The Great Doctor Who Rewatch

Unless you're something over fifty and you live in Britain, you almost certainly didn't come to Doctor Who by starting at its beginning. Maybe you first encountered the programme in childhood, as I did, starting with whoever the current Doctor was at the time. (Peter Davison and Colin Baker, in my case.) Maybe you came to the Doctor through reruns, in which case you're most likely to have started with Tom Baker. Or maybe you're one of the new arrivals of the last few years, watching Eccleston or Tennant or Smith, and either have or haven't gone back to dip into the rich body of work that precedes them.

I've seen every (extant) Doctor Who story, and most of the orphaned episodes.* But like most Doctor Who fans who've gone back and watched the entire programme, I've had to see them out of order. I saw most of Classic Who in reruns--one large chunk in Florida in the 1990s, then another in Maryland in the mid-2000s. Then I had to hunt through VHS releases, DVDs and YouTube to fill in gaps. It was probably an experience representative of much of Who fandom.

I decided soon after I started collecting Doctor Who on DVD that I wanted to watch the whole programme in order, starting with William Hartnell in 1963 and continuing right up to Matt Smith--or Matt Smith's successor, by the time we get there--in the present day. To watch it evolve, both in the small, steady ways, and in the big leaps.

Lisa will be watching with me. She's been into New Who since it premiered, but has had a lot of trouble getting into Classic Who precisely because she wasn't able to watch it in sequence. She'd watch the DVDs with me as they were released out of order, and with every new story, she'd be confronted with a different Doctor, a different companion or companions, a different premise. (The Doctor is a prisoner of the Time Lords, exiled to Earth! The Doctor is a fugitive from the Time Lords! The Doctor is an enigmatic wanderer from an unknown people! The Doctor is More Than Just Another Time Lord!)

She therefore never had a chance to get her bearings, and always felt adrift. By contrast, when the entire Key to Time story arc was released in a single set, and she got to watch 26 sequential episodes, she had a great time, and the Key to Time is (so far) her favourite part of the classic series. So while I'm rewatching these shows, she's going to be seeing most of them for the first time.

I'll be recording our progress here. We're deliberately setting a fairly lazy pace; there's a lot of Doctor Who to see, and we don't want to gorge and become sated before the Daleks have even invaded Earth. We're aiming to watch ninety minutes of Who a week--four twenty-five minute episodes or two forty-five minute episodes. At that pace, it'll take four weeks to do the posts for our first three stories.

It's also lax enough that it allows us to watch individual twenty-five minute episodes in isolation, rather than having to run a whole story together. It's always been my experience that Doctor Who works better that way. The episodes are designed to be watched individually, with both pacing and plotting assuming that you're only going to watch twenty-five minutes at a time. Watched in ninety-minute or one hundred thirty-five minute blocks, I've often found that things start to drag.

We haven't yet decided whether to also cover the spinoff shows when we get to them. My first instinct is that we should include Torchwood, but if we do, I then also feel like we should do The Sarah Jane Adventures, since that's often the show that carries much more of the sensibility of 1970s and 80s Doctor Who. Anyway, we've got plenty of time before we have to make a decision on that.

What we have to make a decision on much sooner is watching the orphan episodes. We've pretty much decided that when it comes to the missing episodes, we'll be watching those stories that have over half their episodes extant (the orphan episodes that are receiving their own DVD release, in other words), the rationale being that even with the odd episode missing, they still flow enough for the story to be followable.

I'm not really going to worry about spoilers. I'm certainly not setting out to spoil anything--I won't be gratuitously revealing twists--but I think it's fairly impossible to do intelligent criticism of a work of narrative while also trying to keep what actually happens in the narrative secret. If I want to consider two stories together, I'll generally do that when we reach the latter story, but that's more because that'll be the place for a more fruitful discussion of them than out of a concern for spoilers--the parallels between "Spearhead From Space" and the 1996 TV movie and "Rose" don't affect "Terror of the Autons" or the TV movie, but they have a huge effect on "Rose".**

First up, in a few days, will be the four episodes of "An Unearthly Child".

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*The only orphaned episodes I haven't seen are those yet to be released on DVD in North America--"The Reign of Terror", "The Tenth Planet" and "The Ice Warriors".

**Though having said that, I'm currently midway through my first post, on "An Unearthly Child", and it does indeed have a segment on the relationship between Doctor Who's first episode and stories that came years, or decades, in the future.