Doctor Who 50th Anniversary post

Whether you're a fan or not, you've heard about the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who. It first aired on 23 November 1963. It replayed a week later since the first showing had poor viewership due to the assassination of JFK dominating the news. Even so, it had immediate popularity.

It was originally designed as a kids show. This tells me that England either treats its kids differently than we do in the US or that they do a better job of recognizing that different age levels like different entertainment.

There's been a lot to celebrate the 50th Anniversary. To the left you see a metal I got for a virtual 5K for charity. No shutting down city streets and screwing up traffic. Just run your own race.

A couple of months back they had a second Doctor Who Proms. Yeah, apparently they use that word differently than we do.


A few days ago the BBC had a special episode to commemorate the anniversary. Alas, Christopher Eccleston decided to opt out, but Matt Smith and David Tennant made the show along with a lost Doctor mentioned first at the end of last season and an extreme closeup with the next Doctor on the schedule as well as a surprise Doctor. Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart passed away, but an actress playing his daughter and current head of UNIT also figures prominently.

If you go back to the first episode when the show came back in 2005 you see The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) in Rose Tyler's living room look at himself in the mirror and evaluate his features. This tells us that his regeneration was so new he hadn't seen a mirror, yet. Not since the end of last weekend's special. Over the next few episodes we learn that all the Time Lords, The Doctor's people, are dead. They were killed in The Time War. And The Doctor killed them. It was something that ate at him and gave darkness to his character. But we'd assumed that it was he or The Doctor (Paul McGann) from the 1996 Fox movie that fought in the war. With the recent short "The Night of The Doctor" we saw the death of that Doctor and the creation of The War Doctor (John Hurt).



This special is about The War Doctor and his decision to wipe out his own people if it would take out all of the Daleks as well. He had to know what would become of him and what he would think about himself and what he'd done. And maybe, given 400 years, if he could come up with another way of doing things.