This article was written as a primer to the main article The Doctor is a Trickster in True Form.
For those of you not in the UK, Doctor Who is a very long-running English television series about a time-travelling human-looking alien. His most famous icon is a blue police box called the TARDIS, which is his time-machine. It is supposed to change shape to blend into its environment, but in the very first episode of the series (all the way back in 1963!) it got locked in this form and has never changed since. So well-known is Doctor Who in Britain, that if you were to show a blue police box (ubiquitous when the series began) to most people, they would not think of the police, but the Doctor.
Amazingly, Doctor Who started as an educational show on the BBC, created as a way to teach children about history almost by osmosis. It quickly threw off this baggage however, and established itself as a family favourite that went on to terrify successive generations of children and their families with rubber monsters.
For a very long time my idea of the Doctor, indeed the only era of stories that appealed to me, were those featuring the actor William Hartnell in the title role. As he played the Doctor, he was an irritable, selfish and dangerous old man who kidnaps the two school teachers of his teenage granddaughter Susan when they come to ask about her strange knowledge and skills.
In this era, the heroes of the stories were the teachers Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright who were "just trying to get home". In these stories, the Doctor is an explorer of time and space, and really represents the villain of the piece. Consider Captain Nemo in his Nautilus.
On several occasions his curiosity and stubborn nature endanger his travelling companions, and even exposes them to the alien race considered to be the Doctor's greatest enemies the Daleks.
Sadly, during this time, William Hartnell's health and memory began to deteriorate, and it was decided that he needed to leave the series. Rather than cancel such a popular show, or simply change actors as is done with James Bond, the Doctor's alien physiology was used to its full potential and the writing team decided he could "regenerate" when near death. Essentially this involves the Doctor gaining a new, younger body, which bears no resemblance to the previous one.
In this way, the problem of casting was solved, and the Doctor has regenerated ten times since we first met him.
Quickly, however, the Doctor became the hero character, and his personality changed from abrasive old man to various kinds of affable buffoons and others, all permitted under the central conceit that the Doctor's personality changes when his body does.
Potted history over, I never really got along with subsequent series after Hartnell's departure, and the series acquired a lovable reputation for rubber monster, shaky sets and dodgy special effects until it was finally cancelled in 1990, 27 years after it began.
Various attempts to reboot the series bore fruit in 2005 when a new series of Doctor Who was aired on BBC1. While the effects were certainly much better, a combination of inconsistent writing and overwrought "wangst" brought about by the Doctor now being "the last of his kind" following a disastrous war with the Daleks, and strong "monster-of-the-week" feel still put me off.
A friend who has enjoyed the series through its ups and downs put me onto the episode "Blink", written by Steven Moffat, which I had to admit was excellent.
I was excited, then, to hear Moffat would be inheriting the lead-writer duties when the Tenth incarnation of the Doctor regenerated and the previous lead-writer Russell T Davies departed.
In an attempt to break the North American audience, the first episode of the Eleventh Doctor's first series was treated as a clean slate. This was a jumping on point after which new viewers would not have to learn nearly half a century of back-story.
Despite a lot of complaining from the usual sources that the series wouldn't be the same without the familiar face (odd for a show where the main character changes his face from time to time), I greatly enjoyed the first outing. To begin with, the Doctor quickly loses his two greatest weapons - the time-and-space-travelling TARDIS, and his magic-wand-in-all-but-name Sonic Screwdriver. For the first time in a long time, the Doctor was going to have think his way out of a problem (Earth will be sterilised of life by aliens in 20 minutes unless they find an inter-dimensional fugitive). Along the way he meets his new companion Amelia "Amy" Pond in several time frames thanks to his damaged TARDIS bouncing around. Meetings a few minutes apart for the Doctor are 12 years apart for Amy, who has spent more than a decade in therapy for her belief in a Raggedy Doctor who visited her as a child.
In the end all is well. Earth isn't sterilised and the fugitive is caught. The Doctor, however, feels honour-bound to undo the damage he inadvertently did to the now-jaded Amy Pond.
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