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I first became aware of Doctor Who after watching the Ninth era episode “The Unquiet Dead” on the Syfy Channel (the channel which hates science fiction so much it calls itself Syfy), but it wasn’t until the Tenth era with David Tennant taking over the role as the Doctor that I started watching the show in earnest and truly became a fan of the character. Once Tennant gave way to Matt Smith (who gave way to Peter Capaldi) and the Stephen Moffat reign began in full however I lost interest, choosing instead to move the large backlog of episodes prior to the modern series. At least in those olden-times episodes I could forgive the ridiculous things that occurred as it being a product of its time, shoestring budgets and all. Even at it’s most campy the old Who never insulted my intelligence the way the way it does in the modern series, which repeatedly attempts to be grandiose and compelling and manages to fail on most of those occasions. In my opinion of course, since I haven’t bothered watching any of Capaldi’s episodes after the first and so have no idea as to the quality of the most recent Doctor Who series. I did hear they made the Master a woman though, and a ‘I’m crazy so I must be kooky’ one at that, which might’ve been interesting if it also didn’t seem on the surface like a poor attempt at shifting the status quo. The series already has a female villain, the Rani, that they could have brought back and built up instead, thereby leaving the Master open for another potential story arc, but instead they decide to genderswap an existing male character and call it progress. Of course it doesn’t really matter if it’s done well, but considering Moffat is the type of artist who sculpts with a jackhammer rather than a chisel, I have my doubts that he could ever write a female character that didn’t lose to a puddle in terms of depth, even if said female character used to have a penis (and was also a cat person).
But I digress.
If we want to to get technical, and I know you nerds love technology, Doctor Who has had three films in its 51 year history. The first two, Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks -- Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D. (1966), are adaptations of two stories from the original William Hartnell series of Who (The Daleks and The Dalek Invasion of Earth respectively) and featured Peter Cushing as an absent-minded human scientist named Doctor Who battling the xenocidal alien squids across time and space. While Cushing would have made for an excellent Doctor, the two 60’s films are their own property and hold no connection to the canon and continuity of the television show. The third film however, a made-for-TV movie simply titled Doctor Who, does in fact fit within the canon of the show. According to wikipedia, it was originally intended to serve as the pilot to an American Doctor Who series and was actually co-produced by Universal Studios, 20th Century Fox and the Fox TV channel, although no such series was ever made. It was also the only appearance of Paul McGann as the 8th iteration of the Doctor until recently, although he is consistently featured in the Doctor Who audio dramas by Big Finish. We may get into the Cushing Who films at some point in the future, but this time we’ll be checking to see if Who ‘96 is up to snuff. Does it serve as a worthy addition to the franchise, or did Geoffrey Sax take a demon dump in the T.A.R.D.I.S.? Only time will tell.
About 7 years after the conclusion of the show’s ‘Classic’ run, Doctor Who begins with a voiceover by Paul McGann, the 8th Doctor, telling us the backstory to this particular adventure. Some time after the events of “Survival”, the last episode of the Classic series, the Doctor (in his 7th incarnation, played by Sylvester McCoy) transports the Master (the Doctor’s archenemy as well as a fellow Time Lord) to Skaro (the original home of the Daleks) to stand trial for his numerous and horrible crimes. The verdict is death, and since the Master had already exhausted the 13 regenerations afforded him by vague unexplained rules, he gets liquidated with seemingly no issue. The Doctor, in accordance with the decision of the council of Skaro is then tasked with transporting the Master’s remains to the planet Gallifrey, homeworld of the Time Lords, presumably so the rest of the species can piss on his grave. This, as McGann explains, turns out to be a bad idea. #Spoilers
Sure enough, during the trip to Gallifrey, the Master (who is now a puddle of bad CGI goo, like an off brand T-1000) escapes from his hi-tech urn and sabotages the T.A.R.D.I.S., forcing the Doctor to make an emergency landing in San Francisco circa 1999, on the eve of the Willenium. The Doctor steps out of the T.A.R.D.I.S. and is promptly shot by Chinese thugs in pursuit of thief Chang Lee (who ends up being a somewhat important character but never a likable one), while the Master sets off to enact whatever evil plan he’s come up with this time around. Thanks to the barest minimal efforts of Chang Lee, the Doctor is taken to the hospital, where he comes under the care of Dr. Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook), who is called away from the opera and her apparently pissy boyfriend to attend to him. Despite her great surgical skill (which is told to us but never actually shown) and the pleas of the weakened alien, Dr. Holloway doesn’t take into account the Doctor’s two hearts (Time Lord physiology) and promptly fucks up the surgery. The Doctor, shining beacon of hope to a million worlds across the universe throughout all of time, dies on the operating table, with nary a friend to remember his life or his grand achievements.
Or so it would have been if the Doctor was some sort of pansy-ass human, as he eventually transforms from his old, mostly dead Sylvester McCoy body into the suave, debonair form of Paul McGann. The Master, in a similar-but-not-quite fashion, becomes a bad CGI goo snake and possesses the body of an EMT by the name of Bruce (Eric Roberts), thereby granting him new life of a sort. This feeble human body is not enough for The Master though: he wants the Doctor’s life, or his future lives to be specific, and if that means opening the magical plot device known as The Eye of Harmony (conveniently located within the T.A.R.D.I.S.) and destroying the Universe as we know it, so be it. It’s up to the new Doctor, along with Grace Holloway, to find the MacGuffin (in this case some sort of microchip in an atomic clock) so that they can fix the T.A.R.D.I.S., close The Eye of Harmony and stop the Master once and for all. A walk in the park for the guy who saves the Earth every week.
