Doctor Who - The Movie

Harmony Padme Hum

Doctor Who - The Movie
UK/USA Directed by Geoffrey Sax
UK Airdate: 27th May 1996
BBC 1 - Region B Blu Ray

Doctor Who was dead... and had been for several years. 

The Seventh Doctor as personified by Sylvester McCoy was the current Doctor when the show was cancelled (for pretty much no good reason by people in power at the BBC who never liked it to begin with... from what I remember). However, this attempt was made, in 1996, to start up the series again as an American/British co-production, shot in Canada. So, yeah, entitled Doctor Who - The Movie, this was a pilot film which, although it did well in the UK, bombed in the US and so was never commissioned as a series. And looking at it now, it’s still easy to see why.

Now, the last time I watched this, before revisiting it on this current Blu Ray incarnation, was on the broadcast date mentioned above. However, this was not the first time I had seen this and this is how I know that both the TV broadcast and this Blu Ray are heavily cut... or rather, missing some footage. I think I first saw this on a bootleg VHS tape somewhere around 3 or more months before the episode... sorry, movie... was broadcast and, to be honest, most people I personally know had already seen this in the same way before it hit our airwaves. Doctor Who, despite the stupid fate of the classic run of the TV show, was always a much loved British phenomenon and so the Brits were desperate to see this one as soon as they could. So, yeah, it was almost impossible not to run into someone at a jumble sale or in your office who had access to a copy.

And that’s how I know this was cut. Admittedly, it had even more excised from it on British TV but in this current version, after the Seventh Doctor, played once again by McCoy for the first ten minutes or so, lands on Earth... he stumbles into a gangland conflict and is shot. Now, on the broadcast version and in this one, he only takes one bullet, despite a later piece of dialogue revealing that he was hit three times. In the print which was doing the rounds on VHS bootlegs, that scene went on a little longer and he takes many more bullet hits. And that’s just one of the cuts I remember and it’s very frustrating now because, the bootlegs were obviously struck from an earlier, pre-cut print of the episode and so, some of the scenes just never existed in any broadcast or home video version to this day. Which is such a shame because I would love to see it again.

Looking at the show now... it really hasn’t held up well over the years but there’s still lots to like about it, as much as there is to hate. For instance, McCoy is excellent in his scenes, as is the new incarnation of The Doctor played by Paul McGann, who quickly manages to make the part his own, playing the role with exactly the kind of flourish and personality quirks that many previous actors had built into the role. He really shines in this and it’s a shame the pilot episode never took off. And another good thing about the pilot is the companions... both Yee Jee Tso to an extent, as a gang member with his heart in the right place but, especially Daphne Ashbrook as Dr. Grace Holloway, who is so good in this she almost steals the show from McGann... but not quite. The chemistry is good, though and they do make a lovely pair... quite literally as they share a kiss on more than one occasion, hinting at romantic entanglements if the show was to continue to run.

And the whole of the first half an hour or so... set in our near future on December 31st 1999 and dealing with the death of the seventh incarnation on the operating table as Puccini plays on the stereo (as Grace manages to kill him with a defibrillation machine because she doesn’t realise he has two hearts), his resurrection in the morgue intercut with and echoing footage from Universal’s 1931 movie Frankenstein, the escape of The Master as a kind of slime mould who invades an ambulance driver and takes him as a host body and The Doctor’s attempts to convince Grace of who he is and just what is going on... is really great. And then it all goes completely pear shaped when The Master somehow gets on board the TARDIS without a key, gets the gang member to open the Eye Of Harmony which powers the TARDIS and then uses it to threaten the existence of the Earth so he can steal The Doctor’s remaining lives for himself. It’s truly dreadful and makes not a lick of sense, with physics bending scenes such as The Doctor walking through a solid glass window because physics is compromised... but only when it’s convenient to service the next dramatic point of the story.

