I
moved to a new school the year that Peter Davison’s Doctor finally
premièred in full in Canada. I had been identified as “gifted”
and was being moved into a gifted programme, something that didn’t
earn me a lot of popularity at the school I was leaving. Of course,
since I was leaving the school (and never actually had much in the
way of popularity anyway), that really didn’t bother me. Popularity
was never something I was after, anyway. I did my own thing, and I
really didn’t care what other people thought of that—well, that’s
what I told myself anyway. In my new class, I found a much greater
level of acceptance (even of the fact that I liked Doctor Who)
and forged much stronger friendships, and that was really rather
liberating. Of course, the school as a whole still shunned the gifted
class, but at least we had each other.
The
day “Castrovalva” Part One aired on TVOntario, I wasn’t
actually expecting it. There had been a straight run of repeats for
numerous months (most of which were actually new to me at the time),
and I hadn’t been paying attention to when the new season might
start. There had been no announcements or previews of the new season
that I had seen, so I sat down that Saturday evening expecting
another Tom Baker story. If I remember correctly, the one that had
been repeated the week before was “The Leisure Hive”. At the
time, I had no idea what came after that story since the repeats
hadn’t caught back up to where I’d started watching (with “Full
Circle”). I think I half expected the repeats to continue all the
way up to “Logopolis” again before the fifth Doctor would finally
start.
The
TVOntario ident came up on screen and then the most bizarre thing
ever happened: the Doctor Who
title sequence didn’t start. Instead, there was a scene of some
scaffolding and a person lying on the ground behind it. For a brief
moment, I panicked. Was Doctor Who
not on? What was happening. And then, as Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan came
running into the scene, I realized that was the Doctor lying on the
ground. These were the ending moments of “Logopolis” as the
Doctor was about to regenerate. I had never seen an episode of Doctor
Who start with a pre-titles
sequence before, but it made instant sense to me that this one had
to. The titles would start as soon as he had regenerated. This was
clearly how it happened with every new Doctor. I
know now I was wrong—that
really was the very first time the show had ever had a pre-titles
sequence—but it made logical sense to me at the time.
Bubbling
over with excitement, I yelled to my mom, who was upstairs, “Mom!
It’s the new Doctor! It’s the new Doctor!” It was important
that she see this; it was a momentous event. I knew that she’d seen
regeneration before—she’d seen all the Doctors after all—but it
was still important she be there for this one. I dwell on this a
little bit now because moments like this would start to become rarer
and rarer over the next few years, partly because I was getting older
and less interested in watching things with my parents, and partly
because my mom started to drift away from Doctor Who
over the Peter Davison period. She would continue to watch
sporadically up until the end of the original series (and she was
quite eager to watch the early William Hartnell stories when they
started airing on YTV), but it was less and less often. She just felt
no one measured up to Tom Baker and the Doctors who came before him.
I didn’t quite understand it at the time. It was all Doctor
Who to me, no matter who was
playing the Doctor, and she had been watching the show for so long.
She was more used to the Doctor changing than I was. Or was she?
I
know now that my mom can’t possibly have seen as much Doctor
Who as she always said she had.
My mom was born in England, but immigrated to Canada with my
grandparents well before Doctor Who
started. CBC aired the first season in the early 60’s and
presumably my mom watched it at the time. But CBC never broadcast any
further seasons after that, and 60’s Who
was never sold to any other North American channels. The earliest
episodes shown on TVOntario and PBS were Jon Pertwee episodes. My mom
always told me how she had watched all the early Doctors. She’d
seen William Hartnell regenerate into Patrick Troughton and watched
all his episodes too. But that’s just not possible. Patrick
Troughton’s episodes never aired here until the 90’s. I don’t
for one minute believe my mom was lying to me. Rather, it’s just
her memory playing tricks on her. She had seen multiple Doctors, so
she assumed she’d seen them all (and it’s possible she might have
caught one or two Troughton episodes on a trip back to England in her
youth—I have no idea how often she and my grandparents went back).
While she watched the show a lot, she didn’t research it the way I
would go on to, so never learned any reason to doubt her memories.
Nevertheless,
regardless of exactly how much Doctor Who
my mom had or hadn’t seen, she had seen quite a bit, and she began
to lose interest in the show in the 80’s. The show had changed a
lot—I just didn’t realize it yet—and it wasn’t the same show
she had been watching previously. To her, Tom Baker had become Doctor
Who, and there was simply no
replacing him with anyone else. In 2005, she did tune in to the first
several episodes of the new series. I asked her regularly what she
thought of it. She hated it. Christopher Eccleston was okay, but not
as good as any of the previous Doctors, and it was set on Earth too
much. Doctor Who was
supposed to be about alien planets and there hadn’t been a single
one yet! She gave up after the fifth or sixth episode and, to the
best of my knowledge, she hasn’t watched an episode since. But I
digress...
