A couple of years ago, when the fiftieth anniversary rolled around, we were marveling at the fact that Remembrance of the Daleks was as far behind us as An Unearthly Child was behind Remembrance. Now Survival, which marked the end of the original run of the series, is as separated from the present as it was from the show’s beginnings (give or take a couple months). Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey indeed.

This kind of temporal comparison fascinates me (something I realized when a different pop cultural correlation occurred to me the other day: Star Wars (the third top-grossing film of all time) came out thirty-eight years ago; Gone With the Wind (all-time top-grossing film) came out thirty-eight years before Star Wars). One can come up with all sorts of interesting pairings—whatever time frame you can think of can yield a new perspective.

For example, nearly fifty-two years down the line from An Unearthly Child, the effects and staging of the episode look positively archaic. At the time, though, it was stretching the medium in new ways. And, after all, it was technological leaps and bounds beyond the cinema of fifty-two years before. In that year (1911), feature films were still a brand new phenomenon. The Italian silent film L’Inferno (The Inferno, from Dante), released in 1911, was perhaps the third or fourth feature film worldwide, and became (Wikipedia tells me) what some consider the first blockbuster.

Looking at a tighter, more recent range, think about the gap between The TV Movie (TVM) and the beginning of the modern era in 2005. There were a mere nine years between the TVM and Rose, but even when one takes the relatively extravagant American production values into account, the TVM couldn’t keep up with Series One visually. And yet even Series One now looks dated when put next to the nine-years-newer episodes from Series Eight this past year.

Or one can go the other direction. There were nine years between the TVM and Series One, but nine years prior to the TVM was 1987’s Season 24. That was McCoy’s first season as the Seventh Doctor, and included Time and the Rani, Paradise Towers, Delta and the Bannermen, and Dragonfire. How does one even compare Seven and Mel (and in the last case also Ace) with Eight and Grace (and arguably Lee)? The shows are completely different beasts.

If we continue using the TVM as our temporal fulcrum, we note that it is nineteen years from the present day (yes, I’m now feeling old). But nineteen years before the TVM, Tom Baker was still on our screens with new episodes. The end of 1977 saw the beginning of Season 15, in which the Doctor and Leela traveled together in Horror of Fang Rock, The Invisible Enemy, Image of the Fendahl, and The Sunmakers (the rest of Season 15 aired in 1978). Oh—and the aforementioned Star Wars had just been in theaters.

As the state of the art advances, special effects seem to grow outdated faster and faster. It’s fun (for me, anyway) to keep these changes in perspective by looking at the kind of equidistances mentioned above. I can only imagine what our visual entertainment will look like in another nine or nineteen or fifty-two years. Do you suppose Doctor Who will still be a going concern in any of those time frames? I hope so. Whatever the case, I’ll sure I’ll still play this game.