For our first writing exercise for my fiction writing class, we have to write a 2nd person how-to narrative. I am an enormous geek. Who could have seen this coming?
All meant in good, if slightly sarcastic fun.
How To Be A Doctor Whovian: a guide for the uninitiated
You watch the show because, well, your friends are watching it – obsessed, they’re absolutely obsessed, and if you hear another joke about sonic screwdrivers someone’s going to get a non-sonic screwdriver in the eye – and you’re sick of them being aghast when you inform them that you haven’t. You’ve heard more than you’d like about Captain Jack and ‘the angels have the phone box,’ so you start with those episodes, and even though they don’t make much sense (a police callbox? Really?) you find yourself falling in love, just a little.
You see new episodes when you can, which isn’t often, but it doesn’t take long to grasp the basics. The Cybermen are robotic and evil. The Daleks are silly-looking and evil. The Master is intriguing and evil. The Doctor is functionally insane and mostly not evil. The policebox is in fact a time machine. Already you know enough inside jokes and sci-fi physics to cancel out any cool points you’ve earned in the rest of your life. You catch yourself telling people you’re going to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow to fix your iPod.
You have a favorite Doctor, whom you defend vociferously against all others, from be-celeried Five to Ten and his sentient hair; even so, you bow to the general consensus that Four was and always will be superior to all of them. You are personally offended when older fans deride the New Who for its romance and its tween-cult pandering, and respond with a scathing skewering of the old series, its gravel pit stage and pound-shop special effects. You have a least favorite Companion, and no matter what she does you protest that Sarah Jane could have done it better and Jack made it sexier.
Whatever you think of the previous Doctor, when he regenerates you moan for months that he isn’t your Doctor and he’s going to be a failure and the show will be ruined. Three weeks into the series, you can’t fathom having any other Doctor.
When Torchwood airs, you don’t even try to put up a fight.