So
excitedly calling my mom down to watch Doctor Who
with me was something that would be coming to an end, but it hadn’t
happened yet when “Castrovalva” first came on. This was a
monumental event to me because it was the first time I had gotten to
see another Doctor than Tom Baker (this isn’t literally true, just
another example of the unreliability of memory as I’ve explained previously). It didn’t
bother me that Tom Baker wasn’t going to be there, not in the way
it might have been bothering my mom. I simply assumed all actors
playing the Doctor would be equally great (and strangely enough, it’s
a belief I still kind of have today; I can recognize their
differences and discuss the merits of their portrayals, but I still
can’t really pick a favourite; when asked my favourite Doctor I
generally reply, “Whichever one I’m watching at the moment”).
And
so “Castrovalva” Part One passed and I loved every minute of it.
I was particularly excited about seeing Peter Davison’s face in the
opening titles in place of Tom Baker’s. It was another thing I had
predicted had to occur—kind of obvious, really, but then again,
there were a lot of assumptions I had about the show and what would
happen that seemed obvious at the time, but that I was completely
wrong about.
The
first was Adric. Adric was a companion of the fourth Doctor. It
didn’t matter that he had only been with the fourth Doctor for a
short while (although I was young and to me that short while seemed
like a long time); companions clearly couldn’t cross over from one
Doctor to the next. So I expected Adric to leave at the end of
“Castrovalva”.
Now,
I should make something clear as I really like Adric. Yes, I am well
aware of how much hatred there is for Adric amongst a lot of Doctor
Who fans, and looking back at
the stories now, I understand what people don’t like about him.
Nevertheless, I still have a soft spot for Adric because I remember
how much I liked him then. I could relate to Adric; he made sense to
me. So I wasn’t wanting
him to leave. I just expected
him to. When he didn’t leave at the end of “Castrovalva”, I
expected him to leave in the next story. Then the one after that.
After
a few stories, I came to accept that I had been mistaken about the
“rules” for companions and that Adric would be sticking around
for a while. I still didn’t understand why my Doctor Who
Annual made no mention of him.
And there was still no sight of this Turlough person from the annual.
The fact is, I still hadn’t clued in just how far behind TVO was
compared to what had aired in Britain.
Then
BAM! Adric was gone, and in the most shocking way possible. He died!
I was pretty stunned by that ending. The Doctor and his friends never
had anything really bad happen to them. They always made it through
and won in the end. Nobody ever died. Now, this didn’t upset me. At
that age, while I loved the show, I didn’t really get emotionally
invested in the characters, even the ones I really liked. Indeed,
over the next few days and weeks, I came to see Adric’s death as
one of the most awesome things ever. He got to go out in a literal
blaze of glory—and as I started to read about other companions’
departures, such as reading the novelization of “Warriors’ Gate”
and finally learning how Romana left (I explained last week how I always
managed to miss the last episode of that story), Adric’s departure
stood out all the more.
Another
companion assumption I had at the time was that Nyssa also couldn’t
possibly be sticking around. I didn’t think of her as a companion
of the fourth Doctor, so it wasn’t for that reason. No, it was
because my Doctor Who Annual
made no mention of her either. Finally, I assumed Tegan would
be sticking around since she was
in the annual, but then suddenly, she was left behind at the end of
“Time Flight”. That didn’t make sense! Obviously, they had to
go back and get her again in the next episode. I waited eagerly for
the next week to come to see how they got her back again, only to be
disappointed to see a repeat.
There
was another assumption I had about Doctor Who
that ended that year too: the length of Doctor Who
stories. Since I had started watching regularly (and paying attention
to these thing), every story had been four episodes in length. Tom
Baker’s final season was all four-episode stories and so was the
season before that (since the six-part “Shada” was never
finished). As such, I believed that every Doctor Who
story ever had always been exactly four episodes long. It was just
the way the series worked. When “Black Orchid” ended after only
two episodes, I was very surprised.
Although
I loved Doctor Who, it
bothered me a little that hardly anyone else seemed to. I had had one
friend in my old school who had watched it, but we had lost touch
since I changed schools. My new friends were much more accepting of
the fact that I watched it, but they still didn’t do so
themselves—that is, not until the following year in seventh grade.
That year, I finally convinced one of my fellow gifted students to
watch an episode. It was the première of the new season, so I filled
him in on everything that had happened up until that point (I knew it
was a new season because that week’s TV Times magazine
listed the title of the week’s episode as “Snakedance”, a story
I hadn’t seen before—yes, I know what many of you must now be
thinking: that’s not the story after “Time Flight”!), about the
characters and most importantly about Tegan being left behind and how
they had to go back and get her. He watched the episode and
absolutely loved it, and for the next couple of years I had a Doctor
Who ally.
