The TV Movie
(Special, Dr 8 with Grace, 27/5/1996 (UK premiere, a fortnight after the USA and Canadian premiere), producer/showrunners: Phillip David Segal, Alex Beaton, Jo Wright, Peter V Ware and Anthony Jacobs, writer: Matthew Jacobs, director: Geoffrey Sax)
Rank: 285
‘You’ve changed
lately Doctor, you’re dressed like a girl with long hair and you’re talking
funny!’
‘Nonsense James,
you can talk in that kilt. Now hand me an espresso, get me my smart Nudie suit,
grab my rifle and let’s go join those noble boys in red white and blue and give
those commie alien gooks hell!’
You’ve changed
lately Doctor, you’re dressed like a girl with long hair and you’re talking
funny!’
‘Nonsense James,
you can talk in that kilt. Now hand me an espresso, get me my smart Nudie suit,
grab my rifle and let’s go join those noble boys in red white and blue and give
those commie alien gooks hell!’
The Doctor was finally back! After a seven year absence! And - to quote the best thing about it, the promotional tagline - it was about time! More than about time in fact. After all, unlike the mid-1980s hiatus, this time when Dr Who was put to ‘rest’ we were told endlessly by the BBC that they’d be happy to let anyone make it if a company could stump up enough money for it. Loads of people tried: you can follow the sage of most of them by hopping between ‘Time and The Rani’ (when the idea of a feature film was first mooted) to ‘Dimensions In Time’ (when a 30th anniversary multi-Doctor story was in the news for months) and this story’s prequels section below, but there were so many more: Dr Who was still a viable financial property to anyone with a brain and everyone except apparently the BBC. We’ve listed the eight separate attempts that closest to fruition but there were oh so many more companies who expressed an interest, including Amblin entertainment (Steven Spielberg was keen to make one – until he read the proposed script and allegedly couldn’t disassociate himself fast enough) and the one every original fan wanted to win, first producer Verity Lambert’s production company. But in the end the big name won: Universal Studios, because their new boss was born in Britain and was a fully paid up Whovian, Phillip Segal. So Universal were the only company to get their act together on time (it being part of the BBC Worldwide contract that a studio had to have both budget and ideas together within a certain timeframe of bidding).What did they win? Only the entire rights to BBC and all the characters not owned by individual writers (so a deal with the Daleks for instance had to be cut extra with Terry Nation’s estate, which is why they’re mentioned but not seen).Indefinitely. Forever. It was a good deal: that’s twenty-six years of history to play with and no end of ideas that are tried and tested winners. There were plans to have lengthy origin series remaking old episodes and hopes that the series would run and run indefinitely. There was just the small piddling matter of a ‘pilot’ to make, to reintroduce The Doc to American audiences in enough numbers to prove that it could work. But that was just a small detail surely: Dr Who had been big during Tom Baker and Peter Davison’s run and it was only the last decade the show’s fandom had dropped off. After all, what could go wrong? Scifi was big in the mid 1990s especially in America with a string of successes with shows far narrower in scope than Who: X-Files, Sliders, various Star Trek Spin-offs, the remake of Twin Peaks, Earth 2, Seaquest…
What’s that you say? You
don’t remember the last two? No, why should you – they did very poorly and
audiences never clicked with them despite colossal budgets and big name stars
including the hottest name of the 1990s Jonathan Brandis (who’s massive career
‘Seaquest’ helped kill off, leading indirectly to his suicide at only
twenty-seven). Which was a worry for fans because the last three of these were
produced by none other than Phillip Segal (and while everyone remembers the
re-make of ‘Twin Peaks’ that’s often for all the wrong reasons). Maybe the
writing will be better though? Well, after a failed attempt to use Adrian
Rigelsford (disgraced in very weird circumstances – see ‘The Dark Dimension’
under ‘Dimensions In Time’) they
settle on a young British lad named Matthew Jacobs. The positives: he too
adores this series and knows it backwards. Heck, Dr Who had got him into TV as
his dad, Anthony Jacobs, had played Doc Halliday (the one William Hartnell is
mistaken for) in ‘The Gunfighters’
thirty years earlier and he had many happy memories of being on set, wishing he
could be part of it (this might also be why this Doctor steals the fancy dress
costume of outlaw Wild Bill Hickock rather than other, potentially more
sensible options from this same hospital). After five years of writers trying
to pitch films who clearly hadn’t got the first clue how this series worked at
last we had one who knew what they were talking about. The bad news: his
closest experience as a writer had been on the wretched ‘Young Indiana Jones
Chronicles’ where a bunch of people who don’t look remotely like Harrison Ford
run around in the action movie equivalent of ‘The Muppet Babies’ (and I should
know, I sat through it to see both Jon Pertwee and Colin Baker and rue hours of
my life I will never get back. And I didn’t even feel that way about
‘Torchwood’ or ‘Class’!) Even so it could have worked: two people who like and
respect this series, together with a bigger budget and the chance to completely
make over Dr Who for a new era, full of dark edgy conspiracy theories and a sort
of gothic romanticist revival. It could have been great. It could have been
brilliant. And it’s…barely tolerable.
Most British fans’
assumption on sitting down to watch this mess on a bank holiday in 1996 (a
fortnight after the American debut) is that nobody involved with the TV Movie
had ever actually seen Dr Who and had at most read a synopses in a book. If
you’ve seen literally any other Who episode in this book, even the bad ones,
you will know that The Doctor is a oral crusader who rights wrongs, fights
injustice and gives the underdog a voice, offering hope to an often downtrodden
universe besieged by bureaucrats, monsters and alien armies. It’s a fight. It
takes a stand for the decent common man who believes in fairness, equality,
tolerance and fair play, whether by pointing out some wrong directly, by using
a time or planet that’s so parallel to our own, by doing something vividly
imaginative that takes our current society to extremes or simply by throwing
the Doctor at a moral conundrum and asking us at home how we would cope. The TV
Movie is The Doctor dying, changing his face and enjoying more of his ongoing
feud with The Master. He doesn’t stand for anything. He’s not your everyman,
he’s not a traveller, he’s not a utopian idealist who wants to make the
universe better. He’s not even particularly ‘good’. If you had never seen Dr
Who before this movie then the most you would learn about him is that he’s a
bit thick, dying needlessly in a San Francisco gang gunfight and that he likes
kissing. A lot. Neither of which has anything to do with the character we know
and love. And while we’re told he’s a time traveller we never actually see him
do any time travelling. And while we’re told he’s a timelord, an alien from
outer space, that amounts to the two hearts that accidentally get him killed on
the operating table and the fact his deadly enemy can take the form of a dodgy
CSI snake – the last of which had never happened before in the entire history
of the show. Over on the BBC The Doctor was a superhero who won not because he
was invincible or had brute strength but because he was really clever,
occasionally fatally curious and was a big fat nerd who knew most everything
about most things. In the TV Movie it’s played for laughs that he’s a bit
thick, about Human things at least, and seems like a wimp (except for one
moment when he has superhuman strength and can push extra-strong morgue doors
off their hinges). Only twice the entire story does this actually feel like Dr
Who rather than some lazy generic scifi that’s been granted use of the Dr Who
logo: when The Doctor is threatening to shoot himself is a traffic cop doesn’t
let him go (a refreshing change given how many American superheroes would just
start shooting other people) and when he’s dancing about the fact that his new
shoes actually fit. But even there The Doctor’s eccentricities are explained
away because ‘he’s British’ rather than because he’s alien.
