The First Doctor

My friend made the mistake of having me watch the first season of the 2005 Doctor Who series starring Christopher Eccleston. The mistake was not in having me watch it because I absolutely loved every second of it. The mistake was not knowing how much of a fanatic I can become. This of course does not effect her in the slightest. Me on the other hand: its become a problem. As I said I loved every second of watching Christopher Eccleston be the Doctor. Then I learned that he was the Ninth Doctor and I was like "there are eight more before him plus the ones after him." That, of course, blew my mind and started me on my fanatical journey to watch every episode of Doctor Who that has been or ever will be made.

Now I have only watched the first two seasons of the new series but I recently went back and watched William Hartnell portray the first ever Doctor. His reign lasting from 1963 to 1966. The first big hurdle to my endeavor: The Lost Episodes. Those episodes wiped from the BBC archives due to a policy they had in the 70's. A tragedy in hindsight. But I was still determined and came up with a sort of solution: I am going to read the the novelizations of the Missing Episodes. Also they now have the animated reconstructions of some of the episodes as well. It was kind of hit or miss but I still had great fun with the whole thing and I would like to share some of the highlights and lowlights.

Lets talk about The Doctor himself first. I liked William Hartnell as The Doctor. Sure he was crotchety but I warmed up to him. He was serious, stern and a bit egotistical. I got the distinct impression on several occasions that he enjoyed proving people wrong and proving he was smarter then them. Every companion has had to be convinced that The Doctor was telling the truth about traveling through time and space and he was always indignant until they believed him. There is, of course, no doubt that he is smarter then everyone in existence but he is also unflappable in the face of danger and quite magnanimous. Not to mention what a snazzy dresser he is :). Once or twice he even showed his comical side. Especially in the serial "The Romans." All in all a great Doctor.

Now for the supporting cast. He had a lot of good companions but also some duds. Susan Foreman was ok but she was kind of "non" to me. I don't know how else to describe it. I have to say my favorite of his companions were Barbara Wright, Ian Chesterton and Vicki. Barbara and Ian were unwilling companions but they adjusted well and just rolled with it. Vicki was spunky but also very smart. She had great chemistry with The Doctor, Barbara and Ian. I think that Steven Taylor was the worst of his companions . He was arrogant and I just did not like him. The Doctor went through his companions Katarina, Sara Kingdom and Dodo Chaplet so fast they are almost not worth mentioning. Katarina and Dodo were both kind of useless but Sara was a kick ass woman. Polly and Ben were alright.

My absolute favorite First Doctor serial is "The Dalek Invasion of Earth." It was a great return of one of The Doctors greatest enemies and it had a heartwarming send off for Susan at the end. My least favorite serial was "The Gunfighter." I just couldn't get into it. Probably cause of Steven and Dodo. Another good serial is "The Edge of Destruction." A rare cerebral adventure.

There is no doubt that the Daleks are an iconic and crowd-pleasing Doctor Who enemy and I would not trade them for the world. But I have to say that my favorite villain that the First Doctor faced was The Celestial Toymaker. Having The Doctor and his companions play games for their lives. Creepy. And just as smart as The Doctor. The worst enemy he faced had to be the giant ant creatures that were afraid of dead spiders. Stupid.

... Oh, another good serial was "The Space Museum." Where the TARDIS crew was displaced in time and had to keep themselves from becoming exhibits in a museum.

... Oh and "The Chase." The Daleks chase the TARDIS through time and space in their very own TARDIS.

OK. I have to stop. I Love Doctor Who!

Leah

http://www.pinterest.com/castleclown/

I Love The Walking Dead

I just watched the first season of the Walking Dead for the second time. I no longer have access to the new episodes so to get my fix I watched the show on instant play on Netflix. I absolutely love that show. I know it is not the greatest show there ever was but I still enjoy it immensely. Zombies are my weakness. I will probably watch anything as long as it has zombies in it. I don’t care they are the slow moving zombies, fast moving zombies or “infected” zombies. I love them all the same. There might be something a little bit wrong with me but as I like to say “I’m weird and I’m ok with that.”

I love Jim Henson

I recently watched Jim Henson’s The Storyteller. It was a cool idea. Take old folk tales and make them come to life. There is nothing I love more than fairy tales. There is something different about fairy tales from other types of stories. I can’t put my finger on it but you know when you have seen or heard a fairy tale and I love that feeling. I also love Jim Henson. His Creature Shop makes awesome puppets. It’s one of the reasons I love the TV show Farscape. Jim Henson Productions produced the show and pretty much made all the aliens for that show and I think they were stunning. I love when shows and movies  use puppets instead of CG. No matter how realistic the CG looks I just feel like I can relate to them better than computer generated creatures. I also love the look when they use puppetry and CG together like in the movie Where the Wild Things Are. 

I Love the Internet

The one thing I love about the internet, and Wikipedia particularly, is how easily you can learn things. Also the wide range of things you can learn about in a short period of time. I mean I don’t go in depth into the things I am learning about like I’m sure other people do. I just hear about something I want to know about and I look it up to get a general knowledge of it. Sometimes I will get caught up on a particular subject. An example: recently I have been obsessed with Doctor Who. If you look at my web browser right now I have about 10 tabs open to different things about Doctor Who and I just can’t stop reading more and opening more tabs. It’s getting out of hand.  But then other times I will look up something, get a general feel for it and then I get a hint of something else on the page and I’ll hit the link and pretty soon I have tons of tabs open to things that are just loosely related to each other.  I just get lost on the internet sometimes but it is so much fun.

International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

I have a calendar that I bought from ThinkGeek that has April 23 marked as International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. And being the curious person I am I looked up International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day on Wikipedia (that is where I get most of my information so if this is wrong I would be more than happy to be told). According to Wikipedia it’s a day that was created writer Jo Walton to encourage writers to make “professional quality” works available for free on the internet. Which is awesome because I love reading and anything for free is great. She picked the day because April 23 is commonly considered Shakespeares birthday. It’s also St. Georges Day, which is celebrated by exchanging red roses or books with your sweetheart. Now that is a day I can get behind. Forget chocolate on St. Valentines Day, I want a book on St. Georges Day. I still can’t figure out what a Pixel-Stained Technopeasant is but it has my full support.

Leah's Random Thought

I was just thinking about the phrase "Avoiding it like the plague." I think it is funny that we are stilling using it today when the plague happened like I don't know how many hundreds of years ago.

Urbaned

My friends and I love to make up words. One we made up a while ago is Urbaned.
We love the actor Carl Urban. We call him the ninja actor because he plays so many different roles that we have a hard time picking him out on screen. Sometimes I do not realize that he is in a movie until I look it up after I watch it. Like The Lord Of the Rings. And that is exactly what being urbaned is. If you are watching a movie and about halfway through it or even after it is over you realize that Carl Urban was in it then you have been Urbaned. My sister got Urbaned by a picture of Carl Urban. It was really funny.