While
he loved the episode, however, I was rather perplexed (although I did
like the episode too). I must have been speculating aloud at some
point about how Tegan would come back because I remember my mom
telling me that she figured Tegan would just be there in the next
episode and that they wouldn’t bother explaining it. I didn’t
believe that. There were a lot of other shows on TV at the time that
would have characters inexplicably vanish and new characters
inexplicably arrive, but Doctor Who
wasn’t like that. Yet, after watching “Snakedance”, I had to
concede that my mom was right. Tegan was just there and there was no
mention at all of her abrupt departure in “Time Flight”. Of
course, my mom actually was wrong. TVO had simply shown “Snakedance”
out of order. But it would be a few weeks before “Arc of Infinity”
started and before I realized this.
I
remember I actually missed the Saturday showing of “Arc of
Infinity” Part One (luckily it was repeated the following
Thursday), and it was my new Doctor Who
ally who told me that he was pretty certain this was the one that
would explain what happened to Tegan since Tegan wasn’t in that
episode. This disappointed him somewhat since Tegan was the main
reason he watched the show (he was very glad when she showed up again
the next episode). As I would come to learn, while he did like the
show itself a great deal, his number one reason for liking it was
because he thought Tegan was hot. The rest of the show could suck,
but as long as Tegan was hot, he’d be watching. Still, he liked the
show enough that, when I scored a copy of the new Doctor
Who Roleplaying Game a year or
so later, he was more than eager to start a game of it.
That
friend only ended up sticking with Doctor Who
until the end of the Peter Davison years. He never saw any Doctor
before Peter Davison and when Colin Baker took over, he hated him. He
just didn’t like the show without Peter Davison and Janet Fielding
in it. As for me, I just didn’t understand why. I agreed Colin
Baker’s first story wasn’t all that good, but it didn’t ruin
the show for me, and I didn’t think that was a Colin Baker
problem—just a bad story problem. It confused me a great deal to
have my mom proclaiming that no one could replace Tom Baker and my
friend proclaiming the same about Peter Davison. Meanwhile I just
didn’t understand why you couldn’t like them all.
The
Peter Davison years were very much a learning experience for
me—learning about the show, about people’s reactions to it (and
different parts of it), but also about myself, and developing myself.
I’ve mentioned before that Doctor Who definitely
helped shape my creative side. I was always interested in writing and
storytelling, but Doctor Who actually
gave me the opportunity to develop that side of me. I had taken my
first stab at “fan fiction” in grade five with my “Doctor What” scripts. In
sixth grade, I started getting ideas for Doctor Who
stories I wanted to write, although it wasn’t until grade seven
that I actually started writing them. Although Peter Davison was
still the Doctor on TVO at the time, my
stories actually featured the sixth Doctor since I knew he was the
current one in the U.K. I wrote quite a lot of those stories, but
I’ll talk about them more next week.
But
it wasn’t just creatively that the show inspired me. It continued
to inspire me to pursue scientific knowledge as well. Of course, I
didn’t know at the time just how scientifically wrong most of
Doctor Who is, but
even if I had known, I don’t think it would have made a difference.
It inspired me to read about the actual science. “Earthshock”,
Adric’s dénouement, was the first time I’d ever heard about the
idea of an asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs. I had always found
dinosaurs rather fascinating, so I sought out books to learn about
this asteroid. I remember then telling another friend all about this
theory for the extinction of the dinosaurs. Sometime later, I
discovered this friend had somehow gotten the impression that I had
come up with the theory all by myself when he suggested I find some
scientists to tell it to so they could check it out. I explained to
him that I was not the originator of that theory, although I don’t
think I told him I’d learned it from Doctor Who!
A
lot of my fondest memories of watching Doctor Who
come from the Peter Davison years. They formed the first period of
the show that I actually got to watch through from beginning to end,
in order (except “The Five Doctors”—I still don’t know why
TVO never showed that one; I suspect it was because it was a
90-minute special rather than episodic, although an episodic version
does exist). It was the first period where I had clear memories of
all the episodes, and could even list every story title (because I
was paying attention to those now). There was also an excitement that
came with watching every new episode. I never lost that excitement
with later Doctors, but it did change somewhat. During the Peter
Davison years, I could show and revel in that excitement in ways that
I couldn’t later on. It was a combination of my age at the time,
and just having the right circle of friends and acquaintances that I
didn’t have to feel any shame or uncertainty over watching it. When
the first full Colin Baker season aired, I was in high school, and
that was a whole different kind of learning experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment