Doctor Who: The Movie Part 3: 1996 And All That

Last blog I looked at the 1960s Dalek movies on the grounds that there was a rumored Doctor Who movie with it's own actors and it's own separate continuity. It turned out I thought this was quite a good idea. Then Steven Moffat tweeted: "To clarify: any Doctor Who movie would be made by the BBC team, star the current TV Doctor and certainly NOT be a Hollywood reboot." So I figure we've got to look at the only official/cannon Doctor Who movie. The 1996 TV Movie.

The movie opens with a cool atmospheric graphic of an alien planet and a monologue voiceover from Paul McGann as The Doctor: "It was on the planet Skaro that my old enemy, The Master, was finally put on trial. They say he listened calmly as his list of evil crimes was read and sentence passed. And then he made his last, and I thought somewhat curious, request. He demanded that I, The Doctor, a rival Timelord, should take his remains back to our home planet, Gallifrey. It was a request they never should have granted." And then it hits us with a bloody fantastic arrangement of the theme tune.

But hang on...Was that Skaro, the planet of the Daleks? Or is it some other Skaro, like how there's a Manchester in America? No, the Dalek planet. Oh yes, here they are. I'm not familiar with these actors work myself, but I hear their collaboration with Alvin and the subsequent Squeakquel were very good, but I question whether getting the chipmunks to voice the Daleks was really appropriate. The opening scene did get one thing right though: "It was a request they never should have granted." They really shouldn't. Since when did the Daleks care about last requests and holding a fair trial? The Daleks aren't even a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kinda race, they're shoot-first-shoot-again-later guys. And what was the Doctor thinking? *ring ring* "HE-LLO DOC-TOR, CAN YOU COME TO SKA-RO, HOME-WORLD OF THE DA-LEKS AND PICK UP YOUR OTHER EN-EMY THE MAS-TER?" You'd be a mug to go!!

Cut to inside the TARDIS and it's the seventh Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. Awesome. I liked him. And he looks so much better without the question mark jumper John Nathan-Turner's gran knitted him. I do have to question though, given that this film was meant to bring new audiences to Doctor Who is it not confusing for new fans to be watching Sylvester McCoy but hearing a voice over from the bloke who played And I in the film Withnail And I? Still it's good to give him a proper regeneration and a decent send-off. At least it would be if they did that. Instead, the TARDIS materialises in the middle of a gang battle, the gangsters then unload their automatic guns into the TARDIS doors. The Doctor then steps out and is, predictably, shot a fair bit. We don't know what happened between Survival, the last story in 1989, and now but whatever it is, the seventh Doctor clearly went senile or suicidal. "Hmmm...sounds like someone just unleashed a load of bullets into the TARDIS door, I'll just stick my head out the door and find out who could be doing that." DEAD! "What's that? Pick the Master up from the Dalek homeworld? Well I've got 20 minutes, and I can't see this going wrong, why the heck not?" DEAD!

That said the Madame Butterfly death scene on the operatin - oh by the way, I'm ignoring that whole Snake-Master thing because that's just plain weird. The scene in the hospital with Madame Butterfly and the Doctor waking up mid-operation is really good. I love that scene. The contrast of the music and the quite horrendous operation is really good. The Frankenstienesque regeneration is pretty cool too, I'm not sure they needed to intercut it with the bloke from the morgue watching the film on a telly - the only purpose for that bit seems to be to prove how clever they're being. And the new Paul-McGann Doctor sits up and then there's this shot:

Maybe it's pinikity to complain about one shot, but Where is that light coming from? He's locked in a drawer! The thing that really frustrates me with this movie is how many little silly things happen that are so easily avoidable. It's very cool and stylish but it makes no sense at all - like Heroes or the world of banking.

Now, although I'm very critical towards this film here, I want to make clear that I will not say one word against Paul McGann as the Doctor. I think he is an excellent actor and a great Doctor. I would really love to have seen more of him and am glad that he's done so many series with Big Finish. Actually, I will say one word against him. (Falls to knees) "Who...am...I? Who am I? WHO! AM! I!?!" is an awfully done, over-the-top stupid bit. But then I really don't know how you ever make that line not-stupid.

