Doctor Who turns 60. I discovered the revived Who—sometimes called NuWho—in my sophomore year of high school because a friend did his ALARP (Advanced Language Arts Research & Presentation, which I did two years in a row) presentation on it. That would have been when I was fifteen, in 2010: Matt Smith was the Eleventh Doctor that year, in his first season, and I came into the season late, but quickly fell in love with the show and backpedaled through Tennant and Eccleston when reruns played after school. (I had a strict TV diet in those days of Doctor Who in the early afternoon, Star Trek: The Original Series when it was still living on YouTube, M*A*S*H, Happy Days, Futurama, and The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which would carry me through my homework and various other tasks to bedtime.) In college, I gained access to Classic Who and, lover as I am of kitschy sci-fi and fantasy, I found the different format of Who (and British serials from the late 20th century generally) refreshingly complementary (and contextualizing) for the sort of Who I knew better. I stayed an avid watcher through Smith and Peter Capaldi, and the Doctor Who Christmas specials were an important part of my holiday canon for many years. Then Steven Moffat stepped off the show and Chris Chibnall took it up. Jodi Whittaker was, I think, a perfectly good Doctor, and I think she got the character; I also think Chibnall’s writing, however, neutered the power of the show, which is its ability to promote progressive politics, social views, and emotional learning in the medium of sci-fi and fantasy, by treating the audience as too stupid to grasp these themes without explication; Chibnall also made a series of odd story-telling choices that in large part retconned or unnecessarily changed the previous fifteen + years of Who’s revised canon. Who has a chance for a rebirth by returning to Russell T. Davies’ direction, and Davies has brought back David Tennant and Catherine Tate to their roles as Doctor and Donna Noble for Who’s sixtieth. I am tentatively excited and confident that this will be a meaningful course correction prior to the advent of our new Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa. But I am also interested to see how the 60th hits me in a way different from the way that the 50th registered with me ten years ago, when I was just starting college out. That story, “The Day of the Doctor,” was a multi-Doctor story explaining what actually happened at the conclusion of the Time War that was used as an explanatory device for the show going off-air in the 90s and early 2000’s before its revival; it featured Tennant and Smith alongside the now late but ever magisterial John Hurt, and a variety of references to fun throwbacks to Who’s past (Zygons! UNIT! All of the living Doctors from Classic Who as Zygons under sheets! etc.). Since that story, the show has become increasingly more comfortable making use of multi-Doctor stories in specials, from the first episode of Peter Capaldi’s run in which the outgoing Matt Smith made a brief appearance, to Capaldi’s own outgoing Christmas special “Twice Upon a Time” (featuring David Bradley as a pretty flawless impersonator of William Hartnell’s First Doctor, following the success of his portrayal of the role of Hartnell in the show’s biopic An Adventure in Space and Time), to the later episodes of Whittaker’s run in which Bradley and other surviving Doctors (Peter Davison, Sylvester McCoy) make brief appearances. I hope that the 60th will follow this tradition, because it’s good fun to see the various iterations of the Doctor paling about together, but I also hope that the episodes will find a way to do so that is intelligent and good for the story rather than simply fan service (but I’m okay with a bit of fan service, truth be told). In general, I think Who is one of those Anglophilic institutions in world culture that I’m happy to see endure. I get that people who grew up with the classic show hate the new show: that’s the way of things. But there’s a powerful myth alive in Who, of a traveler in time and space who goes about seeking to heal and do no harm, with an infinite power of self-regeneration and infinite possibility to assume new forms, that I think speaks to something we all know somewhere in the back of our hearts is true of all of us.
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