Sometimes, inspired by Philip Sandifer's slog through mediocrity, I want to pick a really lengthy, terrible cookbook, cook every recipe in it one by one, and write about them. I have one in mind in particular, which, because it is in a language I don't entirely understand, would provide even more work and need to research. (Well, actually I don't sometimes want to do this--I only did once, just ten minutes ago before writing this entry.)
If the creative and/or productive aspect is taken away, the extended adherence to the sequence of some content might be referred to as a marathon. For instance one (or more ideally more than one) could have a Star Trek marathon, or a Doctor Who marathon. Without specifying, respectively, which show, or which series, a marathon of either of those television shows would be a massive undertaking. But, unlike my scrapped plan to go through an entire cookbook filled with some seventeen thousand mostly unremarkable recipes, the undertaking is normally driven on by an already held devotion to the show. In fact, it is likely that such a marathon would be largely comprised of repeat viewings, because you just can't get enough of it. In a marathon, however, the viewer also subjects himself to the worst episodes, to the episodes he would otherwise probably not watch. My cookbook task would be almost entirely of this sort of recipe, the ones I would never otherwise bother cooking. There would really be nothing to keep me on that track, it would be an entirely contrived task. It would be an endeavor that the Doctor would never commit himself to.
In fact he has never encountered his most feared enemy: drudgery. Yes, he has faced Daleks and nearly lost hope in the process, but even as the human race teeters on the edge of pan-dimensional extinction and he could by all accounts die at any moment, he is never threatened. Because even if he did die, I mean die die, his being would remain intact: he would have never been removed from the moment of heroism. He is what he does. He stumbles into some corner of Time, stumbles into a problem, fixes it, then leaves. (It is, I must say, a perfect paradigm for a television show.) He defies linearity not because he's some hipster postmodernist, but because he abhors boredom. He hops around Time to evade anything that doesn't fit into narrative convention.
My account of what he has never encountered may prove somewhat heretical, as I have only watched the most recent five series. In fact my viewership of the show is precisely not a marathon. The first episodes I watched were those that my friend deemed I needed to watch, and after that I just jumped around looking for the ones worth watching. You probably already know where I'm going with this: I watched Doctor Who just like the Doctor would, jumping around in search for the best stories. Except of course the Doctor is in plenty of shlock episodes. He is not so much in search of the best stories, but in search of a story, his story. He's looking for someone in distress--although it is likely they don't know it until he shows them.
At this point in my viewing, I seem to have run out of palatable episodes. The last few I tried to watch I didn't even finish. I knew where they were going, I had already been there. And this...
