The TARDIS (TIME AND RELATIVE DIMENSION IN SPACE)

March 11 2011

For those of you who do not know already from my other posts I LOVE Science Fiction (please don`t call it Sci-Fi, it sounds like a shitty speaker system) and Doctor Who is no exception. I remember back in the day when old episodes would play after Red Dwarf on BBC and I would roll my eyes and change the chanel (I remember a rubble pit and cap guns, it didn`t catch my attention). I stayed away until much later when in 2006 I was going through the TV stations (late at night/ early morning paranoid from lack of sleep and too much caffine) and saw a full hour show Doctor Who (they used to be 30 minutes episodes in a series of four on average) so I decieded to investigate and to my suprise I was rewarded with one of the creepiest and most magical things I have seen in a long time. The episode was called the Girl in the Fireplace and it focused on Madame De Pompadour and these robots that go back into time by ripping open the fabrics of the universe to harvest her brain. The main character The Doctor was much younger, full of energy and kept you entertained just by his presence. I had to have more and I soon devoured the entire 2005-2007 series and the horrible atrocity that was the TV movie Dr.Who (it was the only adventure to feature the 8th Doctor and I’ll tell you what that means shortly). Right now I am watching the old black and white Dr.Who (aka the origonal series) featuring William Hartnell as the First Doctor. It. Fucking. Rocks!

Doctor Who first broadcast in 1963 titled An Unearthly Child (which I now own on video cassette 🙂 in black and white. A college student who is extreamly smart but different from the other students causes her teachers to stalk her back to where she lives… the dump. There they see her go into a Police Box (a blue box used back then to hold prisoners or call for help before cell phones) and not come out. They sneak inside and are taken aback as the inside is huge like a chamber all fitting neatly inside a box big enough for four (unless your fat). This police box is actually called a TARDIS and is a spaceship in disguise as a police box that can travel through space and time. The Doctor decides to kidnap them as they have seen too much and takes them back in time to the caveman days. There they meet cavemen who are freezing because their leader never learned the secret of fire from his father, the last leader. I won’t ruin the rest for you but its actually not bad and the episode still holds up to this day. From here on the two abducted teachers continue on as the Doctors companions (aside from Susan who is already traveling with her Grandfather, the Doctor). Now here is where the true genious of the show kicks in. In the very begening of season four William Hartnell’s health started to go south and they needed a way to continue the show without him and they came up with the idea of REGENERATION!

WHAT IS A TIME LORD?

A Time Lord is a race that exists throughout the entire origonal series as observers of time vowing to never interfere in the changes of time unless it is something that must be stopped at all costs. The Doctor used to live with his people but it is revealed that he stole the TARDIS and went traveling through space and time for reasons unknown. Due to this he is a fugative due to the theft and his interference with events that according to Laws of Time and can’t return home. In the 2005 re-boot of the show there was a Time War (AKA the Last Great Time War) in which the Doctor fought against his arch enemy the Daleks (a Nazi like race that extermenates anything not Dalek) and personally ended the war by destroying both the Daleks and and the Time Lords and Time-Locking it so that nobody could go back, not even himself.  

REGENERATION

When a Time Lord (the Doctors race) becomes critically injured or just really old they can cheat death by regenerating. Origonally called a renewal it was intended that when the Doctor collapses in the show of old age he becomes younger and can continue (with two hearts mind you) but was later changed to what we call regeneration by the time they hit the fourth Doctor. The Doctor becomes a new man, literally. Changed face, personality and new sense of dress. This would allow the show to continue and eventually become the longest running Science Fiction show with over 700 episodes (the closest equivelent was Stargate SG-1 with over 200 episodes) and a few movies (most of which are non-cannon). By the time we see the Doctor emerge in the New Series (2005) it is started that the Doctor is over 900 years old. At first the Doctor is just a grumpy old man who doesn’t like humans that much seeing them as backwards and quite stupid. After he regenerates into the second Doctor and onwards we see him calm down and eventually he adopts the Earth as his second home, some might even say he loves the Earth even more than his home planet Gallefry. Each time the Doctor regenerates he seems to get younger (with two exeptions but both of them are in the original series and in the new series it seems to be going towards an aging backwards theme) to the point where he is at now (the 11th Doctor is like 22ish).

OLD AND NEW

MY DOCTOR

Everyone has a Doctor they like best. Sometimes not but in most cases one Doctor will stand out in your memory for something that touches you in a way that only the Doctor can. For me it has to be hands DOWN David Tennet (the 10th Doctor). Granted his was the first series I started watching in earnest, I also happen to enjoy his endless energy, his exclemation of “Allons-Y” and the fact that we really get to see his “humanity” by the end of the show. I still enjoy the first, second, fourth, ninth and eleventh Doctors but Tennet stands above them all in his brown trenchcoat given to him by Janis Joplin (I guess she was a fixed point in time eh?)