments: the confrontation and careful reconciliation between Barbara and the Doctor in "The Brink of Disaster," Susan resisting the Doctor's patronizing protectiveness and insisting on her right to her own perspective in "The Sensorites," the Doctor huffily insisting that on a cosmic scale France is essentially exactly the same as England and he can totally fly the TARDIS so stop insinuating that he can't, Susan reminsicing about her as-yet-unnamed home planet (the orange sky! the silver leaves!), every interaction between the Doctor and Cameca in "The Aztecs," and basically every time Barbara was on my screen doing anything at all.
Runner up: meeting the Daleks for the very first time, poor little plunger-handed death machines. I have a soft spot for the Daleks and was delighted to see them introduced so early (in the second serial ever!) already their own hopeless, implacable and ridiculous extermination-fixated selves.
It helps that I actively enjoy the staginess, I think. The sometimes haphazard props and sets in the early episodes are a reminder that this show is new and under construction, that these are actors telling a story with the tools available to them, and I have to be willing to help them out. The serial structure can be frustrating -- there are a lot of self-contained stories that end in abrupt recapture or some other impending disaster in order to set up a suspiciously similar story ending in yet another cliffhanger -- but I've gotten so used to it that it's more funny than anything else.
What I'm a little worried about: sooner or later, I'm going to run into some Vintage BBC Racism, aren't I? (No specific spoilers, please, but. . . it's going to happen, right?) "The Aztecs" was surprisingly ok, despite some odd claims about world history and the one villain guy being played as a Stock Evil Foreigner, but nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain, and I feel sure the casual racism train is going to catch up with me any day now. Other than that, I don't know what to be worried about. I'm just enjoying the journey.
Some favorite moments: the confrontation and careful reconciliation between Barbara and the Doctor in "The Brink of Disaster," Susan resisting the Doctor's patronizing protectiveness and insisting on her right to her own perspective in "The Sensorites," the Doctor huffily insisting that on a cosmic scale France is essentially exactly the same as England and he can totally fly the TARDIS so stop insinuating that he can't, Susan reminsicing about her as-yet-unnamed home planet (the orange sky! the silver leaves!), every interaction between the Doctor and Cameca in "The Aztecs," and basically every time Barbara was on my screen doing anything at all.
Runner up: meeting the Daleks for the very first time, poor little plunger-handed death machines. I have a soft spot for the Daleks and was delighted to see them introduced so early (in the second serial ever!) already their own hopeless, implacable and ridiculous extermination-fixated selves.
It helps that I actively enjoy the staginess, I think. The sometimes haphazard props and sets in the early episodes are a reminder that this show is new and under construction, that these are actors telling a story with the tools available to them, and I have to be willing to help them out. The serial structure can be frustrating -- there are a lot of self-contained stories that end in abrupt recapture or some other impending disaster in order to set up a suspiciously similar story ending in yet another cliffhanger -- but I've gotten so used to it that it's more funny than anything else.
What I'm a little worried about: sooner or later, I'm going to run into some Vintage BBC Racism, aren't I? (No specific spoilers, please, but. . . it's going to happen, right?) "The Aztecs" was surprisingly ok, despite some odd claims about world history and the one villain guy being played as a Stock Evil Foreigner, but nothing lasts forever, even cold November rain, and I feel sure the casual racism train is going to catch up with me any day now. Other than that, I don't know what to be worried about. I'm just enjoying the journey.