They’ve Americanised Dr
Who, the one thing they promised they wouldn’t do and stuck him in the middle
of a boring story about a gang feud, turning The Doctor-Master battle of wills
and debate about whether it is better to control a world and be in charge of
where it goes or be free and leave your fate up to other people (the crux of
almost all Doctor-Master stories) into The Master doing bad things because he’s
bad while the Doctor tries to sop him even though he doesn’t seem particularly
good. The story is solved, in as much as it actually is, not by doing something
clever or inventive but by rewinding time, just like the scene in Superman
everyone laughs at (and even though it’s worse because it’s by pressing a
lever). The Doctor is basically a quirky cop now, not an explorer or adventurer
and while they were always going to play it a bit more safe in a pilot story
there’s an awful feeling that the rest of the episodes to follow would all have
been like this, with The Doctor pressing a button to get himself out of trouble
against a generic baddy.
Because generic is the
word. The Master is interchangeable with any amount of other baddies in awful
TV Movies. Not least because he’s played by Eric Roberts who appeared in a good
half of them. It’s unsettling seeing him with an American accent and turned
into a CGI snake (where did that ability suddenly come from/ And why hasn’t he
used it before? And why, with a budget this big, does it look less convincing
than the pink rubber snake from ‘Kinda’?),
but most of all its unsettling seeing him act completely differently to any
other time we’ve seen him. The Master famously hated getting his hands dirty,
which is why he shrinks people with his tissue compression eliminator rather
than kill them outright or walks around with hired goons like The Ogrons (or
occasionally, if he’s feeling brave The Daleks).He’s an intelligent opportunist
who’s great at exploiting people from Humans to Draconians to, occasionally,
people close to The Doctor His whole point in the early days was that his charm
and two-facedness made him fit into the establishment in a way The Doctor never
did and he could charm snakes from the trees. This time he is the snake and
everyone fears him on sight because he’s a thug, even in the middle of a San
Franciscan gang scene. The thing is though if you’ve never seen him before then
you actually feel sympathetic to his backstory: The Daleks (whoever they might
be) have shot him and all he wants to do is live. So what if he takes over some
bodies? I’m sure we’d all feel the same. Plus he’s played by Eric Roberts,
Julia Roberts’ real-life bro, and you’ve been trained by a decade of awful
films to think of him sympathetically. After all, for all his hard talk and
uncharacteristic neck-snapping, the guy’s clearly a douchebag (it seems natural
to talk in American parlance suddenly reviewing this story), a harmless idiot
out of his depth, wearing dark glasses years after it was ‘cool’ (Robert’s idea
after he was allergic to makeup. As the ‘big name American star’ he also
insisted on having his makeup artists on wage, his own gym, his own canteen,
childcare on set for his two kids and having a bit part for his real wife
Eliza, who plays his character’s possessed character Bruce’s wife Miranda. He
also rejected the panned Victorian costume out of hand, choosing his own
clothes). He ended up costing a packet after all these little ‘extras’, even
though the studio had turned down an interested Christopher Lloyd for asking
for marginally more than they could afford (and he’d have potentially made a great
Master, eccentric and out of control, rather than bland slick faceless villain
we got). Fans seem to lowkey like Roberts’ portrayal but to these eyes it’s a
disaster: he’s a generic baddy who isn’t clever, isn’t funny and is never ever
even remotely close to being realistic, a cardboard cutout that’s an unlikeable
mixture of ice cold and ham theatrical, so OTT I don’t see how any fan could
ever be rude about the Ainley incarnation ever again.
Roberts was Universal’s
request, to have a big name star Americans had heard of and might tune in for.
To give them credit though they figured having a Brit as The Doctor was only
traditional and fair and they saw dozens before finally casting Paul McGann.
The trouble is, though, ‘British’ was about as far as they’d got with deciding
his character. As a sign of what little idea they had, here’s the long list
that they considered casting: Jeremy Brett, Ian Holm, Peter Cook, Ian
McKellan, Leo McKern, John Mills, Donald Pleasance, Patrick Stewart, Peter
Ustinov, Peter O’Toole, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Harry Enfield, Rowan Atkinson,
Michael Crawford, Robert Linsday, Barry Humphries, Nigel Hawthorne, Tim Curry,
Griff Rhys Jones, Hugh Laurie, Billy Connolly, Ron Moody (who always seems to
be in the running every single time and came close to being the 3rd
Doctor) , John Hurt (who ends up The War Doctor seventeen years later) and
Derek Jacobi (who’ll go on to play The Master in ‘Utopia’). They all said some
variation on no (sometimes pronounced ‘NO!!!!!’) straight away. However some
said yes and turned up to auditions: an early frontrunner was Monty Python and
Rutle Eric Idle (who was eager to play the part), Anthony Head (who’ll be in ‘School Reunion’ a decade later), Jonathan
Pryce, comedians Tony Slattery and John Sessions (either of whom would have
been my choice – their auditions are on youtube and so much more interesting
than what we got), relative unknowns Liam Cunningham (he’ll get his scifi big
break in ‘Game Of Thrones’), Van Gorkum (a bit player best known as the voice
of Griffin the Dragon in ‘Dragonheart’), a little named actor named Peter Capaldi
(eighteen years early!) and Mark McGann, Paul’s real life bro. Interestingly
the BBC were given the final choice as the production team couldn’t decide (Jo
Whiley had been a ‘consultant’ on the scripts trying to get them right – and
actually she did a good job in tricky circumstances as the planned version of
the script was even stupider and more American, while by a quirk of fate Paul McGann’s
agent happened to be Janet ‘Tegan’ Fielding, who’d recently given up acting): after
much thought they finally went with Paul (indeed, Whiley might be considered
the first of his many gushing fan girls, telling the papers he had a ‘great
voice, great physique, great hair’. Shedidn’t mention it was a wig). He was
best known at the time for being the voice of reason in screwball comedies (the
most famous being ‘Withnail and I’ alongside Richard E ‘Scream Of the Shalka’ Grant ) but no one
seemed to have any idea what sort of Doctor he should play. There was the
general assumption though that this being a n American scifi show he was going
to end up kissing somewhere so they decided to make him a Byronesque romantic –
something McGann had never played before in his life. And wasn’t very good at.
