208: Doctor Who : The Movie
Doctor : 8th (Paul McGann)
Companions : Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook) Chang Lee (Yee Jee Tso)
Series : -
Originally Transmitted:
14th May 1996 (U.S.)
27th May 1996 (U.K.)
Now where do I begin with this clusterf
uck?
The mid 90s was a weird time to be a Doctor Who fan. In 1993 the show had just celebrated it's 30th anniversary, BBC Enterprises (As opposed to BBC Television) had planned to make a special 30th anniversary straight to video story called 'The Dark Dimension'.
It was a disaster from the start, many ex Doctor's complained that the script just arrived at their homes with a note saying 'looking forward to working with you' without them even bothering to call their agents to check their availability or even if they wanted to do it, some were annoyed that the story centred around Tom Baker feeling it was unfair to Slyvester McCoy who was still the current Doctor at the time.
As 1993 turned to 1994 there was still a buzz about the show. The BBC were releasing VHS tapes of old episodes monthly, Virgin books were releasing 24 original new novels a year, but still nothing from the BBC in the way of the series. During the 30th anniversary documentary '30 Years In The Tardis' head of BBC programming Alan Yentob was asked about the series coming back. He was non-committal but it was known he was a supporter of the show and wanted it back. It was around that time that rumours began circulating that Steven Spielberg was interested in Doctor Who.
And they were true, almost....
Steven Spielberg had history with Doctor Who. In the early 80s Disney had attempted to buy the rights of the show and Spielberg was their choice to run it. He was willing to do it but fell out with them during negotiations. He wanted it run by Disney's parent company with their full backing to give the show the justice he felt it deserved. Disney wanted it run by Touchstone Pictures one of their subsidiary companies.
The project never got off the ground.
The BBC were actually in negotiations with a man called Philip Segal, a British television producer who had been trying to acquire the rights for an American Doctor Who series since 1989. In 1992 he joined Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment which was when he was really able to get things moving, by moving I mean spending the next 3 years trying to keep the BBC, Fox, Universal & Amblin all happy. Segal couldn't get Fox to commit to a full series but did manage to get them to make a 2 hour movie with an option for a series depending on the reaction. He also left Amblin Entertainment in mid 95. Because it was him personally who owned the rights to the show Amblin & Spielberg's involvement ended at this point. In October 1995 it was finally announced Doctor Who was coming back, and in the new year Paul McGann was announced as the 8th Doctor.
All we had to do now was wait.
Then on 14th May 1996 the world watched as Doctor Who returned triumphantly to our screens again......
Only it didn't.
In the U.S. Fox decided in it's wisdom to screen the episode opposite the final ever episode of 'Roseanne' meaning that not many people watched it. And the BBC didn't screen it at all deciding that showing it on Bank Holiday Monday on the 27th would be a better idea, and even then most people who did want to watch it had already seen it by then because they had also decided to release it on VHS a week before it was broadcast.
So the week before May bank holiday I woke up early and for the first time in my life went into town and waited for Woolworths to open at 9am, bought it and rushed home to watch it before I went to work at 12pm. So what was it about?
The Plot
The Master is being tried by The Daleks on Skaro for 'a list of evil crimes', It's never explained why the Daleks would hold a trial rather than just exterminate him or why they would even care about his crimes but we'll go with it. Then we're told The Master's last request before being put to death was that The Doctor takes his remains back to Gallifrey. So now we're supposed to believe that The Daleks would let their biggest enemy swan into a court on Skaro and leave without them even attempting to kill him. And all this is just the spoken intro to the thing.
The chest containing the Master's remains breaks open and we see a black slime emerge, the Tardis starts to go wrong and instead of landing on Gallifrey the 7th Doctor lands in San Francisco on December 30th 1999 where upon landing and exiting the Tardis is immediately gunned down by a gang of Chinese Triads.
Chang Lee, a boy being chased by the gang sees what happens and calls for an ambulance. He goes with the Doctor in the ambulance to the hospital, meanwhile the Master in his black slime form also gets aboard the ambulance.
Doctor Grace Holloway is at the opera with her boyfriend when she is paged back to the hospital. She looks at the Doctor's X-rays which show he has two hearts and just dismisses it as a double exposure. While preforming surgery on him (In her opera gown) The Doctor briefly comes out of conciousness and tells her to stop because he's not human. They put him under and Grace inserts a probe into the Doctor's heart in the wrong place which causes him to have a seizure and kill him. Grace asks Chang Lee if he knows anything about the guy but he says no and then runs off with the Doctor's possessions.
