there's all these competing Doctor Who recommendations bouncing around Cohost as we approach New Specials Season and I'm tempted to throw one in myself because
- I went from swearing up and down in like March that I would never ever care about Doctor Who or learn a single thing about it, I watched the one with Vincent Van Gogh and found it overrated and cloying, and the fandom is terrible, and everyone knows Moffat is bad at writing in general and terrible at writing women in particular... to having strong opinions about which characters from the audio dramas should make an appearance on the show*. they got me.
- we watched it in a completely deranged order, jumping wildly from period to period, and then to make matters weirder our friend Kate was like "hey I'm gonna crash your apartment and show you a bunch of classic serials that the fans have rated 'trippy in a bad way'".
- I like a lot of the stuff various factions of the fandom hate. I think the episode where a bunch of people get absorbed into an alien's body... is really funny in a Mighty Boosh sort of way. Matt Smith's kind of annoyingly quirky personality... masks an intriguingly self-centered, childish, and even malicious side. 12 and Clara... have a mesmerizingly toxic relationship and it's captivating watching them drive each other to worse and worse extremes of hubris. Moffat... is good at writing women actually, and turns not one but FOUR women into lesbian immortal explorers of the cosmos on par with the Doctor. those bad trippy old serials... fucking rule actually, they're like little arthouse sci fi psychedelic films.
so I have the fervor of a recent convert, but with a completely unhinged perspective on what a "viewing order" should look like, and some very strange ideas about what a "good doctor who episode" even is.
I don't know, I don't think you can go very wrong, is the thing. uhhh what's a good Donna episode? Planet of the Ood? sure why not! do Dalek, that's where we arbitrarily started. go back and watch the old serial Genesis of the Daleks too, fuck it. then watch The Happiness Patrol. why? why not? check out The Pilot, there's lesbians. what the hell, watch the youtube short where the 8th Doctor becomes the War Doctor, the man who destroyed the Time Lords, the original sin that hovers over the entire new series. personally, I'm attracted to the darker, more gothic and horror inflected side of the franchise. maybe check out the audio drama The Holy Terror, which starts with a talking penguin being declared God-King and gradually turns into an eldritch apocalypse. get into Faction Paradox! whatever! I'm not your mom!
my real advice is just: find someone to watch some episodes with. watch them in arbitrary order based on what seems interesting. talk about it. I can't imagine a worse way of going into this than treating it like homework lmao or sitting alone trying to speedrun the entire modern series or "the essential lore". it's way more worth your time, in my estimation, to just get a sense of different actors, different eras, the breadth of things, and have people you can ask for recommendations and bandy readings back and forth with. just fuck around, have fun with your friends, and don't worry too much about what The Fandom Consensus or The Lore is, is my advice.
*Frobisher, a shapeshifting penguin. Nimrod, monomaniacal vampire head of a shady government organization who sees no contradiction between his ruthless eradication of alien life, and being himself a fucking vampire. Nobody Noone, the Word Lord, a sort of evil doctor from a dimension of language, who can infect words and drives a CORDIS through speech. this should also give some sense of how buck wild this franchise can get conceptually.