They also decided, for reasons known only to themselves to make him tall,
having him stand on boxes for some scenes and all publicity photos (where he
towers over his good mate Sylvester McCoy despite being roughly the same size).
McGann, out of his depth, playing a part that’s barely recognisable from the
one he signed up to pay and in a style that isn’t his, coupled with the usual
‘post regenerational instability’ gives the single worst lead performance in
the history of the show, making the new Doctor sound as if he’s never strung a
sentence together in English before and coming off as a big fat wimp who doesn’t
do anything.
I stress though that it’s
not McGann’s fault but the script’s. McGann was cast so late in the day that he
had no input into his character at all, with no one to sit down and discuss
things with: the script was a done deal and most decidedly doesn’t play to his
strengths. Had he been left to his own devices or invited to have more input
into his Doctor he could have been fab and the further into shooting we go, the
more input McGann has into the character, the more comfortable he is: it’s when
he’s called on to be a kissable Edwardian Brit standing on a box to make
himself look taller things fall apart. The Big Finish audios prove how great
his Doctor might have been had they allowed him to be a do-gooder eccentric
with a gentle heart rather than a moron who kisses the first person he sees
(even though she’s the person who kills him). The 8th Doctor on
audio is reliable, decent, and courageous with a hint of insecurity never seen
in any other Doctor that makes everything feel a bit too much for him and as if
he’s in over his head, but he’s a fighter this one who never backs down from
doing the right thing even when it costs him dearly (and it so often does: he’s
the ‘unlucky’ Doctor who can’t get away with stuff other regenerations can, by
and large, his mistakes costlier and his achievements often wiped out). On
audio they take his Doctor being ‘half Human’ to mean he’s fragile and
emotional and McGann can play that sort of thing in his sleep; it’s this early
boring generic version of The Doctor on screen that doesn’t suit him. By the
time he’s invited back to the main series, with the ten minute red button 50th
anniversary prologue ‘The Night Of The Doctor’s he knows his Doctor well and
he’s fabulous delivering a fully formed three dimensional performance where his
Doctor is a winner and loser all in one. There’s absolutely no sign of that
here. This Doctor is unfunny, awkward, hyper, rude, silly and gets on your
nerves within the first few minutes. What’s more he feels like a guest part in
his own show, only turning up nearly half an hour in after Sylvester McCoy –
enjoying the far more luxurious facilities of an American studio compared to
the BBC – gives such a mature and dignified performance you want him to stay
more than ever. Of all the decisions
made in the course of this travesty this might just be the dumbest: if you’re a
fan enough to know McCoy then you’re seeing your beloved Doctor and get
replaced by an interloper (and dying in the most un-7th Doctor way
possible. The master chess player, always multiple steps ahead of the biggest
villains, dies because he forgets to check the Tardis scanner and dies in a
hail of bullets). If you’re new then you quite like this newcomer but then have
to get used to someone else all over again half an hour in. By that point
you’ve stopped caring.
The worst of the front-running
characters though is Grace Holloway. Aphne Dashbrook was hired mostly it seems
on the back of an appearance in Star Trek: Deep Space 9 where she’s a patient
struggling with the gravity of a new home who falls in love with a Doctor (the
drippy Bashir – was this who they wanted ‘our’ Doctor to be? The fumbled
romances, Englishness and sense of being ut of his depth are all there. Which
is a shame because literally every other character on DS9 would have been a
better template. Including comedy relief Ferengi Quark). She’s dreadful. We’re
introduced to her character in a rude and arrogant way, as he walks out on her
boyfriend during an opera which she insists on playing during the operation on
The Doctor (even though opera is the last thing you should be playing in a
profession where you need steady hands – no other genre has such extremes of
dynamics from loud to soft) and even though she seems to be high up in her job
so really her boyfriend should have been used to her job and her being on call
by now. She thinks she’s cultured, loves name dropping almost as much as The
Doctor does, looks down her nose at everyone else, won’t own up to mistakes,
quickly gets shouty and is impatient in the extreme. She is, of all the Dr Who
‘companions’, the one I’d least like to spend any amount of time: heck I’d
spend a year with Adric or Mel rather than an hour with Grace. The production
team, who seemed to like the 4th Doctor era best, seem to have been
aiming for Romana, but they miss the whole point of that character: that she’s
a booksmart know it all paired with a Doctor who’s streetsmart and that slowly
she learns from him that being nice is smart and smart isn’t always nice.
There’s no sense Grace will learn anything. She also shares zero chemistry with
McGann, which makes their romance a total non-starter (after all, she
disbelieves him for half the story and shows no sign of bravery or curiosity,
the two things all companions share. Well, all except Turlough maybe). She’s a
non-starter and even the production team seem to have realised this, writing
her out at the end (though it’s left ambiguous whether Grace would be back if
this had gone to a full series).
Now, I get it: The TV
Movie must have been a right pain to write. Only once more in the history of
the show has anyone tried to reintroduce the series to a whole new audience
after a gap as big as these seven years had been. American and British
audiences like very different things. However it’s worth pausing to see all the
things ‘Rose’ got right that the TV Movie didn’t, despite being on the face of
things very similar (Mark Gatiss, a key player in the revived 21st
version, saw a lot of it up close too, as a fan with a camera who tagged along
with McCoy to film a ‘video diary’, which might just be the best thing about
the whole sorry experience, especially the sight of the two Doctors chatting.
Alas right issues means it’s hard to get hold of and has never appeared ion DVD
or blu-ray and is continuously taken off youtube. Keep persevering though and
you’ll find it). The two companions are blonde but Rose is instantly likeable,
‘one of us’ rather than a posh egotist. She seems at first more overawed and
scared and out of her depth than Grace, but she’s plucky is Rose and risks her
life for others straight away. Their romance is organic, a natural response
from two people who visibly enjoy each other’s company. Here The Doctor kisses
Grace more because he feels he has to than because he wants to. Considering The
Doctor avoided kissing for twenty-six years its weird in retrospect he starts
it here with a woman who all but killed him and won’t take him seriously (in
1996 most of the fuss about the TV Movie stemmed from this moment but it’s a
very chaste kiss, not the deeply sensuous one the papers made it out to be.
