my newest obsession

Y'all, Doctor Who is freaking awesome. I have watched only about four episodes of the 2005 season, which is currently airing on Friday nights at 9pm on SciFi, and i am entirely hooked. I realize that a lot of my love is due to the fact that Billie Piper and Christopher Eccleston are both gorgeous and have fantastic chemistry onscreen, but even beyond that, the show as a concept is ... intruiging.

I love that the show aired for 25 years in the UK and NEVER got below 3 million viewers for a first-run episode. I love that it went on hiatus for 16 years and returned without dropping the plot arc or the backstory. I love the complexity of the backstory, and i am absolutely fascinated by the makeup of The Doctor's character. Time Lord, can regenerate when near death, but only 12 times, has done so to date 9 of those times ... what happens next to The Doctor? How long will the show continue before he's run out of chances? How many Companions will he find and discard? (Billie Piper, by the way, is an awesome Companion. She's brave and headstrong and foolish and adorable and i have a huge girl crush on Rose. Just so you know.)

My obsession is such that i am currently sitting on my sofa at 1am on a saturday night, in clear view of my bed and with a brand new book on my coffee table, watching old eps on public television. Just so i can get a better sense of the tremendous arc of the show's history. I remember catching it randomly when i was a child, on the rolling rabbit-eared set in my grandma's kitchen. I remember there was a scarf. Apparently a generation of British children were so frightened by the show, and yet so wanted to watch it, that the phrase "behind the sofa" entered the pop-culture lexicon, indicating something you really want to see but are too afraid to watch head-on. (See also Fear, Pillow of.)

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Jacob (who is my all-time favorite TWoP recapper and whose judgment i trust nearly without question ... except for his inexplicable love of Ryan Seacrest, but that's another post) raised an interesting point in recapping last week's episode, The Empty Boy. He noted that all the good zombie movies for the past twenty years have come out of Britain, linking that fact with both the ep's undead army and the second World War. He also pointed out that the specifically American nightmare is of "strangers in the house," which is a different deep-seated cultural fear. He didn't speculate as to its origin, and i'm not sure i'm up to the task at this time of morning, but regardless, the point stands. My most closely-held and uneradicable fear is of someone invading my apartment, my space, hurting me here. More than any place else, that's what -- and where -- i fear. It's interesting, and i don't know how far back it stretches into the collective unconscious, but i'm fascinated by the idea that it's not just because i'm a silly weak girl but also because i've been programmed to be most afraid of that particular situation.