With more than 800 episodes, "Doctor Who" holds the title of the longest-running sci-fi TV series in history. The Comic-Con Museum has just opened an exhibit dedicated to the BBC show and called "Doctor Who: Worlds of Wonder Where Science Meets Fiction."
"Doctor Who" follows a Time Lord who travels through time and space in a TARDIS, which looks like an unassuming blue British police box. At the entrance to the Comic-Con Museum's new exhibit, you can step into a TARDIS, which is famously bigger on the inside. The exhibit celebrates the wonder, inquisitiveness, science and monsters of the beloved BBC show.
The immersive exhibit features, for the first time, costumes from every Doctor from 1963 to the present, as well as screen-used props and interactive stations. My favorite spot is the Monster Vault, where you can find a Weeping Angel, an Ice Warrior and Daleks!
Andrew Beech, a private collector, fell in love with the "Doctor Who" when it debuted in 1963. His fandom led him to become a collector and, later, a curator. He curated an earlier "Doctor Who" exhibit in Wales more than a decade ago, which I had the privilege of seeing.
"You have to understand the BBC is not geared up to actually keep things from the programs," Beech explained. "The stuff is made to make a program with, and then it's no longer of any use and therefore we'll be thrown away. But there's a significant reason for keeping it. I always knew there was going to be a cultural significance to 'Doctor Who.' So whenever anything to do with the Doctor himself or the companions or the TARDIS was in danger of being lost or being sold off or whatever, I was usually there with a checkbook — useful being a lawyer — to snap it up and keep it. So I have got a quite extensive collection."
For this exhibit, Beech has loaned a few items from his personal collection, including sonic screwdrivers and a Dalek.
"This Dalek was something that I had made many years ago as a fan just to adorn my living room," Beech said. "But of course, with my links to the BBC, they knew I had it, so it would get trundled every now and again for press calls and other events and exhibitions. Then, lo and behold, when Steven Moffat decided he wanted to feature all the old Daleks, my Daleks from my collection all got used on television. So it's now a screen-used artifact. Hurrah."
There is also a gold Dalek with an open back, allowing visitors to reach inside, operate its weapons and yell, "Exterminate!"
"I think the thing about 'Doctor Who' is that it's the ultimate adventure-action series format in the sense you've got the ultimate time-space machine looking rather bizarrely like a crazy old street artifact of the police box, which actually isn't when you go inside," Beech said. "It's this ultimately super-sophisticated time spaceship, which means you can go anywhere in space and time. You can take anybody with you, you can meet anybody or anything — real or imagined — and you can have as many different stories as the writers have imagination. I mean, how can you go wrong?"
You can't, according to fellow "Doctor Who" aficionado Ramie Tateishi, an assistant professor of English and film studies at National University. Tateishi cosplays as four of the Doctors, has written articles about them and has even taught classes about the series. Once, he proved his fandom by offering to list all 600 episodes of the show that he had seen in order to be allowed to look inside a Dalek on display at Forbidden Planet in London.
Since Tateishi brings the perfect mix of academia, nerdy knowledge and passionate fandom, I asked him to walk through the new exhibit at the Comic-Con Museum and highlight the items that most impressed him. You can check out the video below.
Like Beech, Tateishi was introduced to the series as a child. But as someone younger than Beech and from America, he did not watch "Doctor Who" until after he had already become a "Star Trek" fan. But as soon as PBS imported the series, Tateishi fell in love.
"When I was a kid, it was just so imaginative," Tateishi recalled "There hadn't been anything that was like that. It was a very low-budget show, which in a way made it even more appealing to a kid because you saw this stuff and you think, 'That's something I could do myself. I could make my own sets and monster costumes.' It set you off on this very creative, very imaginative path, I think. And just its approach to storytelling — 'Doctor Who' back then was serialized, and so you had to watch it in these 30-minute chunks. That aspect was really exciting, the cliffhanger aspect. There was just nothing like it on TV."
One thing that has contributed to the show's longevity is a clever device the creators came up with early on when the lead actor playing the Doctor wanted to leave. How does a show cope with that? The solution was to recast the role, but unlike the "James Bond" franchise — which asks viewers to accept that there is just one Bond, even though he has been played by multiple actors — "Doctor Who" took advantage of its science-fiction roots to do something different. Since the Doctor is a humanoid alien known as a Time Lord, when his body gets old or severely injured, he can regenerate. That means returns as a new actor, with shared memories and information but new quirks. It's a device that has kept the show running for generations.
"Each time that happens, it's sad because you're saying goodbye to a character that you love," Tateishi said. "But at the same time, simultaneously, it's exciting because you're about to embark on the show, reborn with a new blood and new sense of possibility of what it could do. It's really amazing. Something that you'd think might have been the end of the show, might have been a real obstacle, they turned it into this real advantage and something that has absolutely helped the show to continue on since 1963, all these years."
Although the Doctors change, some things remain the same.
"I think some of the concepts that are always at the core of the Doctor are just always a sense of curiosity and wonderment and positivity, ultimately," Tateishi said. "I like to think that the appeal of 'Doctor Who' goes back to the optimism and the goodwill and just the sheer love of the universe and the curiosity that the character has and exhibits and just models. I hope that's part of it. Another aspect of that is just the uniqueness of that character, as opposed to being someone who's outwardly stereotypically heroic. The Doctor is someone who's quirky across all the wonderful performers who have played The Doctor. There's always just this uniqueness, the sense of individuality, of nonconformity, and of just being an individual, and standing up for what you believe in, and helping others, and doing it in a positive way. I hope that is what a big part of the appeal is."
Whether you are a longtime fan of the Doctor or new to the show, the Comic-Con Museum's "Doctor Who: Worlds of Wonder Where Science Meets Fiction" has something for everyone. The exhibit is open now through March 2026.
You can stream "Doctor Who" on multiple platforms. New episodes are available on Disney+, and past episodes can be streamed for free on Tubi.