Although that might be thanks to Whiley’s editing: one scene she took out had
The Doctor taking a shower after his hideout at Grace’s where she walks in on
him accidentally and comments, a few minutes after learning he has two hearts, ‘well
at least you only have one of…those’. Yuk!) As for The Doctor’s personality, in
‘Rose’ he gives long passionate speeches that show us who he is without
resorting to lengthy explanations so that by the end of the first episode you
have a good understanding off his character despite it being half the length of
the Movie. It takes a while to reintroduce all the fanlore to a new audience:
by contrast the exposition in the TV Movie is truly off the charts. The McGann
Doctor’s opening pompous voiceover (a last minute replacement for one by The
Master dropped when test audiences hadn’t got a clue what was going on) throws
so much stuff at the viewer, none of which they’ll need to follow the rest of
the series (‘The Master’s a bad guy and the good guy is transporting his body’
is all you need, not two minutes of Dalek lore. And why on Skaro are The Daleks
exterminating The Master but treating The Doctor as a guest of honour? That’s a
far more interesting story potentially but one we never see – The Daleks are
never seen and never mentioned again). In one garbled sentence
The Doctor tells Grace about The Master, the eye of harmony, the Tardis and
even what the initials stand for. It took a decade to learn all of that
originally and the comeback series takes it’s sweet time re-introducing fans to
all that across the first year. ‘Rose’ brings back The Autons for a plot
everyone understands straight away (living plastic!) and which could happen
round the corner from where you live, no matter where that might be: this story
only seems to make sense to San Franciscans (and then not much).
Perhaps most of all Russell T learned to have the
regeneration happen before the start of the story, so that we meet one Doctor
and stay with them, only getting that missing regeneration eight years later in
‘The Day of The Doctor’ (and then there’s a
twist that it’s not what we ‘ve imagined it was like all this time).
One weird thing though:
if American TV was playing things so safe deliberately, why do they risk
offending so many people? Chang Lee is an awful character, seemingly there to
tick demographic boxes as much as anything else but as much as he’s made to be
a ‘hero’ by the end, rewarded with gold,
look at what he does before the final ten minutes. He watches his friends get
gunned down in a fight, shows no remorse, hangs around The Doctor not to say
thankyou but to steal his belongings (and what belongings by the way? They fit
in a paper bag. Talk about a lost opportunity to show who The Doctor really is
to a new audience, with a bag that should be overflowing with eccentric alien
knick-knacks). He then sides with The Master (he might be brainwashed but even
so, it doesn’t seem to take much) and is all-round rude and dislikeable.
They’re clearly going for Adric again, a naughty boy out of his depth who’s
meant to learn slowly to grow into a man, but he’s yet another character you
spent the special wanting to punch and he offends the entire Asian community
watching (it doesn’t help that The Master keeps referring to him as ‘The Asian
Child’ but never refers to, say, Grace as ‘The Caucasian Ponce’). It gets
worse: occasionally, in stories such as ‘The Daemons’ or ‘The Awakening’ Dr Who
on the BBC is rude about Christianity. They have to be careful and follow
guidelines by having devils turn out to be ancient aliens and the sort though
and don’t step over the line. In America it’s worse: Christians over there,
especially down South, get het up about the slightest thing they consider
speaking against the Lord’s name, even though most of their lifestyle
(supporting prejudiced racist politicians, owning guns, attacking other people
because of the colour of their skin and hoarding money ) are the most
un-Christian things they could do and go directly against Jesus’ teachings. You
don’t expect to see anything even vaguely critical of Christianity on American
TV. And yet The TV Movie has The Doctor being resurrected (they don’t call it a
regeneration) in a thunderstorm where he’s wrapped in a morgue shroud with his
arms stretched out as if praying and in the finale is forced by The Master to
wear a technological ‘crown of thorns’. That’s a Master who’s spent half the
story as a lousy CGI snake, just like the one in The Garden of Eden. Officially
it’s all coincidence but surely, surely someone connected with this production
somewhere spotted this. It’s so blatant that everyone I knew watching on first
broadcast saw it. What’s more, it’s unnecessary: I wouldn’t mind if Dr 8 used
his timelord gifts to feed the 5000 starving homeless on San Franciscan streets
or to part the red Racnoss seas, but he doesn’t do anything except save his own
sorry skin. Which is precisely what Jesus didn’t do.
The result is...odd. It
all feels small somehow, inconsequential, despite all the fuss and big effects,
as if it’s got things the wrong way round and taken a series about the ordinary
being made to turn extraordinary and instead made it a series where the
extraordinary has become ordinary and commonplace. There’s no ‘ooh’ factor
anywhere, no shock at all the amazing things The Doctor can do (even the Tardis
being bigger on the inside is relegated to The Doctor being inside it when we
first meet him without even an establishing shot and a comedy shot of a
policeman riding a motorcycle round the console and out the doors again). There’s
no mystery here, only a list of boring explanations they keep insisting on
giving us even when it has nothing to do with the plot. Just think of where we
started in ‘An Unearthly Child’ which
hooked us in by the mystery of who The Doctor and his grand-daughter is and why
this impossible time-ship is in a junkyard. Here things happen for reasons they
explain which, if you’re an old hand at this, you already know and if you’re
new don’t seem to make any sense whatsoever. It’s worse than that though: it never
feels like it ‘matters’. This series that was once so full of nuance has been
turned into a Western in space, where good fights evil and always wins, ‘just
because’ (even ‘The Gunfighters’
was less about good v evil than this though). The Master ‘only’ seems to want
to kill The Doctor. The Doctor ‘only’ wants to stop him. They throw in a
backdrop of New Year’s Eve 1999 to make us worked up a bit about a metaphorical
change of a new era that people have long been afraid of (simply because it’s a
nice big round number, though see the Bible again for Christian fears of the
Devil recurring at a millennium, not necessarily this one), in the days when
scientists were just beginning to talk openly about the danger a millennium bug
might inflict taking us back to a technological stone age overnight. But really
it’s a nothing burger. Even in a series that has the occasionally ‘empty plate
of beans’ (the British equivalent?) this is fast food designed who’s biggest
ambition is to get bums on seats, not overthrow the government or help
liberal-leaning bullied kids with big hearts who know about science feel like
they have a voice. McGann tries his best and gets much better as the pilot goes
on but he never feels like ‘our’ Doctor. We don’t care about him. We certainly
don’t care about hang Lee or Grace, who are irritating beyond belief. We think
The Master’s ridiculous. And without any bigger storyline than this to get into
there’s no point to watching this: there’s very little tension and what there
is doesn’t change the world, just the outcome of a Doctor we don’t really take
to. It’s just television. And while Dr Who as the BBC made it often looked more
ridiculous than this, came with its fair share of ideas that don’t work and the
occasional empty character, it never felt as if it didn’t matter before. And
the ending, which rewinds time as if to say that yes it really didn’t matter at
all, takes any goodwill we have left and throws it out the nearest window. Despite
Segal wittering on in interviews about how badly Dr Who had fallen off in the
JNT years and how much better it would be under him, it falls into all the same
traps: so much continuity it puts off the general public, while making mistakes
the committed fan would never let them get away with, with a tongue-in-cheek
style that makes it feel as if everyone is laughing at us for watching this
mess rather than at The Doctor being the perennial outsider the way it should
be.
