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Confession #130: I Miss the Ninth Doctor

About two weeks ago, Gallifrey One, my convention of choice, announced that their headliner guest for 2020 will be none other than the Ninth Doctor himself, Christopher Eccleston. I hardly know how to begin expressing my utter fangirl delight at this news.

You may recall that Eccleston was might first Doctor. You may also recall that I was bitterly disappointed that he chose not to participate in the 50th anniversary celebrations. Everything I had read for years about him and his time on Doctor Who indicated that he had no interest in engaging formally with the fandom, nor intention to do so.

Then in July 2018, at London Film and Comic Con, he made his first convention appearance.

“Okay,” I told myself, “I guess the press of all his various projects has finally convinced him to attend a few of the big, multi-fandom cons. Too bad I never go to those.” And I shrugged a little sadly. I figured maybe after five or ten years of that, he might consent to come to a Doctor Who convention, and eventually make his way to Gally. I did not see this announcement coming.

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Confession #129: I’ve Never Read a Target Novelization

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Just shy of two weeks ago, on 29 Aug 2019, the Doctor Who community lost another vital member when Terrance “Uncle Terry” Dicks died. Dicks made an indelible mark on the show as both script editor (particularly alongside producer Barry Letts) and writer during the Second, Third, and Fourth Doctors’ tenures. Later he also wrote several audio adventures for Big Finish.

But many fans know him best as the author of of over sixty Target novelizations of Classic television adventures, spanning six Doctors. I’ve heard many such fans wax poetic over the importance of those books in their young lives. Yet I have never read any of them myself.

Given the fact that I am a text-based lifeform, my lack of experience with Target novelizations may seem odd. After all, for someone who grew up as a voracious reader (and is raising a pair now), a vast supply of related books seems like it ought to be a no-brainer to add to the ol’ To Be Read (TBR) pile. But there are two major factors at play that work against that course of action.

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Confession #128: I Got Caught Up in the Rumor Mill

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The Doctor Who rumor mill has been busy these last couple of weeks. Did Chibnall get fired? Is Jodie leaving? Did Bradley Walsh really “storm off the set, and hasn’t been seen since”?

Our fandom is known for being full of gloom-and-doom—pretty much always. New showrunner? He’ll run it into the ground. New Doctor? Viewers will stay away in droves, and the show will tank. New broadcast schedule? No one watches telly at that time; the show’s done for. It doesn’t matter which showrunner, which lead actor, or which day of the week the show airs—someone’s going to declare that the end is nigh.

The problem with the fandom rumor mill is, one never knows whom to believe. History has shown that official word coming out from the BBC or the production team could either be roughly accurate (that is, accurate in the big details, but with the sharp edges filed off for public consumption), and at other times is utterly insufficient. And in the latter case, certain fans who are, shall we say, friendly with the production team but not directly involved in production can provide a more detailed version of the situation—well after the fact.

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Confession #127: I Love Intergenerational Television

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It has not escaped my notice that Doctor Who is, for many (especially Brits), intergenerational television—a show that families watch together. The tradition in any given family may have started at any number of points across the past six decades or so, whether the whole family sat down to watch together from the start, or parents who had watched for some time showed their kids something they thought they could share an interest in (or vice versa).

I’m relatively new to the fandom myself (hence my name here), so even though I grew up at the height of the Fourth and Fifth Doctors’ eras, as an American whose parents weren’t big into either television or science fiction/fantasy, Doctor Who wasn’t part of my personal landscape. I didn’t have the same kind of childhood fandom experience that many of my contemporaries do. On the other hand, I do have that kind of memories of an American franchise: Star Trek.

Now I can’t honestly say that my dad was a Star Trek fan, but if it was on when he sat down, he’d happily watch it. On one such occasion, I happened upon him in our TV room, sitting in front of the tube watching something odd, and ended up sitting down to watch with him.

Much like other Who fans, though my overall memories of that first shared experience are sketchy, I still remember which episode we watched. (I’m pretty sure it was “Patterns of Force”; I distinctly remember Kirk and Spock being locked up together in a jail cell.) I watched the show frequently after school from then on, but almost never did my dad and I end up watching together. So while I can point to him as a direct influence on my Star Trek fandom, I can’t truly call it an intergenerational television experience.

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Confession #126: I Dread the Pendulum

I gotta be honest: the state of the world right now has got me down. Feelings of optimism and hope that the world might just—with a lot of continuing effort—start to move toward inclusion and justice are few and far between these days. And despite some steps in the right direction in our beloved show, I’m afraid that attitude of mine extends to Doctor Who as well.

The idea that each of the Doctor’s regenerations is a reaction against the last has been discussed over and over in fandom. We never know for sure along which axis that pendulum will swing—age, temperament, ability to connect with humans, or what-have-you—but swing it will. And given that the Thirteenth Doctor is the first “not a white, cisgender man” incarnation, I can’t help but wonder: How will the Fourteenth Doctor push back against that?

Perhaps my apprehension is misplaced, and Doctor Who, of all institutions, will not fail me. But as we’ve seen time and again, though the Doctor herself is not, those writing her stories are only human. And given the political landscape of both the US, where I live, and UK, where Doctor Who is produced, I can’t help but eye the future with a certain sense of dread.

