8.1: Doctor Who (The TV Movie)
In which we learn how not to relaunch Doctor Who.
Broadcast: May 1996
Watched: April 2021
“Somehow I don’t think the second coming happens here.”
Right, well, obviously this is a f*cking mess. Theme, plot, character, it has no idea what it’s about or what it’s trying to say. We see everything through the Doctor’s eyes which is wrong. Grace takes too long to arrive. It is an American TV movie with a few trappings of Doctor Who, it’s not weird enough, while also not actually being coherent.
The “It’s alive!” bit is good. The “WHO! AM! I!” bit isn’t.
Other good bits: the Master correcting Grace’s grammar; “This. Is. An. AMBULANCE”; actually almost everything Roberts says? He’s the best thing in it. Also the walking through glass and the “or i’ll shoot myself!” Seeing Gareth’s future. The motorbike chases. The joke with the bike cop driving in and out of the TARDIS is lovely.
The Master murdering Bruce’s wife is horrible, in the right sort of way. Fun that it’s sort of a story about the millennium bug before anyone even knew what that was
Bad bits: not sold on the Master being able to goo people to death. The abseiling sequence should be great but is deeply boringly directed. Grace’s unexplained possession, and the story’s even less explained ending.
The idea that Time Lords can regenerate into other species is interesting and sort of fits with the rest of the show but doesn’t go anywhere.
I’m really not comfortable with deciding the Master is now going to be faintly homoerotic at the moment the Doctor decides he likes girls.
But the biggest problem is... it’s all in the wrong order. Grace’s moment of amazement about the two hearts shouldn’t come about 25 minutes after we know for a fact he has two hearts. Change Lee’s wonder at the size of the TARDIS shouldn’t come after we’ve been inside it.
It might be fine as an album track… but as an attempt to relaunch the show for a new audience it’s really, really bad.
Other things:
The idea the Daleks would put the Master on trial feels extremely silly.
McCoy a long way down the credits. Ditto the writer.
Weird seeing McCoy in a sort of gothic TARDIS. The street gang gun battle feels even weirder – although the TARDIS materialising in the middle of it is cool, and McCoy dying by accident is brilliant. [The 7th Doctor had by this point been characterised as a sort of master manipulator, “Time’s Champion”, for nearly a decade, so I love the dramatic irony of this entirely accidental death.]
New ideas: the transference in the way the Master tells Chang Lee the Doctor is a monster and a thief; the Doctor’s memories of his father; all the stuff about humans and the TARDIS; half human; kissing.
There are a couple of H2G” lines – “Life is wasted on the living” is the obvious, but I’m fairly sure there’s another I can’t remember now? Dammit.
I think I sort of like that the TARDIS has landed in an American medical drama? A version of Who where it lands in a different TV genre every week might have worked.
It's incredible that after 7 years and so much money they made the finale to a serial that we've never seen, a pilot for a show that doesn't really pitch where the series would go (Grace staying behind?!), and a plot that makes so little sense to anyone that they can't even explain it to themselves. It's still a mad joyride though. Motorcyle chases instead of corridors. Worldwide chaos instead of an invasion of the sewers of London. It has seeds of genuine ingenuity and heart. Apparently they were basically rewriting it every day as Universal, the BBC, and Fox all constantly wanted changes, all simultaneously caring very deeply about the film in terms of their stake in it, but not caring at all about making the property viable in the short-term. Madness.
I love 'I'm half-human, on my mother's side', whether its true or not.