Oh yeah and apparently
The Doctor is half Human now, ‘on his mum’s side’. This line alone has made the
TV Movie a laughing stock because it seems to come out of nowhere: it has
absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the storyline, bar The Master needing
The Doctor’s retina to open his Tardis. Fans and showrunners alike have made
all sorts of summersaults to make this fit continuity but for the most part
there’s a tacit agreement that it didn’t happen and never ever to mention it
again. It just makes The Doctor less interesting than a timelord who saves us
because he likes and admires some Humans and thinks we need the help, rather
than because he’s ‘one of us’. It’s also a blatant steal from Star Trek, where
Spock too was half-Human (and you might remember that the 4th feature
film and my second favourite purely for its decent amount of gags ‘The Voyage
Home’, all about Spock, is also set in San Francisco. It’s probably not a
coincidence the character was on everyone’s minds given that for a time and a
much earlier script Leonard Nimoy was booked to be the director). The best
fandom can come up with is that somehow Grace’s use of an Earthbound anaesthetic
during the operation to revive Dr 7 infects his genes but that’s not what the
production team had in mind. Talking of the operation by the way, this story
also underscores how rubbish most British people think the American healthcare
system is. The Doctor collapses through no fault of his own, is given a botched
operation by a surgeon who is in such a hurry she hasn’t even changed from her
ballgown into proper scrubs, she knocks out the patient who’s clearly trying to
warn her about something (it’s quite common to be allergic to anaesthetic), who
ignored the people around her who advise caution, shows off to some watching
visitors and when she makes a mistakes panics and rips open a tube (because she
isn’t expecting The Doctor to have a second ventricle). And to think Americans
charge for this: The Doctor is lucky his walking corpse isn’t handed a bill for
the privilege of being killed. Mostly though it’s that ending that undoes all
that goodwill: fancy making us sit through an hour and a half only to end it
with that nonsense, where the Tardis’ eye of harmony suddenly has the power to
bring people back to life. But only the right people (and yes Russell borrows
that idea too for ‘Parting Of The Ways’ but it’s re-introduced to us as a
concept across a whole season and is used because Rose is desperate enough to
get The Doctor back shell do anything. Here Grace presses some random buttons
on a Tardis console she shouldn’t even be able to work without The Doctor
letting her that magically turns out to be just the right ones). It’s as if nobody
cares: as long as we start watching enough for it to count as a viewing figure
nobody cares about the finished product. One other new ability suddenly
developed out of nowhere: telepathy (how come Susan could do it and The Doctor
couldn’t in ‘The Sensorites?’ Some fans have assumed The Doctor has time
travelled enough to meet and chat to all these people he meets, but that’s
clearly not what the writers intended). One line that often gets missed simply because
there are so many other clunkers apparently now timelords turn into a ‘monster’
when they’re past their 13th and final regenerations (What the?
Thankfully Peter Capaldi doesn’t do this after regenerating from Matt Smith,
while even at the time this heavily contradicted what happened to The Master in
‘The Deadly Assassin’). And don’t get
me started on the last minute plot fudge that sees a traffic jam caused by…runaway
chickens (because they couldn’t afford the circus in the script). When did you
last hear about that happening on a San Franciscan highway?
So is there anything this
story gets right compared to the comeback series? Well for all that the plot is
ridiculous at least it’s easy to follow and yet never boring, the two cardinal
sins the series keeps falling into repeatedly across 2015-2025. It’s also
linear and clear, which makes it easier to follow than over half the Steven
Moffat era for a kickoff. Everything that happens until the final act is,
however bonkers, vaguely plausible. And even the messing around with continuity
is more a misguided attempt to add something new to what exists rather than
rewrite history to make the series less interesting (as per ‘The Timeless
Child’). The music’s fabulous too. John Debney appears to be the one person who
genuinely ‘got’ this series and his score is the one reason you feel any
emotion at all. It’s there when the tension needs to growe, it’s quiet when the
dialogue needs space, it’s jovial when things are fun and it’s sombre when
drark, but all these pieces feel organic rather than disjointed the way it
often did in the 1980s and will again in the 2000s. Compared to Murray Gold
it’s subtle and never makes me feel I’m being manipulated into feeling one
particular way. I even like the remake of the theme tune, the first time it had
ever been done with a full orchestral (perhaps the one thing Russell copied,
though for some reason the 1996 version starts at the midway point of the tune
which doesn’t work at all). It’s glossy too in a way that Who hasn’t looked
since the last time it was made on film in ‘Spearhead
From Space’ and the production team really make good use of having the
single biggest budget Who has ever had (I haven’t seen the full figures for the
Disney episodes but, accounting for inflation, I don’t think even they match
the $2million plus $150,000 overrun costs this one took). Despite being made by
Americans that money isn’t wasted: it’s used in things that actually tell the
story, like a greater choice of camera angles, more expansive sets and a whole
host of extras.
Admittedly we didn’t need all the fan props stacked in the Tardis for the plot, but they’re lovingly done too, recreated with more care than anything in the script and it’s great to see the sonic screwdriver back again (destroyed in ‘The Visitation’ and not seen since) being handled by McCoy for the only time on screen, even if someone seems to have given The Doctor one of those stamp machines with the Gallifrey logo on it as it’s now on everything he owns. It’s also a bit weird The Doctor has dozens of clocks hanging around when the Tardis interior is beyond time (are they for all the different intergalactic timezones he might be passing through?) I do like designer Richard Hudolin’s Tardis interior a lot though, more than the 21st century model if I’m honest: its about ten times the sixe of the BBC versions and it looks a cross between Victoriana and 1990s gothic romanticism, full of candles and looking as if a vampire or ‘The Beauty and The Beast’ are going to walk round the console any minute. It’s a real shame we never see it again on screen (yet) so we could see more details (such as some very fetching busts of Rassilon). Shame there are no roundels, though. There are little details too that seem suddenly very Dr Who, that come seemingly out of nowhere, such as The Doctor keeping a spare Tardis key the way the rest of us keep one under a mat (here it’s in a cubby hole above the ‘P’ in phonebox. Which makes you wonder if the Tardis has one whatever shape it’s in – and whether The Doctor would ever be able to find it or would spend half a regeneration scouring his timeship for a hidey hole). I rather like the meta gag about Grace’s sofa disappearing the minute The Doctor turning up too (so she can’t hide behind it – actually her ex has taken it as things turn out).
