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.

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!