Let’s talk about change and the Doctor

All things being equal, I am what you might call a closet advocate. I have my opinions (yes, I know how common they are), and from those come the convictions that I try and stick to, and I stick to them as best I can. I don’t put it out there much, but occasionally I find myself compelled by the greater conscience to speak my mind.

Enter change.org. Here’s a website, a social media spokesperson if you will, that exists to give people a means of funneling those beliefs for a need for change and unifying them, so that united your voices can be heard on the social or political issue that you feel strongly about. I have, in fact, signed a few petitions on change.org, adding my voice to the fray for what are to my senses injustices.

But this is going to far, in my opinion.

What goes too far? Let me sidetrack for a moment, just to bring it all around.

I have been a fan of the Doctor since I was five or six years old. My earliest memory of the Doctor? Watching the Baker episode “The Seeds of Doom” before going to bed on our (portable) black and white television in my room. Probably explains my long standing aversion to brussel sprouts, which I would swear is what the prop guys used for the seeds in that episode. That memory still scars me and stays with me all these thirty some years later. In subsequent years he was that random bit of television that was like mana when I could find it, campy horror and science fiction and outrageous props with nearly visible wires and rubber suits. Pure gold.

The most recent incarnation of the Doctor, starting with Eccleston, is much the same, although completely different. The special effects are immeasurably “better,” the stories a little heavier, and the format – now filling a single hour time slot vs the serial nature of the original – drops a lot of the repetition, though you could make an argument that the shorter story (overall) means the writers have less to work with (like Gaiman’s recent episode, the script of which was cut so much it was almost hard to follow – just so it could fit the time constraints of a 42 minute episode).

And what, pray tell, does this have to do with change.org? I received in my inbox a week or so ago an email from change.org about a new campaign I might be interested in. Was it to help the victim of some senseless social injustice? Perhaps to add my voice to a petition to congress about a law being abused unfairly?

No. It was a call to replace to the current director of Doctor Who.

WHAT!? This is how we use an engine for social progress and change? To ask for a new director for Doctor Who?

I am a huge fan of both, but this is a crossing of the streams that makes me question whether interaction with the human race is really worth it.