3. Doctor Who (Season One)-- The Doctor has been around for decades in various incarnations, but I had next to no knowledge of the concept or the character. I guess it goes something like this: The Timelords travel through time and space and work to keep the timeline as it should be when things go awry. When a Timelord dies, he is “regenerated” in a different form (a very inspired way to allow for different actors to play what is essentially the same character). Sometime before this latest incarnation, there was a war between the Timelords and the Daleks, and The Doctor ended up destroying both the Daleks as well as his own people, the Timelords, in his last-ditch attempt to end the hostilities. The regenerated Doctor is the newest incarnation in this series.
The Doctor this series/season was played by Christopher Eccleston, and he was brilliant. Playing The Doctor is a difficult role, I would imagine. He’s seen everything and can do practically anything—and he is thousands of years old, so he should be an unflappable, “one-step-above-human” force. But he’s not. Eccleston plays The Doctor as very confident and extremely competent—but he lives with a tremendous sense of guilt for killing his own kind to destroy the Daleks. So once in a while, we see him doubting himself. That could be a true, internal, reaction to his loss—or it could be a way to get his human companions to come up with a plan. Because along with that sadness he carries, he seems to have a great joy for watching humans develop.
One of my favorite lines ever on television was uttered by the good Doctor when he mentions something fairly typical about human life, and his companion Rose said something like, “That happens all the time.” And The Doctor responds with, “Yeah! Isn’t it cool?” Right there, the whole series came into focus for me. Sometimes that’s all it takes for me: a single line or scene, and I immediately become hooked. And what’s really cool about those moments are that they are usually the small ones that do it. The joy Eccleston brought to that line was wonderful; the thing he commented on was mundane (so mundane, I can't even remember what it was), but taking a step back and putting the event into perspective, I had to agree that is was cool that those things can happen, even if it happens “all the time”.
Speaking of humans, that brings us to Rose Tyler, a teenager The Doctor saved and took a liking to enough that he invites her along for the trip. Rose is the one who brings humanity to the adventures. The Doctor is compassionate enough, but he is still pretty emotionally scarred from the Time War, and she reminds him that all life is worth preserving. Rose is a character you can instantly fall in love with—and it helps that she was played by the beautiful Billie Piper; an actress talented enough to be strong, vulnerable, gutsy, fearful and any other emotion the stories threw at her.
The two lead actors make an incredible team, and this season of the series has become one of my favorite seasons of television ever. There was a very good range of stories, from the (literal) end of the Earth, to a trip to 19th Century England, to an alien invasion in the present time, the World War II bombing of England, the distant future where television rules humanity’s lives, as well as to a very emotional trip where Rose witnesses her father’s death (she was just an infant at the time it first happened). Like all good science fiction, these stories that couldn’t happen now are able to be great metaphors for what we are experiencing in society. And like all great science fiction, we are entertained while the social commentary is buried within the plots. And like all excellent television, the acting, writing, directing, and effects all come together and become a result that is much more than the sum of all its parts.
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