Daleks are Sexy: A Report from the Denver Comic Con and How I Met My First Doctor

The glare fucked up my sign.  It's supposed to say "The Horror of Fan Blog loves Colin Baker (Whether you like it or not)."

It's been a busy week.  I know it doesn't seem that way since I posted a blog on almost every single day for the past 2 weeks, but most of those were written in advance and put on a timer to post when I was at work.  My job has become wicked busy, and I'm working 50-60 hour weeks.  But it's good money, lots of overtime, good tips, and I spend most of the time riding around in a dump truck.  So it took me a week to finish my write up of my experience at the Denver Comic Con last week.  I wanted to go into some detail of the non-Doctor Who related things I did there, too, but I feel like this post is long enough as it is.

I went to the Denver Comic Con primarily to see Colin Baker.  What I didn't expect was the plethora of incredibly hot girls in nerd costumes, including several sexy Daleks.  I have a new bucket list goal to sleep with a girl in a sexy Dalek costume.

This is not from Denver Comic Con, but rather a picture I found on a Google Image search.  However, this isn't far off from the really sexy Dalek outfits I saw.

By the end of the day, I felt nerded out, like I felt like I couldn't do a single thing nerdy for about a week.  I love being a nerd and I loved being around my fellow nerds.  I thought I was going to hyperventilate from joy.  But after a few hours, you hit a point where you see the obese guy with long hair and the black jean shorts, sneakers, and some sort of black Star Wars shirt (because black on black looks so good together) with some sort of slogan on it that he thinks is funny like "May I Force One In You" (Yes, I've actually seen that) and he's with his girlfriend who is also obese and is wearing too much make-up and a leather corset and she probably does Renaissance Fairs and you think to yourself "Please tell me I don't look like them to other people."  But, I've got just enough nerd in me to write about what happened.

I was one of the more half-assed cosplayers there, and only one of about a million 11th Doctors.  Doctor Who cosplayers were all 4th, 10th, and 11th Doctors, with one solitary 5th Doctor.  That's 7 Doctors being completely unrepresented, including the one who was there.  Although, admittedly, Colin Baker said, flat out, he didn't blame people for not wearing his costume because it's hideous and hard to do.  He said he envies Christopher Eccleston, because Eccleston got the costume that Baker had asked to be able to wear.  Even though he's one of my least favorites, I think next year I'm going to go as the 9th Doctor.  I'll put a sign around my neck that says "I know you can't tell, but I'm supposed to be the 9th Doctor."

Some teenage girls actually stopped me to ask me to take pictures with them, because they were happy that I thought to wear the cowboy hat with my 11th Doctor outfit instead of a fez.  I gave them my email to send me the pictures, but they never seem to have arrived.  Perhaps they thought I was creepy being a 29 year old man giving my email to teenage girls, but I swear I just wanted the pictures.

My favorite Doctor Who related costumes (other than Doctors) were:
-Complete Amy Pond kiss-a-gram outfit, that was impeccably made
-Two different Weeping Angels.  Not the most well done outfits (how could you do a realistic Weeping Angel and still see?), but a creative choice
-The sexy Daleks, obviously.
-Multiple girls in sexy TARDIS dresses, one with "Bad Wolf" written on her ass in chalk.
-A girl dressed as The Empty Child who, as I walked by, put her gas mask back on and said "Are you my mummy?"

The most hilariously irrelevant costumes at the Comic Con:

-Mr. T from The A-Team
-Ronald McDonald
-Oscar the Grouch
-The Mask (from the Jim Carrey movie The Mask)
-Belle from Beauty and the Beast
-The Mad Hatter (specifically from the stupid Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland)
-Natalie Portman in Black Swan
-Gumby
-A narwhal

Colin Baker was an interesting man to talk to.  I asked him a question, and avoided the obvious ones that I knew someone was going to ask because I knew I only got one question.  I knew plenty of people would ask him his opinion about the new series, as there were like 50 girls in the room who were just Tennant fangirls who came because they heard this guy was a Doctor back before they were born.  He was complementary about most of the new series and, even though he was very complementary about David Tennant, he spent a lot of time making fun of David Tennant for being so good looking and young.  He was especially complementary about Matt Smith, saying that, at first, he was afraid because they had "cast another child," but found that, although his body is young, Matt Smith had the mind of a 900 year old man.  His criticisms of the new series included the fact that they are only casting young Doctors (not that he was anything but nice about the actors themselves, just the fact that none of them are older), the revoking of Jonathan Nathan-Turner's old "No Hanky-Panky in the TARDIS" rule (he said he didn't think the Doctor and his companion should even notice that they are of different genders), John Simm's Master, and the fact that the Doctor never suggested keeping the Weeping Angels away by winking with alternating eyes.  Despite the quotations, the following is a paraphrase:  "If he had been a proper Doctor, he would have known how to keep the Angels away.  (Audience laughs)  That's not an insult.  Did I regenerate?  No!  I wasn't there.  So I never regenerated.  That means the 6th Doctor is still the Doctor and any others after him are just impostors."

