I knew nothing of Doctor Who until two weeks ago.
Well, that's not strictly correct. I knew it involved time travel. I have a vague memory of college friends watching a curly-haired, bug-eyed guy in a freakishly long scarf scramble over piles of gravel. I knew the fabric of my British TV knowledge had a giant hole that needed to be mended.
So when I heard that the BBC was having a 50th anniversary something or other, I decided to consult an expert to bring me up to speed.
Enter Kevin, a longtime friend who has been a Whovian since childhood. I took over his living room and made him show me "Doctor Who" while I asked stupid questions. We started at 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon, and I watched and took notes until 4:30 a.m. Sunday. What follows is what actually happened.
I quickly learn that the very first episode of the show was among the 106 destroyed - on purpose! - by some BBC geniuses back in the day, so we begin with "The Aztecs," a black-and-white episode from 1964. A guy who looks like George Washington in a plaid suit appears to be raiding a tomb with his friends. We pause for questions.
SARA: What is he a doctor of?
KEVIN: Pretty much everything.
What are they doing?
Traveling. Knockin' about.
What's up with the phone booth?
It's just a disguise for the time travel machine. That is the TARDIS: Time and Relative Dimension in Space. And it's not a phone booth, it's a police call box.
What's the difference?
Before the advent of good telecommunications and mobiles and whatnot, the British had all these phone boxes everywhere where they could temporarily lock up somebody, with a direct line to headquarters.
So it's not your typical, put-in-a-quarter-and-call-someone situation?
Correct. It's also huge inside.
And "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" is still a total ripoff of this?
Oh, absolutely.
Can Superman change his clothes in there?
I'm not going to answer that.
The Doctor is really focused on making sure he and his traveling companions don't interfere with past events and muck up the future. The Doctor's companion, Barbara, tries to keep said Aztecs from practicing human sacrifice. Even though they think she's a god because she helped herself to a sacred bracelet, things don't end well. Kevin thinks it's time I saw some Second Doctor.
Are we talking about different people?
Yeah. Different actors, yeah.
No, what I mean is, are we talking about different characters?
Like, how does the doctor's personality change throughout the series?
No ... Are they just rotating actors in to play the same character?
Yeah.
OK.
Weeeellll, each actor gives his own little spin on it obviously. Each regeneration has his own personality but he's still the Doctor.
The Third Doctor was a kind of man of action, he knew aikido and liked fast cars, kind of like a Steve McQueen. The Third Doctor was very comical, almost like a clown, basically. The First Doctor, as you saw, was very staid and scholarly.
They all have their own storylines, which they really shouldn't cross. Let me show you. I know I saw "The Three Doctors" on here.
Kevin queues up an episode (actually, a serial consisting of shorter episodes) from 1972, which has the first three Doctors working together. Soon, British people are strutting about with dental hygiene and wardrobes straight out of "Austin Powers," including a tall, white-haired actor later identified as Jon Pertwee. He's wearing a red velvet suit. I have more questions.
What's with the clothes?
Well, the Doctor was a bit of a dandy.
Are they all a bit of a dandy? I mean, the Steve McQueen guy obviously isn't.
This is, uh, who I was describing.
Wait a minute, that guy? What?
The guy in the smoking jacket and the ruffled shirt, yes.
That's as close to Steve McQueen as we're gonna get?
On screen, an uptight uniformed lackey is demanding, "Are you or are you not the Doctor I met during that yeti business?"
Yeti business?
The Second Doctor, whose giant collar is strangling his bow tie, replies, "Don't you see? I'm just a temporal anomaly."
The plot of "The Three Doctors" hinges on the Second Doctor's missing recorder. Not a tape recorder, but a little clarinet like you learn to play in the fourth grade. The highlight, for me, was the lavender fur coat worn by Jo Grant, part of the Doctor's rotation of attractive lady tagalongs.
I assume she's a love interest, but Kevin tells me she's not taking off her white go-go boots for any of these guys. "There really is absolutely no sex in the classic series," he says.
