Thursday, January 26, 2006

Have a Jelly Baby!

Doctor Who is finally returning to the States! In March, the SciFi Channel will begin airing the thirteen recent episodes of the show that feature Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor. The episodes will be running in Battlestar Galactica's timeslot, meaning -- I assume -- that Season Two of Galactica will be all done by then. That'll be a very nice antidote to the post-Galactica depression.

If I understand the press release right, SciFi's also bought the option to the David Tennant episodes that follow Eccleston's. Presumably, if the Eccleston episodes do well, we'll also get to see the Tennant ones.

I can't tell you how stoked I am about this. Like a lot of nerds my age, I discovered the Tom Baker version of Doctor Who in high school when they used to run those episodes on PBS. The cheesy special effects and British production values were easily overlooked in light of the charmingly quirky personality of the Doctor and his ability to change from being scatterbrained to deadly efficient as the situation dictated. Once Baker's run was over, it took me a while to warm up to Peter Davison as his successor, but I did and faithfully continued to follow the show until PBS stopped running it. I lost track of the show during the Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy years, but you better believe I caught the unfortunately disappointing TV movie (ten years ago!) with Paul McGann.

I've been frustrated for a long time at the BBC's reluctance to release a comprehensive, season-by-season collection of the entire series. They do it in bits and pieces: a Tom Baker story here, a Patrick Troughton story there. I'm hoping that a resurgence in the Doctor's popularity makes them rethink that strategy. Fortunately, this gives me hope.

1 comment:

Grant Gould said...

yeah, i'm glad they'll be showing dr. who too :) it'll be a nice filler for the breaks between battlestar seasons. heh

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