he's back, and it's about -- oh, forget it

So I haven't posted in four weeks, but look on the plus side, I've saved you the trouble of wading through a bunch of rants about the weather. We've made it to the nether end of the fourth snowiest winter on record, and in retrospect it wasn't that awful, but I'm sure that's what the English said at the end of the bubonic plague, too.

So let's talk about something truly momentous, like the return of Doctor Who, which premiered on BBC1 Saturday night with the first new episode in 16 years. Although there's still not an American distributor in sight, I was hopeful that somehow I'd be able to see at least the first episode before another 16 years went by. For a while I figured I could get one of my cohorts in the London office to tape it for me, but then I thought, That's so eighties, in this web-enabled era that we live in I should be able to just download the damn thing. So after about 5 minutes of surfing on usenet and downloading the latest version of BitTorrent, I was off and running, and after about a 10-hour download I've got me the first episode, hurrah! This is, of course, morally reprehensible and borderline criminal, but it's hardly the most incriminating thing on my hard drive, so you capitalists out there lighten up. It's not like I'm going to sell copies to Who fans who can't figure out how to do this themselves (I doubt there are any, for starters).

As a first episode, it shows plenty of promise within the confines of what is considered acceptable tv in this day and age. Christopher Eccleston, whom I've only seen as the deranged military guy in 28 Days Later, is only slightly deranged as the Doctor, creating an incarnation subject to rapidly changing moods, generally wide-eyed and child-like, but with the weight of the universe on him. Billie Piper as his companion Rose is, as Letterman would say, easy on the eyes. If she does nothing more than wear the clingy outfit she was wearing in this episode, we have a winner.

Producer Russell T Davies has chosen to for this first strike to remake parts of Spearhead from Space, this time doing the Auton shop dummies coming to life properly with plenty of smashed store windows and bodies littering the streets. Nobody dies on camera, and only one speaking character of consequence dies at all, the guy with the Doctor website who spends his free time piecing together all the various sightings of the Doctor through history. He would've made a worthwhile recurring character, but on the other hand you don't actually see him shot by an Auton, so maybe he survives. The episode wimps out on killing off either Rose's annoying boyfriend or her mother, either or both of which would've made her sudden decision to go with the Doctor at the end a little more plausible.

The script is fairly action-oriented, no problem there, although the action consists of an inordinate percentage of people running around, as though moving faster makes it more exciting. There's a good amount of humor in the script, and I think there's some definite chemistry between the two main characters, and the supporting cast are uniformly good except maybe for Rose's boyfriend, who needs to be sort of a jerk and a wimp without coming across as a parody. At one point he's replaced by an Auton with a suitably glazed expression and glossy complexion, and Rose doesn't notice, the point being that they're not really that close to begin with, I suppose, but it's done a little too obviously.

What I think makes sense is that there's no attempt to resolve the regeneration from the previous Doctor, or even to reference such a thing as regenerations, there's no heavy continuity-laden backstory about the Autons (I don't know that the Doctor ever mentions he's encountered them at least twice before), there's a few off-the-cuff remarks that fans will pick up on, but not much else. Davies probably figures he's got plenty of time to work all this stuff in, while fans who already know what's gone before want to skip all of those revelations being made again. While Doctor Who is an icon in Britain, it's not like everyone knows all about his origins and can quote chapter and verse of every story. What you've got in this episode is not classic Doctor Who (they spent too much money to hope for that), so you're going to miss out on the long scenes of exposition and endless chases through catacombs and rock quarries, not to mention the so-called special effects, all of which were part of its charm and, as the actors themselves keep saying in the dvd commentaries, "very much of its time." If I can continue to see the new episodes beyond this first one, I'm hoping they start to build on each other, I think the people making the show know what they're doing, and if they don't succeed they will only prove that it truly can't be done.