At the suggestion of a friend, I’ve started watching Dr. Who on streaming.
I’ve watched some of the older Dr. Who, the oldest available is from the very first season. I’ve also watched the first 3 episodes of the new Dr. Who from 2005.
Is there a good guide out there, I’m finding it somewhat difficult to follow all that is going on.
I have spend some time on Wikipedia, that has at least explained the concept of the different doctors.
Well, for the new version, you need to start at the beginning with “Rose.” It references the past, but that’s not necessary to enjoy it.
The BBC has a very good set of pages that talk about the original series and the reboot.
The concept is simple: The Doctor is a time traveler/space traveler in the TARDIS, a spaceship that is stuck in the shape of a police box from the 1960s.* He travels with “companions,” usually female, who act as his sidekick. He has various adventures, saving Earth and other planets.
The current version adds the fact that his home planet, Gallifrey, was destroyed.
*Not a phone booth; police boxes were set up for police to store equipment on their beat; they also had a phone to call for help.
You aren’t really supposed to know everything that’s going on. The show, while I love it, is bad about the technobabble and pulling a solution out of the Doctor’s rear end. All you really need to know is that he can regenerate, he’s an alien, he has a spaceship that can travel through time and looks like a police box, he has a magic wand called a sonic screwdriver, and a penchant for traveling with nubile young ladies and saving humanity.
If you try to analyze it much further than that, it falls apart kinda quickly. Just accept it for the fun ride that it is.
Yep, agree with all this. Don’t try to follow the technobabble, its just filler really. The whole thing is basically like a fairy tale. The Tardis is a magic door, and the Doctor is a wizard. It’s a kids show*, but a kids show for adults
Just go with it, and its a lot of fun
Craig Ferguson’s (“lost”) opening to his show, explaining Doctor Who.
This is actually kinda neat because it gives a bit of the background but also explains the show’s popularity, themes and history… all in a couple of minutes.
The one who comes in at the end is the current Doctor. Some of the puppets and such in the clip are just Craig Ferguson things though.
It’s not a show for tiny tots, but in the UK it goes out on a Saturday at around 7pm* on the main BBC entertainment channel, so it’s definitely family-friendly. It does go into some surprisingly dark places though.
But to the OP: the Doctor and companions change, and that’s just part of the show. The showrunner (of which there have been two since the revival) set the overall arcs and tones, and write a few of the scripts, but there are different writers and different directors etc from episode to episode. This basically means that you don’t know what to expect from week to week - which I think is a strength.
“The Triumph Of Intellect And Romance Over Brute Force And Cynicism.”*
Pretty much sums it up.
Just keep watching the new Who episodes in order. The 2005 reboot was intended to bring new viewers up to speed. It references stuff from the original series, but you won’t miss out if you’ve never seen any of the old episodes.
Here are the basics:
The Doctor is a space alien. He’s a member of an ancient race called the Time Lords. Years ago he stole a time machine (called a Tardis) and set off adventuring through the universe. The Tardis can change shape to blend in with its surroundings, but the shape-changing circuit broke, so now it always looks like a 1960’s police box. The Doctor likes humans and usually has one or two traveling with him to keep him company. Time Lords have the ability to regenerate their bodies when they’re badly injured, but the transformation changes how they look (that’s how they explain switching actors).
As the new series begins, all of the Time Lords except for the Doctor are dead, killed off in the Time War. This was an excuse to wipe the slate clean so the new series didn’t have to deal with a bunch of canon from the old series.
Old Who is fun, but it can be tough going. The production values were much worse and the later episodes assume that you know a whole lot about the fictional universe.
Two additional show elements I don’t think anyone’s mentioned yet…
The Doctor generally has two bits of equipment with him:
His “psychic paper” — wallet-sized, and when he shows it to someone they “see” whatever they subconsciously want/need to see there. So, TARDIS plops him down at a nuclear reactor, they ask to see his ID, and he shows them the psychic paper. “Oh, I see! Well if you’re the director of nuclear regulation, right this way sir!”
His “sonic screwdriver” — initially a uber-universal remote control… not just for devices but even simple mechanical objects (lock/unlock doors, etc.)
Lately it’s become a bit of a deus ex machina. “Oh, but by reversing the isogravatronic isotope flow, I can have the sonic screwdriver send a signal to the 3rd chicken from the left and have it bring us 3 eggs: 2 brown and 1 white” sort of thing.
Only other point I can think of… the only real semblance of internal consistency is within the story arcs. This has been tough for me to get used to too… “this is the very last of the Daleks ever, for real this time completely totally only one ever anywhere any way possible.” ==> Daleks are gone for at LEAST four episodes, maybe five 
He was on first.
And, since we’re on the subject, there’s also the Translation Circuit, which allows the Doctor and his companions communicate with alien species. Essentially a wank to hand wave away everyone on the show speaking Standard English, even cavemen.
Early storylines had the Doctor (nobody in the show ever refers to him as Dr. Who) interacting with various Earth-based historical events and trying not to mess with the timeline too much. As the show bedded down it introduced various alien antagonists such as the Daleks, who have passed into the language (and were cheap to build and run), the Cybermen, and others, and episodes took place on other planets without any earth-based reference point. It used the serial format with each episode ending on a cliffhanger. When William Hartnell departed the concept of ‘regeneration’ was introduced to allow another actor to take up the role and it proved resilient enough to be used repeatedly. In the early '70s the show went through a firmly present-day Earth-based period (for budgetry reasons) and various recurring characters were introduced. The time-and-space travelling stuff eventually returned but by the late '80s the show was looking tired and scripts were awful parodies of what they used to be. It was discontinued and appeared to be dead and buried but the concept was successfully rebooted in 2005, aimed at a slightly more mature audience this time, and has proved very successful. A major change was the dropping of the serial format, with most plotlines concluded in a single episode - a weakness in my view. More recently multi-episode story arcs were used again though most episodes still did not end on a cliffhanger.
Years ago, I read a review that described it as “a British children’s program that doesn’t go over the heads of American adults.”
The way those pepperpots keep showing up, chances are there are more Time Lords hiding somewhere.