When I was a kid, you watched what was on TV when you wanted to watch. No Tivo, no on-demand, no downloads. There were some shows my bro and I watched because they were just on, like say, Gilligan’s Island. But there were only a few shows I went out of my way to be sure to watch. As a scifi geek from the earliest time I could read (favorite first chapter books: The Phantom Tollbooth and the Matthew Looney series), near the top of the TV viewing priority list was the absurdly cheesy yet entertaining British import, Doctor Who.
The story of the galaxy gallivanting Time Lord who tried to put things right from his spaceship shaped like a London police box was engaging and the horrible special effects just made it all the more fun. The Doctor’s classic foe, the robotic Daleks, scared me every time. We watched starting at the end of the tenure of Jon Pertwee as the Doctor in the early 1970s and kept right at it for all of Tom Baker’s turn, finally losing interest completely when he gave the part over to Peter Davison sometime after Ronald Reagan became president and silly scifi shows didn’t seem so important anymore.
I hadn’t thought about Dr. Who in ages until a year or two ago when I heard that the BBC was reviving the series. Yawn, too old for that, I thought. And even when it came to the SciFi Channel here in the states not long ago, I ignored it. But a few weeks ago, after watching a particularly intense episode of Battlestar Galactica, I stayed up late and watched a re-run of a spin-off of the new Doctor called The Sarah Jane Adventures. This series picks up the story in current times of one of the 1970s Doctor’s loyal sidekicks, Sarah Jane Smith, played by the actress Elisabeth Sladen. And despite Hollywood’s obsession with youth and air-headed beauty, somehow the series stars the same Elisabeth Sladen, looking no less beautiful but clearly well over the age of 20 (in fact she’s close to 60!). So what’s this? A strong female scifi heroine who gets by on smarts and gumption with minimal gadgetry, exposed cleavage or brawling. Very nice. Now I seem to be rather hooked and Tivo is dutifully recording all new episodes.
Robert Lloyd, the TV critic at the L.A. Times, may have summed it up best in a review a couple of weeks ago:
As a Dalek might say, in that perpetually annoyed, blown-speaker voice they share, “Resistance is useless.” You could resist it, really, as you should be able to resist all television, unless you have been completely assimilated into the matrix. But you’d be missing some sparky fun. Submit.
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