Essay #15: Doctor Who

I came upon this line from Donald Hall in John Green's Anthropocene Reviewed: "We did not spend our days gazing into each other's eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.”

For many years, Jeremy and my "third thing" was Doctor Who.

I couldn't say exactly why we both embraced this niche fandom. I'd fallen deeply for The X-Files in middle school, and Jeremy adored the high-fantasy Wheel of Time series as a kid, so maybe it somehow fit both interests. The new series' reboot started in 2005, but I believe we jumped on board a couple years later. In 2013, when we traveled to Great Britain, we visited Cardiff, Wales solely because it's where Doctor Who is filmed. We did a bus tour of shooting locations and spent hours in the Doctor Who Experience, a sort of interactive museum. 

It's a little funny that we visited in 2013, because the next year I would give birth to Amelia, and she would shift to be our one and only "third thing" (until Clara was born in 2017, of course). Doctor Who had declined in quality by then anyway, we said. There were huge gaps between seasons. We still kept up with the show, though often months after the episodes aired. We thought Jodi Whittaker did an admirable job, but we couldn't muster any enthusiasm for her tenure.

Within the last few weeks, Doctor Who aired three new specials starring David Tennant and Catherine Tate. David Tennant previously played the Doctor from 2005-2010, when we first started watching, and Tate joined him as his companion Donna Noble in 2008. At first I was a little skeptical--the choice to bring back old stars seemed like a desperate cash-in on nostalgia, and the first special was clunky and thematically awkward.

This past Friday night, Jeremy and I watched the second special, and it was like I'd been transported back in time. The story was interesting; the characters had chemistry; the pace was quick; the villains were scary. It was an hour of pure joy. For an hour, we shared our former "third thing." I remembered life before children, where being passionate about something inconsequential seemed important, not a silly luxury. I remembered the enthusiasm for complicated adventures and weird British mannerisms that had brought Jeremy and I together.

Of course, Doctor Who had never been our only "third thing." There was The Office; our cats, Abby and Oliver; a cooking class; a dislike of Philadelphia; Scrabble games. Still, it stands out to me as uniquely emblematic of my 20's and the first years of our marriage.

Today, there are still remnants of our Doctor Who stage around the house, including a Tardis salt shaker and coin bank and a poster of the Doctors in our bathroom. And if you're a fan like us, then you'll already have noticed another remnant: the names of our children.*

*Amelia Pond, companion from 2010-2012 (The Doctor played by Matt Smith)
Clara Oswald, companion from 2012-2015 (The Doctor played by Matt Smith and then Peter Capaldi)