Meanwhile the Doctor is placed in the morgue where he regenerates, and escapes by kicking it open.
At the home of Bruce the ambulance man the Master now in the form of a black goo snake takes over possession of Bruce's body. Both Time Lords are reborn.
The Doctor picks out some clothes from the hospital lockers which are mostly filled with costumes for the new years eve fancy dress party. He discards a 4th Doctor scarf and finally settles on a Wild Bill Hickok costume and then goes into the hospital waiting area.
He spots Grace who has just resigned from her job after the hospital administrator burned the Doctor's X-rays and told her to pretend it never happened. He follows her back to her car and Grace thinks she's dealing with a nut until he cries out in pain and then pulls the probe from out of his chest.
Then Grace realises it's the same man she operated on only with a different appearance and takes him back to her place where on arriving discovers her boyfriend has left her and cleared the house out.
The Master arrives at the hospital and the receptionist tells him he looks awful, he tells her he had a rough night and then peels off a fingernail, already his body is beginning to fail and he's looking for a new one. He begins by looking for Chang Lee.
Lee finds the Tardis key in the Doctor's bag of possessions and enters it, he is soon joined by the Master where he tells Lee that the Doctor stole the Tardis and his body from him and he wants Lee's help to get them back. He forces Lee to open the Tardis Eye of Harmony (Which was on Gallifrey last time it was mentioned in the old series, but Steven Moffat went with it being in the Tardis for the new series so I guess I should too).
Lee can open the Eye Of Harmony because for some unexplained reason only someone with a human retina pattern can open the Eye Of Harmony. The Master then discovers that the Doctor also has a human retina pattern meaning that he is half human, he explains to Grace that he is half human on his mother's side.
** At this point I need to take a break to vomit**
The Doctor is taking a walk through the park with Grace and his memories of who he is begin to return and he also gets excited about the shoes she gave him. Then we get The Doctor kissing Grace which had tons of Doctor Who fans choking on their jelly babies with horror. I never had a problem with it. He then realises that The Master has opened the Eye of Harmony and wants his body and the Eye of Harmony will suck the Earth through it if it is not closed by midnight and that he needs an atomic clock component to get the Tardis to close it. She doesn't want to believe him and goes back to her home. He proves it to her by walking straight through her French windows. While at her house they just happen to see a news report about a millennium clock run by atomic energy......
Well what a coincidence !!!!!!!
The Master shows up at Grace's house offer to give them a ride to the San Francisco Institute of Technological Advancement and Research which is where the clock is. The Doctor is unaware of who is driving them until The Master removes his shades. The Doctor and Grace escape and we have a race to get to the atomic clock. The Doctor and Grace steal a police motorcycle and The Master & Chang Lee take the ambulance. While looking for the component from the clock the Tardis needs we discover the Master's new trick of killing people by sneezing over them. Grace is also hit by the slime on her arm.
The Doctor manages to get the component first and goes back to the Tardis, he realises the Eye has been open too long and needs to rewire the Tardis to go back to a point in time before the Eye was open. The Master is able to control Grace through the infection he caused to her arm and she knocks out The Doctor with a spanner.
The Doctor awakes restrained, The Master walks down the stairs looking camper than Liberace saying that he likes to 'Dress for the occasion'. The Doctor is chained up with his eyes forced open. The Doctor makes a plea to Chang Lee saying to look at Grace and see she is possessed by evil and that The Master is lying to him. Chang Lee refuses to open the eye so the Master kills him by breaking his neck.
The Master now needs Grace to open the eye but this won't work in her possessed state so he releases her from it and uses her to open the eye.
While the Master is absorbing the Doctor's lives Grace runs back to the console room and connects the rest of the atomic clock and closes the eye just as the Earth is about to be sucked up and sends the Tardis into a temporal orbit. For some unknown reason midnight on new years eve happens at the same time everywhere around the world...hmmm.
The Master having failed throws Grace off a balcony killing her also, The Doctor and The Master have their final battle and The Master is sucked into the eye having refused help from The Doctor (It's later revealed in the new series that The Master was saved from being sucked into the eye by the Time Lords so he could be used by them in the time war.)
