After Defiling the Honored Dead, This Is Nothing

My father was something of an Anglophile. He loved PBS, and because of that he introduced me to Monty Python, Blake's 7, and Doctor Who. Along with James Bond and J.R.R. Tolkien, he's responsible for most of my non-gaming fandom that doesn't involve anime or Star Wars.

He took me to my first fan convention--a very shitty Doctor Who convension in downtown Minneapolis, at the Armory--and paid for my membership in a fan society (The Whoniversity). He loved Jon Pertwee; that was his Doctor. Peter Davison was mine. When we got a shot at watching all of the older Doctors, starting from the beginning, back in the 1980s we made time to watch it together. Doctor Who was special for us. We were sad to see it go with McCoy, but we also didn't miss it thereafter.

The new series began five years after my father died. I stuck with it through to Capaldi's first series. The hit-or-miss ratio of the series skewed more and more to "miss" once Tennant and Davies left. Not that Smith (or Capaldi) were bad Doctors, but the rest of the show began veering more and more into the poz. After Danny and Clara, I tuned out and just kept an eye on it to wait out whatever bad writers they had until the inevitable sacking.

Then Moffat defiled The Brigadier.

Nevermind Missy! (That was a very bad move after a series of bad moves, but not a deal-breaker.) That final Cyberman story of that series, what rid the show of Danny Pink, also defiled the sole Companion of the classic series who forced The Doctor to be reasonable when the genius spilled into impracticality: Brigadier Sir Alastair Lethbridge-Stewart, of U.N.I.T., one of a handful of Companions so beloved as to be revived in the new franchise (albeit part of The Sarah Jane Adventures).

My father would never stand for that. There are lines you do NOT cross in this life, and Moffat crossed one by taking a beloved (and dead) character to be used for a cheap shot at the end of a story involving said character's inferior successor fucking it up. It was not only bad storytelling, it was not only Authorial Interference for political purposes, it was the willful violation of an icon of British manhood and masculinity in a series often devoid of it (both old and new).

That was the deal-breaker. After that, the incompetency in storytelling and show-running used to excuse politically-motivated propaganda in the new series--while disappointing--cannot compare to what had already been done. It is being shot in the arm with a squirrel rifle after having one's legs blown off from the waist by an anti-personnel mine. I feel nothing whatsoever about Capaldi's successor. Nothing. No well-wishes. No jeers. Nothing. At. All.

Because the worst had already been done, the corruption of a thing that once brought joy to my father and I, through which I kept his memory alive. I walked away a while ago. This thing that mocks the series I knew by wearing its clothes and aping its mannerisms is a stranger to me, and I care not if it lives or dies. I will, instead, find anew that joy elsewhere. Woe to those who dare pursue me hither.