In fact the writing in this is pretty bad, for the most part... again, once the Eye of Harmony is open. It tries hard to appeal to an American audience and has scenes like a motorbike ambulance chase and even a fist fight in the TARDIS between The Doctor and The Master. It’s just not very well done. Eric Roberts plays The Master and he does his best but he just comes off as a cheap villain for the most part, rather than having the gravitas of the versions which came before him (something McGann seems to get right with his version of The Doctor). I don’t believe it’s Roberts’ fault, to be honest... it just wasn’t written any differently in the script. And the dead giveaway here that this was half financed with American money is that there are a fair few references to Tom Baker’s incarnation of The Doctor (the one best known Who actor to American fans of the show at the time, on the cable networks which showed it in the US) via little ‘object cameos’ such as a long, colourful scarf, his yoyo and a bag of Jelly Babies.

And alas, all that hard work to get it to appeal to a multi-national audience... those Fourth Doctor moments, the pop culture references and the nice, steam-punk look of the new Doctor’s costume... really didn’t matter because the second half of the movie is just, yeah, it’s mostly terrible with the producers seeming to want to turn it into an action packed US cop show or some such. It just doesn’t work and it becomes ‘bad Doctor Who’ pretty quickly. Which is a shame because, McGann and Ashbrook would have made a good crew for the TARDIS in any future adventures.

As it is, the ratings dive bombed in the US and this was never followed up. Paul McGann would eventually play The Doctor again in a series of Big Finish produced audio adventures and, most notably, in the short internet streamed prelude to the 50th Anniversary show The Day Of The Doctor, fittingly called The Night Of The Doctor (and included as an extra on both the 50th Anniversary special Blu Ray and on this Blu Ray too). That prelude showed how McGann’s Doctor regenerated into the retrofitted incarnation The War Doctor, created for The Day Of The Doctor, after Christopher Eccleston refused to return to the show and John Hurt was called in to fill the role instead.

And that’s me done on Doctor Who - The Movie... it’s kinda nice seeing it again (albeit in the official cut as opposed to the pre-release version) but it wears it’s mis-steps very firmly on its sleeve and, despite its warm reception in the UK at the time, it really isn’t a good version of the show, to be fair. I would certainly not recommend this one as a jumping on point for anyone interested in the modern show’s past but, you know, it’s currently available if you want it.

Doctor Who - The Power Of The Doctor

The
Regeneration
Game

Doctor Who
The Power Of The Doctor
Airdate: 23rd October 2022
BBC 1

Warning: All the spoilers.

Well this one was a bit hit and miss.

I’ll start off by saying I quite enjoyed the new Doctor Who special The Power Of The Doctor (more so than anyone else in the house, that’s for sure) and thought it was fast paced and fairly entertaining for a feature length episode of the series. I don’t think it was too hard to understand in terms of story... some people seem a bit stumped by it. I think a lot of the stuff which people are asking questions about at the moment are dead ends rather than loose ends in the plot... they weren’t supposed to be that clever and you should just take things like the ‘significance’ of the missing paintings (there isn’t much, it would seem) at face value.

Now, a friend of mine told me today, an hour or so before I watched it, that none of the dangling plot ends everything has been building up to get resolved or answered in any way. And I found that hard to believe but, it’s true. Following on from the overreaching story arc from a couple of seasons ago... we still don’t know much about the Timeless Child and why The Master went a bit mad and burned down Gallifrey, it seems to me. Hints and clues were pointing to the fact that maybe The Master was just a different life-cycle identity of The Doctor, memory blocked versions of each other but... I guess we’ll never know now. That part of the story seems to have been forgotten and, I suspect, be dropped completely from future stories (as many unanswered plot threads have been over the last ten or more years of the show).

Similarly... the pregnant mother reunited with the father of her child from Flux was somehow highlighted in a way that made me assume we’d find out the child inside her womb was The Doctor (and by extension, The Master, if my theory was correct) but, yeah, even though her other half is present in this adventure, it’s not even mentioned. So... no, none of it really tied up anything, it has to be said and, the emotional sub plot of the ‘burgeoning romance’ of The Doctor (played brilliantly again by Jodie Whittaker) and Yas (played wonderfully by Mandip Gill) wasn’t even tackled at all.

But the story, such as it was, kept moving a pace and never really got boring... so there’s that.

There were some nice, if corny shout back jokes such as the Master/Doctor forced regeneration incarnation wearing Sylvester McCoy’s jumper (still got mine), Peter Davison’s stick of celery, Tom Baker’s scarf and playing Patrick Troughton’s recorder. And... well... The Master Dalek Plan anyone? Long term watchers of the show like myself may have chuckled lightly at that one, I guess (yeah, okay, so maybe I did, briefly).