In another sickening moment the Tardis uses what looks like regeneration energy from the new series to bring Chang Lee & Grace back from the dead, apparently being outside of space and time means you can't die now.
The Doctor shows them Gallifrey and then takes them home to New Years Eve. He lets Chang Lee keep the two bags of gold dust promised to him by The Master and warns him not to be in San Francisco next Christmas and to take a vacation. He then asks Grace to come with him, she refuses and asks him to come with her instead. They kiss and he goes off back to the Tardis to a new destination.
First things first, I will not have a bad thing said about Paul McGann who is nothing but excellent in this. In fact if it wasn't for him this story may have ended up being bottom. If you watch Night Of The Doctor (Which made my jaw hit the floor when I saw him appear in it) you'll see more of what McGann wanted to bring to the role, I.E. not wearing a silly wig and wearing a leather jacket. And he is right, it's a much more effective outfit than the fancy dress outfit of a cowboy he gets in the movie.
If like me you were used to the classic BBC series seeing Doctor Who with lots of money spent on it and with up to date special effects to rival any movie of the time was a bit of a novelty. Throw in a charismatic Doctor and lots of references to the classic series as you can (Even one as small the professor of the institute chanting 'Om, Om' to himself was a nod to Jon Pertwee's final story Planet Of The Spiders). It's all very nice having all that stuff but one you get over all that you realise that the plot is wafer thin.
I mean it's nice that we get to see the 7th Doctor regenerate to the 8th Doctor but none of it is really needed. If anything all it does is slow down the story and we don't get to the main plot of the story until something like 45 minutes of the episode has passed. Compare that to how Russell T Davies started the first story 'Rose' in the new series where the action starts about 5 minutes in and within minutes you know who the Doctor is and what's going on.
I quite like a lot of the main cast. Yee Jee Tso as Chang Lee is kind of annoying but he's supposed to be so no complaints there. Daphne Ashbrook is decent as Grace. I find her a little bit too whiny but I think had this gone to a series she would have toned down on that. Having seen what Daphne Ashbrook is like in real life she does have a great sense of humour and does have chemistry with Paul McGann.
I have no idea what Eric Roberts was smoking when he took this role but his Master is pure pantomime, he even manages to make Anthony Ainley's 1980s Master look minimalist. It's interesting that Russell T Davies also told John Simm to camp up the character and go overboard a lot more than Simm wanted to himself.
It's a growing annoyance that these showrunners can't go back and look at Roger Delgado's portrayal and pick up on the subtleties of the character.
Rumour has it that Steven Moffat has cast a new Master for Series 8, Sylvester McCoy says he knows who it is and this person will be brilliant. The bookies favourite for the role is Charles Dance.
Although to be fair to Eric Roberts he does play Bruce the ambulance man well and makes him likeable in the few scenes he's in.
There are a few things that are unforgivable, the Tardis has never and will never have a cloaking device. It's called a Chameleon Circuit, it has always been a Chameleon Circuit and will always be a Chameleon Circuit and I love it that in 'Rose' we get a scene where The Doctor tells Rose about the Tardis changing it's appearance and she asks if it's a cloaking device and he corrects her calling it a Chameleon Circuit.
Thank you thank you thank you Russell T.
Also the bit about the Doctor being half human, can we forget that ever happened please. It's just such an awful Hollywood cliché, so bad I'm surprised they didn't make The Doctor and The Master brothers as well.
I also read some of the plans that the production team might have used had a series been commissioned and it revolves The Doctor going around the universe in search of his Father who would eventually be played by guess who... Leonard Nimoy' (Yawn... what amazing foresight & originality these Hollywood producers possess)
I forget a lot of the other stuff they had planned (The site was removed years ago) but I think a talking Tardis was another one. At the time it was disappointing that it didn't get an American series but in hindsight getting one may have killed it for good and just makes you appreciate what Russell T Davis did with it when it was in his hands.
If you want to watch this go ahead but bear in mind this is mindless drivel but Paul McGann alone will save it for you. After you've done that go watch 'Night Of The Doctor' on youtube and thank Fox & Universal that they at least got one thing right in casting him.
I leave you with one final piece of trivia. This is the only Doctor Who story ever to be filmed in Canada.