The first appearance of the Eleventh Doctor premiered in the UK this weekend, as well as several showings at San Francisco’s WonderCon. It doesn’t technically premiere in the US until April 17^th, but I saw it and was just blown away, so to heck with the US release date. As Doctor Who is also on my List of Giant Things, I’m taking this opportunity to write up an unscheduled LoGT entry.

Doctor Who has actually undergone several significant shifts since its last Christmas special episode. David Tennant’s reign has come to an end, so a lot of “The Eleventh Hour” was about introducing the new Doctor, played by Matt Smith, and trying to cross the tricky transition from one protagonist into another. Doctor Who is such an odd, unique form of storytelling in this respect – every once in a while, a new actor shows up to take over the main character’s role, and the whole fiction has to continue in the same universe with this new player in its midst. Switching actors happens a fair amount on long-running film mediums, but it’s almost always on the James Bond model: exit Sean Connery, enter Roger Moore, with little comment and very little difference in the essential character. Instead, Doctor Who fictionalizes the new actor’s entrance, usually with great moment and aplomb, and takes each version of the Doctor as an opportunity to start all over again.

Matt Smith and Karen Gillan as the new Doctor Who and his companion, Amy Pond

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The last few weeks were a bleak and barren televised world, but one of the few notable bright spots was the significant and strange two-part Doctor Who Christmas special. In general, the first part was pretty bad, and the second part was pretty good.

David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor

More specifically, these were the last two episodes of David Tennant’s reign as the Tenth Doctor, as well as the end of Russell T. Davies’ dominance over the Doctor Who reboot. Both of these facts were leaked long ago, which robbed the Christmas special of some of its impact and forced Davies to build up the inevitable death scene to the point of an operatic farewell, but my love for the Doctor and for David Tennant’s portrayal of him made the whole thing palatable, if not uniformly satisfying. As always happens with the Doctor, the best scenes were those smaller moments between the Doctor and whoever happens to be standing in as his human conscience, and the two-door nuclear meltdown bit with the Doctor and Wilf was an unexpected and gracefully small-scale way to complete the Tenth Doctor’s tenure. After all the fizzing wizbangs and defrazzled lasers and “I’m the END OF TIME,” – no – “I’M the END OF TIME” shenanigans of the first half of part two, it was nice to see the scary prophecy (“he will knock four times”) end up with gentle Wilf as the awful “he” and the ominous knocking merely a request for some help opening a door. The Doctor may have hesitated for a long time about sending the Time Lords back through the magical diamond heartbeat bridge thingy (plot has never been this show’s strong suit), but once we realize that he has to kill himself to save Wilf, there’s never a doubt he’ll do it.

Timothy Dalton's Death Glove, the Master picks up a few tricks from Iron Man, and a suddenly appearing planet

Once all the explosions, excess Time Lords, and Timothy Dalton’s Death Glove were dispensed with, it was really just a two part special about saying goodbye to David Tennant. It was lovely to allow him to do a Tenth Doctor reunion tour before succumbing to regeneration, and the highlight was certainly stopping by the Mos Eisely Cantina to help Captain Jack hook up with Alonso from “Voyage of the Damned,” but the whole exit was also overwrought. I couldn’t help but think back to the previous regeneration scene, when Christopher Eccleston made that stupid joke about dogs and then suddenly disintegrated, and I think what made this exit so much clunkier was the lack of a companion figure. Wilf was a good stand-in, but without a constant partner to reflect the audience’s feelings of shock and grief, Davies had to work us all into an emotional lather by revisiting the ghosts of companions past. Rose’s presence was a gift in the previous transition, when our wariness about exchanging actors was filtered through her mistrust of the new doctor. Without that nagging reminder of the previous Doctor, I worry we’ll lose some opportunities for character development when Matt Smith takes over.

Nevertheless, the whole show is about saying goodbye to one Doctor and greeting the next one. Goodbye, David Tennant. I didn’t want you to go, either, but maybe it was time.

Last night I stayed up way past my (lame, freakishly habitual) bedtime to drive out to where it was pitch black and watch the Leonid meteor shower. It was gorgeous – completely clear and not so cold that it was uncomfortable to wait around for a little bit, and there were several very bright, impressive meteors. I sat outside in a nature preserve at two in the morning watching shooting stars, and I thought to myself, “I am really jealous of Doctor Who.”

Or, to be more clear, I am jealous that the Brits have a protagonist who zips around the universe in a spaceship that looks like a police call box, and that this protagonist has become part of the national culture. Americans have plenty of mythic space-travelling television, most significantly Star Trek, but for the most part we carefully segregate it into a big, locked box of genre fiction and put a giant “FOR NERDS ONLY” sign on the outside. From what I understand about Doctor Who, though, the Doctor’s relationship with British national identity is a crucial aspect of the entire series, whereas Star Trek goes out of its way to abolish nationality by the time the 23^rd century rolls around. The difference is reflected in the plotlines. While Captain Picard’s out there in the future representing humanity as a whole, the Doctor is capable of traveling through all of time and space and yet somehow keeps ending up in London. Even at his most distant and inhuman, the Doctor’s deep love for humanity seems to be perpetually deflected into a fondness for fish and chips or a nice cup of tea.

Slitheen spacecraft crashing into the Thames (after knocking a chuck out of Big Ben)

Maybe I’m grasping, but I think the differences have important ramifications for how we view these shows and, in turn, how we feel about space and the future. Star Trek is idealistic and distant, and gives us an aspirational vision of the future, but its persistent remoteness from our world makes it very easy to shove off into the scifi corner. Doctor Who’s world is all about shoving the known and unknown into the same place and watching them try to work it out. I don’t think it imparts the same feeling of manifest destiny that Star Trek conveys. Still, for Doctor Who, space can’t really be the final frontier because it’s already here, even if we’re not paying attention. I love American scifi, but Doctor Who is all about connecting the aliens and sonic screwdrivers and the majesty of space with the world we already have. So yes, I’m envious that the British have Doctor Who. Nothing much to do about it, I suppose, except drape myself in a Union Jack and join the Doctor for fish and chips.