Dr Who Season 1

Today I got my lap top back from Dee. This is good news because I have some backed back logging up my sleeve that I can now slip in just under the month's end wire. This is the first season of the show called Doctor Who but apparently it is not the beggining of the Dr Who series. In fact this season begins with the story of the ninth doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston, and his companion Rose Tyler, played by Billie Piper. Having jumped into this series, in what appears to be the middle, I decided I needed to do a little background research. I discovered that the show, which started in the fifties, was originally an educational series where the doctor traveled the universe in his time machine and he was accompanied by a companion, who in the early days tended to be a scientist of a historian and they would teach children about history and science using the time machine as a entertaining medium, not too unlike The Magic School Bus. However, it soon became apparent to the producers that the audience, mostly younger viewers, were more interested in the aliens and monsters than they were in the educational background so that was soon scrapped and the show took on a more Sci Fi persona. Because of non careful storing, a good deal of the original tapes have been lost to time and deterioration and may never be viewed in their original. The series has been around for a long time and has made its most recent revival in the mid 2000s with the ninth doctor, this being explained in the series as a kind of molting that the Doctor does when he transforms into a new persona who sometimes has a different personality and new quirks but generally knows everything that his previous form had. The doctor has no name, that I know of and the only thing you know about him is that he is an alien of the Time Lord race and that the rest of his people were wiped out by an alien race known as the Daleks. His space ship is the TARDIS which stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space.

With all that background information out of the way I can actually move on to my thoughts and feelings on the show. To start with I hated it, the effects look like they haven't changed much from the fifties and the robots appear to be moving trash cans and are almost never frightening. However, as the series went out I learned to appreciate this. Where Lucas made three prequel movies that are way better shot than there predecessors without any explanation this show went the opposite route by keeping the shitty effects and focusing more on character and plot development. Episodes bounce between the past, the present and the future while also shifting around in space, sometimes they are in London and others they are in outer space. Just when you think that you are getting bored with one place or time they shift and show another, keeping the show fresh and entertaining. The most notable historical character in this season is Charles Dickens. The season ends with the Doctors transformation into his tenth form played by David Tennant who we all know best from his portrayal of Barty Crouch Jr in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.