Doctor Who – Memphis Flyer

Tonight and next Thursday, August 24, at the Malco Paradiso, Doctor Who gets skewered.

A still from ‘The Five Doctors’ featuring four Doctors, one of whom is an imposter. It’s just a disaster, really.

The longest running sci fi TV series in the world—indeed, one of the longest running TV series anywhere—is Doctor Who. It originally ran from 1963 (its premiere was interrupted by BBC’s reporting on the assassination of President Kennedy) to 1989, and was then revived in 2005. You don’t run that long without making some changes, and one of the things that makes the character of the Doctor so compelling is that he always changing. When Time Lords are injured or old, they regenerate into a new body—a device thought up by the producers to keep the show fresh and allow them to do periodic reboots. Originally, the Doctor was allowed twelve regenerations, but that rule seems to be no longer operative, because the show’s fans were just energized to learn that the thirteenth actor playing the Doctor will be Jodi Whittaker, the first woman ever to take up the Sonic Screwdriver.

One of the cardinal rules of Doctor Who-style time travel is that you can’t meet yourself. But, like everything else in sci fi fantasy, that rule is subject to change. In 1983, the show celebrated its twentieth anniversary by bringing together all of the actors who had ever played the role for one giant adventure. But the show, known as “The Five Doctors”, was famously a giant trainwreck. First of all, the best and longest-running Doctor, Tom Baker, nursing hurt feelings over being forced out of the role two years earlier, declined to appear. Instead, the producers cut in scenes filmed from an unaired Tom Baker episode called “Shada”. So really it was kind of the Four-And-A-Half Doctors. William Hartnell, who originated the role, died seven years earlier, and was replaced by a lookalike named Richard Hurndall, which makes it Three Doctors Plus A Ringer And A Half Doctor. Even though the show was in the midst of a period when it had some of the strongest writing ever (“The Caves of Androzani”, which a recent fan poll named the show’s greatest episode, appeared the next year.), the highly hyped “The Five Doctors” crashed and burned.

This epic fail did not go unnoticed by former Mystery Science Theater 3000 stars Mike Nelson, Bill Corbin, and Kevin Murphy. Expect them to mock the show mercilessly in a special RiffTrax event, broadcast to theaters this week and next week. Here’s the trailer:

When Geeks Icons Collide: RiffTrax Takes On Doctor Who

Doctor Who is now entering its 51st year. The BBC sci-fi TV show is older than Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Its first episode, which was delayed because of BBC’s coverage of the Kennedy asassination, debuted in England the same year that Astro Boy, the first ever anime, debuted in Japan. Can a show that is as old as an entire genre still have something to say?

The first actor to play the Doctor was William Hartnell, who was 55 years old at the time of the 1963 debut. After three years galavanting through time and space in the TARDIS, Hartnell’s deteriorating health forced him to retire. So the writers came up with a way to keep the popular show going without its star. When Time Lords like the Doctor are near death, their bodies regenerate, changing appearance and giving them new life. The number of total regenerations a single Time Lord could get was set at 12, which, in 1966 probably seemed like a large enough number that the writers would never have to deal with what happened when the Doctor ran out.

BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who

After being cancelled in 1989, Doctor Who regenerated in 2005. For the first 26 years of the show’s run, it was a series of half-hour cliffhangers that bound five or six episodes together under one long story arc. When it returned, it was as series of one-hour, stand-alone episodes with only the loosest of a season-long arc. The new Who was instantly popular, thanks in large part to the onscreen chemistry between the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper), the Doctor’s human traveling companion. When Eccleston decided that one year as the most recognized man in nerddom was enough, he was replaced by the 10th Doctor (David Tennant), and Piper stuck around long enough to get the new guy established and set the new Who up for its best years. Long-form television was back in fashion, and Doctor Who‘s plot machinations became increasingly byzantine, as the Doctor’s troubled past in the Time War caught up with him. When Tennant left the TARDIS in 2010, he was replaced by the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), who was initially well received but never achieved the same depth of fan love as Tennant. Smith stayed for three years until being killed off during the show’s emotional 50th anniversary special. And so, here we are, with Peter Capaldi premiering as the once-thought-impossible 12th Doctor.

Doctor Who fandom is the oldest and most fanatical of the nerd subtribes, and during the run up to the 50th anniversary, showrunner Steven Moffat seemed determined to serve up as much red meat to the fans as possible. The series immersed itself in its own mythology, becoming a show mostly about itself, a recursion that the character of the Doctor, who once famously described the universe as a “big ball of wibby wobbly timey-wimey stuff,” would appreciate.

Moffat surrounds the new Doctor with fan-favorite characters Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, their Sontaran comic relief. But Moffat doesn’t give the new guy much to do. When Capaldi is finally unleashed late in the show to confront the cyborg villain, he hints at a new iron hand under the Doctor’s jolly velvet glove. But overall, Capaldi’s first episode seems flat and uninspired. If he is to be the actor to regenerate a franchise crushed under the weight of its own history, Moffat is going to have to find new places for the TARDIS to go.