Doctor Who

Sometime during the summer before high school, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my mom late one Sunday night. I had recently returned from a three week church choir tour of Europe. While passing PBS on the TV, we started watching what looked to be a British science fiction show of which I had a minimal awareness. It was called Doctor Who.

Fortunately, the episode was the excellent "Ark in Space" and from that moment I was a Doctor Who fan. I have watched it on and off over the years and have always enjoyed it. When the show was revived in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor, I didn't catch many episodes, but it looked like a successful reinvigoration.

A few weeks ago on a Saturday afternoon, I started watching an episode of the latest Doctor, David Tennant, and Rachel came in and started watching with me. She liked it, so we started recording both Tennant and Eccleston episodes. Now we watch several episodes each week, catching up. It's been great fun. I hope that when we finish all the new episodes, we'll go back and watch the Tom Baker episodes.

A couple of weeks ago, we caught the Tennant episode entitled "Blink". It's a very atypical episode, featuring the Doctor only fleetingly. To describe the plot is to spoil it, but I will say that it was completely brilliant. Surprising, funny, sad, poignant and very creepy. The writing was incredible and among Doctor Who fans it seems to have become an instant classic.

"Blink" is on a few times over the next week. If you have BBC America on cable, you should definitely try and catch it. I can't recommend it enough. The schedule of upcoming showings is below.

• Sat. March 29, 7PM - BBC
• Sun. March 30, 2PM - BBC
• Sat. April 5, 6PM - BBC

I mentioned the church tour of Europe above because my host family in England was named Pertwee. While we were in London, our group was treated to a party at the estate of a popular English actor who was a relative of my host family. I didn't know it at the time, but I attended a party at the home of Jon Pertwee, the third Doctor Who.