Doctor Who: Final Thoughts (spoilerfree)

Wow. That was cool.
It isn’t going to be remembered as one of the great TV show seasons of all time – it was too choppy for that, and the crisis resolutions were usually of a type that you can get away with sometimes but not all the time. If this seems like praising with faint damnation, it is.
This will be remembered as one of the great family TV show seasons of all time. Maybe the greatest. If you’re not in the UK it’s hard to convey just how big and mainstream it has been over here – everyone is watching it, I’ve got into random conversations with strangers about it, in the buildup to today’s final episode I witnessed about six different conversations about it among people from work. Kids love it. Parents watch it with their kids, and that’s magic. It’s such a huge success.
And it is still my show, the one I loved as a boy because it was the right mix of wild and scary and creative and moral and true. Everything is in the right place, everything works. The hearts beating in this show are the same ones from November 1963. It feels exactly as it should.
And it is still my show, of a piece with what has come before. It has even done the seeming impossible and made the misguided ’96 American co-production, featuring a wonderful Paul McGann and an incoherent and dismal plot, into a coherent part of the experience. It works its continuity magic not by explanation or reference – although fanboys like me could pick up loads of cheeky little nods – but by picking up the best spirit of what has come before and celebrating it in the new.
And it is still my show, over-brimming with hope for human beings with all our failures and our foibles and our pride, trusting us, loving us.
It’s the best revival of a TV show there will ever be.
Doctor Who will never be in my pantheon of truly great television. It isn’t Homicide or Freaks and Geeks or Buffy or Twin Peaks. But it is very very special. It is part of what pop culture should be. And it makes me happy to see it shine.
Hurrah!