Doctor Who (21st Century), you're dead to me

I have been watching Doctor Who since 1978.  That admission gives away my age, but it should also indicate my long-term devotion to the show.  As an American, I suppose I’m not a “true” DW fan in some people’s eyes (mainly UK fans).  Although I did order the Target Books novelizations, at a time when it was expensive for a 15 year old to scrape up enough pocket money to buy any at all.  There were no VCR/DVD/BluRay releases in those days, so book were all any fans had to rexperience past broadcasts of the show.  I slavishly watched the show every weekend on my local PBS, all the way into my mid twenties.

Years after the death of DW, in 1989, I returned to see reruns of the adventures of my favorite Timelord.  You see, DW was a low budget SciFi/Fantasy serial from the BBC, but it told incredibly wonderful stories, with clever dialog.  The production staff did the best they could with the pitiful budget they were given.  Once again, I want to repeat, the stories were the core of pre 21st century Doctor Who.

Many fans of the old Doctor Who wanted desperately for the show to return.  They wanted to see a modernized version of their beloved program.  What they got was something totally devoid of the spirit of the original series.  It started well enough, Autons, an “End of the World” story, A Charles Dickens ghost story, even a wonderfully original Dalek story, and then the other shoe dropped.  We had nanotech altered children, annoyingly intoning “MAWMEEEEE!  MAWMEEEE!”, farting aliens in “human suits” (two whole episodes wasted on that crap). To top it all off, the companion, in the season finale, destroying the whole of the Dalek race, by absorbing energy from the TARDIS and then the Doctor sacrificing himself for this cardboard cut out of a woman.

This pseudo-Doctor Who has gained a huge following worldwide.  There are theatrical releases of episodes, images of scenes from the show, projected onto the sides of buildings and of course, a plethora of merchandising paraphernalia.  Doctor Who as a popular culture icon is a worldwide phenomenon.  Unfortunately, the stories, for the most part, are not of any significant quality.  Instead of good adventure yarns, with fun SciFi / Fantasy plots, we have soap opera and postmodernist meta-textual nonsense.

I am not going to go into episode by episode nitpicking.  That can be left for articles that follow this one.  I can only say that I am sick of this parody of my favorite SciFi TV series.  I want it to be dead.  Short of that, I will treat it as dead.  The latest Series (8) as of this article, has been just plain awful, only one episode redeems the entire year’s run (“Flatline”). 

I have given this version of Doctor Who 10 years to shape up, it has failed.  So, goodbye travesty masquerading as Doctor Who.  Goodbye.