Verity Lambert, I could kiss you.

[tenlittlebullets]

On Saturday I had a couple friends I made at Gally over for tea, toast, and Doctor Who, and at some point in the discussions of what to watch, I shamefacedly admitted I’d seen something of all the Doctors except One and Two.  Whereupon I was forcibly marched to the couch and plonked down with the first episode of An Unearthly Child, and then all of The Daleks.

YOU GUYS, I AM IN LOVE.  I don’t think I’ve been this tempted to sit down and mainline entire seasons since my first precipitous slide into the fandom.

Tell you a secret? I had avoided watching any One or Two because I was mortally afraid I wouldn’t like it. I don’t know if it’s ADD or what, but no matter how awesome Pertwee and Delgado are I can’t get through Three serials without friends there to watch with me.  I was afraid that going backwards it would be a linear scale of datedness and pacing issues, and that I wouldn’t be able to make it through seven-episode serials even with company.

FALSE. ALL FALSE.

Hartnell era is delightful.  It’s even more delightful if you have an inkling that the show is a metaphor for itself—it is being written and directed and produced by a crew of upstart young renegades shoved into the pokiest studio with the creakiest old equipment at the Beeb, and they use it to make magic.  It reminds me of Nine era (and even a bit of Seven’s last season)—it’s still getting its feet under it, it doesn’t have the greatest production values, and it’s sort of the BBC’s bastard stepchild, but by God it has a vision and it will sell it to you as hard as it can.  Nobody is coasting or phoning it in.  Nobody is banking on an easy success or a cult following.  It’s almost as though the show is at its best when the Powers That Be are covertly or not-so-covertly hoping it will die an ignoble death.

...and then I watched The Edge of Destruction alone in the middle of the night, which was possibly a bad idea, and now I’ve reached my first lost serial. *stifled sob*  So the question becomes: try my luck with a recon of Marco Polo, or jump to Keys of Marinus?  Decisions, decisions.

Fuck it. I’ve got Keys of Marinus, who knows how long it would take me to download a seven-episode recon.  So really, the question is: do I have the self-control to keep myself from watching Keys of Marinus all in one go tonight, or am I going to be very very tired at work tomorrow?

Comments

[aria]

Yesssss you are seeing One! I still think that War Games is the best black and white serial there is, but oh my goodness The Daleks and The Aztecs and The Time Meddler are extremely dear to my heart.

Also goodness knows when I will catch you on gtalk for any extended flailing, but now that you have seen some One I would really love rambling discussions on How To Write Theta. (I mean, my thesis is fairly simple, it is just "For the love of god, stop writing even more twink blond Ten and start writing how this amazing prickly curious lapel-rubbing snappish man would have been when he was young," but really I just want to get my love for One all over everything. :D?)

[tenlittlebullets]

Yesssssss. I might at some point put aside some time for Tomb of the Cybermen and War Games, but the problem is that now I've got it into my head that I want to watch all the Hartnell and the compulsive "must watch in order" tendencies are kicking in. Which in a way is even more important for One because he changes so much, but it might mean Two gets the short end of the stick for a while.

I want to see more One before I can talk about How To Write Theta (okay, I want to see more One full stop), but yessss, blond twink Ten should not be the template, we should be looking at cranky mischievous domineering One who has never dealt with real live humans before and is alone in the universe except for his granddaughter and a creaky old time machine he barely knows how to operate. And the wondrous thing about Hartnell is that he is young--yes, he's an old man stranded in time and space, but he's also an immature little shit who clearly enjoys being a crotchety old man. And, like River says, he's not done yet--you can see the seeds of who he'll become, but neither he nor the show has quite pinned down what his approach to life will be later.