jblum's Journal

Every so often Doctor Who fandom can still astonish me.

After this last week -- which was probably the most old-school story yet, UNIT verus a Sontaran invasion, familiar objects like satnavs and emissions controllers turned lethal, all the most charming cliches of the Pertwee era in one neat package -- I've seen old-school fans complaining that the new show has got it wrong because:
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Now, obviously Doctor Who appeals to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons. But all these "my Doctor would never have done that" bits are just so, well, completely and utterly factually wrong that I'm finding myself resorting to the great cliche: What show were you watching again?

And I'm just wondering where some of those ideas could come from -- most of all, their idea that the Doctor used to be nice. (Sorry, folks -- he was brilliant, funny, caring, astonishing, brave, wonderful, and quite frequently an asshole.) I think a fan just gave me a bit of a clue with something they said about him: "He didn't go around judging people and he didn't hate people unless they were the baddies."

Now, this fan said that completely obliviously of the huge judgmentalism right there in that statement. But more to the point, it made me think of the kind of people they missed him judging, the ones who the Doctor saw as beneath him... who are quite often the ones the young fans would have thought were beneath them too.
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But of course those special bits of your childhood when you were sure you were the Doctor's best-friend-in-waiting couldn't have been a lie -- so he must have changed, not you. And that's how people can accuse the Doctor of having become "one of the cool kids" -- not recognizing that the arrogance of the cool kids and the arrogance of the geek squad are just two sides of the same coin.

This is rather a lot of words for Livejournal, so I'll try to compress this thousand into an icon: it would be a rotating series of pictures of the Doctors, from the first through the tenth, with text reading "CHANCES ARE HE WOULDN'T LIKE YOU". And I should probably throw House and Sherlock Holmes in there as well!