If terribly stupid things float your boat though, then this scene is definitely for you. The hospital administrator has come to see Dr. Grace about this double exposure thing (The Doctor's two hearts which turned out not to be a double exposure) he is fuming and burns the X-Ray to leave behind no evidence of the hospitals incompetence because "I have to keep this hospital open." Not ridiculous in itself, but as this scene comes a minute after we've seen The Doctor walking though a room with smashed-in windows, a leaky roof, flowers all over the floor, beds thrown everywhere, creepy kids toys all over the place and a big pile of smashed up shards of mirror, why is he bothering about a damn double exposure. Surely even the NHS must realise that the room the Doctor's in is unacceptable. Even the hospital administrator in Diagnosis Murder is less laughable than this guy and he's the comic relief (that says as much about the jokes in Diagnosis Murder as it does about the drama in this).

The Doctor steals his new outfit from the hospital changing rooms. So did his third and eleventh incarnations. That's three times he's stolen clothes from a hospital! I'm starting to think this guy just calls himself a doctor to avoid the queues in Primark.

As I said, Paul McGann is fantastic in this movie, full marks on his performance as the Doctor. But what of the new Master? The Master not getting human stuff is funny ("HAHA You kill me man!!" "You want me to kill you?"/"You're sick!" "Thank you.") It's a little bit let down by the fact that if Russell T. Davies wrote an episode of Torchwood where Captain Jack had to team up with Dale Winton in order to battle this incarnation of the Master, The Master would be the camp one.

Those little Master-not-getting-human-things lines are very good though and fit the Master's character well. I also really like The Master: "Gengis Kahn?" Chang-Li: "What about him?" The Master: "That was him." And the writers capture the Doctor perfectly in these bits. The slightly crazy scenes where he follows Dr Grace to her car trying to remember where he knows her from are superb. "I was with Puccini before he died...it was sooo sad," is such a Doctor-ish thing to say, it's bang-on for the character. And this line...this line is wonderful, a contender for best bit of the film:

And yet the problems and stupidness persist. For example, why does Chang-Li believe that the Master is not evil and the Doctor is the bad-guy just because the Master tells him so? The master has evil green eyes, speaks with a scary snake-like voice when he gets annoyed which is a lot, possesses Grace, calls himself The Master, has stolen a body and "What's in it for me?" "You get to live." All classic good-guy traits. Why on Earth would you trust this guy?

I love this gothic TARDIS design. I think it's really awesome. But then we see the bats and the dead leaves. Like the light on the Doctor's eye these are kinda stylish, but who has bats on a spaceship? To be fair, the TARDIS is infinite and it wouldn't surprise me to find that the Doctor is the kinda madman who likes to keep bats in his spaceship because it looks cool, if that happens in series 7 I could live with that. But I don't think that's the reason they're included here. I think they're in this film because the director thinks they look cool, but it's not justified in the script or in logic at all.

I probably haven't picked quite so many nits as this since infant school - I was very scruffy, in hindsight bath time isn't so bad - but this is a kinda big-stupid one. The Eye of Harmony only opens for Chang-Li because it needs a human eye. So you're saying if an all-knowing Timelord needed to open the Eye of Harmony for some reason they couldn't, but if Rory dropped his pen into the hole and bent down to have a look he could accidentally destroy all of time? Why would the Timelord's ever design that? I know Americans like their sci-fi to have a man with pointy ears going on about how illogical it all is, but this is just nuts.

This is where the line "The Doctor is half human" comes up. I wont get involved in this debate too much. Personally, I don't think the line needed to be in there. I don't see what it brings to the story. We can connect with the Doctor perfectly well if he's an alien and I like him best when he's oddly not-human. That said, if Moffat or someone chose to confirm or deny the half-human claim one way or the other, I wouldn't care. It doesn't make as much impact on the show as some fans seem to think. Personally, I think, until someone says other, he's 100% Timelord coz that's cooler.

