Doctor Who comes to Sci-Fi Channel

You could call it perfect timing.

After many years of being mysteriously sucked into some space-time vortex, Doctor Who returns to American audiences with a new facelift. It’s about time.

Time, literally, is the keyword here.

The time-traveler once again grace the television screens after well-earned rest. Nine years since. It’s good to see the Sci-Fi Channel pick up the series. I'm surprised it's taken this long.

The series debuts this Friday on March 17 at 8 p.m. Not just one hour. It's a two hour event with the following shows "Rose" and "The End of the World."

Seeing the Doctor bring his own sense of style and mischief to TV is a much needed remedy. He’ll be bringing along his own prescription for the Sci-Fi Channel addicts.

There’s a bigger budget this time around. New stories. Plus new actors in the spotlight. The dialogue in the new series remains a sparkling example of good writing. Brought to you courtesy of Russell T. Davies.

You’ll get to see manikins come to life, earth becoming a ball of flames five billion years into the future, a meet-up with Charles Dickens and ghostly aliens looking to inhabit corpses in Victorian England. All in a good day’s work.

My favorite episodes are too many to list: “The End of the World,” “The Unquiet Dead” and “Father’s Day.” There’s a polished feel to the writing. It’s always good.

The nice thing is that they don’t chuck away the old series. They build on it. The stories continue from the long-running BBC stuff which starred the ever popular Tom Baker. It remains the foundation for what you’re about to see in the new series.

Doctor Who is a good drama series. You’ll see there are story arcs instilled in the general run of stories. Which brings about enormous complexities. One major arc deals with the Doctor surviving the Time-War--leaving him the last of his own people. He’s filled with doubt. He becomes more cynical, more detached from everyone else. The Doctor is more of an outsider than ever before. He carries psychological scars.

Played to the hilt by Christopher Eccleston, the Doctor is more abrasive. He’s fitted into modern times.

Yet he’s brought back from the oblivion of life by one person: Rose Tyler.

Interestingly, Rose is an important counterpart to the series. She’s pushed into the forefront. Many of the episodes such as “Father’s Day” centers around her character. In fact, we, as an audience, get to see what kind of background a companion comes from: we get to see Rose’s mother and her boyfriend. We go back to this familiar territory from time to time.

Rose becomes very much an intergral part of the plot. Her character drives forward the another story arc which wraps the series to an end.

Sure, Billie Piper is eye candy for the hormone-toting adolescent imagination. Yes, she’s pretty. But she’s talented. She can act.

So the cosmic wanderer makes some house calls during the thirteen-part series which will be filling for Battlestar Galactica during the summer season. If it does well enough, and I do certainly hope so, the series may see a return for next year. It is a triumphant revival of a series long thought dead in empty space. Nobody has seen a revival like this.

Now Americans can discover for themselves the fantastic adventures set in and outside of the time-traveling machine still disguised as an old British police box. You’re in for a few surprises.

The show's an enigma. No boundaries hold back the stories. You can go anywhere you want or any time. And there’s no way you can run out of stories in a universe so big.

The Doctor has checked in. Take a number.