Now I’ve watched a decent amount of movies in my day, and from the movies I choose to write about you folks know I have a certain fondness for movies of an underground, cult, and low-budget nature, because I’m of the mind that a good movie is good regardless of the money thrown at it. So I hope my meaning comes through when I say that Doctor Who looks and feels cheap. The production values of today might be spoiling me as to what to expect from television, but I think that even if I were watching this back in the day I would have found it chintzy as well. The bad CGI snake has already been mentioned, and could probably be forgiven considering the state of computer graphics at the time, but the special effects in general barely seem like an upgrade from the original series, despite coming a decade and with a presumably larger budget than the show ended up with at that time as well. Combined with the cheezy flirtations with melodrama, the grossly out-of-place cartoonish sound effects placed during attempts at ‘comedy’, plus the issues with plot (nothing too outlandish for Doctor Who, but the surrounding elements are pretty bad) and characterization, it’s all mixes together to make a shit stew. It’s a made-for-TV movie that no one could mistake for anything other than a made-for-TV movie, and that’s not a compliment. When you’re dipping into Hallmark Channel territory, you’ve lost all hope.
One of the main parts of the Doctor Who formula is the addition of a companion who travels with the Doctor and acts as the audience surrogate/damsel in distress, usually a white female in her early 20s (#diversity). Occasionally these usually female companions work well opposite the Doctor and become interesting characters in their own right, like Sarah Jane Smith (who was popular enough to get a spin-off show, The Sarah Jane Adventures) or the Time Lady Romana, and sometimes they’re just a character for the Doctor to bounce dialog off of. Grace Holloway is of the latter, a character that isn’t absolutely horrible but sort of builds up enough bad karma to become unlikable. I’ll give Daphne Ashbrook the benefit of the doubt and say that it was the director and the script that allowed Grace Holloway to come of as such a vapid, wooden character that seemingly exists for the Doctor to get his proto-50 Shades freak on with. Grace Holloway is a character that has no problem making out with a guy that accosted her in a parking lot, a she repeatedly states is mentally ill mind you, less than 24 hours (hell, less than 5 hours) after breaking up with her boyfriend, whom she is never shown to have any feelings for whatsoever. Is this supposed to be a character the audience is supposed to identify with? Is it supposed to be one that we like, that we’re supposed to like interacting with the Doctor? Because she fulfills none of those criteria. In fact, for a franchise that’s lasted long enough to see the bad balance evenly with the good, I’m failing to recall a single secondary character in this film that I actually liked or cared about one way or another. Just morons and chucklefucks the whole way down.
Then, of course, there are the issues affecting Who canon itself. Making the Master into a bad CGI goo snake is pretty bad, and claiming that the Doctor is half-human seems like a pointless addition for the purposes of plot, but my personal biggest grievance with Doctor Who is the reason they give for the transition from the 7th and 8th Doctors. While I like every incarnation of the Doctor’s character in one way or another, I’ve always had a fondness for Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, and the fact that his whole death scene is “walk out of T.A.R.D.I.S., get shot by thugs which only appear in that one scene’ is both stupid and unfortunate at the same time. Not that all the Doctors have had grand exits (Sixth Doctor Colin Baker got it even worse) but both Colin and McCoy came in at a time when everything was against them in regards to production, bad administrators, budgetary issues, all in a period where the BBC was trying to phase out the show altogether. Despite all the crap they had to deal with, there are still moments in their respective series when the brilliance that makes Doctor Who great could shine through. They needed some way to get McCoy out and McGann in obviously, but he didn’t get to save the Earth one last time, or stop the Daleks/Cybermen/Zygons/whoever from committing evil space crimes on some innocent planet, he was shot by some extras and died a victim of malpractice. What a goddamn waste.
As for what I actually liked about the movie...there’s not much, to be honest. As I said before, I like every incarnation of the Doctor in some way, and when McGann isn’t bogged down by the movie’s shit he’s the quirky and enigmatic Time Lord that we’ve come to know and love. Eric Roberts as the Master isn’t all that bad either, even though he dresses like the Terminator and has stupid green eyes, he’s as ridiculously sinister as ever. I think I might prefer the T.A.R.D.I.S., which has gone from the white circled walls of yesteryear into a full-on Victorian mansion motif, complete with stained glass windows and wood-and-stone foundation. It’s a bit excessive but I’m a sucker for late 19th century decor, and it gives a far larger sense of space than the singular room shown in the classic and modern runs of Doctor Who. It makes the T.A.R.D.I.S. feel like the Doctor’s home, rather than just the vehicle he travels in, which is often implied to be the case but rarely shown. Dude’s been traveling the Universe for hundreds of years but I think this might be the only time he’s shown to have actual furniture.
Doctor Who is not for everyone, but 1996’s Doctor Who is not for anyone. I suppose I might recommend it to DW fans interested in seeing the first and only appearance of the 8th Doctor, but from what I’ve heard the audio dramas from Big Finish do a much better job of fleshing out McGann’s character and adventures, so honestly I’d say go with those instead. To everyone else I’d say that if you’re actually interested in getting into DW, this road leads to nothing but hate and confusion. You’re better off just trying out the modern series, or maybe a Tom Baker serial and seeing how you feel about it then, put this shit off until the last minute. Don’t worry, when it comes to Doctor Who, you’ll always have time to spare.
Always leave them wishing you had left sooner.
RESULT: NOT RECOMMENDED
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