Doctor Who: The Beginning.

After years of being told that we should watch it, the husband and I are finally beginning our Doctor Who journey.  Admittedly, we don't have the patience to go back and watch the eight doctors preceding Christopher Eccelston.  So, we've begun with the reboot, episode 1 - Rose.

And so far?  I love it.  Of course, I have a bit of a bias, because I've always liked Christopher Eccleston, and his Doctor is so abrupt and funny.  The first episode Rose nearly gets strangulated by Evil Shop Dummies, which is unsettling enough.  Then the Doctor shows up and tells her to run.  Off they go, and Rose is pretty much "wtf?" for the duration of the episode.  She searches for a bunch of random stuff that would never bring up any information ever about the Doctor, and if it did, it'd be on the last page of the entire search, despite the fact that it claims to be on page 1-10.

 At this point, she clearly has to contact Clive, who has apparently started a website inquiring about Doctor sightings. So, she does, and her Very Nice Boyfriend voices concerns about Clive potentially being an axe murderer.  Which, in all honesty, is a pretty legit concern.

Did I say Clive?

So, they go to see Clive, who turns out to be a relatively normal, if somewhat squat and awkward, guy.  At this point, we are introduced to some truly terrible CG when Very Nice Boyfriend notices a garbage can that is moving by itself and generally just being inappropriate.  Being A Very Curious Guy as well, Very Nice Boyfriend gets out of the car to investigate and ends up being devoured by the angry trash can.

There's no caption to really do this screencap justice.

Then, Very Nice Boyfriend is back, but is made of plastic and is evil and wants to kill everyone.

From there, all hell breaks loose, which eventually culminates with the revelation that Some Horrible Thing is controlling all of the plastic in London and is planning to unleash an army of awkward, inanimate objects (some of which inexplicably have firearms hidden in their hands) on the city to wreak havoc and do murders.

And, of course, the Doctor eventually shares all of this with Rose and they decide to go try and stop it.  They show up in some awful underground place where there's a giant pit of sentient, undulating melted plastic.  The Doctor proceeds to quote some Important Space Ordinances at the plastic glob who then orders his shop dummy minions to grab the Doctor and threatens to destroy the TARDIS.

Rose remembers that she was mediocre at gymnastics in grade school which means that she can swing like an orangutan from dangling chains and knock out bad guys.  She does that, saves the day, then clambers into the TARDIS with the Doctor and an extremely rattled Very Nice Boyfriend (who was there, by the way - apparently getting eaten by a garbage can and turned into Unfriendly Plastic Boyfriend sent the real him to the horrible plastic death room).

At this point, Rose decides to go with the Doctor in the TARDIS and explore the universe with no reservations, whatsoever, for leaving behind her Very Nice Boyfriend and scatter-brained mother.

Thanks for being such a Nice Boyfriend.  It'd be way harder to completely abandon you if you were an asshole.

 The next episode features the Doctor trying to impress Rose with the size of his TARDIS.  She says she wants to go one hundred years into the future, and he's all, "Child's play.  Pick again."  So she goes higher.  And he's all, "Step outside.  You're in the fuuuuuture."  She's unimpressed, she says (although, that's bullshit - I'd be outside freaking out of he'd taken me three hours into the future because TIME TRAVEL) so the Doctor decides he'll show that bitch and takes them five billion years into the future, when we've run out of numbers so hard that we've started using fresh produce into our years.

Because Rose is being such an uppity bitch, the Doctor decides to pwn her hardcore and make her witness the destruction of Earth.  Which isn't as sadistic as it seems, since no one lives on Earth anymore.  Still, I had kind of a Princess Leia flashback moment.

Dantooine!  They're on Dantooine!

An assortment of odd alien creatures are then paraded in, including a giant head (The Face of Boe), an awesome looking tree woman and Lady Cassandra O'Brien (yeah, she has her own Wikipedia page).  For another episode, Rose is just sort of like... wtf?  Lady Cassandra was, by far, one of my favorite parts of the entire episode.  She was flanked by two guys in HAZMAT suits with shower heads that she kept muttering, "Moisturize me!  Moisturize me!" to.  She was seriously hilarious.

She's being billed as the "last human," but she's basically a face on skin stretched on some sort of weird mount.  She's kind of like the Lady Catherine  de Bourgh of this episode.  Unsurprisingly, then, she's also a treacherous shrew and has released some kind of crazy mechano-spiders onto the ship to try and burnmurder everyone just after she teleports out.

They suspect nothing.

So, again, the Doctor saves the day after Jade, the pretty tree lady, has to catch on fire (because it's hot enough to set wood on fire in the room, but the Doctor is totally unaffected) and sacrifice herself, but everyone is saved!

Rose is momentarily traumatized by the fact that the Earth was destroyed and no one was paying attention, because they were too busy trying not to get burnmurdered by the the skin curtain.

Too bad I don't have a machine that could transport me back five billion years to when the Earth was still there.

Anyway, I really like the show, so far.  I mean, it's cheesy (as far as the effects go), but the concept is pretty awesome.  I'm dedicated.  We'll probably watch an episode or two more tonight after the kid goes to bed.  Pretty soon, I'll be able to change my Facebook header to the TARDIS and not feel like a noob.