A homemade knitted Dalek in one hand and a Sonic Screwdriver in the other, with a mix of Blue Curacao and vodka they’re calling The TARDIS in the cup holder – I’m thinking, This better be good. I curled my hair for this.

I went to The Angelika in Dallas for the series 9 premiere of Doctor Who. Of course it was good. With Peter Capaldi as The Doctor they’ll never do wrong. It was a free showing thanks to bigfanboy.com and the fact they were streaming directly from BBC America. I’ve never watched Doctor Who on BBC America before, so I wasn’t expecting commercials. I’m fundamentally against inserting commercials into BBC shows that weren’t meant to be split up, and in a full, dark theater packed with viewers transfixed on the narrative’s every move, it was abundantly clear why. Doctor Who, when it’s good, has a flow that’s a crime to break (although I’ve started to feel like most Steven Moffat scripts could cut the first twenty minutes and immediately improve by at least 15 percent). We all sat together, snapped out of our collective trance, and began analyzing the structure of each ad’s marketing strategy instead. The interruption of the storyline for commercials was a jarring reminder of the intrusion of commercial interests into the pure enjoyment of the show. It made me wonder about the impact on both the viewers’ experience and the network’s paycheck.

We cheered at the good parts. The Twelfth Doctor is a rockstar, and he got the applause he deserves. There’s always something transcendent about watching something important for the first time with a huge group of people. It just about made up for splitting up the time with suspension-breaking commercials.