By Mark HadleyMonday 23 May 2011TV and StreamingReading Time: 2 minutes
Dr Who – Season 32
RATING: PG
DISTRIBUTOR: ABC1
RELEASE DATE: Sundays, 7:30 PM
Dr Who, the longest running and arguably most successful science fiction television series returns for its 32nd season with Matt Smith in charge of the TARDIS. This series the eleventh incarnation of the travelling Time Lord is confronting the most difficult challenge of his career: marriage.
Talk about beginning with a bang – the Doctor dies at the end of the first episode with no hope of regeneration! But fans know better than to despair given that there are typically another 12 episodes to go. Sure enough The Impossible Astronaut soon reveals that this was a much older Doctor who had snuck into the company of his friends. The ‘present’ Doctor now has to work out why his future self needs him to travel to the time of the first moon landing, and what the mysterious River Song (Alex Kingston) has to do with this part of his life. What begins to emerge is the biggest adventure for the bachelor Doctor in over a millennia of time travel: the revelation that he has a wife.
Since the revitalisation of the series in 2005, the BBC has been delving into more and more human struggles for its time-travelling alien. The Doctor has always figured as the earth’s saviour in its darkest hours; increasingly he is confronting his personal demons and looking to save himself. The introduction of his wife into the series creates opportunities to consider what producers think this ancient institution can offer denizens of the 21st century.
It will be interesting to see whether the writers will favour the Doctor’s intensely responsible streak, and turn him into the model husband. Or whether his individuality will win out, and we’ll see another relationship as paradoxical as time travel: two people who can remain entirely independent and yet still claim to love each other.