Okay, so the first episode of Doctor Who I ever watched was Gridlock. And I couldn’t stand it. The special effects were bad, the atmosphere weird and depressing, the writing uneven. I didn’t fully understand what was going on—where was this taking place, and when? And why was the Doctor there? Had he been somehow summoned? Was he supposed to help someone, a la Quantum Leap or had he just stumbled there, like on Sliders? I had no context for this sort of show, and I didn’t feel grounded at all.

For me, the last straw was what I felt was a show of terrifically bad science. A cat-like alien and a human woman are in a relationship, and they show the Doctor their babies, and it’s a basket of kittens.

“Ugh!” I said, “This sucks!”

My husband was hooked on it, though, and so I was exposed to a few more episodes. Those did little to alleviate my concerns about quality. The special effects and ideas remained fairly cheesy—there was the one about the adipose, for example, which are walking, talking balls of fat.

I did start to understand a little more about the Doctor, though. As my husband explained it, he’s an adventurer who visits different places in time and space for the fun of it. He’s stolen his time machine from the other Time Lords, a race of aliens of whom the Doctor is a member, who then all died out in the Time Wars. He loves humans, and takes them along with him on adventures, but because he lives such a very long time, and because they often love him romantically, and he seems incapable of that, they’re always leaving him.

I liked the Doctor from the very beginning. David Tennant is a cutie, and it’s an archetype with a tremendous potential for depth—the dichotmy of the old trickster God beloved by a young worshipper. There was a sadness to his character, what with his people being dead and all, but also a danger—I saw episodes where he murdered entire races as acts of vengence—and a tremendous love of wonder and play. The Doctor was awesome, right from the beginning. I saw that, and couldn’t really deny it.

But I couldn’t get over the bad special effects and hammy writing. Not until I saw “Silence in the Library.”

“Silence in the Library” was the first episode to feature River Song, a sort of female spin on Indiana Jones (she’s a bad-ass archaeologist) who apparently shares a past with the Doctor. When they meet, in a planet-sized library filled with shadows that eat people, she has a diary filled with stories of their meetings. She knows his true name, a secret that can only be revealed in tragic circumstances, but there’s a problem …

The Doctor hadn’t met her yet.

For a time traveler, you see, in early episodes of the reboot, there are surprisingly few plots that explore the narrative potential of time travel in an interesting way. In fact, the vast majority of episodes that do—“The Girl in the Fireplace”, “Blink”, and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead”—were written by Steven Moffat, the guy who currently helms the show. Most plot lines were fairly predictable, featuring the Doctor visiting a new place and time and getting wrapped up in some sort of danger there.

Moffat, however, has no qualms with playing with narrative structure, utilizing time travel to its full potential.

Take “Blink.” It’s often referred to as a Doctor-lite story. In fact, he’s only featured in a small handful of scenes. In it, the Doctor is stuck in the nineteen sixties, and has to convince Sally Sparrow, a modern girl, to save his spaceship from a race of evil statues so that he can be reunited with it. And so he seeds clues in her life—writing messages to her on walls that have since been papered over, embedding his end of conversations with her in Easter Eggs of DVDs. But how does he know what happens on her end of the conversation?

Well, before any of this happens, at the end of her story, Sally Sparrow hands him a file that tells him exactly what to do. It’s classical bootstrapping, though the Doctor (in Moffat stories) is never particularly concerned about such paradoxes breaking the universe (other than what seems to be a fairly immutable rule never to “cross your own timestream” and touch yourself). In fact, in this episode, the Doctor explains what seems to be Steven Moffat’s Rule of Time Travel, which is this: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.

Viewpoint is incredibly important to understanding timetravel-heavy Moffat stories. In “The Girl in the Fireplace,” the Doctor visits a historical figure, the Madame du Pompadour at several points throughout her life. Over time, she falls in love with him. The only problem is that the Doctor, inconsistent trickster God that he is, never shows up when he’s supposed to. He’s often late, not out of malice, but because his own life gets in the way. Sadly, though, that means that Jeanne Antoinette grows up without him, mostly missing him. As she says, “There is a vessel in your world where the days of my life are pressed together like the chapters of a book so that he may step from one to the other without increase of age, while I, weary traveller, must always take the slower path.”

This is an incredibly poignant story—something akin to Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife—but with awesome clockwork robots and spaceships and aliens. And with half the overwrought angst.

But back to “Silence in the Library.”

What Moffat does there is begin an incredibly ambitious story—he’s playing with the subjective nature of Time Travel. We, like the Doctor, are viewing the story from one end, while River Song is on the other. We’ve just met her, but she knows us (and him) all-too-well. But she’s a mystery. She might be his wife. She might have murdered him. She, maddeningly, refuses to reveal the truth—she doesn’t want to reveal spoilers, she says; his rule.

And then her story ends.

The fascinating thing is that Moffat reveals almost nothing about the nature of Song’s relationship with the Doctor in these two episodes. Instead, it’s clear that he has a grand story all planned out—one that has, so far, reached over three seasons. With each passing two parter, the Doctor (and the viewer) knows her a little better. The many possibilities that we were given about River Song—was she a criminal? A murderer? a romantic foil?—are beginning to become refined, to narrow down. But meanwhile, we’re marching toward the beginning of her relationship with the Doctor—from her perspective. Eventually, we’ll reach a point where we know everything there is to know about her, and she’ll know nothing about him.

It’s a masterful bit of storytelling, because it necessitated, at the beginning and for the sake of mystery, that every possibility seem equally plausible. And, really, River’s story could have gone a million ways. But the one we’ve been given so far (we’re probably about halfway through) was entirely appropriate, foreshadowed, well-justified from the very beginning.

In this, Steven Moffat has created a show that doesn’t just compliment multiple watchings (great for the DVD generation). He’s actually created a show that rewards being watched in an entirely different order than the usual, straightforward one. At the end of it—indeed, in the middle of it; I’ve already jumped the gun and watched most of River’s episodes backwards and it was awesome—we’ll be able to create a whole new “River continuity”, an arc of episodes that tells a really tragic story about someone getting to know the Doctor, a man who already knows her, and about him gradually forgetting her, piece by piece by piece.

Moffat’s not a perfect writer in every way, and Doctor Who still isn’t a perfect show. Over time, I’ve realized what was wrong about my approach to it—it’s science fantasy, not science fiction, and it doesn’t even try to be scientifically accurate. But I’ve grown to love the Doctor, in all of his regenerations, because he remains the same enigmatic, capricious, trickster god; the same alien mad scientist; the same madcap adventurer. I’ve grown to love his companions, for how they represent us, and how (in his universe) he might, at any moment, drop out of the sky and make our lives better. I’ve grown to appreciate his history, his depth.

But mostly I can’t wait to see the resolution of truly epic storytelling, something that’s conceptually just as daring and well-plotted as the best of what we have to offer on this side of the pond; a story that gets the subjective nature of time travel right and plays with our expectations, teasing them out for years so that some day, we can watch it in either direction and still be satisfied. I can’t wait to see how River’s song ends. Or rather, begins.