It’s weird how malleable our perception of time is. People have long observed that as we age, time seems to pass more quickly, and that how engrossed we are in whatever we’re doing affects how we experience the passage of time (see: “time flies when you’re having fun” or “I was playing a game and lost track of the time”).
The pandemic has been particularly hard on our mushy human sense of time. It simultaneously seems like these last seven (yes, seven!) months since my community first started sheltering in place have flown past and dragged on forever. We remember how the world worked before COVID with nostalgia, but forget how very recent that time was.
A particular example really struck me a week or so ago. (There’s another instance of losing track of relative time. This particular thought might’ve come up last week or last month, for all I can remember. I frequently find myself thinking back to somwhat-recent-but-long-passed events, and then realize they happened that morning.) I got to thinking about how everything had changed for film and television production, and that we’d end up waiting just ages between series of Doctor Who.
Then it struck me that Series 12 was this year. That happened in 2020. I watched an episode with my friends a Gallifrey One* just this past February.
There were so many amazing new additions to the Doctor Who “canon” in that most recent series, and yet the discussions about it—which should, by rights, have raged for months—have been subsumed by other considerations in all of our lives. (Though I will readily admit that, as I’ve almost completely avoided Twitter in these last months, I may simply have missed some of this discussion I’ve just claimed hasn’t happened.)
Let me be clear: there are so many things that are more important than a television show that should be taking our attention. This is not a complaint that our poor show has been lost in the shuffle or any such nonsense. It is merely an observation about how shifting priorities can warp our perceptions of the flow of time.
Put simply, Series 12 was in The Before Times; it feels like it can’t possibly have happened in the year 2020, which has turned out to be a whopper. So much has happened this year it’s become impossible to keep track without a scorecard (and we still have nearly a quarter to go!). Even if production had continued uninterrupted and we’d gotten Series 13 in early 2021, it’s possible we’d all still feel at loose ends, like we hadn’t seen any new Doctor Who in a decade.
Thanks to the magic of modern videoconferencing technology, I’ve recently reconnected with the Ladies of WhoFest. (Do any of my readers even remember the Nu-Views? lol) Over the last several years, we’ve barely managed to keep up with new episodes, let alone had a chance to watch Classic ones.
Since 2019 had all of one episode, though, we’ve finally made it up to the latest series, and will soon begin watching it together. It will be interesting to see how all the things that seemed so earth-shattering in Series 12 during The Before Times strike me (and the rest of the Ladies) now.
I expect the hindsight of 2020 to be pretty mind-bending.