BBC America’s sci-fi series ‘Dr. Who’ comes back strong

The first previews for the latest season of “Doctor Who” on BBC America started airing during the Christmas special.

Now in its sixth season since the Russell T. Davies-led series reboot in 2005 – post the Paul McGann movie version, post the on-again, off-again classic “Who” production dating back to the early 1960s and featuring Tom Baker most prominently as the Fourth Doctor – the series is popular enough in America that they are premiering the series on the same day both sides of the Atlantic.

This has paid off in huge dividends with Saturday’s premiere setting viewing records for the channel with 1.3 million viewers according to the Zap2it ratings site.

More importantly, the Doctor – a time-traveling alien who moves through time and space in a phone booth (and has been doing so way longer than Bill and Ted) solving problems, meeting new people and occasionally regenerating into new and different versions of himself – he is currently played by Matt Smith – is himself coming to America.

On location

Saturday’s premiere, the first of a two-parter titled “The Impossible Astronaut,” was at least partly filmed on location in the American Southwest and was written by show-runner Steven Moffat. You can tell because the plot involves a young child in a significant way.

Moffat seems endlessly fascinated by the imaginations, the minds, the dreams, the fears and the occasionally piquant logic of children and captures it brilliantly in his storytelling – most prominently evidenced in such episodes as “The Empty Child,” “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “The Beast Below,” his own take on “A Christmas Carol” and our introduction to companion Amy Pond in season five.

One long-running theme in Doctor Who is the presence of companions, often human, accompanying him on his trips through time and space, generally to stand around going “Ooooo!” and getting into trouble.

In “The Impossible Astronaut,” the Doctor and his companions – newlyweds Amy and Rory and the enigmatic River Song – are drawn to Washington, D.C., amidst the events surrounding the moon landing in 1969.

They meet with Stuart Milligan as President Nixon in the Oval Office – that’s where he’d be – and an adviser of his played by Mark Sheppard. Sheppard of course is instantly recognizable as a corrupt potentate in “Firefly,” a well-to-do demon in “Supernatural,” an attorney in the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot and lots of other productions, many of them sci-fi. So much fun to see him here.

Together they encounter these mysterious man-eating aliens who define the concept “out of sight, out of mind” – as soon as you turn away from them you can’t remember them. The Earth is apparently overrun with these aliens but everyone is completely unaware of them. Everyone, that is, except for a small, scared little girl who is trying desperately to warn the president about them.

Return visit

It didn’t occur to me right away, but this is at least a return visit to this country by the Doctor. He was in Utah in 2012 during his ninth incarnation, battling a race of alien creatures called Daleks – cybernetic alien killing machines developed by Davros on Skaro, bent on destroying anything that isn’t a Dalek.

He battled Daleks again in the 1930s in Manhattan – after all, he’s not the only alien capable of time travel. This storyline featured an attempt to create hybrids between Daleks and humans, which was not well received – not least of which because it would never occur to Daleks (who are kind of like squids in giant salt-and-pepper shakers) that they were not already the supreme beings in the universe.

Saturday’s episode did not feature Daleks. The aliens in this case looked more like the standard Roswell aliens with pencil-thin bodies and giant heads – the ones who always look like they’re about to fall over. We’ll probably find out Saturday in “Day of the Moon” – the second-half of the two-parter – how it is that they are all over the place and how it comes to pass that we remain entirely unaware of them.

And how a frightened little girl in Florida came to have the direct line to President Nixon and the Oval Office.

New episodes of “Doctor Who” air Saturdays at 9/8c on BBC America.