The filming is also
luxurious with no expense spared for tracking shots or exotic camera angles, done
by a camera crew who are clearly used to this sort of thing and, like the vast
majority of US TV Pilots, it’s actually filmed in Vancouver with multiple
locations familiar to anyone who’s seen any 1990s scifi TV (the production team
even shared a hotel with The X Files who were shooting the scenes from season 3
down a different end of the same building, Columbia Children’s Hospital, who
were funded partly through filming and always kept a spare wing or two for
camera crews though they were still a working hospital). Best of all McCoy is
brilliant, the one actor at home even though he’s in a foreign land (and
staying with his Canadian in-laws and Gatiss during filming). He brings an
elder, more melancholic nostalgic feel to his Doctor and plays him with grace
and dignity. He’s so successful, in fact, that you rather resent McGann for
taking his place (he also finally got paid a decent wage at last, earning more
than he did in a season of playing Who in the 1980s. He made a lot of friends
too, after puncturing the pomposity of the American cast by laughing at the
notice on his trailer door that he was laying the ‘old Doctor (sorry
Sylvester!)’ and cracking jokes on set to ease tension. Certainly there were a
lot more Dr Who fans on set after they’d wrapped up filming than in the
pre-production, which was reportedly tense and full of arguing, Sylv’s goodwill
bringing a lot of ‘real’ Dr Who to a troubled series.
Time has been a lot
kinder to this story too. After the Chris Chibnall years gave us so many bits
of continuity gibberish, plotholes and made a Doctor who stands around having
stuff explained to him ‘normal’ the TV Movie suddenly doesn’t seem as much of
a sore thumb as it once did. What
appeared a travesty on first broadcast and quite possibly the story so wretched
that it had killed our favourite series off forever turns out only to have been
responsible for manslaughter, for delaying the return of an old friend rather
than destroying it all together. It feels misguided and silly, a mis-step that
didn’t quite get the balance right rather than the series Antichrist it once
did (despite or perhaps because of all that Jesus imagery). The 8th
Doctor’s continued rise on audio (where he’s roughly level with Colin Baker as
most fan’s favourite) and the fact that we’ve tried every other thing in this
series by now rather than Americanise it makes people feel a lot more patient
with the mistakes this TV Movie kept making. There is worth here after all and
it is only a pilot, not a whole series – had the Andrew Cartmel years been
judged purely on ‘Time and The Rani’ or Bob
Holmes begun and ended with ‘The Krotons’
and ‘The Space Pirates’ before showing
off what they could really do they would probably have been mocked within
fandom just as much. If anything it’s amazing that it’s not worse in many ways:
after all in the lead up to this we were told that one or other of these TV
movies would have an American lead, a different shaped Tardis, a new theme tune
and an ‘origin’ story set on Gallifrey. Thank goodness none of them happened. Even
so it’s a real missed opportunity this one: just think of a Dr Who made with
this budget in line with the darker gloomier conspiracy-fuelled scifi series on
in its day where The Master is a shady figure manipulating aliens into taking
over The Earth bit by bit, as The Doctor struggles to get people to listen and
a full on invasion fleet turn up in the last act. They could have had such fun
with his character too, giving him new tastebuds that suddenly don’t like tea
but adores coffee for instance, or a sudden writing affliction that means he
keeps taking the letter ‘u’ out of any word he tries to spell, or Chang Lee
being arrested not for attempted murder but for being in possession of deadly
jelly babies (given that they’re considered a narcotic in America and therefore
banned). The Doctor might even have developed perfect teeth (rather than that
stupid wig: while McGann preferred to wear his hair long and indeed it was at
his audition, before filming he’d had a
buzz-cut to play an SS officer in the Gulf War drama ‘The One That Got Away’.
It looks utterly stupid and if you know McGann is giving a very ‘static’
performance partly because he’s trying to stop it from falling off!) Even at
the time though it impressed by just how contemporary it all seemed, bringing a
series that had arguably fallen bejind other scifi series across the 1980s bang
up to date by looking like everything else around in 1996. Unfortunately the
downside of that is that Who seemed exactly like every other scifi series
around in 1996, with nothing left to make it really stand out from the crowd.
In 1989, however low the budget, there was still nothing else like Dr Who on TV
and it scratched an itch other series couldn’t get close to. In 1996 there’s
way better competition on almost every channel than this.
However this is a hard
bit of television to get worked up about. If you’re already a fan you’re
annoyed at all the pointless changes made for no reason and put off by the
clunky empty plot and bad acting. If you’re a newbie there’s nothing here to
grab and make you want to keep watching and there are a dozen more generic
scifi franchises on in 1996 more deserving of your time. Remember they had
twenty-six years of lore and the perfect opportunity to reintroduce the best bits
that had already been proven to work to a new audience with a much bigger
budget and no one complaining of recycling. And yet they chose this. As bad as
the other dropped TV Movies would have been, as much as this is somehow ‘more’
Dr Who than anything else that was considered in the 1990s for TV, it’s still a
failure in practically every single way. Including the one thing the bosses
measured success with: the ratings. Universal/Fox plugged this story to death
alienating many who saws the trailer and still didn’t properly understand who
Dr Who was, with the promise that they would commission a whole series if 12
million viewers tuned in as it was rather assumed they would. Instead their
rivals stuck on an ‘eventful’ episode of much-watched comedy Rosanne and most
people watched that instead, the American ratings a paltry 8.3million in a
country with many more potential viewers than Britain. The result was a pitiful
9% share of the audience – everyone had been boasting behind the scenes about
getting 15% (and The X Files got 18% at the time, even in a 3rd
season dip). The pilot actually did well in Britain, with 9million (even though
our population is so much smaller), the healthiest since Peter Davison’s first
year (‘Black Orchid’ to be exact). But
the probem with the TV Movie all round was that nobody cared about Britain
anymore: this was meant to be an international success story and it very much
wasn’t. The idea was dropped, the sets crapped and their studio space and slot
given over to another show (an unexpected third series of ‘Sliders’ just t rub
it in: imagine a show where every week was like ‘Inferno’. Made by Americans.
