Not dead yet

I know, I know.

I'm not going to make any excuses. Let's just say that I've been unaccountably lazy and leave it at that. Let's just catch up and pretend I haven't disappeared for a while. The reason I'm up this late (or early) is because I spent most of the day knocked out on Nyquil^® due to a head cold I picked up.

So, what's been happening?

( I ramble about grad school. )

( I ramble about living in Georgia and a bit about Torcon. )

( I ramble about living on my own, and cooking. )

So that's where I am. Kind of. I'll see about getting back to bitching about the political situation again - but it seems that people are starting to cotton on to Bush's impotence, so there's less need to rabble rouse.

Come visit me. I'll cook.

Somewhere else the tea's getting cold

I get all maudlin about the Doctor every now and then, as you all know. This time is because the Doctor Who Unbound CDs arrived in the mail. What are these, you ask? Well, Big Finish Productions has the official license from the BBC to do new Doctor Who audio adventures starring the currently surviving Doctors - so we can get new stories with Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison and even Paul McGann. Big Finish's stuff has been more or less consistently excellent (take the third episode ending for "Omega", for example, which made my jaw drop and let loose an expletive), and it's almost like having the Doctor back on screen.

But not quite.

Doctor Who Unbound is Big Finish's little "mini-series" of six unconnected CD plays starring different people as the Doctor in stories that happen out of official continuity - famous actors like David Warner, or Sir Derek Jacobi, and what-if stories like "What if the Doctor had never left Gallifrey?" or "What if the Doctor had never been UNIT's scientific advisor?" The last question is answered by David Warner's Doctor in "Sympathy For The Devil", which I played the first few minutes of. David Warner's Doctor sounds so right, the images that the play evokes in my head so clear that it hurt.

I had to turn it off, I was starting to tear up. I could see it, you see. In those swirling what-ifs I play around with in my neurotic and sad little fanboy mind, I could see the streets of Hong Kong, the out-of-place Police Box, and David Warner stepping out of it with a little worried frown as he sees a world that has faced decades of alien invasions and dimensional incursions without him to help. And the sense of loss for a TV show that I didn't even really get to see much of until I had hit my twenties, as silly and as stupid as that sounds, hit me again.

In a way, I don't feel I have the right to mourn the show. After all, I was never a child watching it. I never hid behind the sofa or try to exterminate my classmates - even though I did own a Doctor Who comic annual when I was 8. But watching and listening to the Doctor's adventures makes me feel I've been watching them all my life. And in those mind-bending infinite possibilities that the show revolves around, maybe I have.

Maybe I am just a sad fanboy trying to recapture a childhood I never had. Maybe it's all arrested development and I should grow up. And yet. Doctor Who is one of the few things that can make me feel like a kid again, and forget the real world for a bit. And well-written Doctor Who - well, that's something really special.

Maybe that's worth feeling and looking stupid for.