Where would we be without modern Doctor Who? In 2005, there was no Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Trek: Enterprise was running on fumes, Farscape had ended the previous year, and the biggest sci-fi show, Battlestar Galactica, was a grim, hardcore story about robots murdering the remnants of the human race. Into a landscape in which there was not a ton of uplifting sci-fi TV came a new version of Doctor Who, the venerable British series that had gone off the air in 1989 and had, briefly, been resurrected as a TV movie in 1996.
Twenty years ago, Doctor Who came back with a small, quiet episode that kicked off a massive new era not just for the Who franchise but the entirety of popular science fiction. But, looking back, does the first episode of the reborn Who — “Rose” — actually hold up?
