My husband is seven years older than me. For most of my friends, that's somehow an issue. He's Portuguese (which means brown), and I'm Australian (which means white); for so many, that's still an issue.
Doctor Who shows, for my husband and I, are barely remembered truths from a distant past. (Barely remembered: we were children when we first hid behind the sofa (or rather, our hands covering our own eyes - metaphorically*). Truths, because the Doctor mostly went (and goes) (and will go) around, trying to do the right thing. That he succeeds is the magic of cinema. Or TV, if you like that better. We are children of our times: we mostly try to do the right thing.
When the Doctor came back, it was a delightful revisiting of what we knew, what we thought, and what we hoped (in our deepest hopes); also some good entertainment. Confronted with constant negative reinforcement of a democratic ideal (terrorists! everywhere!), why not escape into somewhere, someone who challenges that and asks for the deeper issue, the motivation behind someone doing an apparently wrong thing? We are all people, after all.
We follow (in the twitter- and facebook-sense of the word) the modern profiles of "the Doctor" now because we have a child of our own, and he wants to see the cool whiz-bang (or cool whoz-bang), and promotion does help with that. We know when the next trailer has been released, and we can show him. Do we show him when it's first posted? Of course not. Close to the time? You bet. Is it excessive? God, yes. It's tiresome. Watch this next thing! Get ready for it! Let's count down! Let's not: I don't want teasers, at my time of life: tell me or don't tell me, I'll live, either way.
Last night I watched a little of An Adventure in Space and Time, but I stopped when it got to the Daleks**. I wanted husbandly to see it too, because of the sheer delight when I saw them. Daleks were like us, and now hate anything that isn't them. Isn't that the catch-cry of my generation and the hope of any other? If not the latter, shouldn't it be? To see the original Daleks re-created, to see how our childhood was formed by our externals, oh, how extraordinary. These were the adventures we'd thought to see in our lives; science would mean we could fly to the moon, and beyond. Metaphorically, the Daleks are "people" we never want to be: we want to accept others, because we're all people, after all. Perhaps that's only a personal thing to husbandly and I, but I don't want to think so.
*metaphorically: we'd have to convince our parents we should watch it, so we couldn't be too scared. So we'd keep our eyes open, but refuse to let ourselves see. (A parallel in real life perhaps? Perhaps.) (But I don't think you can blame the Doctor for that.)
**Yes, that's a trailer. Sorry, kids, I couldn't find the full version: this one sums it up.
Does any of that mean you should like the Doctor, or Doctor Who? Of course not. It means something to me, to my husband, and to my son. But social media means you're going to wind up seeing things that you're not interested in. By virtue of it, I've wound up with "friends" and "followers" (in the facebook- and twitter-sense, respectively) who DO like it, and go on about it. And ones who don't, and bemoan the fact. They're not wrong. Personally, I avoid anyone too rabid about the Doctor. But I also have those who go on about the wonders of Star Trek, Dollhouse, Buffy, Dragons, Angel, Firefly/Serenity, Game of Thrones, Star Wars.
I have to confess here, that I find the stories of Star Wars the most morally bereft: not because of the internal story, but because of the investment I'm supposed to make in the Clone Wars: I should invest emotionally in characters, including their betrayer, knowing that will be betrayed? I don't THINK SO. While stories should be told, gratuitous rehashing is unnecessary. It's elaborate wanking, to my mind. Perhaps I'm inflexible.
But the moderate obsession with stories that grab us as a person? Well, der. Stories are how we tell ourselves how to live. The sum of our experiences can only tell us so much: reading of others' views (the fact that when you touch a novel, you touch a world should not be a new idea to anyone interested enough to read this post), gives us perspective and insight to other experiences. That we want them to tell us more is perfectly understandable.
But mostly, for us "oldies", the break between the "old" Doctor and the "new" one gives us that space for perspective and insight.
