A few years ago, I was at the New York Comic-Convention, waiting in line to get into a panel with a few acquaintances, when someone walked by in an excellent Tenth Doctor costume. When the people I was with started discussing how great the costume was, and how excited they were for Matt Smith to start as the Eleventh Doctor, I casually mentioned that I wasn’t, in fact, someone who had ever watched “Doctor Who”.

Their reaction was very similar to how I would imagine most people would respond to someone asking if they could molest a beloved pet while doing unseemly acts to the grave of a loved one. I was told, in an extraordinarily loud fashion, that I could not consider myself a nerd unless I watched “Doctor Who”. I shrugged it off, avoided accusing them of a lack of nerd credentials given that they were at a comic convention and didn’t know that Hulk and Captain America weren’t part of the Justice League [1] because I try to avoid nerd-on-nerd hate, and quietly swore that I would never watch “Doctor Who”. Ever.

Earlier this year, however, one of my friends told me that he had just gone through all of the new “Doctor Who” on Netflix, and that I had to give it a chance. I did, and I found the first few episodes of the first series painfully dull, which I decided to use as a defense for any future instances that someone told me I had to start watching the show. That same friend insisted that you had to watch it straight through to understand what was going on, and the Ninth Doctor was a leather-jacket wearing dose of British Ambien in my mind, so that wasn’t going to work, thank you very much.

It wasn’t until I met Tom at BiSC last May that I decided to give the show a final shot. Unlike the other Whovians [2], Tom not only listened to my complaint about the episodes I had watched, he actually accepted that someone could find something that he enjoyed less than rad. [3] He rejected my other friend’s claim that you needed to go through the first season to enjoy the others, and that if I started with the David Tennant episodes in series two, it was very likely that I would love it.

And, wouldn’t you know it, that charming Canadian bastard was 100% correct. I have since consumed series two through seven in the past few months [4], and have spent more time than is appropriate Googling various “Doctor Who” trivia. [5]

Basically, this is a very long-winded way of saying I am super excited for the 50th Anniversary Special, The Day of the Doctor, which will be simulcast across the world on November 23rd, the trailer for which is above.