Doctor Who was one of those shows that I could always count on as a kid. Pretty much where ever you lived, you could flip on the TV to your local PBS station* and find Tom Baker’s face staring back at you. Or sometimes Jon Pertwee. Sometimes one after each other.

You see, it was rough times for Doctor Who fans in the US. When the program was first introduced, the concept that it was a serial didn’t quite transfer with it, and broadcasters decided to just air the episodes in whatever order they pleased. A local commercial station, WTVQ, latched on and was one of four such stations to show the series in syndication, but for the most part, it was on the public channels, and it was all jumbled up out of order. And if you were lucky, and it wasn’t jumbled up out of order, the entire four to fourteen part serial had been clumsily spliced together to make a “Whovie”**.

The “Whovie” was the most common way I saw Doctor Who as a kid, which left my impressionable mind with the distinct impression that Doctor Who wasn’t a series at all, but rather a collection of TV movie adventures of random old men with their hot younger companions. And you know, perhaps that isn’t too far off. The Whovies, as I said, were poorly edited, and sometimes the credits would break in unexpectedly, or they’d have missed a bit of the audio track and in the middle of a scene you’d get that trademark electronic WHOO-OOO-OOOOH screaming through. And the parts they’d cut out were sometimes necessary for understanding the plot, and you’d–if you were like me–be left going, “What does it all mean? Who is this nerd, when it was Troughton last week?”

But I loved it nonetheless. And when the TV movie came out in 1996, my family and I all gathered around the set in eagerness, waiting to see the first new adventure of the Doctor since 1989. I had fallen in love with the Doctor in his absence, and the thought of seeing a new story was like finally getting to see your favorite band live. It was, of course, the greatest disappointment any fan could have imagined. Not long after, PBS affiliates stopped showing the old episodes, and gradually Doctor Who itself faded from the American cultural consciousness.

I forgot about Doctor Who, myself. I turned to Star Trek and The X-Files and grew up geekily anyway, collecting licensed novels and action figures, largely forgetting all about the adventures of the Doctor–which by that time seemed almost dreamlike, feverish imaginings of a child’s mind. Like Crystal Coke, which no-one else in America remembers but I DO. This might’ve continued on until one day my hypothetical ignorant grandchildren would’ve patted me on the head and said, “Oh, Granny, there’s no such thing as Daleks…”, were it not for the new series of Doctor Who.

Now I want a more cohesive picture of the Doctor, minus all that editing and jumbling. And so thanks to the magic of the internet, my delightfully nerdy boyfriend and I can watch the entire show, from the first episode in 1963 to last week’s lo-fi screamer with David Tennant. But we’re not going to. We’re starting with Tom Baker and working our way forward, and we’ve decided to document it all here. The adventures of two young people, both born within the air-dates of the original series (admittedly, one more narrowly than the other), confronting the past and the future with the Doctor. If we don’t go mad first, that is.

* Public Broadcasting Service, America’s version of the BBC, except with much less funding and possibly more British programming. Their main shows today include Keeping Up Appearances, Last of the Summer Wine, and As Time Goes By. That is, if you’re not being tortured by Lawrence Welk.
** Is this not the worst word on the planet? It’s right up there with “blogosphere” and “moist”.