Why Today’s Doctor Who is the Most Important of the Season
In just a few hours, “The Doctor’s Wife” will air, and one fan’s dream will come true — and so will many, many more.
Neil Gaiman, beloved speculative fiction author, has been a Doctor Who fan for a long time, even coaching his many readers through adjusting to a new actor when Matt Smith replaced the beloved David Tennant. He’s expressed his desire to write an episode before, and so when it was announced that he’d be penning a script for the Eleventh Doctor’s second series, there was quite a stir.
Now it’s many fans’ dream to actually work on the thing they love. David Tennant also grew up with the show, and often spoke of what an unbelievable experience it was to be the Doctor. That dream is no less true for writers than for actors, and every week tuning in to DW are a thousand and one authors — aspiring or otherwise — who would trade anything for the chance to write an episode. So what makes Gaiman’s episode so special?
In the intervening time between Gaiman watching Who in his youth and penning a script that will air today, he has had a fantastic career, written some of the greatest books in the English language, and amassed a small army of loyal fans of his own. It has become such a given that any given site Gaiman finds interesting will be crashed and downed by his Twitter followers that it even has its own hashtag: #neilwebfail
So is it just the rabid press of Gaiman fans ready and waiting for anything that comes from Gaiman’s pen? Well, at least partly. But it’s still more than even that. It’s not just that Gaiman has devoted followers and he so happens to be writing a Who episode. It’s that this specific desire is a long-held wish for many. Even before the buzz of publicity leading up to today crowned Gaiman as an important and influential Whovian, and while Doctor Who was still gaining its post-2005 momentum, Gaiman-fans and Who-fans who hadn’t even realized Gaiman was a Whovian were saying “it would be perfect if Neil Gaiman wrote an episode.” In achieving his own dream, Gaiman has — all at once — also caused the very dream of many, many fans to be realized as well.
Speculative fiction, more than other genres, especially needs that symbiosis between author, text, and reader; in contemporary times spec-fic series are made or broken by fan response and the relationship between the fanbase and creators. Gaiman’s relationship and communication with his fans has always been fantastic (why, he’s even tweeted @ me before), holding Q&A sessions over Twitter and on the road, even “touring” his Newberry Award-winning Graveyard Book for free. But I can’t think of any time — whether we’re talking about Gaiman, or some other author — where there’s been this much conflagration between the author’s dreams and the fans’ dreams coming true, together. On the one hand, Gaiman is just another Whovian, one who’s “made it;” to that extent he is one of us. But even as he is nervous for the coming episode, Gaiman is simultaneously more a fan, and more an author, than ever before. (That Gaiman’s episode comes under fan-favorite showrunner Steven Moffat and not the more ambiguously received Russell T. Davies only underscores all this.) It’s a wondrous and almost cosmic synchronization of desire and enjoyment. Hopes are high — poor Gaiman is possibly a nervous wreck — but honestly, I can’t imagine much disappointment. Expectations are as high as ever since the trailer aired, and every moment of it is not only classic Who, but unmistakably Gaimanesque.
I can’t imagine a time where something that I hope, dream, and pray for becomes the very thing that others are hoping, dreaming and praying for — not that they too want to do it, but that they also are hoping and dreaming that I will do it. I imagine I would be honored, and so:
Mr. Gaiman, if you ever read this, I hope you too are honored. Having met you (I am sure you do not remember, even though you did dedicate Anansi Boys to me), I must say that if this strange and wondrous alignment of fandom wishes had to happen to anyone, I am incredibly glad it happened to someone like you. I suspect you will be able to handle it.
A Diversity of Lions 