Doctor Who Now?

I'm still recovering from this past weekend's Doctor Who marathon. It pretty much made me lose all sense of reality, and I've learned my lesson to never again watch 15 hours of sci fi or ANY one tv show, because it got to the point where I was on the verge of believing that a Cybermen or Dalek invasion was a question of when rather than if, and even my dreams were about being the Doctor. I feel more disoriented as I try to recover from this weekend than I would if I were recovering from lethal quantities of beer. That's exactly it, I feel drunk. I'm trying to counter the effects of Doctor Who poisoning by trying to read as much news as possible. I'm even trying to watch Prime Minister's Questions, even though I'm not British, because I feel that I need to be reminded that boring things happen in London, too. Things like government overspending, welfare reform and the placing of park benches... and not just massive alien invasions that put the very existence of all dimensions in the universe at stake.

Before I move on from Doctor Who, I just gotta say: I love that the Doctor is non-violent and that the most aggressive thing in his arsenal is a thing called a "sonic screwdriver," which, with a light at the tip instead of a point, is even less threatening than a plastic Fisher Price screwdriver used by small children pretending to be Bob the Builder. Having said that, however, I feel that I must also point out that it seems like the vast majority of the villains in Doctor Who are villains from previous episodes that the Doctor was too much of a pussy to kill off. And so they come back, stronger than ever and now aware that at the very worst the Doctor will blink them with a tiny, non-lethal light bulb. I'm all for giving villains a second chance, maybe even a third one, but when the Daleks invade for the gazillionth time, I think it's time to start kicking ass and taking names. I mean, for fuck's sake, the man has a spaceship/time machine. Maybe this proves that it's all for the best that I'm not a Time Lord and that I've only got the one heart, but if I had that kind of technology I'd have traveled to a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away and stolen some weaponry from the Star Wars world. If the TARDIS has towed Planet Earth in the past, I'm sure it could tow the Death Star. No Dalek is going to want to mess with a man wielding the power of Darth Vader. Are lasers too violent for the Doctor? Fine then, he has all the time in the world, he could spend a regeneration learning Jedi mind tricks and learn to choke people without actually touching them. Heck, even if the Doctor didn't want to go to the trouble of towing the Death Star or spending years under the tutelage of a wrinkly little green thing that speaks English with Latin syntax, he could still just grab himself a couple of lightsabers and start wailing on some Dalek ass. He'd like that, I'm sure, because lightsabers are kind of like his trusty sonic screwdriver, as both emit light. But unlike the Doctor's trusty sonic screwdriver, lightsabers can do so much more than just unlock shit.

I also understand that Doctor Who is a kids' show, which may explain the Doctor's reluctance to choose violence. And while part of me respects that, I also fear that the Doctor may be teaching kids to simply buy themselves time rather than solve their problems once and for all. Instead, the Doctor teaches kids about procrastination of cosmic proportions, that it's a happy ending if the threat of the annihilation of humankind is put off until tomorrow. Yeah, the Cybermen are going to come back, stronger and angrier than ever (okay, maybe not angrier since Cybermen have emotion inhibitors), but let's not kill them because we can get out of this current mess without doing so, because killing them would be mean.

I also have to wonder about the Doctor. The poor thing has to travel throughout time and space saving people from the same villains, time and time again. Sure, not all of the villains in Doctor Who are repeat offenders, but a large enough percentage of them are, large enough that the Doctor, being the clever Time Lord that he is, has probably noticed. Had he just started EX-TER-MIN-ATE-ing them after maybe the fourth time they tried to destroy Earth, or enslave the human race, or turn the population into pigs, or whatever they're up to this time, then maybe the Doctor could have retired five regenerations ago. Instead of saving the planet from Cybermen or Daleks for the umpteenth time, he could be sipping margaritas on a beach on some distant planet, occasionally coming out of retirement to defeat a new challenger who has creative ideas of how to kill the human race, a challenger who could really push the Doctor's cleverness to its limits.

I mean, who is he trying to be? Jesus? For pete's sake, even G-d smites people from time to time.