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prixmiumcontent · 6 years

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Doctor Who Introduction Post

Hello #Doctor Who! My “name” is Prix, and I am about to embark on a re-watch of Doctor Who during which I will be writing reviews and other such commentary on this new meta blog. Please see the links and pages around the blog for more information if you are interested. Before I get started, I wanted to take a few moments to articulate why I am writing about Doctor Who, how I feel about it, and why I decided to start with it here even though I plan to write about it and many other fandoms.

The Present

At the time of writing this, I am 27 years old. I am a school teacher, but I am currently without a full-time position. Given that I have a little bit of time on my hands, I really wanted to work on my sustained writing-for-pleasure skills, and this blog seemed like a good way to do it. I have a personal blog, which I will follow from if I follow you back, but this is a fresh start for a more disciplined approach to running an actual-blog rather than a big mess of blogging, reblogging, and flailing. Doctor Who continues to be one of those things that always draws me back in. However, over the past couple of years, I have not been quite as on top of it as I once was. Letting go of Clara Oswald has proved to be very difficult for me, so while I like Bill - and the other companions I have seen - I have not seen all of S10. As a result, I haven’t even started on S11. However, I hope to very soon! While I am embarking on a full re-watch of Doctor Who (2005), I won’t necessarily prevent myself from catching up on everything I’m missing before I finish this up.

The Past

I was an avid internet user from the time I was about twelve years old. I was home-schooled for a time, and so much of my interaction with the outside world came through meeting people to talk to through AIM (may she rest in peace.) One of those people that I befriended (and have since unbefriended) was a young man five years my senior with a lot of chronic health problems. Given our mutual circumstances, for the good years of our relationship, we were able to find time to talk to each other despite a five-hour time difference. He lived in England, and I was so young that the concept of world geography was something well beyond my grasp as an American. Nevertheless, I had an adolescence very colored by a sort of cultural exchange with this friend of mine whom I much respected and wanted to please. I dimly remember his first mentions of Doctor Who being revived and his confusing explanations of what it was registering as a simple footnote in our conversations. It was something he watched on Saturdays. For a while, that was that.

Fast forward to the end of 2006. Due to various circumstances including my grandmother’s having a stroke and my parents’ mutual concern that as math and science courses became more difficult that a home-schooling curriculum wouldn’t cut it from them, I returned to public school. I was fifteen, and I was tagging along behind my peers who had been new students to high school the previous year. This new-to-everything, fish-out-of-water experience left me vulnerable to a certain individual whom I wish I had never met but who has shaped much of who I am today. I was in a relationship with him for a couple of months, during which I was emotionally abused and coerced in ways that I won’t go into detail about. The only part that is relevant is that this relationship really shook my ability to trust in people to the core. I was a different person from August to December and one who felt hollowed-out at that.

It was a relief to finally be on Winter Break, if only to get away from the presence of my then-ex who continued to follow and harass me while I was at school. However, the experiences of the past couple of months had taken the joy out of most of what I had been doing. I had been loosely into online fandom since about 2003, but I had never really learned the tools of the trade, and it was just a matter of happening upon people with similar interests through word-of-mouth and a few fanfiction.net-made contacts. I was still talking to my English friend online when I could.

Then, one day, I was feeling very depressed and lethargic. I took a break from vacuuming the house, and I turned on the television. I dully watched the scrolling TV Guide Channel, and I noticed that the SciFi Channel (it wasn’t SyFy at this point) was running a marathon of Doctor Who. Curiously, I changed the channel.

I watched “The Idiot’s Lantern,” an episode from Series 2, with no context whatsoever. I was confused and mildly intrigued. More than anything, I wanted to tell my English friend that I had finally seen an episode. He did his best to explain the show to me a bit better, and later that day I found myself tempted to tune back in.

In the days that intervened between that day and Christmas Day, the channel played at least several hours of Doctor Who episodes per day. They were marathoning Series 2, and on Christmas Day itself, they were going to play “The Christmas Invasion” - the Christmas Special spanning the gap between Series 1 and Series 2. I was supposed to go to my grandmother’s, but I made a point to note what times they were showing it. I was invested already, and soon I had seen “Doomsday” and knew that my heart was going to break no matter what but that I wanted to know more and more about this show.

I remember going to my room after returning from my grandmother’s that day. I know that I had been showing signs of my depression and lethargy, and while my parents didn’t know the full extent of the damage my brief foray into trying to be “in a relationship” as a high school student had gone, they were most certainly concerned about me.

My mom and dad were in the living room visiting with someone - it was Christmas - and I remember feeling a sudden rush of energy and resolve come over me that I had not felt in a long time. My relationship with fandom may not be the healthiest that has ever been, but I don’t think that it is a bad thing either. I have always been one to fixate, to have maladaptive daydreams about those things I love, and to feel a rush of endorphins when I find something new to add to my collection of beloved stories. I fall in love with my fandoms, and they’re my friends.

That hadn’t been true for months at that point, though, and Doctor Who breathed new life into my teenage bones when I was - justified or not - dangling by a thread. The particular scene that burned itself into my consciousness was Ten’s speech to the Sycorax - “It is defended.” I’m not even sure why, but it kind of gave me a little bit of a kick in the butt to get back up, to try, and to feel something again.

I often tell people that Doctor Who saved my life, and that’s how. It gave me a friend when I felt like I had none. It gave me energy, purpose, and a reminder that even when things are difficult and it feels like there is no reward for the things one tries to do because they feel like the right thing, there still is a point to it. I consumed Series 2 in order as quickly as I could; I was a poor teenager and wanted to make sure that I got the series i had fallen in love with before deciding on more. Then, I manage to get Series 1 and watched them back to back. At the time, it was nowhere near as popular in the US as it became later, so I paid $60-70 per season at the time. I never did get past Series 2 on DVD as a result. Maybe one day I’ll buy a huge boxed set, but for now I make do with streaming on Amazon Prime for the most part.

I hope that this personal glimpse into my past will give you some kind of connection to me as a writer and that you will understand how much Doctor Who means to me as a show.

The Future

I plan to watch an episode or two most days for the foreseeable future and to write a post and create at least one edit per episode that I watch. I hope to queue them after the first couple so I can have a consistently active blog. Please feel free to interact with me! I follow back from my personal blog (currently polyroci), but I am very interested in interacting with people about this and other fandoms that are dear to my heart.

#doctor who #doctor who meta

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