It’s alive. It’s alive. It’s alive!
How do you re-introduce a legend? Doctor Who‘s cancellation in 1989 represents the end of twenty-six years of (mostly) continuous presence in the cultural landscape—in the United Kingdom, at least, though pockets of fandom certainly exist throughout Europe and the English-speaking world. Never ones to let a potentially valuable intellectual property sit fallow, Hollywood starts sniffing about even before Doctor Who‘s ultimate demise, and after a few false starts, a backdoor pilot episode for a potential revamped series finally comes to fruition. Matthew Jacobs’ pithily titled “TV Movie” hits the air in May of 1996 in the United States, Canada, and the UK, a joint production of Fox, Universal, and the BBC.
Though a fair percentage of the audience has doubtless been waiting seven years for this moment, explaining just what—or perhaps, more properly, who—Doctor Who is becomes paramount to retaining new viewers tuning in to a much-ballyhooed television event. A pre-title voiceover attempts to set the stage, explaining that the Master, a “rival Time Lord” to the Doctor, has been put on trial on Skaro (of all places) and, having run out of regenerations, becomes nothing more than an urn of ashes for the Doctor to return to Gallifrey, helpfully noted as their home planet. More shocking to long-time viewers than the Daleks suddenly having a functional judicial system (or even that Skaro still exists), however, is the delightful presence of Sylvester McCoy, reprising the Seventh Doctor not just for a regeneration sequence but a twenty-odd minute introduction to the character.
Significantly, McCoy’s presence indicates that the “TV Movie” stands in the established continuity rather than throwing the baby out with the blue box, a potential harbinger of respect for the source material that is certainly not guaranteed, particularly once American television executives get involved. The Master somehow becomes an amorphous slug and escapes his urn, diverting the TARDIS (noted, for the uninitiated, as a time machine by the Doctor reading H.G. Wells’ novel of the same name) to Earth, where the Seventh Doctor interrupts a gang fight in 1999 San Francisco, leaving him riddled with bullets for his troubles.
Despite the director, Geoffrey Sax, being a product of the British television scene, he films the ensuing hospital sequence, and indeed the entire film, in the frenetic, mid-90s mode favored by American television, with fish-eye scenes of ambulances screeching; fast push-in shots framed with the camera jauntily tilted; and gurney-level perspectives of the Doctor being put under anesthesia, all the while insisting that he’s not human. The attending cardiologist, Grace (Daphne Ashbrook), ignores him (and the x-rays showing he has two hearts); she finishes the job the bullets started, killing him on the operating table, an ignominious end for the Seventh Doctor.
Though Doctor Who could never be accused of avoiding self-consciousness or on-the-nose allusions, parallelling the Doctor’s regeneration shot-for-shot with the famous scene from the Boris Karloff Frankenstein featuring the titular doctor’s monster coming to life feels just a bit too cavalier, more film school final project than serious cinematography. The actual regeneration of Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor into Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor leans far more heavily into body horror than any transformation before (or in the 2005 BBC series since, to be sure); the disturbing scene, with lots of lightning and much gurning and facial warping (a tribute both to the effects team and McCoy’s pliable features!), owes a greater debt to An American Werewolf in London or The Fly than to the rather staid fade-out/fade-in that serves to denote the change in Doctor Who previously.
The Doctor’s ensuing disorientation, again rather pointedly signposted by broken mirrors reflecting his unfamiliar visage (in a part of the rich, well-funded hospital that is, apparently, abandoned and ruined, flung open to the elements), culminates in his dropping to his knees and screaming, “Who? Am? I?”, just in case audiences didn’t connect the title of the show with the character (who, to be clear, is not named Doctor Who). And then, at the critical juncture of his self-encounter, that most American of moments occurs: a commercial break…
To be fair, Doctor Who does feature breaks between episodes, but they are connected by repeating the last few beats of the prior episode to start the next; here, since the story is told in one long eighty-five minute “episode,” Jacobs uses the enforced interstice to jump the plot ahead slightly, with the Doctor in somewhat greater control of his faculties, rummaging through staff lockers to find clothing, including, incongruously, the Fourth Doctor’s iconic scarf, before settling on a dark velour overcoat. (The explanation for the wide range of costuming, that the staff is preparing for a New Year’s Eve costume party, helps explain the ornate coat, but unless Tom Baker’s adventures are being aired on KQED-PBS in this version of San Francisco, the variegated scarf is a bit of a stretch. Still a nice homage, however.)
