THE UNIVERSE IS CALLING
"You mean you're deliberately choosing to go on the run from your own people, in a rackety old TARDIS?"
"Why not? After all, that's how it all started."
Doctor Who is the (nearly) perennial science fiction show which has so ingrained itself into the consciousness of the United Kingdom and beyond, on the days that it can bother calling itself science fiction. Since November 23rd, 1963, the Doctor and company have sailed through space and time, combating evil, righting wrongs, and being extraordinarily silly. The Doctor is a Time Lord, a member of an alien race with two hearts and not a brain between them, fled from decadence in a stolen time machine (the TARDIS - Time And Relative Dimension In Space) to vworp from adventure to adventure. Sometimes she is a homeless wanderer, sometimes she is a champion of justice, and sometimes she is a lonely god, but she is always the smartest and most charming man in the room. She is joined by one or more companions, outsiders to her life and our eyes into the workings of a madman's mind - typically, a young Earth girl with a scream that can shatter glass and a formidable amount of moxy. Together, the Doctor and her friends battle against vicious monsters and insane tyrants, from the likes of the murderous Daleks, soulless Cybermen, and the wicked Master, to those of the Freudian Vervoids, the unconvincing Nimons, and the inspired Slitheen. She does it with style, with gravitas, and with her trusty
There are some corners of the universe which have bred the most terrible things. Things which act against everything we believe in. Things which bear a strange resemblance to men in rubber suits. They must be fought!
This year, 2018, marks fifty-five years of Doctor Who in every medium conceivable - making it the longest running science fiction show in televisual history. (Eat that, Star Trek.) Books, comics, radio plays, the small screen, the big screen, fairly average medium-sized screens, even video games: if you can think of it, the Doctor is having adventures there. As we begin the eleventh series of the revived show (and Season 37 of the show entire) and embark alongside the thirteenth numbered incarnation of everyone's favorite Time Lord, we find ourselves the same as ever: the Doctor and her companions in an impossible blue box, passing through, helping out, learning. Though much has changed since that police box landed in a junkyard so many years ago, children are still hiding from Daleks behind sofas, the Master is still delightfully evil, and the Doctor's clothes are still utterly ridiculous. There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else, the tea's getting cold. It is a good year to love Who, as it is every year.
Well, come on!
We have work to do.
