THE REGENERATION OF THE BLOG!

Way back in 2008, I started this blog called The Doctor's Diary. I took the name from the Series 3 episode "Human Nature," in which The 10th Doctor (played by David Tennant) finds himself stripped of all of his memories and hiding in the year 1913. Being a Doctor Who fan was different back in those days; the revitalized Doctor Who had been around for a few seasons, but it was hard to find it in America. In fact, for the first couple of seasons, US viewers had to lean on creative ways to see the show. It eventually ended up on SyFy (then the Sci Fi Channel) and finally on BBC America, which is where it belongs. No one in America knew much about the show. Until around 2010, when you told someone you were a fan of Doctor Who, you received confused or dubious looks. Now the show is an institution in America as well as the rest of the world, but in 2008, it still wasn't a big thing. I needed an outlet to express my love for Doctor Who, particularly the classic series that ran from 1963 to 1989.

I started blogging not about the current series, but about the classic show because I'd been going through it chronologically to the best of my ability. I had come off a long stint of watching Tom Baker's 4th Doctor and found myself on the cusp of Peter Davison's 5th Doctor. I saw an opportunity to review each story starting with the fifth Doctor as I watched them, and that's what I did until things got a bit hairy for me in my own personal life during the latter half of 2009. The blog was abandoned, I lost access to it, and it ended up in the Blogger Archive, inaccessible and destined for eventual deletion. I'm going to republish those original reviews of the classic 5th and 6th Doctor stories here so that they aren't lost forever. Not that they're revolutionary or anything, but I hate the idea of those moments in time being lost.

So here we are now. Doctor Who has just started its ninth season with Peter Capaldi in his second year as the Doctor (number 12!) and the show confirmed for at least the next five years. The viewership figures in America alone reach into the millions, and everyone loves The Doctor. There are books, posters, IOS games, DVDs, puzzles, you name it, The Doctor is plastered on anything and everything. It's a great time to be a fan of the rogue Gallifreyan, even if that fandom isn't a secret society anymore. I plan to blog about each and every episode of the show moving forward (and with an occasional retro review thrown in as well, because my heart still lies with the classic series) because I love it, and I just have to talk about it. After all, there's no one like The Doctor.