Doctor Who

This is completely non-science, non-medicine related. Well, it might be related, if you count the title "Doctor." Anyway, in recent years, I have fallen in love with "Doctor Who." So has husband. We have fallen so hard that we briefly toyed with the idea of painting our car blue so that we could name it "The TARDIS." Then we found out that it would cost $2ooo or more. We named the car "The Debt-mobile." That works too.

Anyway, we just watched the episode, "The Stolen Earth," and may I say that it was quite good. I loved how they incorporated Davros, who first appeared in "Genesis of the Daleks" in the 1970s. That was brilliant. The look of shock when David Tennant saw Davros was nothing short of brilliant. It had even more impact if you had, like us, actually watched the 1970s mini-series.

What I find most interesting about "Doctor Who" is not the plot, the twists and turns, or the illusions to other historical events being orchestrated by the Doctor. It's that the latest incarnation is intended to be a children's program. Either Americans are wusses or the Brits really like to mess with their children, because some of these episodes would have really scared me silly as a child. I mean, I'm still frighted when I hear the all too familiar and eerie exclamation of "EXTERMINATE." The episode "Blink" from a few seasons back effectively gave me a fear of garden statuary. It really makes me wonder about what, exactly, constitutes a children's show. When I was little, they were fairly obvious. Pretty much any cartoon was a children's show. Then, of course, "The Simpsons" came along and blurred the line a little. But that was on during prime time. It was a fairly hard and fast rule that anything on after the 6 o'clock news was going to be adult programming. That's all changed now. The Cartoon Network actually premieres new cartoons in the early evening, cartoons that my husband and I watch. Now, too, there are more cartoons intended for adults. They play directly after the cartoons for children. Sure, they're grouped under the title "Adult Swim," indicating that they're not for children, but the line is blurred. When I worked in social services, I often had pre-teen clients who wanted to talk about the latest episode of "Family Guy" or "South Park." It always gave me pause, as I don't believe in censorship, but the content of these shows tends toward the more mature.

I have the same questions about young adult fiction too. When I was a kid, this genre barely existed. It was made up of, principally, "Goosebumps" books by R. L. Stein. I read a few of them on a camping trip. They were entertaining enough, but I wanted to read other things too, and so moved right along to adult fiction. Now, a scant twelve years later, the young adult genre is exploding with books that I would, and have, read. Books like "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow and the "Uglies" series by Scott Westerfeld are all fairly sophisticated stuff for kids. I would have loved these books as a kid, and my mom wouldn't have had the control of them the way she did tv. I distinctly remember, for instance, when she fast forwarded through the racy scene betwen Forrest and Jenny in "Forrest Gump." At that same age, I was reading adult fiction, studying Shakespeare. It struck me as hilarious then. I couldn't watch it on tv, but I could read about it at great length. It's still funny, actually.

Basically, what designates something as being for young adults versus actual adults?