Blather. Rants. Repeat. - Lost: Brain Cells. Answer to "Ray." If found, please return.

It's one of those old-time TV kinda days.

People are tempting me to get into this current run of Dr. Who, despite my long history of avoiding the thing. It was run, at least in New York, on latenight PBS in the 70s, but unlike other loves of my life from back then (particularly Python and its alumni descendants), and despite being seriously Trek-deprived, it never caught on with me. Over the years, I got into just about every other sci-fi fandom to some extent, be it serious or HHGTG-ish silly, and certainly without regard to quality. Hell, I watched Gerry and Sylvia Anderson sci-fi shows, not just Space 1999 but the ubercool show UFO which was their first live-action attempt. I watched the eerily weird low-budget Canadian scifi product The Starlost, perhaps most notable for being the worst career move Keir Dullea could've made after starring in Kubrick's 2001. I wrote fanfic for a series with gaps in canon longer than my daughter's life. So why no Who?

Go ahead, then. Convince me. You know you want to.

----

From a similar time, I just finished a semi-lost episode of one of my favorite fandoms: "White Gold," an episode featuring Colonel Flagg from late in the third season of MASH. Not sure why I have so little recollection of it; MASH was on so many times during its run, at one time you could choose from as many as seven episodes a day on CBS and different cable channels. I'm guessing it's because it was the second-to-last episode of that season, and thus the one right before "Abbysinnia, Henry," which is still so moving and powerful to me, it may tend to suck in all of the arc around it.

Watching this Flagg episode now, I found it notable for two reasons. One, its plot: to cut down on Flagg's troublemaking, Hawkeye and Trapper slip a mickey into his coffee which doubles him over, and the tag scene of the episode is his recovery from the resulting unneccessary appendectomy they performed on him. The Gelbart-written script plays this entirely for laughs, with a side order of justice, and it struck me as being oddly contrasting to a later-series episode titled "Preventive Medicine." In that one, Hawkeye returns to the same M.O. to get a different destructive colonel off the front lines, but instead of being the loyal sidekick, BJ is all judgmental about such a violation of their Hippocratic oath. Me? I'd remove an organ a day if it would stop a war sooner.

There was also another of my aha!-slash-duh! moments at the end of the one I just watched. An MP returns an escaped medic to Colonel Blake's care; I thought the guy looked familiar, but guessed he was just one of the many MP-looking guys MASH used over the years who I'd seen in other episodes.

Begora it twasn't! It was Stafford Repp, who played Chief O'Hara on the campy Batman TV series, and it proved to be his last appearance ever on film before his sudden heart attack in 1974 at the age of only 56.

We now return you to your current century.

Comments

thanatos_kalos

2007-03-05 12:55 am (UTC)

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Go ahead, then. Convince me. You know you want to.

You'd love the new Dr Who series. It's got a strong humorous element, a fair bit of social commentary, very deep, well-thought out characters, time travel both backwards and forwards, strong mythological and religious undertones, and, to top it all off, the Queen of England enjoys it. :)

(Just don't ask me to explain the ninjas...)

headbanger118

2007-03-05 02:18 am (UTC)

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I LOVED MASH when it was a comedy and not a sermon.

sturgeonslawyer

2007-03-05 06:28 pm (UTC)

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Pretty much, what thanatos_kalos said, with this as caveat: there's a lot of history in Dr. Who, and this new series takes its history seriously. It does make a major break with the old series (spoilers available on request) that makes it easier for new viewers to come in.

There are probably places where a n00b will be staring at the screen wondering what it is s/he is supposed to know. Actually, though, there's very little you need to know; part of the design of the show from the beginning has been the Doctor's "companions," people who don't know much more than the viewers. Sometimes this gets used as an excuse for the Doctor to spout an expository lump, but more often, it's a device that makes it okay that we don't understand what he's talking about.

In order to "get" the series, you need to know these things, nothing more.

1. The Doctor (no "who") is a Time Lord from Gallifrey.

2. Like all Time Lords, he has the ability to "regenerate" when his current body dies (allowing the Beeb to put in new actors as old ones leave). Time Lords have a limited number of times they can do this; this limit may not apply to the Doctor for reasons that don't really matter.

3. He travels in a device called "the TARDIS." It moves through time and space pretty much at will. Due to a faulty "chameleon circuit," it's stuck looking like a '50s vintage police call box. Oh, and it's much, much bigger inside than out.

4. Some long-standing villains -- which the new series actually does a decent job of reintroducing:

a. "Daleks," little fireplugs that go around screaming "Exterminate!"
b. "Cybermen," robot bodies with human brains.
c. "The Master," an evil Time Lord (who has not shown up as far as I've seen of the new series).

That's about it.

Watching Doctor Who is not like watching Trek. It's more a matter of the moments than the stories -- though the new show actually does better at developing interesting stories than the old one did. A lot of it is creating situations where the Doctor can say weird things like "Pardon me, but my hat is on fire and you're standing on my chest" -- a bit from the old show.

Example of the new show's way of doing things.

"If you're from space, how come you have a Northern accent?"
"A lot of planets have a North..."