And Ace was a soul singer accidentally caught up in a science experiment. And I
actually like Sliders, but it’s no Who). Most fans breathed a sigh of relief and
thanked their lucky stars. Had this gone to series, with the (many) problems wrinkled
out I'm one of those fans who reckons this might have worked out. Yes, even the
remake of 'The Web Planet' with its giant
ants and butterflies they were talking about doing. As a 90-minute one-off
though this special just had too much weighing on its shoulders that it had to
be damn near perfect to restore Dr Who to its former glories and they couldn’t
even get most of the basics of storytelling right. A total disaster in nearly
every way.
One quick note: for once
in this list the version the BBC got was the censored version with bits trimmed
out that were broadcast in the Canadian original (the American broadcast coming
two days later). This amounts to maybe eighty seconds’ worth of differences,
all of them scenes of violence and mostly The Master showing an
uncharacteristic glee in cracking people’s skulls (though the hail of bullets
that kills McCoy was reduced too). By chance the Dunblane massacre had taken
place in Scotland the week before broadcast and people were suddenly very jumpy
when it came to violence on TV. Due to weird licensing rights the CHS featured
the incomplete version too – most Brits only saw the unedited version during a
Dr Who theme night in 1999, with the DVD and blu-ray (and now the i-player ‘Whoniverse’
version) complete. One other thing added to the British version was a tribute
to Jon Pertwee who had died the same week: by chance Universal had decided not
to use their own logo and had picked out his era’s ‘diamond’ shape as their own
so this story seemed like moe of a tribute than it should have been. Most fans,
in a nostalgic mood, felt even more betrayed by the TV Movie than they would
normally have been as a result.
POSITIVES +Poor McCoy
had a thankless job. He's effectively fired here after nine very interrupted
years, dies in the least heroic way possible (of all the Drs it’s this one that
forgets to check the scanner during a gun battle?!), his last words are when
being knocked out on an operating table and has the indignity of his (even)
smaller co-star standing on a box to make him look tiny. He doesn't even get
many actual words. And yet still he shines, outclassing all the more famous
actors and actresses here with a performance that’s thoughtful and subtle against
all the ‘American acting’ on offer (even though like a lot of American series a
lot of people are Canadians because it’s cheaper filming there for some reason).
There’s a lot going on behind the 7th Doctor’s eyes that point to a set
of contrasting emotions while everyone else is merely speaking lines.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: As
a fan who’d only just discovered Dr Who during it’s last season I waited
eagerly for my next story so that I could enjoy it on first transmission along
with everybody else. After all, it had seemed imminent for pretty much the
entire first half of the 1990s, with a ful seven attempts to revive Dr Who
abandoned before The TV Movie came into being (pretty much at the point when
we’d all given up hope of it ever
happening at all). The sticking point was that any company making Dr Who had to
buy the rights off The BBC – a pricey undertaking for a series that didn’t then
enjoy international fame in quite the same way as it does now and wasn’t in the
best of health. The abandoned attempts at different movies feature a catalogue
of writers, some of them with long Dr Who pedigrees and some of them not,
usually promised a huge budget and told to be as epic as possible, before the
costings came in and producers got cold feet. There’s a really interesting
book, Jean-Marc L’officer’s ‘The Nth Doctor’ (1997) that rounds them all up
with plot synopses, interviews with writers and directors and even some
extracts. Honestly most of them aren’t terribly good and don’t feel much like
Dr Who at all – even compared to ‘The TV Movie’, they sound slightly wonky and
way too dark, especially the ones that were designed as multi-Doctor stories
for the 30th anniversary in 1993. If you’ve come here from ‘Time and The Rani’
you’ll know just how hard independent production companies were trying to make
Dr Who after the BBC began offering the license for the film rights. By 1993,
with the TV series off the air, the BBC were at last happy to pass over all
rights which only made the offer more tempting and lucrative: as far as the
public were concerned this would be the ‘only’ Dr Who rather than in a sort of
halfway house parallel world like the Peter Cushing films of the 1960s sharing
space with the Hartnell version on TV. We kept hearing in the news about these
new ideas and how they were 99% certain to happen and then…collapse, over and
over. So the biggest surprise of all wasn’t what happened in the TV Movie, but
the fact we actually got one at all.
With Plan A having failed The Doctor heads for Plan
B, to foil The Dalek invasion with a sneak attack on Skaro, in the middle of
the Kaled atomic war from ‘The
Daleks’. Reunited with Lizzie, they’re attacked by mutants,
taken hostage and taken to see the Dalek boss Davros who has been in league
with The Master but plans to betray him (and weirdly who’s name is apparently Dalek
for ‘bearer of gifts’; even more weirdly he’s almost nice in this script, the
calming influence on The Daleks, his creations that have got out of control). The
Doctor uncharacteristically betrays his new friend and blows the Dalek factory
up with a bomb, The Master arrives and kills Davros and goads The Doctor in
killing him too but it’s all a trap: violence is so prohibited on Gallifrey The
Doctor would have been barred as a timelord and forced to remain an outsider
for the rest of time (while The Master is still on his first regeneration and
has more lives to gamble with, as well as typical arrogance he will never be
found out). For some reason though The Doctor refusing to fight causes The
Master give up and hand his throne over to The Doctor (the ending is the least
developed part of the script) who drops Lizzie back off at her own time with
what would have been the first on-screen Doctor kiss.
Segal wasn’t done there. Spielberg hadn’t cancelled
the idea of making Dr Who outright – if he wanted a funnier script with less
continuity then that’s that he was going to get. Comedy writer Robert De
Laurentis was hired to write ‘The Time Of My Life’ in something of a hurry with
an early 1995 deadline and the remnants of the previous script to build on. The
Tardis is now disguised as a pyramid, The Doctor is an alien philosopher/explorer
of origins unknown and his companion a rotund comedy sidekick named Sherman.
The Tardis lands on the unexplored planet Ardor which has six moons and creepy
native creatures known as Voxyls. This is quite a promising start actually with
The Doctor back to exploring the unknown with lots of room for the bigger
effects budget. Then, alas, it goes downhill. The Daleks (back to their normal
selves now, not insects) invade and cart The Doctor off to see The Master,
their boss, on Gallifrey (they’re obsessed these writers). The planet is in
turmoil, a civil war having broken out between the war-like Master and peacenik
Borusa. It turns out that The Doctor is Borusa’s grandson in this version, sent
out into space in secret to keep him safe and The Master is his evil cousin.