Who cares? We don't have time for this half-human debate now! The Eye is open and that means that the world will end at midnight. I'm not gonna complain about this too much, because I never could resist a ticking clock, but I don't understand why midnight. There's not any real reason for the world to end at 00:00 on 1/1/2000. All I can think of is either 1) The writers thought it would be cool to tap into that late 90s millennium excitement, but neglected to come up with a reason to explain it in the story OR 2) The Eye Of Harmony infects everything with the millennium bug, which with hindsight is far less scary or exciting than it sounded.

The Master correcting Dr. Grace's grammar is a lovely bit, very Masterlike. The Master then vomits all over Grace and his vomit burns her flesh. So the Doctor sprays the Master with a fire extinguisher at which point the Master squirms and starts speaking in tongues and shouting "get it off me" in a silly voice. I want to make this a semi-proper sensible review with a bit of wit to it, but there are times when WTF? is really all I can say, and this is one of them.

The next bits are genuinely very very good and I would like to list the things I like about them:

1. The Doctor threatening to kill himself rather than the cop. Funny and brilliant.
2. "This planets about to be destroyed and I'm stuck in a traffic jam."
3. The music for the chase (and to be fair, the film in general) is very good. You can tell it influenced Murray Gold who composes the music for the new series.
4. "Yes, we're a...team."
5. Aside from the Master voming on some more people and turning them into statues (because that makes sense) all the business at the party is decent and witty and entertaining.
6. *Sets off fire alarm* "Why did you do that?" "Liven the mood." These lines make you realise how good this film could be. They've got the Doctor written perfectly.

The Doctor and Dr. Grace get back to the TARDIS and a police motorbike with no brakes comes zooming round the corner drives into the TARDIS and then, after a comedy pause, drives back out. There is a prize for the first viewer to tell me the relevance of this. Why is it there?

Inside the TARDIS, Grace knocks the Doctor out, I guess because the Master has some power over her because he threw up on her, it's never made entirely clear but the Master's vom seems to have odd powers. The Doctor is strapped to a table and the Master enters in full Timelord robes.
The Master: "I always like to dresssss for the occasion." Very Masterlike, good characterisation, but very camp.
The Doctor: "I'm glad you're aware of the gravity of the situation." Good Timelord banter.

Things get worse when the Master forces Grace to look into the Eye of Harmony and she goes blind. Even though when Chang-Li did it earlier he was fine. Bloody hell! This film doesn't even follow it's own continuity let alone that of the series as a whole!

Now here I have a really big question, because it's kinda crucial to everything. I've seen this film loads of times now, because there's a lot to really like about it, but for the life of me, I haven't a clue how they save the day. Can anyone explain what happens at the end? I know Grace rewires the console in some way (because you know, everything about her suggests she's an expert in Gallifreyan engineering, I'm sure she knows how to rewire a TARDIS, who doesn't? (hope the sarcasm comes over there)).

With the universe saved (probably, I don't have a clue what's going on at this stage), Grace helps the Doctor escape to fight the Master. The Master kills Grace and Chang-Li in unneccessarily graphic and brutal ways - I don't mind that, bit horrible for the kiddies but as a grown-up I liked it. Then the Doctor and The Master fight and trade cutting insults ("You want dominion over the living and yet all you do is kill" is a favourite line. "Life is wasted on the living" makes me laugh everytime.) and I LOVE that the Doctor tries to save the Master, this is the most right thing about their whole relationship in this film. Perfect.

So universe saved (somehow), Master defeated, the TARDIS decides to bring back Grace and Li, because it's a "sentimental old thing." Is that a bit of a cop out? To be fair, it did the same for Captain Jack in The Parting Of The Ways but why just those three companions? Of all the people the Doctor has known and lost, why only those? I guess the TARDIS must have been as fed up with Adric travelling inside it as we viewers were.

Final word: Lot's to enjoy, but lots of wasted potential, silly mistakes that just needn't have been made, and a baffling ending. Great theme tune and fantastic Doctor though.

PS. 2 mins, 38 seconds into this clip. The room that the hospital administrator isn't worried will get them closed down: