‘INDEFINABLE MAGIC’: A term coined by fans who cannot for the life of them explain why they watch a tacky, cheap kids’ show. ‘Well, it has that indefinable magic, dunnit?’

From the Completely Useless Encyclopedia, by Chris Howarth & Steve Lyons.

It’s taken me a while to come up with an answer. I know the question was why someone should get attached to a show where the cast changes so frequently, but I couldn’t help but get tangled up in all the confusion over why I like the show in the first place.

I’ve been a Doctor Who fan for more than twenty years, and that quote up there just about sums it up for me. I’ve spent more than half of that time, off and on, trying to figure out why I like the show as much as I do. The weird thing about Doctor Who fandom is that it, itself, has been doing the same thing as well. Star Trek fans (note: I like Star Trek, too) don’t have these kinds of crises of faith, they just get on with their technical manuals and Klingon language classes.

Fortunately, I don’t have to explain the whole tacky, 70′s era stuff (I hope), because we’re talking about the new series. And, I don’t have to explain why  I dig the show, but rather, why the revolving cast doesn’t stop me from digging it. So….

It does seem a little weird to get attached to a show where the main character changes. It didn’t work on X-Files, Northern Exposure, or The Dukes of Hazzard, for example. At best, you miss the old actor too much to enjoy the new one. At worst, you feel like somebody’s trying to sell you on a cheap imitation at full price.

Of course, there are some franchises that go through these changes fairly successfully. The one that leaps immediately to mind is the James Bond series of films. We were expected to believe that Connery, Moore, Dalton, and Brosnan were all the same guy — and enough people bought into it that they’re still making Bond movies (though they had to do a reboot for the last couple of them).

Actually, it all got a little bit silly with Brosnan, didn’t it? In his first film they had his boss call him out for being a 50′s era relic, but without explaining why he looked like he was in his mid-forties. They never mention on screen the fact that Bond’s face keeps changing, and that he somehow doesn’t age.

Doctor Who does things completely differently. As a writer for Doctor Who Magazine once pointed out, the main character is never recast in some subtle way, whenever the actor decides to leave. They make a big deal of it — a huge deal. Names are leaked to the press, the announcements are made like the new guy is about to be given some major award, and when the regeneration finally happens, it’s with all the build-up, drama, and special effects the production team can muster. It’s about as head-on as you can get. Bells, whistles, smoke and lights and — bam! There’s the new guy.

Still — so what if the show has the most blatant, bombastic cast changes in the business? It’s still a casting change.

But it’s only a casting change. There’s so much of the show that stays right where its always been. It’s still about a guy who travels through space and time in a blue police box, there’s still alien civilizations to meet, and the destruction of Earth to prevent. And of course, the Doctor is still the same.

Sorry, that doesn’t make sense. It’s just that, while the spectacular regeneration scenes give the lead actors the cover they need to have different personalities, builds, and habits, the over all character of the Doctor himself doesn’t actually change much. Because they never take the character so far from himself that he’d wind up in the midst of an invasion or cruel dictatorship only to turn around and say, "Sod this for a game of soldiers, let’s get the hell out of here — there’s this great nightclub on Perseus 2 that I’ve been dying to check out!"

All of the things that make the Doctor "the Doctor" remain, no matter who plays him: The over-developed sense of justice, the willingness to put his (and his companions, it must be acknowledged) life on the line to make a point, his general distaste for violence and his readiness to kill vast, huge swathes of other life forms when all the pacifist stuff doesn’t work — this doesn’t change.

And the companions — um, do I have to? Oh, all right.

The companions in the new series, at least, get much better treatment that the old series ones ever did. (With the possible exception of Sarah Jane.) The whole thing with Rose was bittersweet because we knew from the start that it would have to end, but that’ didn’t stop them from wringing every last ounce they could out of the goodbye. Problem is, how many times can you do that?

At least they get character arcs and development, these new companions. In the old, er — not so much.

Well, that’s all I’ve got, anyway. Boiled down, it’s like this: What’s good about the show isn’t entirely due to the actors who appear on it, so that when they change, a lot of good stuff remains, and that makes Doctor Who worth watching no matter who’s on screen at the moment.

Or, possibly, we Doctor Who fans just like getting our hearts broken over and over again. We’re strange people.