It's vital that I see "Genesis of the Daleks," which is a Fourth Doctor story about the worst villains of the series. It's not on Netflix, but Kevin has it on DVD. As soon as he presses Play, I start pointing and exclaiming, "That's the guy I've seen. I recognize him."
The curly-haired scarf-wearer turns out to be Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor, and he seems ready to abandon that whole non-interference philosophy when it comes to the Daleks, giant pepper shakers with R2-D2 appendages.
So what's up with the Daleks?
They used to be a race called the Kaleds. They had so much genetic mutation from the radiation from the nuclear wars on their planet, called Skaro, that they evolved into goo. Every Doctor has encountered them numerous times.
So inside those rolling road cones, they're goo?
It's not goo, it's this ... shapeless mass. Some tentacles action going on. You get a better look at it in later episodes.
What's their problem?
They're always rolling around going "EXTERMINATE!" It's kind of a battle cry. And their philosophy of being.
Soon, I'm ready for the Daleks to get wiped off the face of the galaxy. Alas, the Doctor has a crisis of conscience, pontificating when he should be detonating.
Kevin lets it slip that Douglas Adams, one of my favorite authors, wrote for the show. I demand to see his work, so it's on to more Fourth Doctor in "City of Death," which is a lot more fun than it sounds.
When a roughed-up Tom Baker says to his captor, "I say, what a wonderful butler. He's so violent!" I laugh and laugh.
I'm starting to get it. But the bad guy - named Scaroth! Last of the Jageroth! - looks like a pile of knitted earthworms under his Julian Glover mask.
Why are all these aliens so ugly? When do we get to the sexy alien villains?
Never. This isn't "Star Trek."
Because time is limited, Kevin dials up a 2005 episode from the first season of the BBC reboot titled "Bad Wolf" and introduces me to the Ninth Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, who looks familiar to me because he's currently in "Thor: The Dark World."
The special effects are as impressive in 2005 as they were laughable in 1975. But Eccleston is the Doctor I've been waiting for all day.
He wears a black leather coat instead of an argyle vest, vibrates with lust when he looks at his cutie companion Rose and dismisses autocrats with a clipped, "You just lost the right to even talk to me."
"Bad Wolf" turns out to be my favorite hour of "Doctor Who," and I later figure out it premiered the day I got married. It's a funny-scary send-up of reality TV. Then we watch its follow-up, "The Parting of the Ways," and Eccleston explodes in a ball of lasers that become Tenth Doctor David Tennant.
Rose is not at all cool with that, and neither am I.
Tennant is popular with Doctor Who loyalists, so I reluctantly give him a chance. But his first full episode, "Christmas Invasion," for me belongs to jet-setting British Prime Minister Harriet Jones. She's played by Penelope Wilton ("Downton Abbey's" Mrs. Crawley) and has worked with the Doctor before. In fact, as she puts it, "There's an act of Parliament banning my autobiography."
I end up watching four more reboot episodes, including one with Richard Nixon and the moon landing. But the one that knocks my socks off is "Blink," which stars Carey Mulligan and a posse of cemetery statues that move when you take your eyes off them.
You literally never see the Weeping Angels in action, but they're terrifying all the same.
"Blink" doesn't look much like the old serials, with their "I say!" dialogue and gravel pit alien landscapes. ("I've been to many planets in the solar system," the Tenth Doctor muses, "and you'd be surprised how many of them look like quarries in Wales.")
This "Doctor Who" actually scared me, unlike any of the classic episodes, but it was in that childlike, startled, don't-go-there-girl way. Both iterations of the show made me laugh, but only the new ones made me think.
What I really think is that I need to watch the entire season with Eccleston. I learned the lesson most fans have known for years: Even if you like your current Doctor, you can't keep him.
Who's next
The Twelfth Doctor will be played by Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, who is also an Oscar-winning writer and director. "Doctor Who" showrunner Steven Moffat has said Capaldi's incarnation of the Doctor will have "the best ever entrance into the TARDIS." Capaldi was recently on the big screen in "World War Z" as a physician working for the World Health Organization. That's right: A WHO doctor.