Allons-y!

I never watched Doctor Who growing up. I have always known about it, of course. Tom Baker was still playing the role when I was a kid, and the picture of him with his curly hair, frumpy fedora and long scarf burned as an iconic image in my young mind. Yet there was something about it that always turned me off. Granted, I never really had much access to it, and the only person I ever heard talking about it was my mom, who used to go on and on about how much she loved Tom Baker. I think the biggest impediment back then was that I was always told it was England's version of Star Trek, i.e., it was their own sci-fi show. I remember having these proprietary feelings about "my" show, and wanted nothing to do with "that other one." When the television movie came out in 1996, I was dating a guy who was a huge fan of the show, as were all his friends and brothers. I tried to watch it with them, but I just didn't like it. When the show came back in 2005, once again, I had no interest. Last fall, as I posted a few weeks ago, my husband started watching it. He tried to get me into it, but I really, really didn't like it. I realize a couple of days ago it's because the first episode I ended up watching was not its finest hour, and I was only paying attention half the time while surfing the intertubes the other half.


After that detour of an episode, which I found out was actually the Christmas episode that aired right before Series 3, he started watching them in order from the first episode of Series 1, starring a dude with a leather jacket and big ears. I really wasn't that impressed. He seemed to be all right, if a bit of a jerk. Mind you, once my husband told me what had happened to him, I became much more understanding. He went through a lot of terrible, terrible things. I did think actor, Christopher Eccleston, was good.

The problems for me were two fold. 1) The special effects looked pretty bad. Not as bad as they did when I was growing up, but it was very strange for me to see actors that were so clearly just wearing rubber alien masks. American shows usually have a much more slick look to them. But, this issue was trivial, and if it had been my only stumbling block, I probably would have warmed up to the show rather quickly.



This brings me to 2) The Doctor's companion: Rose Tyler. Oh. My. God. She is so ridiculously stupid in the first episode. This is the reason that I mocked the episodes my husband was watching from behind my handy dandy laptop. It was bad enough that the first glimpses I had gotten of the new Doctor Who featured a woman who is so dumb it becomes a part of the plot (Donna Noble in Runaway Bride). Now this actress, who was a regular for the first two series, also played a dumb woman. So far, this show was not making a good impression. I complained vociferously and often that the show would probably be pretty good if the writers would incorporate intelligent women.

But then something started to change. Half way through the first season, the stories became interesting and Rose less annoying. I started watching more and more to the point that by the last four episodes of the series I was watching them from beginning to end without once looking at my laptop. Thankfully, the writers of the show had allowed Rose to grow into a much more confident young woman who turned out to be not as dumb as even she believed she was. By the last episode of the series I was almost heartbroken that the 9th Doctor sacrificed himself to save Rose, even though I knew that he would regenerate.



I was so distraught over the 9th Doctor dying that I couldn't warm to David Tennant's 10th Doctor. There was also the problem with the fact that the first bits of Doctor Who I had seen, as I wrote above, were from Runaway Bride, which had David Tennant as The Doctor. I have already written this, but I really must stress how much I hated that episode. My husband kept trying to woo me back by saying that Donna Noble wasn't in all the episodes, and that I just happened to catch a bad episode. But no matter how hard he tried, it didn't work. Though I would sit on the couch with him sometimes while surfing the internet, occasionally catching brief glimpses here and there, I didn't really watch the episodes.




Then once again, just like at the end of Series 1, as my husband advanced through the episodes, I started catching bits of scenes that I really liked. I watched the last three episodes of the 3rd series featuring the Master, the other surviving Time Lord, and I just loved them. I didn't immediately start watching every episode, but by the last five episodes of Series 4 I was asking my husband to wait until I was home to watch them. When my husband had me watch one of the last one-hour movies featuring David Tennant, my fate was sealed: I was officially a fan of the new Doctor Who show. I also found, to my surprise, that I liked David Tennant even more than Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor. I never thought that possible.

As my husband and I were about to watch the final two David Tennant episodes, I came up with what I thought was a brilliant idea; I am sure my husband would have a very different description of it. As I detailed a few weeks ago here on this blog: I wanted to go back to Series 2 through 4 and watch them in order. Though I loved Christopher Eccleston as The Doctor, I didn't much care for half of the first series. I have already detailed my adventure of getting through Series 2, but as I mentioned in my last post, I am going back to The Christmas Invasion to start over. This post was originally going to be my thoughts on The Christmas Invasion, but as I was about to start watching it, I started thinking about how I came to love this show. This is my post explaining the process of how, very much against my will, I became a major fan of this show. All thanks to my husband.

Next post: The Christmas Invasion