John Nathan-Turner Tribute
by Michael Lee

I never met John Nathan-Turner, the last producer of the Doctor Who television series, but I talked to him once. I was helping to organize the 1988 Time Festival in Saint Paul, and we had written him a letter to see if he was able to be a guest. And so, one day, I get a collect call, and the operator asks if I would like to accept a call from the UK from a Mr. John Nathan-Turner. I was a bit stunned, and I was at that point very much the enthusiastic and speechless teenage fan for a few minutes.

I don't remember much of the details about the conversation, and he didn't end up at the convention, but having that conversation was one of my fond memories of my teenage fan club years.

Of course, in the modern era all to many deaths are reported by e-mail gossip. I receive a mail message that says that he had passed away at the age of 54. All too young. A few more notes, and the realization is confirmed.

Doctor Who is one series where the nature of the series would change radically when the production staff changes. When I first was watching the series as a child, you could tell that something serious behind the scenes of the show had changed when that first episode of The Leisure Hive. The flashier title sequence, but the music, the type and nature of the stories.

He stayed on the program until the bitter end of its television days, not entirely by choice. He cast more actors as the Doctor than any one else, and was involved with the series as it was possible to be. In my list of favorite stories, he was the producer of many of them. Caves of Androzani, Remembrance of the Daleks, Curse of Fenric, Logopolis, Earthshock, The Five Doctors. And that's just a start. With Doctor Who now appearing on DVD, many of his stories were amongst the first ones to be released.

Some say that since he was the last person to produce Doctor Who as a television series, he should be held responsible for its demise. But I suspect that if he hadn't been the spokesperson for the series that he was, that Doctor Who wouldn't have made it as long as it did, and I highly doubt that it would have been as successful in the United States as it was without him. I imagine that Doctor Who wouldn't still be as popular as it is today, even after all of the time without a regular television series, without him. And he more or less sacrificed his producing career to Doctor Who, after

So for all of that, he'll definitely be missed. I think I'll be putting in my copy of Caves of Androzani, one of my favorite Doctor Who stories, into the DVD player soon in tribute. And think back with him asking me why I was shocked speechless when he called me up all those years ago.

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Michael Lee stepped into the MISFITS Website and vanished .... He woke to find himself trapped on the Internet, facing pages that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change the MISFITS Website for the better. His only guide on this journey is Professor Maxwell Misfittle, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Mike can see and hear. And so Mr. Lee finds himself leaping from site to site, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.