In the beginning....

So, you say, another Doctor Who blog.

Yep.

For the uninitiated, Doctor Who is the best sci fi television series to ever grace television screens. The series made its debut on 23 November 1963 and ran until 6 December 1989. In all, seven actors portrayed the Doctor over the 26 years on the original BBC series, and in 1996 a rather lame attempt at a television movie starring Paul McGann was made.

While the series was off the air, interest never really died and further adventures of the Doctor and his companions were made in novels published first by Virgin Publishing, and then by BBC Books. Three adventures were made for radio, and following their success many more have been recorded by a company called Big Finish.

So what's my angle?

Well, for starters, the show is coming back. All new episodes are being made right now in the UK with a tentative premiere on BBC 1 sometime at the end of March 2005. Soon Doctor Who and his TARDIS will be the talk of the sci fi community, spawning debate amongst longtime fans and picking up legions of new ones, much in the same vein as the recent reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. Unlike Galactica, though, Doctor Who will pick up where the series left off, and not try to define over 40 years of history. It's the history that interests me the most, and as a fan since I was about 4 years old I appreciate where the show has been, how it has evolved, and where it will ultimately lead. There is no point in me trying to create a whole new online database when there are so many others out there like the BBC's own homepage http://bbc.co.uk/doctorwho or the cutting edge Outpost Gallifrey http://www.gallifreyone.com so I am going to do something a bit different.

This is my blog, so this is going to be my own perceptions of the series. What I liked. What I didn't. What someone who watched it with me that day liked, and what I thought of their ideas.

As I described above, there have been many additions to the "Whoniverse" as it is sometimes called, with new books and audios created to fit in between existing episodes, so I am going to incorporate the newest and the most interesting of the older ones in their timelines and see how well they do indeed mesh with the existing series. I have actually already done this once, and it has taken me two years to finish the cycle, but in that time new books have been written, new audios recorded, and, most importantly, "lost" episodes have been recovered (more on that when we actually come to a lost episode, and how we will bridge that gap).

So there's my intro. Be warned, I am not starting this right away though; I have two novels to finish reading before I can begin, and I am going to start with prequel novellas before the actual series. Once I do get going there will be an entry almost every day, the exception being vacations and reading novels, which takes a bit longer than watching television.

Ready....?