TV Tuesday: Doctor Who's first season!

[evelyn_b]

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

Comments

[newmoonstar]

Aw, the first season was my first taste of Classic Who too, & still my favorite. Going back and seeing the start of all the adventures after watching New Who for so many years was just magical. And Barbara is undoubtedly the awesomest badass lady in all of time and space. My favorite companion for always. ♥

The famous Exagerated Cliffhanger Endings (dun dun DUN!!) of the Classic series can be a bit forced & sometimes downright silly, but that's part of the charm of the serial format & just takes getting used to. (By the time I got to the Seventh Doctor, I didn't even question it anymore- there's an episode where he literally hangs off an actual cliff for no reason & I just shrugged like 'yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do to get those viewers back next week! LOL)

I was actually pleasantly surprised by the lack of truly egregious vintage racism in most of Classic Who- I think the Doctor's 'stupid red Indians' remark in the very first episode was the worst thing I ever heard a character say. There were a few times when they'd cast a black actor as a stupid muscle man & you sit there thinking 'REALLY?!', but I'd say on the whole it does better than most other TV & film of the period.

I hope you continue to have fun meeting all the new (old) Doctors, companions & monsters! :)

[evelyn_b]

Barbara is magnificent. I'm going to miss her

I hope I'll go on being pleasantly surprised by the relative lack of racism! Better to be pleasantly surprised than unpleasantly surprised. One thing I have been continually pleased by is the good female characters. There are several! They're different from each other! I guess that's a low bar to clear, but. If you compare Carol, one of the astronauts in "The Sensorites" to any female guest star on the original Star Trek, the difference in how she's treated by her co-workers and Team TARDIS is really noticeable. Her costume isn't heavily gender-coded the way the uniforms are on Star Trek; there's no eyebrow-wagging, even from Ian and Barbara who are from the 1960s and might have an excuse for it; her presence as a member of the team is taken so much for granted that no one bothers to explain or defend it, and even though her fiancé’s space-induced madness has caused her a lot of pain, no one suggests that this is somehow the result of her "forgetting her woman's heart" by taking a job in space, or however they would have tried to frame it in Star Trek while grabbing her by the wrist and maybe forcing a kiss on her. She's just a character with a job and some circumstances.

Low bar. But still nice to see. And she's just one example. Cameca in "The Aztecs" and Jenny in "The Dalek Invasion" are also great guest characters who are treated thoughtfully by the script.

Thanks! I'm sure I will. I have a lot of confidence in this weird little show. <3

[newmoonstar]

Yes, one of my favorite things about Classic Who is that the scripts don't usually waste time pointing out that female characters are women and should act a certain way because of it- which quite frankly is still a problem on some TV shows today. When I got to the Second Doctor's episodes especially, I was just floored by the amount of times there were guest characters who were scientists, rebel commanders, or other figures of authority who were women, and it was never made an issue of. It's a really nice thing to see. And of course, the stories themselves are pretty great too. Classic Who is just really awesome, but that's just stating the obvious. ;)