What the Puff: Pipes in Pop Culture

I smoke tobacco pipes. I’ve enjoyed them since I turned 18 and even make them. So, I am pleased when I see television or movies including characters smoking their pipes. You’ll never know where pipe smokers are going to turn up in these things, from Colonel Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds to Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean. Even the First and Fourth Doctors in Doctor Who were seen smoking pipes. However, I’m almost always infuriated when I see how they smoke them. This is because many times the characters smoke their pipes wrong. Typically, these characters seem to be most interested in making as much smoke as possible. This isn’t wrong because of arbitrary etiquette, but rather is wrong because it ruins the taste of the tobacco, burns the mouth, and can ruin a pipe over time.

An Unearthly Journey: Doctor Who, Season Two

Continued from here, this series follows me on my erstwhile adventures through Classic Who. We left off on my review of the original Season One; now let’s act a little out of character as Doctor Who fans and proceed directly to the next season in chronological order.

I actually finished watching the First Doctor a while ago, and never really got around to posting about it. (I tend to watch while I sew, and with no conventions since Comic Con, I haven’t had a lot of time.) There are still two seasons with One in them after S2, but there are too many good episodes to talk about in this season to bother trying to mush all three remaining Hartnell seasons into one post.

So, without further ado, onto the review!

An Unearthly Journey: Doctor Who, Season One

A lot of people say that you can’t really call yourself a Whovian if you’ve never seen any classic Who. To those people, I say that it’s not okay to give people assignments on what they should or shouldn’t do before they can call themselves geeks. So that’s not the reason I’m watching classic Who.

But hey, I am watching it, and this series will encompass reviews of the good old days. Some of them will look at entire seasons, some at specific episodes; it will jump all over the place between Doctors in properly timey-wimey fashion; but all will be rooted firmly in the appreciation of the Doctor by Hartnell through McGann. I hope to watch as much as I can before the 50th Anniversary next fall.

So when I say Season One above, I mean, well, the very first season of Doctor Who that ever aired, back in 1963. The season that started it all, beginning with “The Unearthly Child.”

Sexualized Saturdays: The Doctor is…?

Oh, have I ever been excited to write this post. For the purposes of this post which I am excited to write, let it be known that I am only familiar with the events and companions of the 2005 series and the first season of Hartnell’s Doctor. Also, I’m looking specifically at the person of the Doctor and how he behaves and what is in character for him, and not at the meta societal influences that have shaped the casting, writing, and acting choices made in the show.

The Time Lord we know and love is a tricky character, because we actually know next to nothing about him. We don’t know his real name, or if he even has one (although this season might change that?); we don’t know how Time Lords reproduce, or if they get married or have similar social norms. And since sexuality is tied up in gender, you have to factor in that it’s been introduced in canon that Time Lord regeneration is not restricted to one gender, and so therefore it’s difficult to put a label on that as well.

So given that we have only circumstantial evidence to go on, where do we go from here?