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| Well, the new series is now over, and we all have to wait until Christmas for our next dose. Okay, well, that's a lie. We have to wait until Christmas for our next dose of original episodes staring the tenth doctor. I've been looking on Amazon, and the sheer amount of D.V.D's available is impressive. I mean, I know the show ran for 26 years before it was axed, but it's still impressive. All I need now is the money to buy them. The seventh doctor is the one I want to get a look at, as well as the first doctor. I mean, I grew up with the seventh doctor, so of course he's going to have a special place in my heart. But what I like about him is the fact that he's a manipulative git who doesn't mind playing the long game and hurting people's feelings to get what he wants. It's just nice to see that. And the first doctor, well, he strikes me as the sort of person I could grow to like. Cantankerous, superiorist and not even a little bit human, that's what the doctor should be like. It is, of course, the fashion to wax lyrical about the fourth doctor – Tom Baker’s doctor – but I’m not sure I like him. He’s just . . . arrogant, you know? Just swans around the place expecting the world to revolve around him, and the worst part about it is that most of the time it does. Plus he’s all very 1970’s, and by that I mean the kind of disco thing, rather than the hard rock thing. Number five, well, maybe I could grow to like him. Six . . . an acquired taste, by all accounts. And number two only has two extant episodes, the rest having been wiped or left in a box in the BBC cleaning cupboard, or something. Incidentally, the BBC has a wonderful archive of video clips that you can look at, all the way from the first doctor to the seventh. Beautiful stuff. Now, on to my point. As we all know, what we – the little people – write up in our humble weblogs (or ‘blogs’, if you will) can actually alter the fabric of reality. Somewhere, secreted among the windswept hills of Snowdonia National Park, there is a building. It’s a nondescript, 1960’s flat pack type of affair, the sort of thing that you might drive past and not notice or register only as a vaguely offensive eyesore. Just to the side of the sliding glass doors which lead into the reception, there’s a simple white sign with black letters cut into it, and lets say that it says, ‘Association for Altered Harmony’, a phrase somewhere between mystic and corporate that has no real meaning and instantly fails to stick in the mind. But the building is big. Only two stories of administration exist above the ground, but tucked down in the roots of the mountain, where the magma that makes our world floats and flows, the building reaches down, and inside those depths rank after rank after rank of precision trained, single-minded people sit, concentrating, shaping. Every single method of communication we use today is monitored. Every single world or syllable is heard or read and understood and acted upon. Every single blog, forum, text message, chatroom and anything else is monitored, listened to, sympathised with. And these people, these people that listen and understand, they reshape the world. They understand how we’re feeling, and they reshape the world around us, change us so it makes us happier. So posting on a forum or in your blog changes the world. You’re not simply shouting into the darkness. You’re not just some sad idiot with delusions of grandeur. You’re not some prat who can’t even punctuate a sentence properly but still thinks what you put on your pathetic little MySpaz account (‘I have my own website!’) should have some influence in the world. Every time you post something, you change the world! OMG!!!!!11 Anyways, on to my point. The new Doctor Who series. I like it. I mean, you know, I make time for it, and I enjoy watching it. It’s a good show. Fun, you know? But the phrase I keep using is, ‘this isn’t what I paid my money for’. And it’s not. This new series is far more touchy-feely then the previous incarnations, and that’s only to be expected. People are told that touchy-feely emotions are what they want, and so they get upset when they don’t get it. I don’t really have a problem exploring the character’s feelings and, well, it can be interesting. Please note, Russell, can. The trouble I’m having is that, at the end of the day, feelings isn’t what Doctor Who is about. Coming to terms with life isn’t what it should be about. It should be about adventure. New civilisations. Challenging your perceptions of your own society by refracting it through a latex and animatronic mirror. Challenging your hopes and dreams by showing you the nightmares which are just as much a part of them. Making you question your future and making you sit down and work out what you want it to be and how you can get there. And, with Doctor Who, all that applies to the past as well. You can humanise and understand the past, not as a series of events, but as the experiences of the people who endured them. I mean, the man who dropped the Cyclone B into the hole – who was he? What did he dream of? Why did he do it? This new series is far, far too terra-centric. Out of 27 episodes broadcast so far, 19 have been set on Earth. 11 have been set in present day earth. 17 have been on earth, within 60 years of the present day – i.e. within living memory. And every single one has been about humans. We haven’t seen one, single alien culture. We haven’t even had any developed alien protagonists. The closest we came was the Sisters of Plenitude. There were different, interesting, developed, motivated, slightly sinister, easy on the eye and entirely underused. What the hell’s the point in having a TARDIS if you’re just going to pop to the Second World War and back to a London council estate. You have the most advanced piece of hardware anywhere in the universe, and you’re using it do the weekly shop. I don’t, as a rule, have any problem engaging with characters and exploring their relationships. It can be very interesting. But, when I tune into Doctor Who, it’s not what I pay my money for. If that was what I wanted, I’d go somewhere else. I watch Doctor Who to explore strange and startling alien civilisations with a person who is human enough for me to connect to but too alien for me to understand. That’s what I pay my money for. Not this Eastenders-Titanic-great-unspoken-love-a Because, you see, at the end of the day, I have testacies. It is an undeniable and unavoidable fact. Hang around with me enough, and you’ll probably get to see them. I seem to be developing a habit for whipping them out at parties. I’m not sure why. But this means that I much prefer being intellectually challenged than being emotionally challenged. I like gadgets and gizmos and pseudo-science. I like little references and nods that you have to be a real anorak to understand and smile at. I like plot arcs that take 27 episodes to set up and 17 to resolve. I like kung-fu monks, things with four heads, and people in silly costumes surrounded by special effects. Most men do. And, you know what, there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not being juvenile, or emotionally retarded, or insensitive. I’m just being the way that God built me. Now, people who like love stories and like having their hearts put through the mill are good. The world needs people like that. You see, humanity can be divided into two parts. It’s not a finite, discrete line because we carry both parts with us, and they way that they interact with each other and influence each other is what defines us as people and what defines us as human beings. You have emotion, and you have intellect. And to understand who we are, we need to understand both halves. Before my time, so I hear, the emotional side of ourselves was beaten into submission and left cowering in a corner, whipped every time it moved. Then the 80’s and 90’s changed all that. The trouble is that I grew up in those decades. I’ve been told all my life that they way I think is wrong, the way my head is wired is up wrong. I just accepted it as fact and tried to change. But the more I come to understand people and society, the more I realise that it’s just not true. What I’ve been told my whole life is to embrace the emotion and deny the intellect. I’ve been told that the intellect is wrong and emotion should rule the heart and the head. But that’s just as dangerous, juvenile and irresponsible as denying the emotion. In my head, emotion is a scared, quite, backwards child that needs a lot of care and attention. Intellect is left with the burden of life and the burden of looking after that child. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I know I have problems. I have big problems and I know things are unbalanced in my head. They should be equal parties, a symbiotic pair of twins who work in harmony. (Of course, I’d be willing to bet the shirt on my back that not one single living human being has that privilege, but that’s another rant.) My point is that indulging the dominant twin is just as healthy as supporting and nurturing the submissive one, which ever way around they are. Doctor Who should be about indulging your intellect. It should be about taking an hour or so out of your week for a spot of pure, unburdened indulgence with the stronger brother, not having to worry about looking after the weaker one for once. I mean, he can come along if he wants to, but the focus should be on intellect and emotion can come along to add spice and flavour. That’s what I pay my money for. |
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