Let’s deal with the formalities right out of the gate: Doctor Who is a British sci-fi show
about an alien, his human companion, and their shenanigans through time and
space inside their ship that looks like a police box. The actors playing both roles have come and gone numerous
times in the show’s 50 year history with the human character just leaving while
the alien, named The Doctor, regenerates into a new actor whenever he’s
catastrophically injured. It’s a
good show, very imaginative and enjoyable, massive history, I’ve talked about
it before. What we’re here to
discuss today is Doctor Who
spin-offs. A new spin-off of the
show was announced last week entitled Class,
the idea being that it would revolve around the Coal Hill School that was
initially featured in the show’s pilot and then never again until the 50th
anniversary. However, that got me
thinking about Doctor Who’s previous
spin-offs so I’m going to talk about them because I made a column about geeky
television and that’s what we do.
K-9 AND COMPANY
The first official Doctor
Who spin-off to make it to air was K-9
and Company, in 1981.
Previously there had been plans for a Dalek-centric TV show around the
time of those Dalek movies I reviewed and a Victorian set spin-off featuring a
couple side character from the 1977 serial ‘The Talons of Weng-Chiang.’ Both of those ideas sound pretty
terrible by the way as the Daleks are fun but their voices are a bit to grating
to sustain sole focus of a TV show and Talons of Weng-Chiang was shockingly racist
even for the time. K-9 and Company was put together to
capitalize on the popularity of the Doctor’s robot dog companion K-9. The robo-dog had proved wildly popular
with children despite how troublesome it was for the filming process leading to
a long career alongside the Doctor throughout the ‘70s. K-9 left the show in 1981 and was
teamed up with a past popular companion Sarah Jane Smith for this incredibly
brief TV spin-off.
K-9 and Company
only lasted one episode and rightly so: it’s terrible. The overall plot is an incredibly
bizarre, Wicker Man esc conspiracy
plot about failed crops and covens of eldritch witches hiding in the scenic
back country of England but it’s all terrible. Firstly, K-9 and
Company was intended for children which makes a lot of the devil worship
and human sacrifice thoroughly tone deaf and off-putting, that is when it’s
actually around. Most of the
episode is spent on long, boring talky scenes of people vaguely discussing the
local politics and situations of the farming village. I don’t know why the producers seemed convinced that
children were desperate for slow as molasses conspiracy dramas revolving around
Satanism and murder but that’s what we got. Also K-9 is barely in the episode, though he does spring up
at the end to mow the witch coven down with his laser nose in an amazing ending
sequence that comes far too late in the production.
K-9
Yes, there was another K-9
show; this one is contemporary and even appeared on the Disney channel. Airing in 2009, making this technically
congruent with The Sarah Jane Adventures,
the show was a British-Australian co-production and featured a revamped CGI K-9
palling around with a bunch of kids solving weird sci-fi mysteries and what
not. I’m not exactly sure what the
impetus was for this show given that K-9 hasn’t really been popular or cutting
edge for decades now. He’s
basically the RC version of Aibo so I don’t see why making him floaty with bad
CGI is somekind of improvement to get kids watching. The show didn’t last very long, only running one season of
26 episodes. It’s not really worth
your time to watch unless you’re a big fan of subpar kids shows. It’s also a little odd this showed up
in 2009 on Disney as that was right about the time Disney was shuttering their
live action adventure shows and moving that particular fixation over the movies
with stuff like Tron: Legacy and Pirates of the Caribbean 4. Regardless, this is easily the
least of the completed Doctor Who
spin-offs and I actually don’t think it was ever broadcast outside of
Australia.
TORCHWOOD
Torchwood was the
first successful TV series to spin out of Doctor
Who, specifically it came out of the new series under the control of 2005
show runner Russel T. Davies.
Premiering in 2006 in conjunction with that year’s Doctor Who season arc, Torchwood
was intended to be a more adult oriented series set within the Doctor Who universe. As such the show is filled up with a
lot of swearing and sex, including a lot of LGBT elements as well through the
lead character of Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman.
Captain Jack is a “time agent,” a defender of time who warps
through history with two fists and insatiable appetite for sex, adventure, and
justice. He’s also immortal for
reasons too complicated to sum up here.
He’s basically a classic, pulp sci-fi hero with the jaw line and
wardrobe to match, he’s also the best genre series depiction of a bisexual
character. The idea is that
because Jack comes from a distant future humanity has evolved to a point where
we just bone anything, mainly because of all the aliens we’d encountered and no
doubt had sex with. It’s a decent
enough concept and works incredibly well here because it helps keep Jack from
falling into any of the standard bisexual traps. Most bisexuals characters in geeky genre fiction are
characterized as either being sneaky and manipulative like John Constantine or
Frank Underwood or exist to titillate male readers like Harley Quinn. It’s supremely rare to have a male
bisexual hero who is just legitimately heroic and Captain Jack is that rare
exception.
Torchwood’s basic
set-up was about a former government agency, the Torchwood Institute, which had
come under Jack’s control when he became stranded in the past. The institute is located over a major
rift in space-time and serves to help defend the Earth from alien activity that
either slips through the rift or lands on the planet. They’re essentially the Agents
of SHIELD of the Doctor Who
universe. The series was fun and
imaginative and ran for 2 respectable seasons followed by 2 mini-series. The first mini-series, Children of Earth, is one of the darkest
stories in the entire Doctor Who
mythos but I highly recommend it.
It’s a creepy and well-realized narrative about an alien landing in London
that takes a number of deeply disturbing twists and turns.
The second, Miracle
Day, is a fun sci-fi caper that does a great job imagining the
multi-facetted impact of a single high concept sci-fi event. The basic idea is that out of nowhere
everyone on Earth stops dying, and the mini-series tries to figure out what
would happen next. Though not the
best Doctor Who spin-off I highly
recommend checking out the Torchwood
catalogue as there’s a lot of good stuff to be found, especially the
mini-series.
THE SARAH JANE
ADVENTURES
The Sarah Jane
Adventures was the second spin-off the new series produced in 2007. The show starred Elisabeth Sladen, the
original Sarah Jane Smith who had appeared as a long running companion of the
Doctor on the classic series. The
series was designed more for kids but was still enjoyable for adults, mainly
due to how much it brought together from the old series. The basic format was just Sarah Jane
Smith having adventures with a couple of children, an advanced super computer
called Mr. Smith, and K-9, who they dragged out of mothballs to reappear in the
series. Sarah Jane Adventures is the closest the new series ever got to the
weird, low-budget creativity of the original series and is very much worth
looking into as it’s probably the best spin-off Doctor Who has produced.
It also featured the only new series appearance of Brigadier
Alistair Gordon Leftbridghe-Stewart, the Doctor’s longest running supporting
character played by Nicholas Courtney.
Courtney had always wanted to appear on the main show but the show
runners simply never called him to appear so it was nice he was able to appear
in something prior to his death in 2009.
The show also featured an appearance by Katy Manning as Jo Grant, a
fellow titan of the classic series era and the companion who travelled with the
Doctor prior to Sarah Jane. Jo
appeared alongside 11th Doctor Matt Smith in what was probably the Sarah Jane Adventures’ best
episode. The show is thoroughly
worth checking out over the course of its respectable 4 season run as it was
canceled in 2011 with Sladen’s unfortunate passing.
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