Doctor Who S1 ★★★★★

Fantastic! Christopher Eccleston is incredible as the Doctor. The goofiness, the anger, that shit-eating grin. The energy he brings to every scene is wonderful. Billie Piper opposite him is wonderful as well and I definitely did not appreciate her as Rose when I saw this originally back in the day.

I don’t think that there’s a bad episode here. The Long Game is perhaps the most forgettable, but it’s by no means bad, just bog-standard Doctor Who. The Unquiet Dead is perhaps not incredible either, but it has its moments. Gwyneth is definitely another character I did not appreciate as much as a teenager.

But every episode is also doing something important, either laying the groundwork for or pushing forward the characters. People make fun of the season arc just being the words “Bad Wolf” spread across various episodes and miss the actual stories happening in front of them. Rose becoming someone who can’t just sit by and watch things happen any more, the Doctor having to face how far he will or won’t go any more in the aftermath of the Time War, dealing with his own guilt. And you just have an amazing run of television from Father’s Day up through The Parting of the Ways, with only The Long Game getting in the way of adding Dalek to that.

Steven Moffat’s two-parter gets heralded as some of his best work here and not undeservedly. I remember reading someone saying before that one gets decades to write a first novel, and only a year or two to write a second. Obviously this is not Moffat’s first television script (or, technically, his fist Doctor Who script either) but it is his first big foray into writing a proper Doctor Who story with his big puzzlebox finale style and it is refined to a tee. Having watched it too many times it’s impressive just how dense the first conversation with Rose and the Doctor is with set-up and the whole two-parter feels like this. Almost every detail that gets layered on over the course of the two episodes coming together in a big, emotional payoff—like a good detective story. Could do without the wank about Britain standing tall, alone the Nazis, though.

And from Russell T. Davies we have the wonderful soapiness and campiness that gives the sci-fi nonsense its heart and makes the wobbly sets and bad C.G.I. all the more endearing, only heightened by how incredibly mid-2000s it all is. This show is not trying to be timeless and absolutely did not need to be. For better and for worse it’s all here, in its exaggerated, sci-fi, bloom-filled sheen. Downing Street is being run by something wearing the skin of a dead and hallowed out Labour Party, dragging the world into war with lies about W.M.D.s; Rose, disgusted by Cassandra, still can’t help but see her as a source of thinspiration (2000s diet culture was utterly vile); Rose calling the Doctor gay; the fears of the T.V. news conglomerates and rot of reality T.V. almost feel quaint now, but being slammed in the face with the Big Brother theme as the grand threat to open the penultimate episode with is so utterly unhinged in a way that is not going to land with anyone who was not at least somewhat engrossed in the culture of British television of the time. That specific mode of of-its-time campiness, and an edginess too, dwindles out as the show goes on. I can see why Smith’s Doctor seems to be the one that resonates more with the American fanbase; Moffat’s version of the show having a little bit more timelessness to it. But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

Sad to see Eccleston go, but looking forward to seeing my partner react to Tennant.