And there were some nice surprises in it too. I mean, we knew from the trailers that Janet Fielding was back as fourth/fifth Doctor companion Tegan Jovanka and seventh Doctor companion Sophie Aldred was back as Ace and... they did very nicely back in their respective roles, for sure. It was great seeing them again. But there were more surprises too. John Bishop’s companion Dan’s quick exit from the show early on was unexpected, for sure. And... not so much surprises... were the return of David Bradley as the first Doctor (reprising his recreated role of William Hartnell’s original take on the Timelord), Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor, Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor, Sylvester McCoy as the seventh Doctor and Paul McGann as the eighth Doctor. Now, I know why they were all showing their age... but that wouldn’t happen to the Doctor since he doesn’t age, he regenerates. I was surprised they didn’t CGI them as younger versions of themselves, since they were a kind of post-regeneration guardian/illusion (take your pick).

More interesting surprises were Bradley Walsh as Jaz co-companion Graham, Katy Manning as third Doctor companion Jo Grant, Bonnie Langford as sixth/seventh Doctor companion Melanie Bush and William Russell as first Doctor companion Ian Chesterton... although I was disappointed as to how brief those last three companion cameos were.

The one thing which didn’t surprise me, however, was who Jodie Whittaker regenerated into at the end of the episode. We’ve been hearing David Tennant would be returning to the role in some capacity and a few weeks ago I said to at least one friend that I didn’t think Jodie would be regenerating into the new Doctor just yet. Either she would perish off screen or possibly regenerate back into Tennant and, well, at least one of those two theories was proven right I guess. So, yeah, we have a very bemused Doctor at the end of the story, wondering just why she has changed back into the tenth Doctor (or eleventh if you rightly count The War Doctor as number ten). Even so, just because I was expecting it, I wasn’t disappointed by it... it was kind of what I was hoping for, to be honest.

Another big surprise is that the episode didn’t look dirt cheap. The effects work was quite good with some interesting shots and visual compositions. The acting from everyone was superb. Yeah, the script was weak and perhaps Sacha Dhawan’s version of The Master was a little over the top and irritating but, that’s fine, he’s the villain. He’s supposed to be irritating. But Jodie really shone in the role again and I was grateful that she went out in a blaze of glory, so to speak.

That being said, I did find one shot in the thing very strange. When Yas picks up The Doctor’s damaged body, we get a quick shot of the ground where she had fallen. Well... there seems to be nothing extraordinary about the ground and my guess is it was originally supposed to have shown some CGI blood there, to show audiences the seriousness of The Doctor’s wounds. Instead, perhaps it was deemed there would be no pool of blood in a family show and so the blood was either removed or not added. I’m just guessing here but, either way, it seems strange to have a shot covering a small area of ground for a second or two, for sure.

Another thing that niggled was...  if The Master inhabiting the body of The Doctor transplanted his personality and attitude into The Doctor, instead of triggering a new personality, then does that mean that the forced regeneration from the second to the third Doctor at the end of The War Games also meant The Doctor’s personality was erased or sublimated? I wish the writers, especially when they are the show runners, would be more careful when it comes to putting new angles on Timelord history, to be honest.

And that’s me pretty much done with The Power Of The Doctor. It’s not the best swan song for an incarnation of The Doctor but it’s not the worst either. Overall, I really hated the Chibnall era of Doctor Who (but loved Jodie Whittaker in the role) and, although the scripts were better, I didn’t have much love for the Moffat era either. I really enjoyed the Russel T. Davies era on the show but, now that he’s come back and hinted at what the future has in store for the character, I can’t say I’m looking forward to his return either, if I’m being honest. In fact, I suspect that he’s only been brought back to stabilise the show and I reckon if he hadn’t taken the job to come back and rescue it, the show might have been cancelled at the end of Chibnall’s run. Still, as ever, we shall see what we shall see when The Doctor returns for his sixtieth anniversary show in November of 2023. Until then, I shall be slowly working my way through those Blu Ray legacy sets so... plenty more classic Doctor Who reviews will be going up before then.