The Master threatens Gallifrey with a black hole that can destroy the planet
while The Doctor, the only person who can stop it, tries to recover his
memories of temporal time engineering. How
does he smuggle himself into The Master’s lair to stop him? A ventilation shaft
of course, the most Dr Whoy moment in the script (we’ve still never seen what a
Gallifreyan ventilation shaft would look like!) Sherman dies at this point,
killed by the Vroixls (which sounds painful). Borusa, at the point of death,
gives The Doctor the key to his father’s Tardis, long hidden and thought lost
and tells him to find it. The pre-programmed Tardis then homes in on the last
place The Doctor’s father was spotted and lands in WWII but, rather than the
British Museum, The Doctor is right in the middle of the war. Here he befriends
a bunch of soldiers, a sort of cross between UNIT and Dad’s Army. He strikes up
a rapport with local girl Jane who’s like a less earnest Lizzie and even spends
the night at her house when he reveals he’s effectively homeless. Her superior
Captain Sanders reckons he’s a Nazi spy and warns her off, no surprise as a
quick disguise reveal later he turns out to be (should I include spoilers for
something that was never made? Consider this your warning...) The Master!
A Dalek invasion later and Jane decides the Doctor
is telling the truth and fully sides with him, smuggling information that his
father is likely in a prisoner of war camp. The Tardis then lands in…San
Francisco, just like the TV Movie, only it’s not in 1944 (as The Doctor planned in the story) or 1999 (as per the TV Movie)
but 1995. The Doctor figures his dad must be an old man by now but might still
be around. It turns out that he was an anti-nuclear activist nicknamed ‘Dr
Doom’ (!) who’s absconded with his mysterious lab assistant Q-Star, the name of
the energy force the timelords use (and close to the eye of harmony in the TV
Movie, albeit outside Gallifrey not inside the Tardis). Further investigation
sees The Doctor track down a Professor Baker who once worked with pa who
reveals that The Doctor’s dad became a science fiction writer (!) but he died
three months ago. Or did he? Her story seems suspect, almost as if she’s
covering up for something. It turns out that she’s the ‘real’ Q-Star, an
ordinary Human now married to The Doctor’s dad and terrified that her
son-in-law might take him away from her and go back home. Besides his work on Earth
is important too: he thinks he’s found a way to talk to God, or as he calls him
‘The Great Moral Dialectic’, with plans to assassinate Hitler and end the war
early. The Doctor also finds out he has a half-sister (and it’s her that’s
half-Human in this version, not him!) That entire part of the plot is a waste
of time as The Doctor realises his dad is best left where he is and he has to
defeat The Master alone. He and Jane fly off to Skaro to interfere with The
Master’s Dalek-based invasion plans (how come they’re hanging around to be
blown up?), only to be captured and Jane threatened with being turned into a
Dalek. The Doctor escapes, has Jane pretend to be a full Dalek convert giving
the metal meanies new orders to disperse and blows Skaro up with the black hole
bomb, The Master running off with a few seconds to go, setting up another story
to come. The Doctor then takes Jane back home, but with no kiss this time.
Well, this script is more ‘normal’ and closer to
what we’ll get in the TV Movie but it still doesn’t quite work: the comedy in
the first half turning into sudden violence seems off (especially the killing
of Sherman, the comedy character), the entire ‘hi dad’ second half seems
redundant and it’s hard to get a handle on what this Doctor’s personality is
and how much he really knows about his past: in some scenes he seems to know
everything and is a hugely moral dashing figure; at others he’s a shady
opportunist making it up as he goes along. No one is quite sure why this
version was dropped either: it seems that there was just a general feeling that
maybe it wouldn’t quite work. All in all it’s probably a good thing none of
these nearly-stories got made: the TV Movie really was about the best of a bad
bunch though some of the very earliest ones by Johnny Byrne were arguably on a
par. Lots of marks for effort though: you could never say that the various
people involved in these different scripts didn’t love Dr Who or try their
hardest, which was often the accusation from fans; more that they never fully
understood it, at least not in the way Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat and co
will.
So instead we got The TV Movie, intended solely as a
pilot before McGann came back for a full series. Had it been a success there
were then plans to re-boot the series with re-makes of some of the most popular
Dr Who stories across a whole season, albeit Segal and Leekley seemed to
misunderstand ‘popular’ and took it to mean ‘most watched’ with a few oddities
thrown in, so the list of what we might have got next is a pretty weird set of
stories indeed. It changed from draft to draft but at different times included:
‘The Smugglers’
(with The Doctor still looking for his father and reckons Bluebeard looks just
like him!), ‘The Reign Of Terror’
(with The Doctor discovering that his time-travelling dad had et Robespierre),
‘The Talons Of Weng
Chiang’ (now about American drug cartels rather than London
opium dens), ‘Earthshock’
(moved to Wyoming in 1994 for some reason, with Cybermen re-developed as cyborg
native American pirates! The surviving sketches really are too ridiculous for
words) ‘The Horror Of Fang
Rock’ (identical except the Rutans are un-named and not
at war with the Sontarons and it’s set on Nantucket!)‘The Celestial Toymaker’
(who’s a pawn of The Master) ‘The
Gunfighters’(inevitably given Matthew Jacob’s links
to his dad being in it, but with a note that it should be ‘more historically
accurate’! Stupidly it was renamed ‘Don’t Shoot, I’m The Doctor’) ‘Tomb Of the Cybermen’
(with The Master in the Klieg role – this story was still missing at the time
of course so would have been a big deal), ‘The Abominable Snowman’
(who turn out to be Neanderthals rather than Great Intelligence controlled
robots, with most of the plot revolving around The Dalai Lama), ‘The Sea Devils’
(who now live in Louisiana) ‘The
Ark In Space’ (the closest of all the remakes to the
original with no changes beyond the different characters of The Doctor and
companions) and two original stories, one based around ‘The Cybs’ (the new-look
Cybermen who are working a mineshaft on Mars) and ‘The Outcasts’ (where The
Doctor defends his fellow Gallifreyans against a Master-controlled Cyb
invasion, ‘Lawrence of Arabia style’ according to the surviving synopsis). Now
that would have been a series and a half! Vague plans were even underway for a
second series featuring original stories alongside re-makes of ‘The Mind Robber’ ‘The
Claws Of Axos’ ‘The
Daemons’ ‘The
Web Planet’ and even ‘Shada’,
still unfinished at this point in time (unique as not only the one Dr Who story
that was never finished but one that was never even started the second time to
boot!) I still can’t decide if it would have been a fascinating exercise in
contrasts watching Paul McGann tackle giant insects, green blobs and finally
meet Professor Chronotis with a bigger budget or whether it would have been
crass, pointless, stupid and American. It depends what you think of the TV
Movie itself I suppose.
Previous ‘Dimensions In Time’ next ‘Scream
Of The Shalka’
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