The Doctor

I recently finished watching David Tennant’s run on Doctor Who.  It is now official.  Tennant was the best Doctor.  It really pains me to say that—I thought nobody would ever top Tom Baker, but Tennant did it.  I remember back in my undergrad days having a debate over who was the best Doctor—the candidates were Baker and Peter Davison; Davison was the pretty boy Doctor—I liked him a lot too—but Baker had that manic air that made him something special.  In some ways Tennant was Davison and Baker combined—though there was this nice bit in one of the Children in Need specials when the Davison Doctor meets the Tennant Doctor and Tennant says, “You were my doctor.” (You can see it here--though I have no idea if it will make any sense at all if you are not an afficionado of the show.)

I have loved Doctor Who since I was in high school.  Janet and I use to watch him every Saturday night on PBS when we were in grad school.  She liked Davison the best.  (Now she won’t admit to ever having liked Doctor Who, but I was there—she used to like the Doctor.  She forgets things like this—I think deliberately so—and it has been a long time since she sat down to watch an episode of Doctor Who with me.)

None of my kids like Doctor Who at all.  I cannot understand it.  Emma usually has good taste in movies—there aren’t many movies I like that she can’t stand.  And Clara is of the perfect temperament for Doctor Who.  (Lily is a lost cause in this respect—it is no surprise she doesn’t watch it.)  Emma and Clara both negatively react to the, as Emma calls it, “bad 80’s special effects.”  She saw a clip of the new Doctor Who and was amazed that they had kept the feel of those “bad 80s special effects.”    Sigh.

When the series restarted a few years back, I was afraid to watch it.  I thought for sure they would have destroyed the charm of the old series.  I mentioned this to a guy at a conference I was at two years ago, and he told me not to worry, that the new series was actually quite good and that they had modernized it but kept a knowing look back to the old series to make it feel right.  So, I watched it, and was hooked on the first episode.  I liked the first season of the new run so much, in fact, that I was sorry to see Christopher Eccleston leave—but then he was replaced by the best Doctor ever.  I haven’t started watching the new Doctor yet—I’ll wait until the season is out on DVD, but the brief clip of him at the end of the last Tennant show was quite promising.

And, by the way, on the bulletin board in the hall near my office, someone put up a “Vote Saxon” flyer.  It creeps me out every time I see it.