The Doctor is In

It is sad to admit this but I catch ever reference to scifi and comics made on The Big Bang Theory. Yes, I know that makes me a nerd, dork, and uber-geek. On the plus side, it also means that I also get most of the science references, too! Yes, I know what that says about me; but don't you secretly love watching Star Trek, Star Wars, anything that has Star in the title, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Firefly or The Lord of Rings all day everyday? Perhaps that's just me. Of all those shows there is one that stands out to those of us who are members of the SyFy Frequent Viewers Club: Doctor Who!

Now for the sake of those of you who have been living under a red rock in an white outhouse on a bleak desert island in the North Sea without access to BBC America, allow me to give you this basics. The Doctor (his name is NOT Doctor Who and please don't call him that around my son who will complain to me for at least 29 days about what an idiot you are) is a 900+ year old alien from Gallefry who is the last of a race called the Time Lords. When he is close to death he regenerates into a new actor which explains how we have had eleven different actors to play the role in its 49 year history. He travels through space and time in his TARDIS which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It is a blue British police phone box from the 1950's that is bigger on the inside than it looks like on the outside and can travel anywhere in time and space. All clear? Good!

Now the cool things about Doctor Who are the planets, time periods, aliens, and quirky British phrases that make no sense to Americans until you Google them to find out what in the world that word means even though you are speaking very close to the same language. In all fairness, most Americans speak American English (yes I do see the oxymoron in that phrase) as opposed to the Queen's English because of this little misunderstanding over a ship full of tea in 1773 where King George, III wanted to tax our tea and we wanted to have fish with a caffeine addiction so we tossed it in Boston Harbor and refused to pay the tax since we didn't drink it. I bet John Adams sent a letter explaining that it was the fish who drank it so try to get them to pay. That is also why we drink more coffee than tea. Since then we have been going different directions with our words making Doctor Who a wondrous weapon in the war of words. I really had no clue that a flat was something more than what you had when your tire ran over a nail left there by the roofers who were too lazy to throw away the nails when they reroofed my apartment. (Not that I have issues about that.) Apparently a flat IS the apartment which makes as much sense as calling something that is connected to a bunch of other things just like it an APARTment.

That is the kind of thing the Doctor would point out. He is a mega, ultra, super, technotronic genius beyond anything you can imagine. He is also a bit unusual, odd, quirky, strange eccentric and just plain goofy; which may explain why I like him. It is that whole “I'm an alien and do things that make you shake your head and wonder what I'm thinking or if I'm thinking or what time zone my brain is in and is it ahead or behind the rest of my body” thing that you see all the time at the DMV. But the Doctor doesn't make you wait in line for what seems to be an eternity just to get your son a simple little book to study for his drivers' test. (God help us all and stay off the sidewalks!) The Doctor just skips to the front of the line and, through smarts, charm and weirdness, does what needs to be done to defeat the aliens controlling the world through the licensing process and get his drivers' license book in the most creative and unusual ways you can imagine.

Now if this blog seems to have been going all over the place then you now have an idea of what to expect when you watch Doctor Who. Good luck and don't forget your towel. No wait. The towel is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.