Dr. Who?

In college, I got hooked on Dr. Who, the BBC series about an alien genius who travels time and space in the British equivalent of a 1950’s telephone booth.

The costumes were often borrowed from the BBC prop archives; instead of looking otherworldly, villians from Planet X usually donned Viking helmets, left-over robes from Shakespearean dramas, and tin-foil shoes. The effects were terribly cheesy — on par, say, with Land of the Lost or H. R. Puffinstuff. The sets were flimsy, too. Slam a door, and the supposedly inpenetrable TARDIS — The Doctor’s time machine — would shudder like a cardboard box.

Still, on Saturday afternoons from four to six, a dozen or so folks from all over campus would converge on my depressingly bleak apartment, pile onto the bad used furniture, and tune in the local PBS station. What drew us in? The stories. Behind the rubber heads and the melodrama, Dr. Who featured some of the most clever writing on television … so clever, in fact, that the episodes we were watching were still fresh, still funny, still intriguing almost twenty years after they had been produced.

Later incarnations of the series were never as arresting. With great anticipation, I tuned into one of the revivals — a dreadful made-for-television movie that, in addition to breaking all the old show’s rules, just looked and sounded silly. In my mind, Dr. Who was over — a fact the BBC underscored by cancelling the series not long after.

Word that the series was back in production didn’t thrill me. After all, what had been done badly before would likely be done badly again.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Thanks to BitTorrent — a program designed to pass files quickly from user to user — the first episode of the new Dr. Who popped up on the Internet days before it will actually be broadcast on the BBC. (The file was “leaked” in order to build excitement over the premiere.) After cranking up Azureus — a BitTorrent “client” used to find, retrieve, and assemble files — I downloaded the new episode in less than two hours.

In short: this first episode of the new series is smart, stylish, sleek, contemporary … and, as they say across the pond, “simply brilliant.”

It hits all the right notes: a perfect intro (they kept the old theme), a frantic opening sequence (London’s never looked better), clever asides to explain the basics to new viewers (“It’s bigger inside than it is outside!”), and a new-century touch of realism (running around with The Doctor is an adventure … albeit, an admittedly very dangerous and sometimes deadly one).

The show comes just in time: desperate for that old “Dr. Who feeling,” I’ve watched my 5-disc Thom Baker / Key to Time collection so often, I’ve worn the DVDs down to thin wafers. And while one American network or the other is bound to offer the new Dr. Who at some point … how cool, for now, to be able to tune in via Internet.