"back in the loop"

TV One of the rights of passage most Doctor Who fans go through at some point is watching the whole series from start to, well, it used to be finish. I'm planning mine for 2013 when the entire thing, or what's left of it, is available on dvd (a grand year long session catching up on the production subtitles) but Neil of Tachyon TV, late of Behind The Sofa, has already begun and in a grand experiment to discover what someone who isn't really a fan thinks of it all, he's being accompanied by his wife Sue.

He's writing up each session on the blog in a slot he's calling Adventures with Wife in Space and the result flirts with genius and quite often isn't flirting.

Here's why.  Because she's not seen the series before Sue's fulfilling roughly the same function for Neil and the rest of us as the Doctor says Amy and his previous companions do in the Meanwhile in the TARDIS scenes from the fifth season boxset.  

Like the timelord and his supernovas, it's impossible for us fans to watch any story without some preconceived ideas, because we've been watching them all of our lives and when we've not been watching we've been reading about them, chatting about them, become soggy with nostalgia over them, growing ever more cynical with the passage of time.

Sue allowing us to see them through new eyes, either confirming what we already thought or noticing something new, in other words as close as damn it as how the audience experienced it on first broadcast.  Albeit with some knowledge of what a Dalek is.

When she says of The Rescue, "I like it when they draw attention to how stupid everything looks. It makes me feel like I'm back in the loop", it demonstrates how inclusive the franchise can be and now tolerant we often are of the poor production values.

What makes these reviews work best is the banter between Neil and Sue, the "we" and the "not we" (which she'll understand when she reaches Kinda).  Like the Doctor, Neil will ask her what she thought of something like Vicki as a new companion and she'll be relatively cautious (she's right to be).

But the element of hindsight also means that we "we" know what episodes are coming up and we can't wait to read what Sue thought of them.  The Web Planet is a perfect example and the resulting review is as funny as you would hope.