The New Doctor Who

Who's been watching the new Doctor Who episodes on SciFi? I for one. Also many people I talk to.

Let's see....

irreverent....

funny....

serious....

Yep, that's Doctor Who all right.

So why do I hear so many long time Doctor Who fans saying that they "think they like it"?

Perhaps it's as simple as it takes a little time to get used to a new Doctor. That's typical. A new doctor, a new director, a new producer... that all adds up to some changes. Some subtle. Some not so subtle. It takes a few episodes to get your expectations in line.

I suspect there's another issue as well: The difference between writing 20+ minute serial episodes and writing for a 1 hour time format.

If you look at the old Doctor Who's you'll note that typical story was made up of 4 to 6 episodes, but the range seems to go all the way from 2 to 7 excluding a hand full of exceptions. (The Five Doctors was shown as one episode, The Dalek Masterplan was 12 of which only 2 still exist, The Invasion was 8 of which only 6 still exist, and The War Games was 10.)

Working with 20+ minute chuncks of time they could craft the story to be pretty much exactly the length it needed to be within the constraint of having to have a cliffhanger at the end of each of those time segments.

The new 1 hour chunk of time is really equivalent to 2 episodes meaning content wise they can do the equivalent of an even number of episodes of the old format.

What if they have an idea that would have been best handled with 3, 5, or 7 episodes in the old format? Quite simply, they'll need to squeeze something out or add padding.

In the handful of episodes I've seen of the new show I haven't really noted all that much padding, but there have been a few ocaissions we I felt like they went from step 3 to step 4 1/2 of the story logic.

Asking Doctor Who to be logical is probably not appropriate, but typically Doctor Who stories do procede in such a way that when you look back on the story from the end you can follow the logic of what happened from a story perspective. A few of the new stories have made some interesting leaps, and I think that's where that "think" word comes in when people say they like the new show.

If you want to dig into some Doctor Who stuff.....

episode details indexed by season.
The Doctor Who Wav Archive
SciFi Channel's Doctor Who Site
BBC Doctor Who Site (Notice that there's yet another new Doctor)

But honestly, just search "Doctor Who" on Google, and you'll find all the resources you could ever want.