The Doctor recognizes Grace—who has quit her job at the hospital in protest over the attempt to cover up the Doctor’s death and the subsequent “disappearance” of his body, giving her the freedom to gallivant across the galaxy as a companion, potentially—and spends a good five minutes explaining to her, and the audience, that he really is the person she killed the night before, going so far as to pull the stuck, bloody probe from his chest that caused his cardiac arrest(s), another bit of gore that feels out of keeping with Doctor Who as we have known it. The only person he doesn’t have to convince of his “alienness” is the Master (Eric Roberts), who has occupied the body of the ambulance driver that brought him to the hospital by, um, slithering down his throat in another rather graphic scene. This version of the Master echoes that played by Peter Pratt in “The Deadly Assassin,” wherein we learn that the Master has already run out of regenerations: purely evil, vindictive, and cruel, lacking any nuance or nobility, tainted though it may be. When he strangles the ambulance driver’s spouse with nary a thought, just a smile, we know that this is not the Delgado or Ainley Master. As seen in “The Keeper of Traken,” the Master can possess other bodies as a means of circumventing the regeneration limit, but this time the process seems to be failing, and the Master needs the Doctor’s help—or, rather, his lives.
The Master tries to track down the Doctor by seeking out the gangster who summoned an ambulance for the wounded Gallifreyan, Chang Lee (Yee Jee Tso), an amoral teenager more interested in the Doctor’s personal effects than his well-being. Lee finds the TARDIS key, and does the traditional double-take when entering the dimensionally transcendent space-time craft, a nod to the classics that one must allow. Somehow—and that’s a word that comes up often when discussing the “TV Movie”—the Master is already inside the TARDIS, waiting for him. After spinning a tale about the Doctor having “stolen” his lives, the Master enlists the naïve Lee to help him find the elusive Time Lord, Together, they open the Eye of Harmony at the center of the TARDIS. (Um, let’s just ignore that the Eye of Harmony is “the nucleus of a black hole,” harnessed by Rassilon, balanced “in an eternally dynamic equation against the mass of [Gallifrey],” per the Fourth Doctor in “The Deadly Assassin.”)
More shocking still, once the Eye of Harmony™ opens, the event returns the Doctor’s memories to him, and in his excitement, he pulls Grace in for…a kiss. Yup, we’ve got a smooching Doctor on our hands. And, assuming the reader is sitting down at this point, he is half-human, at least according to the Master. (The Doctor himself later in the story claims to be half-human “on his mother’s side,” though possibly—hopefully?—as a joke.)
Establishing just who the Doctor and the Master are and explaining the “rules of the game” takes up fully half the runtime of the “TV Movie,” leaving roughly forty minutes to establish something for our protagonist and antagonist to actually do. By opening the Eye of Harmony, the Master has established a means of transferring the Doctor’s regenerations to himself (not unlike the Valeyard’s goal in “The Ultimate Foe,” which the Master, then still in his Ainley incarnation, would have known about); the minor side effect of the Earth being “sucked through” the Eye if it is not shuttered immediately provides the motivation for what follows.
To close the Eye, the Doctor must reset the “timing mechanism” in the TARDIS, for which he needs an atomic clock. Thankfully (?), the Earth has apparently decided to establish, um, “San Francisco Mean-Time” in conjunction with the advent of the year 2000, and that requires the most precise atomic clock ever designed. Grace, sigh, just so happens to be on the board of trustees for the institute operating the clock, which will be unveiled that very evening, quite fortuitous given that at midnight, the Eye will pull the planet “inside out”—as always, no matter the regeneration or body, the Master never leaves himself much time for his plans to come to fruition.
One freeway motorcycle/ambulance chase later—Jon Pertwee would have loved to do that stunt driving—the Doctor and Grace arrive at the clock’s unveiling, with the Master and Lee in pursuit. A bit of sleight of hand that would make the Seventh Doctor proud sees the Doctor purloin credentials to access the clock, where it’s a simple matter to pop the atomic chip out of the timepiece. The chip lets the Doctor close the Eye of Harmony, but it’s no good; there is no future past midnight for Earth or the solar system, as the Eye has been open too long. Which is good, because they still have twenty minutes of airtime to fill.
The Master now possesses several new skills, including the ability to spew psychoactive venom and cast paralyzing webs—which really would have made several of his prior ploys much simpler to execute—and having previously envenomed Grace, he exerts control over her as she and the Doctor are about to “jump-start” the TARDIS and return to a time just before the Eye was opened, Blinovich Limitation Effect, the longest-established time travel rule in all of Doctor Who, be damned. (And why not at this point?) Grace, Lee, and the Master hook the Doctor up to a set of very medieval restraints—what the Doctor was doing with them stashed in the TARDIS for the Master to repurpose doesn’t bear contemplation—so the Eye can suck the lives out of him, but it requires a human to open it once more. (Which, really? That’s something of an odd fail-safe for the Time Lords to have wired into their sole source of time-travel energy, especially when they have proven willing to destroy the planet humans come from to cover up their misdeeds.)
