[TV] The New Doctor Who - Series 1 (2005)

During the Sci-Fi Philippines September 'Thon, Inklingfair was kind enough to lend me her collection of the first season of The New Doctor Who series back from 2005 featuring Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor.

For those unfamiliar, Doctor Who remains to be the pretty much the longest-running science fiction series out there (although not necessarily continuously running, mind you). The series centers around the rather enigmatic time traveler known only as The Doctor and his various adventures across time as he works to save humanity from threats beyond our comprehension.

In this particular regeneration of the Doctor, he eventually takes on Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) as a Companion and together they continue in the grand tradition of previous incarnations of the Doctor and attempt to right wrongs across the timeline.

This Ninth Doctor is pretty refreshing although with a bit more edge behind his somewhat jovial exterior - a foreshadowing of the dark events he's faced since the last time there's been an official series on the air. It appears that he's now the last of his kind, an alien race known as the Time Lords. Snippets of information littered across the season reveal that they died in a great Time War against the Daleks, longtime menace of the series.

Thus the series works to do several things - (1) re-establish the Doctor, (2) reveal clues to what has happened to the rest of the Time Lords and (3) document the continuing adventures of everyone's favorite time traveler and his blue box.

The series is brilliantly intelligent and rich with British wit and humor, which may or may not strike your fancy. The great thing is that you don't need to have seen the previous series to really enjoy it - the show stands on its own and each episode is capable of operating independently of the others, much akin to the Discworld or Xanth books which are part of a larger series but more or less each story can be enjoyed independently of the others. Going over all the stories just helps things make a lot more sense.

So if you're looking for an intelligent TV experience that dabbles in science fiction but doesn't overwhelm you with technobabble and all that, this is definitely something for you to try.