A lot of people wanted to ask him about his opinion regarding the introduction of the John Hurt Doctor.  Even after he said that he had not seen the most recent season, some people, who either didn't hear him or walked in late, still tried to ask him about the John Hurt Doctor.  I got people to start yelling "Spoilers!" when this happened.  But I think he may have figured out what's happened, and that's a shame.  But he's a Doctor, and the introduction of a new Doctor is an unbelievably important change to his character, and he was pretty much the only person in the room and didn't know about it.

I showed up late to take a picture with him, but he was kind enough to set up a late picture with me.  Unfortunately, this meant that I had to wait near his booth until he was available, and caused me to miss out on William Shatner.  He was a little cold.  When I asked him if he would take a picture with my sign, he said "It's your photograph."  I was thrilled, so I tried to show him the sign, and he simply repeated "It's your photograph."  I could tell I had annoyed him a bit, but it might be because I fucked up and missed the photo taking times.  I was also stammering like a mad idiot because I was so happy about meeting a Doctor.

The other Doctor Who "celebrity" there was Daphne Ashbrook, who played the one and only televised companion to the 8th Doctor, Grace Holloway.  This woman pissed me off to no end.  Now, understand, she was on screen in this series for only 90 minutes in the 1996 Doctor Who made-for-TV movie.  So, really, she's not much of a get for this convention.  I could understand if this woman was only involved in one movie, but later fell in love with the series and wanted to talk with the fans about how proud she was of her one small achievement in this franchise.  Sadly, that was not the case.  This was a woman who was in the franchise for 90 minutes almost 20 years ago and does not care about Doctor Who.  She talked about recently starting to watch the Classic Series episodes.  This seems like basic character research work for someone before they start playing a companion.  She didn't know the franchise very well.  And this is the moment where she really lost me:  She said that she only realized, the day before, at that very same convention, sitting in on another panel, that The Master was from the same planet as The Doctor.



I.  Was.  Stunned.

Hey, Daphne, there was exactly one villain in your Doctor Who movie.  How did you miss a key plot point in your own movie?  Why would you have acted in a movie that you didn't fully understand the plot of?  Why wouldn't you ask as many questions as possible to figure out what you're getting yourself into.

And, while we're at it, why did you come to a convention for a franchise you clearly care so little about?  Oh, wait, I think I know what it is.  You're a 2-bit hack actress who couldn't act her way out of a shoebox to get into a shoe commercial.  But it turns out that science-fiction conventions are rife with fans so fucking in love with this wonderful franchise that, in their love of that franchise--crossed with a number of cases of unfortunately strong OCD--they would pay for an autograph from anyone who has ever touched anything Doctor Who, right down to the key grip on the 7th episode of K-9.  So you went to a convention, pretended you liked this one movie that you did that you clearly cared very little about, avoid the questions you don't know the answers to by somehow parlaying it into a barely related anecdote about your movie, and charged people $30 a pop to get your autograph and--maybe if they're really off of their rockers--a photograph with you.  Oh, and you put up a picture of yourself from your one episode of Deep Space Nine that you did just in case you reel in some of the equally enthusiastic Star Trek fan.

The fans are good people with a deep passion, not walking ATMs, Daphne.

I refused to be sucked in, and it made me think a little bit about my own fandomness.  There are some things I'm going to be interested in paying money to do just because of the way it's linked to the franchise I love.  I need to remember that, sometimes, these things are not an important part of being a fan.  If I'm ever paying money to buy a perfect replica of the 6th Doctor's blue variant costume from the expanded universe stories simply because I have to have an exact replica of every costume the Doctor ever wore, I want you to smack me in the head with my sonic screwdriver for the love of Christ!  I'm going to buy a lot of Doctor Who merchandise in my lifetime.  Perhaps more than some people would deem normal.  They're going to have to accept that about me.  But I need to realize that there are some limits, and that I don't have to have everything just to have everything.  From now on, when I'm looking into a Doctor Who item I want to purchase, I'm going to ask myself a very important question:  Is this really something I want, or is this Daphne Ashbrook's autograph.