TV Club: Doctor Who, “The Girl Who Waited”

Hi folks—first off, if you’re wondering, no, Keith has not regenerated. I’m just filling in for a week while he’s off fighting crime, or perhaps committing crime, or whatever he’s up to. If you’re following the Doctor Who Classic writeups where I normally hang out, we’re pushing coverage of “The Aztecs” back a week to Sept. 18 to accommodate this shift. It’s 47 years old; it’ll wait for “The Girl Who Waited.”

The best thing about traveling with the Doctor is that he’s pretty much making it all up as he goes along. He always has been, in all his incarnations, ever since he stole the TARDIS in the first place. He bounces around time and space essentially at random, usually with no more solid plan in mind than seeing what fantastic new horizon appears each time he lands. Those guys on Star Trek are always talking about diplomatic missions and border patrols to explain why they’re traveling around, but on Doctor Who, you don’t need a reason, you just go. It’s the pure spirit of adventure, pure curiosity, that motivates him, and what’s more fun than that? That’s shown to great effect here by the opening scene of “The Girl Who Waited,” in which a typically ebullient Eleventh Doctor talks up the wonders of (but sadly for me, not the spelling of) Apulapuchia, or perhaps Appleapplechia, or perhaps Apoo-lapoo-chia, the second-greatest vacation planet in the known universe.

Originally published Sept. 10, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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