orthogeeks

I must have been 4 or 5 years old.  All I remember is a flash: a green tentacle wraps around the throat of an unsuspecting man and tightens.  The man chokes out a terrified scream.  A younger man in odd tan clothing grabs the tentacled creature and throws it to the ground.  He has a gun.  He shoots the creature until it stops moving.

On the strength of this horrible moment, I didn’t watch Doctor Who again for years.  If I even heard the unmistakable strains of the theme music floating through the house, I would demand with tears that my parents turn it off.

And yet, even then, I loved it.  I never admitted my fear to my friend James, who can truly be credited with introducing me to the show.  We went right on playing Doctor Who in the quite awesome cardboard TARDIS his father made for him.

But from that point on, our games had a different taste to them.  When I finally did come back to the show in my early teens, it was with a certain degree of wariness; at any moment something horrifying could occur.

Of course, a rather sad sort of teenage cynicism and jadedness came over me for a few years, and I would only see the cheesiness of the monsters and the cheapness of the effects.  For some reason I kept watching.

It was the theme song.  It lived in my head and my heart, and does up to this day.  What it says is the essence of the show for viewers young and old, fans of 4th, 7th, 10th, or 11th doctors:  prepare for an adventure through time and space, and prepare to be afraid.

It was during this period of viewing (spoilers ahead) that I witnessed one of the most shocking events in Doctor Who history; the death of his companion Adric, in the 5th Doctor Episode “Earthshock”.  A new reality settled in.

Characters that I knew, people that I cared about, could be in serious danger, and their survival was not guaranteed.

Life would later remind me of this lesson, but it was one for which the Doctor had prepared the ground.

Man, do I love Doctor Who.  Just ask anyone, and they’ll tell you, “Man, does Chris go on about Doctor Who.”

It’s true.  There are few subjects that I go on about more often or more interminably than the eponymous Doctor and his mad, glorious, often terrifying and sometimes absurd adventures.

This has been going on since long before the return of the show to television in 2005.  The Doctor and his many companions have been a regular fixture of my life in one form or another since I was about 5 years old (that’s 26 years ago).  It therefore seems meet and right for me to address this most geeky of subjects in my first substantive essay here on Orthogeeks, since it is a cornerstone of my life as a geek, and has to a large extent informed my tastes in the sci-fi genre.

I will begin with a quick description of the show and its main character to provide context.  If you’re in need of a more in-depth description, you should head over to my friend Alan Kistler’s website, where he has written a series of excellent essays on the show.

First, a point of order.  When one is discussing the show, the Doctor is referred to as “the Doctor,” and never as “Doctor Who.”  Moving on.

The Doctor is a time-traveling alien from a society known as the Time Lords.  At press time he is 907 Earth years old.  He is a renegade/exile from his people, for reasons that are never explicitly stated.  It is implied that he disapproves of the stagnation and non-interventionist ways of the Time Lords.  At some point shortly before the beginning of the series, he stole a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) and ran, with his granddaughter in tow.  The TARDIS is his time machine, and on the outside it looks like an old police box, akin to a telephone booth; an outdated piece of pop iconography.  With this device he travels to points across all of time and space, battling evil geniuses and malevolent aliens, usually with a young human companion, through whose eyes the viewer is introduced to the show and its concepts.

Coming soon:  An Introduction to Terror