My family rocks.
With new episodes of most of the shows I watch on hiatus seemingly until Spring, I’ve been dwindling my backlog of DVR fare as of late. But luckily just before our trip south, I noticed that BBC America was rerunning the latest season of Doctor Who – a show I have not followed nearly as closely as I’d like to. So when I got home I had a nice array of episodes to watch – some I had already half-scene, but many I missed.
I started watching some over the weekend with my daughter (my wife and son were napping and there was nothing on worth watching). She is 5 and a little young for some of the content and concepts, but she seemed to enjoy watching it as she played with her toys nearby. My wife has also been mostly uninitiated to this show, but she ended up watching part of an episode with me later Saturday evening as well.
Then comes Sunday – it had been a restless night with my son and by his nap-time, I felt like I could use one as well. So I took one. Later that afternoon, I awake and come downstairs to find my kids watching a Doctor Who marathon while my wife was doing some work on her laptop. So in the matter of a weekend I seem to have gotten both my wife and my daughter into one of the best sci-fi genre shows of all time. I already knew that they rocked, but this just takes their geek-sheik status up a notch.
my friend with similar sci-fi movie/tv tastes to mine recently lent me “dr who” on dvd. i knew nothing about it. ryan and i have watched two episodes so far…the verdict’s still out.
for christmas, ryan got me the ultimate christopher reeve superman collection PLUS the superman 2: richard donnor cut. sweet.
Leah: With Doctor Who, it helps to have some background on what you are watching. First it helps to know that prior to the recent run (which has lasted about 4 seasons so far), this show had run in in the UK from the 60s into the 90s and was a landmark sci-fi show. In truth, it can tend to be campy at times (and sticks to that a bit now to preserve consistency) but the premise is cool and the adventures vary greatly. So if you don’t care for one episode, you could love the next one.
The basic constants are (a) the Doctor (whose name has never been revealed) who is a Time Lord – the last of his race – and travels through time and space to protect Earth, (b) his companion – usually a British woman – who helps him on his adventures, (c) the TARDIS – his ship, which from the outside appears like a 50s era British police box but is much larger inside. It is also good to know that if the Doctor ever comes near death, he has the ability to regenerate himself, but when he does he takes on a new appearance. In the recent run of the series, the Doctor has already been played by 2 different actors and I believe that he will be changing again at the start of the next season.
Anyway, glad you got some very worthwhile gift for Christmas. I was able to add Transformers to my DVD collection this year. Now if only I could get my wife to watch it.