Doctor Who

What’s the Story?

When a mysterious stranger rescues Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) from a creature that clearly has no business on planet Earth, she's faced with the choice of going home or setting off on a series of madcap journeys across time and space. She decides to join The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston in the first season; David Tennant later), as he calls himself, and quickly discovers that there's far more to the galaxy than the everyday slice of London that she previously called home. The Doctor, as it turns out, is the last of the Time Lords, a race that mastered time travel and then mysteriously died off, leaving only The Doctor to carry on their important work.

Is It Any Good?

Sort of an anti-action-hero, The Doctor uses charm and quick thinking to disarm his foes, rather than guns or fists. This makes his character appealing and ensures that the show is fun for all ages. Many actors have played the good doctor over the years (just as many actresses have played his sidekicks), and the show -- in some incarnation or another -- has been on and off the small screen since the early 1960s. But the basic concept is still unchanged: An unflappable adventurer goes where he's needed to prevent an ever-changing rogues' gallery of interplanetary villains from pursuing their evil agendas.

Although many of the plots hint at complicated concepts -- especially when you consider the inter-dimensional capabilities of The Doctor's time machine, the TARDIS (that's Time and Relative Dimensions in Space, if you must know) -- the stories are generally rather simplistic. The interactions between The Doctor and his assistant are fun, but sometimes it seems like the female sidekick's main purpose is to give The Doctor a reason to explain the crisis of the day and then to get in trouble, which provides him with extra motivation to solve said crisis. Hard-core sci-fi fans might not be satisfied, but anyone looking for a basic adventure show with a cosmic theme won't be disappointed.