The Beginning

Hey guys.

So, I like Doctor Who. Or at least, I used to THINK I liked Doctor Who, but nowadays I'm not so sure.

When the show came back in 2005 I leapt at the chance to watch it, having only been passingly familar with the show beforehand. But then... wow. This was a show that promised everything. Adventures in Time and Space, anywhere and anywhen. And... well, it seemed to revolve around Earth a little too much, but it was still fun. Some great stories came around, stories that you just couldn't tell in any other television show. It was, if you'll excuse the half-pun, fantastic.

And then time passed, and both I and the show grew older. I became more cynical and jaded, and the show got a new lead, more experimental and more bogged down in its own past. At least, that's how I saw it, anyway. Everyone else just lapped it up, and I started to see that maybe I wasn't as big a fan of the show as I thought.

More time passed. More risks were taken, more self-indulgent wallowing ensued, more praise and fans were earned, and I became more and more disinterested. It wasn't that the show was bad - although it most CERTAINLY had its off days - it's that it had increasingly become concerned with ever more complex stories that were never truely stand-alone, and they all felt SO rushed as they tried packing more and more story into the 45 minutes each episode provided.

It came to a head with the 4 Specials that signaled the end of David Tennant's reign. I enjoyed exactly half of them, and the other two... well, what does one say about The End of Time? It was the most self-indulgant and ridiculous set of stories that Russell T Davies ever wrote. I realized, watching them the day after Christmas, that I was no longer a die-hard fan of the show. It had slipped away from me, to the point where I didn't even attempt to watch it live on Christmas, instead being perfectly happy to watch a Sky+ recording later that evening.

But I held out hope. There was another Doctor inbound, and a new show-runner! Maybe things would change! Maybe I'd be drawn back into the show, just as Eccleston had won me over in 2005. Maybe...

And, initially, it did. I was hooked once again. Change is always interesting, and the show was very much a similar yet different beast now. But once again, I started seeing things I didn't enjoy. The cracks in time started off as a neat little idea, a return of the Bad Wolf sort-of story arc that allowed for stand-alone episodes that had a common thread. But then River Song came back as a major returning character, and the cracks became more than just a sort-of story arc, and it all got complicated and I started getting tired again.

I kept watching, but I was much less attached to the characters or the stories in them, and it was clear that for all the talent and effort behind it, New-Who was not the show I wanted.

As it turns out, the show I wanted had existed for about 25 years, long before I was born.

Classic Who is almost everything I love about the show. It could go anywhere and do anything, it had no real overarching plot to make things complicated, and above all, it had something the new show is missing. For all the high budget and special effects New-Who has, it seems to lack the simple charm that the Classic show had. It's all about big dramatic theatrics these days, with devestating revelations and shocking plot twists. What happened to good old fashioned fun little adventures? (Aside from The Crimson Horror, which was a fantastic tribute to the sort of random adventures I long for and is one of my favourite New-Who episodes as a result) What happened to things being charming and simplistic?

Classic Who has it all, and that's why I'm going back and watching it all again. All of it (or as much as I can watch, given how some only exist as audios). And I'll be telling you exactly what I think of it. Right here.

This might take some time. There's over 150 Classic stories to get through. Deep breaths now...