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Confession #125: I Want Even More Representation

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On Friday, I got a call from my kids’ school. One of them had injured her ankle in gym class, and couldn’t bear weight on it; I had to go pick her up. In the end, it turned out to be a bad sprain, rather than a break, but she still has to wear one of those boots to keep it immobilized, and is on crutches until the pain has improved enough that she can stand to walk with the boot.

The changes we have had to make to our routine and to the way we execute daily tasks in order to accommodate her altered mobility have made me think more about the way those of us without disabilities approach the world, blithely assuming everything will come easily to us. And that, in turn, got me thinking about the way the Doctor operates.

It’s kind of a character through-line that the Doctor tends to ignore any and all obstacles in their way. They rush in, always assuming they’ll pull out a win somehow, never stopping to think that it’s because of various advantages they possess that they have the freedom to do so.

Admittedly, some regenerations are more oblivious than others. Perhaps the most egregious example is the Tenth Doctor, who advised Martha in The Shakespeare Code to “just walk about like you own the place.” Because it “works for [him],” he never even considers the possibility that someone else might not be given the same latitude—or, for that matter, be able to walk about!

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Confession #124: I Dislike “Received Fan Wisdom”

As I’ve explored some of the stories for my Bad Reputation™ series, it has struck me more than once that stinky is in the eye of the beholder. While to a certain degree I tend to find myself in agreement with what people in fandom say online about the relative quality of the Doctor’s various adventures—or even eras—I have learned the hard way that “received fan wisdom” (or RFW, the supposed “everybody thinks such-and-such a story is X” consensus) is questionable at best.

When I first dove into the back catalog of Classic Who, all I knew of the show was Nine and Ten’s runs (S1-S4), and vague images of Four from flipping past my local PBS channel as a kid. I’d had relatively little interaction with fandom, having only recently dipped my toe into those corners of the internet, yet already I knew what to expect from what I had yet to see.

RFW told me that the Sixth Doctor was awful. So was the First—or at the very least, he was boring. And the Third Doctor was probably not worth my while, either; “okay” at best. Of course, only selecting the “best” bits to consume is not the way I operate. I’m not going to pick and choose; if I can, I’m going to watch all of a thing. So I started from the beginning, with “An Unearthly Child,” and went from there.

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Confession #123: I Messed Up

The first thing I have to confess today is that after Gallifrey One, I completely lost track of when I was supposed to be posting. What with my kids’ crazy spring schedule, the thirty-nine inches of snow we got in February that are now trying to melt off within a two-week span, and the siren call of my fiction writing, the blog simply fell off the radar.

It doesn’t help that I hadn’t put anything on my 2019 calendar that hadn’t dripped over from 2018 when I adjusted for my Series Eleven posts. Thus, here we are, a week late and a blog post short.

As I look ahead now, I realize that I’ve quite enjoyed the “Bad Reputation” series, and I’d like to continue it. So let me walk you through my decision-making process, and share what’s to come for the rest of the year.

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Confession #122: I’m Already Impressed

We finally have an air date for the first episode of Series Eleven (07 Oct 2018), which will now go out on Sundays for (I believe) the first time. It’s been a long haul; we’ve known Capaldi was leaving since the end of January last year, and there’s been more than a nine-month gap between new episodes. Further, we’ll have known Jodie was destined to be the next Doctor for nearly fifteen months before we get to see her in action for real.

And yet, we’ve heard precious little about what will—or won’t—be on screen this year. I’m actually pretty impressed.

It has become the norm since the show returned in 2005 for a certain number of details to leak. In fact, whole episodes (e.g., S01E01 Rose, S08E01 Deep Breath) or scripts (much of Series Eight) have made their way to the Internet well before they were slated to air. The Night of the Doctor reportedly had to be released earlier than intended to head off a similar leak and the spoiling of the reveal within.

But episodes and other plot elements aren’t the only details to leak. Casting surprises like last year’s return of John Simm as the Master have also been a victim of loose lips. And because there’s a part of fandom that’s eager for any scrap of news they can get—and loves to share it as soon as they hear—spoilers run rampant in such a way that it’s hard to avoid them if one uses the Internet at all (which is to say, a huge number of fans).

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Confession #121: I Don’t Mind the Wait

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As the first official trailer for the upcoming series gets micro-analyzed and reports roll in that filming for Series Eleven has wrapped, we all continue to twiddle our thumbs waiting for an announcement of the date for the premiere episode. The “wilderness months” (if you will) between seasons are always trying for fans, especially when there’s the promise of a new Doctor to come.

And yet I’m not frothing at the mouth in frustrated anticipation these days.

I can’t tell whether my remarkable indifference—it’s not outright apathy, because I am eager to see Jodie in action—is due to that background feeling of anxiety about how “the first woman Doctor” will be written, a result of the fact that much of my mental energy is being spent on personal/family issues, or merely a side effect of my natural cyclical media interests. Whatever the case (okay, definitely that middle part, so let’s let that one slide), I find myself puzzled when I come across others having reactions I would another year have found to be normal, expected, and shared. I almost don’t recognize myself.

Granted, I don’t participate as thoroughly in internet fandom as I once did, nor have I ever gone looking for spoilers or those breathlessly titled clickbait articles that promise a deep dive into the hidden meaning in every frame of a forty-second spot. I’ll admit that it’s possible that I’ve simply missed something that’s got the rest of fandom abuzz. But my little corner of the internet has been quietly marking time, content to let things come as they will.

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