Being a Doctor Who fan places you on the bottom of the geek pecking order in America. In a collection of quirky misfits, you suddenly become the quirkiest of the lot. It doesn’t help that many of us were more or less inducted into fandom in a way reminiscent of a cult. Some people came across it late on Saturday nights while watching PBS. Others were raised up on it by their parents, already dedicated converts who wanted to get their kids on the right track to sci-fi righteousness. Then there was my path into this bizarre world of Daleks and Autons.
I was always a geek. I had been ever since I uttered my first word, which was “Batman.” All through my childhood, I was pleasantly dragged into the realm of science fiction and fantasy by my older brother. Roleplaying games, Nintendo and comic books made up the majority of my social activities. After college, I was working at a bookstore, like many others who foolishly chose to major in English without the benefit of a trust fund to see us through to a doctorate and tenure. There were three other guys at the store I tended to hang out with and complain about the customers. But every so often they would start talking about the Doctor. I was lost. My entire exposure to Doctor Who at that point had been a themed pinball machine and a strange collection of toys I saw at GenCon. These guys would go on about the mythos of the show, bringing up favorite episodes. And eventually, I had to ask what the hell they were talking about. And, like the drug dealers they were, they were only too happy to hook me up with a sample.
Two of the guys, Andy and Pat, invited me to join in on a viewing of Terror of the Autons (yes, my first Doctor was John Pertwee, and I still love the Venusian Aikido and I still try to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow). We gathered in Pat’s living rooms, along with his girlfriend, and by the time the DVD was finished, I had become a faithful convert. I joined in on the conversations about regenerations and sonic screwdrivers. I sat in basements watching bootlegs. And I was one very happy monkey the day I learned the show was coming back with a new Ninth Doctor in 2005. By then, I had left the bookstore in Milwaukee for a newsroom in DC, and still had coworkers I could chat with about the show.
But I found myself in a rather odd position. In social gatherings of a geeky nature, I found myself mostly isolated from the conversation, as everyone else wanted to talk about Star Wars and Star Trek. Occasionally, there might be a remark about the show, some people knew about it, but no one around had the same passion for it that I did. It was never their main interest in the universe of sci fi and fantasy, just another satellite orbiting the core planet of Star Wars/Trek. I was the outcast among the outcasts.
And to be quite frank, it can stay that way. That’s because I’ve realized something about Doctor Who that, for me, makes it superior to the more mainstream obsessions of American sci-fi fans. Star Wars had three movies, three horrendous attempts at expanding the films, and a large number of books that are really necessary to keep adding to the story, and yet those books are an absolute muddle of conflicting ideas. Star Trek had to be rebooted with a new cast as The Next Generation, then again as Deep Space Nine (which, for my money, is the pinnacle of the franchise), then again as Voyager, then again as Enterprise. Even the films had to be rebooted, until finally they’ve been reborn as a lens flare-laden piece of shit directed by the biggest hack in Hollywood, J.J. Abrams. True, all of those stories take place in the same universe, but there is no real continuity except when it is unnaturally shoehorned in. Both series had to do complete overhauls in order to stay relevant (and unfortunately, in the case of Star Wars, those overhauls have almost destroyed the love of that universe that many have held). But Doctor Who is a constant, never needing a reboot because it has always been about change. It is a simple story of a man in a blue box who can go anywhere in time and space, and the few people in the universe who have the good (and sometimes horrifically bad) fortune to go along with him. Its narrative is as boundless as the human experience.
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