I am just rediscovering the good doctor. Tom Baker was my doctor the only doctor way back in the 70s on my local PBS station. My favorite Baker was Terror of Fang Rock. Less than a year ago came across a weird show with people mutating into living zombies with gas masks, did not know what it was until they mentioned Doctor. For a while I didn’t know who was supposed to be the doctor Jack or Eccleston. Can’t buy Eccleston, seems not enough quirky for the doctor I could easily see him playing a macho “tough guy”.
Re-hooked with David Tennet and especially Matt Smith, wow he is The Doctor in the very first episode.
I’ll echo everyone else and say you should go back to the show’s revival in 2005 with Christopher Ecclestone and keep watching from there. You can watch any season from the new series from the beginning but it does gain a lot from watching in sequence. If you prefer to skip it I’d still suggest you watch Dalek, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances, Blink and Midnight for quality and Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead as it introduces an important character to the show.
The classic series doesn’t work the same way. It’s a totally different experience from the new show and it also varies a lot depending on the era you choose to watch. As a rule, with the older stories you can watch anyone in any order you choose to no detriment to the narrative. The episode and story length varied a lot during the years, but most stories lasted for 4 to 6 25 minute episodes and these serials were largely self-contained. In my opinion all the classic Doctors but the Sixth and the Eighth had many great and enjoyable stories well worth watching, but many fans of the new show don’t even like the old one.
I actually came on board with the revival but have come to prefer the classic series by a mile. If you want to watch the old show I’d recommend you ask for suggestions as it’s a very mixed bag. For the new viewer I’d go with City of Death or Genesis of the Daleks. They’re both classics of the old show and feature Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor, the most recognizable of them all. City of Death is charming, funny and very, very clever. It was written by Douglas Adams. Genesis also features Tom Baker and is one of the show’s most well-known stories. It’s from my favorite period of the show (the Hinchcliff/Holmes era) and introduces a major new villain. Also in this story is Sarah Jane Smith, the most loved of the classic companions (although I personally prefer Leela). Other good places to start are Spearhead From Space and Terror of the Autons, both from the Jon Pertwee (the Third Doctor) years. Spearhead introduced the Third Doctor and a new era of the show (now in color!), in which the Doctor was exiled to Earth and had many adventures besides UNIT (the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce), while Autons debuted the Master, another major villain in the show’s mythology and yet another companion. You could also begin with An Unearthly Child, the very first one, and go from there, but I personally believe it’s best to get used to a more modern variant of the classic show before watching the black and white, live in the studio older stuff.
Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures are both spin-offs of the revival and aren’t necessary viewing. Personally I didn’t like either all that much, but Torchwood’s third season, the Children of Earth mini-series was excellent. However, for that to make any sense you’ll have to watch the, IMO, bad to mediocre first two seasons of the show.
Talking of spin-offs, Big Finish productions also makes Doctor Who audio plays with four of the classic Doctors (Peter Davison, the Fifth, Colin Baker, the Sixth, Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh and Paul McGann, the Eighth) and they have recently managed to sign Tom Baker; their motto is “Classic Doctors, brand new adventures”. They use the original actors for the Doctors, the companions and for some of the villains. Their stories take place in the gaps between the televised ones. None of their stuff is required listening but I love the audios and they have had many great stories. Jubilee has been adapted by the new series as Dalek (by its own author), The Fires of Vulcan as The Fires of Pompeii and Spare Parts as Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel and in the three cases I think the audios are the superior product by far. The audios are noteworthy for redeeming Colin Baker’s Doctor, which for several production related reasons wasn’t very successful on TV but revealed himself as a truly great Doctor when given good scripts, for actually giving a personality to the Eighth Doctor (on the TV he only had two thirds of a story as the movie didn’t lead to a series revival as had been hoped) and for introducing a few new companions to the Doctor. Evelyn Smythe, an old history professor close to retirement is by far my favorite companion and she’s original to Big Finish. As with all Doctor Who, the quality of the stories goes from genius to horrible and everywhere in between, so if choose to give them a try, ask around for the good ones and learn which ones are to be avoided.
In one of those Dr. Who extra shows, they mentioned that the writers wanted a tool that worked like a handwave so that they didn’t have to explain everything. (hopefully my memory is good on that).
Minor very vague spoilers about Dr. Who companions. Mostly my opinions on them:
[spoiler]I am not well enough in touch with the average Who fan to know what the consensus opinion is, but I hate his next companion. Hate. She is everything that Rose was but less interesting on every level. The one after that I love. Donna isn’t Rose but she is perfect in her own way. She is much more a companion in the truest most platonic sense of the word than any of the others.
After Stephen Moffet took over you get Amy who also feels a bit like Rose lite to me, but she grew on me as that season progressed. Her boyfriend Rory is also a companion eventually and him I like a lot.[/spoiler]
Martha is a great companion just for Human Nature, and the very small part in Blink. Donna is the best companion generally of the RTD years. Her best one is Turn Left, but you need to see them all before that to understand why. Amy and Rory with Eleven are just wonderful, too.
This, though Wilf and Rory are among the very best. But the way Donna grew over the series. Didn’t like her at first but first impressions are not always right.
Can’t work out the nested quotes to do this properly dropzone, but you are absolutely right about the companions you mention. Also: and this is a gigantic spoiler for anyone who hasn’t seen what
She was reduced back to what she had been before, all her growth and courage and perspective, all gone. Why bother with Donna’s arc other than, duh,why? Oh, right, Rose.
[spoiler]If she had just died, it’d be just the same situation, wouldn’t it? All her growth and courage and perspective, all gone. Does that mean that any story that ends with the death of a protagonist is pointless? I certainly don’t think so. She saved the entire universe, just for starters. She changed the fundamental way her mother and grandfather view her, even if she can’t understand the reason for the change in their attitudes. And, of course, there’s the catastrophic effect her fate had on the Doctor himself. And, unlike simply dying, her reset allows for the possibility that she can experience that growth again, even if it’s in an entirely mundane, non-Doctor related context.
I can’t really credit the idea that her fate was contrived to give Rose a happy ending, either. Nothing in what happened to Rose and the Doctor duplicate required that Donna have her brain fried. Both story resolutions are based on a bunch of argle-bargle and timey-wimey handwaving. They could easily have used that conclusion to Rose’s story, and kept Donna on for another season, if that’s the path they’d wanted to go. Seems to me that the decisions to end those two stories the way they did were largely independent of each other.[/spoiler]
Okay, Skald, you have to remember this is a kid show and an adult show at the same time and always has been. Levels cross levels in ways unheard of in the USA since the contemporary and halcyon days of “Rocky and Bulwinkle” and Fred and Barney enjoying a Winston behind the garage. Enjoy the ride, including the more juvenile “Sarah Smith Adventures” and the “more adult means it’s dirtier ;)” “Torchwood.”
[/spoiler.]