Lee realizes that the Master has been lying about the Doctor’s “evil” nature, so the Master snaps his neck and forces Grace to open the Eye instead. But once the Master has linked himself into the life-siphoning circuit, he is immobilized, allowing Grace to run to the TARDIS console and complete the “jump start”—which, as it turns out, is as simple as hot-wiring a Honda, just stick two bare wires together and try not to electrocute yourself. The TARDIS enters “temporal orbit” and interrupts the life transference process, enabling Grace to free the Doctor from his restraints. The ensuing fracas between the dying Master and the very annoyed Doctor sees the Master eventually flung into the maw of the open Eye.
Perhaps remembering when he pointedly refused to help the Master back on the fire planet Sarn, though probably not, the Doctor reaches out a hand; the Master refuses, and is sucked into the vortex to his (undoubtedly temporary) demise. Grace, too, dies during the fight between the Time Lords. But not to worry! This is American television now! Glowy orange stuff from the still-open Eye revitalizes both the plucky doctor and the now-noble teen. “What a sentimental old thing this TARDIS is,” the Doctor remarks. And how. Neither Grace nor Lee signs on to Team TARDIS as the story ends—leaving open the possibility of recasting the companions should a fickle audience not like them—and off the Doctor goes, though not without a goodbye kiss (from Grace, not Lee).
Both of the potential companions, Daphne Ashbrook and Yee Jee Tso, as Grace and Lee respectively, perform admirably, getting into that slightly-larger-than-life mode of acting required on Doctor Who—switching from bemused amazement at interdimensionality to blithe acceptance of moving around components on a device holding back the energies of a black hole with nary a second between. Too, they both seem to understand that they need to play types as much as specific characters; Lee serves as the self-centered yet good-hearted scamp (q.v. Adric, Turlough), while Grace occupies a nearly-co-equal companion role, needing to be strong enough to push back against the Doctor through either specialized knowledge or force of will (q.v. Romana, Ian, Barbara). Should the “TV Movie” have led to a new series, the producers could have done far worse than to keep them onboard—but without so much kissing, please. The Doctor should always be just slightly alien and apart.
Eric Roberts, though, just plain doesn’t work as the Master. It’s no patch on Roberts; he gamely carries out what the script asks, and likely the role was tailored in part to play to his strengths as a snarling, yet surprisingly effete, villain. There’s no charm in the character as written and presented here, no panache, which both Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley bring to the Master in spades. Had the character been a different antagonist, one new to the series, the sense of dissonance in his casting would be far lessened. (The same problem holds true for casting the Master into the 2005 BBC series—Michelle Gomez comes close to matching the tone of Delgado and Ainley, but even she falls just short. It’s a tough role to fill after two very iconic performances.)
And the Eighth Doctor? Paul McGann, like so many of his predecessors, deserves more time in the role. He’s immediately comfortable in the Doctor’s skin, balancing nicely the character’s innate sense of wonder and curiosity with the knowing tone of someone who has almost literally seen it all and done it all. Both in stature and in approach, McGann promises to be a delightful fit for the title character. But without a full body of stories, it’s so hard to really tell just what kind of a Doctor he would have been. On the evidence, though, it’s a grand shame he doesn’t have more tales to his tally.
The rather vain hope that the “TV Movie” would abide by, or at the very least only gently trod on, established continuity seems silly in retrospect. Though not a full-on reboot, the “TV Movie” and any subsequent series spurred by the pilot would nevertheless have always been an Americanized—or bastardized, to be less coy—version of the original series. Still, the extent to which the “TV Movie” throws out well-loved lore structures remains breathtaking. At what point does it stop being Doctor Who, despite the name on the tin? Certainly, writers have jettisoned inconvenient plot points throughout Doctor Who‘s twenty-six season run; Season Twenty-Three might as well not have happened at all, and the Doctor has often gained new talents (and lost old ones) right when required by the narrative. But this, this feels different. There’s no harmony to what is presented, and though the individual elements might delight, the “TV Movie” has the unfocused appeal of a plate thrown together from random tasty bits at a buffet. Filling, perhaps, even fun, but gourmet it is not. The “TV Movie” represents a deal whose terms are too steep, and it’s ultimately for the best that nothing comes of the backdoor pilot. We don’t want the Doctor back if this is the price.
(Details surrounding the mounting of the “TV Movie” sourced from Paul Kirkley’s Space Helmet for a Cow, Volume Two.)
(Previous Story: Survival)
Post 167 of the Doctor Who Project