WTF?

Doctor Who

I’ve mentioned before how I fought tooth-and-nail for a long time against wanting anything to do with The Doctor.

I’ve also mentioned that I’ve since got sucked in and totally hooked.

But any regular visitor of Adorkification can tell from my issue by issue comments of character appearances and total admiration of Mark Gruenwald…I’m a sucker for continuity.

And that’s something The Doctor really lacks. Now before you get angry, hear me out.

There’s no argument that The Doctor currently played by Matt Smith is indeed the same Doctor that William Hartnell played in the beginning.

But between the series, the novels, the comics, the New Adventures, the Missing Adventures, audio sessions, computer games and all…I’m having a hard time sorting it all out.

It seems that one of the great things about The Doctor is that fans can decide for themselves what ‘counts’ and what doesn’t.

And that just frustrates the heck out of me. I clearly need guidance.

With comics it’s easier, because every movie/cartoon/television show/Broadway musical is a variation of the source material – the comics. Plot points are altered and characters are created or not simply to tell the story in a different medium. This I can understand. I can also come up with reasons why Tony Stark’s hair would change from one issue to the next and back again ala Marvel’s No-Prize.

Is it really that simple to do with The Doctor? When events and characters in an episode appear in a novel? When incarnations meet incarnations between series?

The whole thing makes my head hurt because I want to read and learn more about The Doctor, but it makes no sense.

There’s a a great site I found that breaks every story ever told into categories by Doctor and whether it’s a book, episode, audio or whatever. It helps me make sense of the grandness of the character.

But it still gives me a headache because it kicks my collective tendencies into overdrive. I want to collect them all, like comics. Do you know how many years it took to convince myself that just because I want to own every appearance of Superman, I don’t need to own every appearance of Superman? And now I’m to throw it all away for some silly British alien that nobody expected to last almost fifty years?

FRAK!