Far and Distant Things

The first time I saw an episode of Doctor Who was about a month after my 11th birthday, Saturday, May 16, 1987.  I figured this out last year by researching a broadcast dates guide on the web, what I will call for the purposes of this post Deep Fandom.  I immediately fell in love.  I've probably said this before, I'll probably say it again.  Beginnings are important, the places I keep returning to, the things I remember best - through repetition, probably.

Because I'm thinking again about what struck me as being most alien about it, which was the essential Britishness of it.  This coded to me as erudition, although the show certainly wasn't erudite.  In 1987, Terry Nation, who wrote the first episode I saw, was in America, writing for shows like MacGyver, about a white hero with a mullet the extraordinary ability to turn any household object into an improvised explosive device.  (A black man in America with his skills would, like as not, have spent the past 20 years in 23-hour-a-day solitary confinement.)  MacGyver did not come across to me as a particularly erudite show.

Doctor Who seemed like a "cult show" while I was watching it, even though my entire Boy Scout troop also watched the show, even though every surviving episode was being broadcast, four or six episodes at a time, weekly.  Sometimes I would watch two different stories on two different channels in the same week.  It was available, it was _easy_ for me to watch.  More to the point it was easy for me, on any given day, to not watch, because I was tired, because I was on a camping trip.  It has long been easier for me to write about shows than to actually watch them.

When I was young, it seemed like a fixed and permanent part of my life, something that would always be there, broadcast late night on damn near every PBS station in America.  And then, around the time I went off to college, it wasn't anymore.  That's a big part of the "missing episode" story - when did things actually vanish?  When were the tapes destroyed?  Put another way, when did we lose what we had?

None of the tapes were destroyed this time.  I later came to learn that Lionheart, for reasons I don't particularly understand myself, decided to jack up the episode price after the show was cancelled, and so most stations stopped showing it.  There are a couple around still.  Iowa.  Spokane.  The idea that there are still, somewhere in America, PBS stations showing Doctor Who every week, is important to me, just like the idea that there is one Blockbuster left in America, in Bend, Oregon, is important to a lot of people.

This period, from the show's cancellation in '89 to the revival in 2005, is part of what is termed in fandom "the Wilderness Years".  It marks my understanding of the show deeply, the understanding of the show of nearly all of us who went through it.  Doctor Who was, during this time, not a TV show, but an idea... no, more than that, a community.  It was still easy for me to be a fan in the '90s, because I spent most of them on Usenet, hanging around rec.arts.drwho, reading what people had to say about books and episodes and magazines and occasionally getting the rare opportunity to trade through the mail for a badly generated copy of the first three episodes of "The Tenth Planet", a story which borders on being unwatchably bad even in pristine quality.

I'm not sure the wilderness has ever really left me, even if I have emerged out the other side.  It always beckons.  I wander on the borders.

Because, and this is not a complaint but an observation, it's not actually easy to watch Doctor Who in America, and very few of us, even those who think of ourselves as "fans", seem to do it.

It's the money thing.  Most of my life I was poor, not so poor that I couldn't afford videotapes, too poor for Collecting.  And that is a lot of fandom around these parts, at least.  People who are sad about the missing episodes less because of any artistic value they might have, but because they can never have a complete collection, they can never have the whole thing, and me, you know, I look at the show as so vast and labyrinthine that the idea that it makes a mockery of the very concept.

I'm not poor right now, though that could change at any time.  I probably would be if I bought even a significant fraction of the stuff marketed to the fandom.  I have a hard time differentiating between a Big Finish audio and a Doctor Who-branded Mr. Potato Head.

Which is unfortunate because there is a difference.  A huge chunk of Who fandom in America is, to be blunt, paywalled.  Occasionally some tendril of it emerges like some Qlippothic alien planet that only appears under the right celestial conditions...

I don't really know what the word "Qlippothic" means.  I like the word.  It has sort of a Lovecraftian sound to it.  El Sandifer's Eruditorium was the last time, I think, I was a fan.  I'm told there's amazing stuff going on in fandom right now, and I believe it.  Doctor Who has, for as long as I've been a fan, had this frequently amazing queer fandom.  But where is it?  There are podcasts, which I'm not suited to listening to.  There is Twitter, which is not a good fit for me.  There are these really fun animated reconstructions like, most recently, "The Faceless Ones", which I don't own, which I don't even know where to _pirate_...

I am jealous of other fandoms that regularly produce weird ephemera.  Jealous of the weirdo who edited together all of the dialogue in the original Star Wars film in alphabetical order, uploaded it to Youtube, and, well, it lasted long enough that I have a copy.  Jealous of fandom that gets actual good video games based on their shows instead of fucking "Destiny of the Doctors" and "Dalek Attack".  I'm glad that in Doctor Who, the weirdos are inside the building, I'm glad at all of the bizarre stuff that winds up on the official DVDs and, now, on the Blu-Rays, but I chafe sometimes at the way the corporate overlords handle it, chafe at the sharply drawn line between "official" and "contraband".  I'm fascinated and inspired that there is an edit of "Ghost Light" that is allegedly actually coherent, am mildly interested in seeing it, and... I don't know, do I not deserve to see it because I'm not willing to drop money on a Blu-Ray set containing a bunch of episodes I didn't much like watching the first time around?

The episodes themselves, the new ones - I don't even fucking know what cable channel they're broadcast on these days, or when.  BBC America?  There's probably one of a billion different streaming services where I can see the show.  When Netflix was the only streaming service occasionally they would get the streaming rights to two or three years old, but that time is long past.  Twitch spent a couple weeks streaming all the original episodes they had and could get rights to, and that was amazing.  Even in the wilderness years, there were a couple good years for the books under Virgin, and then some inscrutable head in the Corporation got worried about outsourcing their Intellectual Property and transferred responsibility for the books to their new, much more boring imprint, wherein the Doctor was under no circumstances to drop acid.

I'm glad the show exists.  I'm glad people get to watch it.  It's a continual source of puzzlement to me that I do not watch it, have not in years, despite my ability to write long rambling blog posts about it at the drop of a hat.