Space Pirates Ltd.

Hello! Rifty here, hope our five readers are doing well! This little article’s been bouncing around my head for weeks and weeks and weeks, from just after the Linux one actually. But for one reason or another I could never actually manage to articulate everything. Not much of a problem with me usually, so as you can imagine it became quite a sore point for me.

 

So Dan’s been bugging me to write Something right? Loves content that man does, and frankly I’ve been thinking we’ve dipped into the random and crazy MSPaint pool a bit much. I sat here and thought and thought and thought, trying desperately to come up with a solid piece of writing.

 

Nothing came up, nothing at all.

 

What’s a college age writer to do?

 

Do it all at once late at night while drinking lots of coffee of course! So that’s the plan, everything’s been written in the last eight minutes, and I’ve always had a topic, so I figure I’ll rant away.

 

I’ve got a reputation as the resident geek, and it’s not exactly a undeserving title. I can talk about Star Wars, The Enterprise (All eight of em!) how warp drives work and I can explain how to play Yu-Gi-Oh in fifteen minutes. But all these pale in comparison to the one thing I love more than Lord of the Rings and the Original Trilogy and Seven of Nine’s magnificent curves.

 

Doctor Who.

 

I’ve said it, I love Doctor Who. I love the old series with it’s cardboard sets, blatantly phony aliens, flubbed lines, terrible dialogue, paper thin plots, and effects work that looks worse than a baby pushing random buttons in Final Cut Pro. I love its quintessential Britishness and its pantomime villains.

 

The show lasted 27 seasons with a quality level that could fluctuate between the most critically acclaimed episodes of TV drama you can think of and the worst drivel you’ve ever managed to catch on Mystery Science Theater 3000. At it’s height in the mid 70’s it had millions upon millions of rapt viewers on both sides of the Atlantic, and even when viewing numbers began to drop it still managed to last another ten years.

 

When it was finally dropped completely by a less than charitable British Broadcasting Company, the show had managed to drop to a quality level that even the last few seasons of The Simpsons would cringe at. Gem episodes went from a good set a season to a few every few years if you were generous. Even then it had fans, vocal fans that loved the show so much they kept it going in one form or another, in books and plays and audio dramas. There’s only one solid reason for that, the premise.

 

Doctor Who is a show about a centuries old alien who can travel to any point in time or space with his ship and home, the TARDIS, which just happens to have the external appearance of London Police telephone box, circa mid 1950’s. The lead, known only as “The Doctor” only seems to want to do two things, explore the universe with a few friends, and save said universe from unbeatable odds and unimaginable evil. Usually armed only with his vastly superior intellect, quick wit, British humor, and a trusty Deus Ex Machina called the sonic screwdriver, The Doctor managed to save any and all who needed saving practically every week between 1963 and 1989.

 

But it really did get a bit crap, so it was canceled. As far as anyone was concerned, The Doctor wasn’t going to be back on English TV’s ever again. The fans decided to just keep it up with their own efforts, even quite a bit of officially licensed ones. Nothing really replaced the show though. They tried to revive it in `96 with a TV Movie. The movie was financed and produced and had creative consult from Fox.

 

Yeah. That Fox.

 

The movie wasn’t bad so much as it was laughable. Early Next Generation laughable. Nobody really knows what ratings Fox would’ve needed to green light a full production season, but it sure as hell wasn’t what they got. Fans blame some super special episode of Roseanne that was up against it but everyone who has any sense usually admits it was probably more the fault of poor advertising and it being pretty substantially bad.

 

That put the BBC off trying again, and most people figured it would be for good. However a bit of a revival movement started in house, and it finally managed to gain enough steam to actually get a show produced in 2003. That finally finished production in 2005, the show premered in April of 05.

 

It was Glorious. Amazing. Fantastic. ‘Who had a budget, it had A List actors, writers, directors, the best the TV and Film establishment of Great Britain had to offer. The first season was better than everything the United States had to offer me for weekly TV drama. Hell it was Way better than any Sci-Fi besides Stargate.

 

The premise remains the same, The Doctor shows up at a random place and time, and kicks evil’s ass. Everything that we fans respected remained, everything we laughed at dropped away. Not only is this show not Sci-Fi Camp anymore, it’s damn good drama in any regard. I recommend this show not only to fellow geeks, dweebs, and nerds, but to everyone. All my friends, fans of the fantastical or not.

 

But this is the internet, and here I can do ever so slightly better. Don’t take my word for it, watch for yourself.

 

Doctor Who, “School Reunion” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9RRcKaAVtI (Split Youtube, apoligies)

 

Doctor Who, “The Christmas Invasion” http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=3899309779253401303&q=Doctor+Who

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 11:12 am and is filed under Pirate Brew Ha-Ha. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.