Beatles and Daleks in time for Christmas: sparknotes for Season One

Sorry it's been a while. I was playing a wild dog/tour guide/weatherman in a piece about Hurricane Katrina. You know how it is. To get us back into the swing of things, I want to look at Doctor Who's inaugural season as a whole. If you still haven't watched anything from Season One, do so now, because we're moving on. But also, here's a guide to what you missed.

Of course, if you have seen stuff from Season One, it might feel a bit odd to think of it that way. Certainly, fans of the New Series might wonder how The Reign of Terror (1.8) could be a "season finale" if it doesn't have an army of CGI Daleks in it. Fans of Buffy or Babylon 5 might look in vain for an over-arching plot, theme, or monster. And fans of Lost or Battlestar Galactica will might be puzzled by the lack of cliffhanger revelations in the final episode to get everyone excited about Season 2. It just goes to show how different TV is now. Each episode of Doctor Who was made in a week, and one was made every week, so what is in retrospect seen as a break between seasons was in fact just a well-earned rest for the cast and crew over the summer. The production team and viewers thought in story arcs (the serials) between 2 and 7 episodes long, and it won't be until Season Five that we start seeing any evidence of thought into how those story arcs might fit together. About Time says that, from a production perspective, An Unearthly Child (1.1) through The Dalek Invasion of Earth (2.2) could be considered one season, and The Rescue (2.3) though "Mission to the Unknown" (3.2) another. This actually resembles a little more a "season" as we've come to understand it. That way "Season One" ends with the return of the series' first and most popular monsters, and the departure of the "Unearthly Child" who got Ian and Barbara mixed up in this business in the first place.

Is Doctor Who cool yet?

Doctor Who Magazine gave me a giant poster of the Eleventh Doctor, which I put on my door. I mainly did this to annoy my flatmate who thinks Matt Smith is ugly (I initially put it on his door). Point is, it was the most fanboyish sight I have beheld since I made the mistake of attending Whovention 2003. It made me wonder whether things have improved for my kind since the dark days of my teenage years.

Lest we forget, in its early days Doctor Who was the shit. In 1965, considered by some to be the height of series' popularity, kids were talking about it in school, everyone wanted a Dalek for Christmas, and outgoing producer Verity Lambert was leaving as her legacy a hit show that was being sold to 44 countries or something. Doctor Who wasn't a nerd thing in its early days. It was a groundbreaking series that collided the mundane with the ultra-modern, and histories of the period list it, along with the Beatles and the Bond films, as one of the defining