Why I Love "Doctor Who"

Elaine Magliaro of the Wild Rose Reader Blog has challenged me to write an Ode to "Doctor Who". My poetry writing skills are even more rusty than my fiction-writing ones were about 3.5 months ago, so it's going to take some time for me to come up with a poetic response to her challenge. In the meantime, however, I have a prose Ode for you. You see, I belong to several online discussion forums and on one of them just lately there's been an awful lot of criticism for "Doctor Who", which has been bugging me, so today I initiated a conversation about why I love "Doctor Who". Here's what I wrote:

I love the concept of a two-hearted renegade alien who travels through Time and Space in a blue box that's bigger on the inside than the outside, and is armed only with a Sonic Screwdriver - not a sword, or a lightsabre, or a sonic blaster, but a sonic screwdriver...

I love the fact that the Doctor is largely peace-loving and a genius who loves humanity in spite of our flaws, who thinks we're worth fighting for and dying for...

I love the fact that the monsters aren't always the big green slavering creatures that are coming out of the spaceships, sometimes they're the guy or the woman in a business suit...

I know very well that it's got dodgy science, that it's frequently bonkers and that, often enough, it's got plotholes you could drive a Sherman Tank through, but I find the philosophy of the show overall very hopeful and encouraging...

And yes, David Tennant's totally gorgeous, but I'll still be watching when he's gone on to other things, just the same as I'm trying to watch as many of the Classic Who serials as I can... The Whoniverse is my happy home...

So for those of you who've been wondering lately what a "serious" scholar of literature is doing raving incessantly about this madcap British TV show, here are my reasons. And I'll add one more - it's allowed me to make friends with a whole group of people who share my love for this show, people with whom I'd never previously spoken on the aforementioned discussion forum - and some of them have become friends. What more could I ask for ?