The TV Movie

Dear Gary—

Doctor Who the TV Movie is just bad. There’s no getting around it. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. The trouble with Doctor Who the TV Movie is that it is insincere in its sincerity. It plays lip service homage to Doctor Who all the while operating under the misguided attempt to pander to ratings and the lowest common denominator audience. As a result it is bad. Not just bad, it is awful.

However it does not outrage me as it did back in 1996 when it aired for the first time. Back then the one thing that I took away from it and that left a sour taste was the romance. The Doctor, I raved, does not get intimate with his companions.

However, recent viewings reveal that the ‘romance’ is not as blatant as I remembered; in fact it is rather sweet, at least on the Doctor’s part. I’m not so sure about Grace, though. And that is one of the things making this bad. Rather than taking time to allow the audience to get to know her, Grace is handed to us with a cutout character. Like the single perfect tear rolling down her cheek when she lowers her opera glasses. Come on. That whole opening opera sequence with Grace decked out in her finest ball gown is contrivance at its most convenient. It is a shortcut way to present this fairy princess heroine to us on a silver platter. But I can only wonder why she would get all made up and spend money (or let her boyfriend spend money) on prime seats for Madame Butterfly, which she obviously passionately wants to see, when she is on call at the hospital. I guess there were no pre-show announcements back then about turning off all electronic devices.

What about that long-suffering boyfriend Brian? He apparently is a dull fellow and hardly worthy of our saintly Dr. Grace Holloway. It must be so because when she returns home to find him gone the only thing she is upset about is that he took the sofa. (And really, he took the sofa but left behind his shoes?) He has threatened to leave in the past, according to the derisive comments of Grace’s co-workers, so I guess this is no surprise to her; but she has been content to live with him for what must have been quite some time for them to have been so settled in their home together. What was she staying with him for? His sofa?

Then, mere hours after her live-in boyfriend has left her, and only hours after meeting a man (the Doctor) who breaks into her house and who frightens her and who she thinks is mad, she suddenly, in mid motorcycle ride, decides that this is the man of her dreams. I have serious doubts about this woman’s depth of feeling.

I do like the actress, and she does the best she can with what she is handed, but what she is handed is a shallow script that tells us she is a wonderful person but in doing so showcases some questionable personality traits.

Worse than this, though, is the sanitized violence of the production, personified by Chang Lee. Chang Lee is a member of a vicious street gang and involved in a fierce gunfight to begin our tale; yet Chang Lee comes across as a clean-cut boy next door. We are supposed to care about this young thug; we are supposed to believe that this gangbanger has a good heart and is simply duped by the Master.  Doctor Who the TV Movie wants to be hardened and sentimental at the same time. The sugar coated realism doesn’t work.

Then there is the Master. The Master in Doctor Who the TV Movie is the reverse of the aforementioned candy land approach. Classic Who Master always was a bit sugar coated, and arguably this is a fault of Classic Who. The TV Movie presents us with a truly evil villain and calls him the Master, and while the Master always was evil and should have been more evil than he came across, this unredeemable and relentless heavy of the Movie is over the top bad and I can’t quite believe he is the Master. The Master by any other name . . . but then again, the name alone does not make the man.

Next we come to the plot. Classic Who has its share of clunker scripts with gaping holes, but there are usually other elements that make up for this. I can get over the speedy Doctor/Grace connection (which had been my main objection upon first viewing) because of the actors, but I can’t get past the bad narrative.  There is just nothing about it that entertains or enlightens or elevates.

The Master wants to take over the Doctor’s body. Ok, that’s sufficiently plausible. But now, how exactly has he survived his execution? And if he has this ability for his spirit to take on this shimmery snake form and possess other beings, why hasn’t he used this power before? Well, he did take over Tremas’ body in The Keeper of Traken, that’s true, albeit without the shimmery snake intermediary. But then why didn’t he just enter the Doctor’s body straight away and be done with it? And what’s with the whole Eye of Harmony, heart of the TARDIS, need for the human retina, metal head contraption, atomic clock, midnight on New Year’s Eve nonsense? Midnight—really? Midnight on the eve of the year 2,000? Really? Talk about contrivance at its most convenient. And I still don’t know how that muddle of a miraculous saving Grace works in the end, or how or why the two dead bodies of Grace and Chang Lee are resurrected.

For any of that inane jumble to work, the characters of the Master and Chang Lee have to work, and they just don’t.  The despicable Master with his glowing green eyes is not going to fool anyone as the wronged victim; except that is for the delinquent Chang, who despite being pursued by gunmen takes the time to sit in a public waiting room for news of the total stranger he accompanied to the hospital just on the off chance he could steal his meager personal effects. The Master tells Chang that the Doctor is evil; that the TARDIS and the Doctor’s body are stolen from him, the Master. And the kid believes the obviously possessed guy who has basically told him ‘obey me or die’ just because. Just because he’s stupid. Just because he’s naïve. Just because the script instructs him. Just because. But you see we have to believe that Chang believes the Master (and isn’t simply being mercenary based on the bags of gold the Master has promised him) because the street punk with criminal intent is really a kid with a heart of gold who wants to do the right thing. Yeah, right.

But you know, Gary, I could even forgive this. And I can forgive the whole TARDIS key thing—the key works for Chang; the Doctor has a spare in a cubby above the P; somehow the Master got into the TARDIS without one (or maybe he found the spare). What I find that I cannot and will not tolerate, however, is the claim that the Doctor is half human. This is the single most idiotic thing ever done in Doctor Who and deserves to be ignored.

It is a shame, really, because Paul McGann as the Doctor is good and this leads me to the few things about Doctor Who the TV Movie that are good; and they all have to do with the Doctor. To begin, Sylvester McCoy in his brief cameo is a breath of fresh air in this stinker. I can believe that his Doctor has made over the control room into the serene library feel that it now has, and his sitting down to a cup of tea and a good read is understandable and long overdue. Then we get the regeneration. Sylvester McCoy was short changed when he first regenerated into himself; he is well compensated as he regenerates out of himself. Although I find serious fault with the malpractice of the hospital and its staff, the scene of the Doctor on the operating table is well played for tension with the audience aware of the two hearts and non human patient time bombs that the hospital personnel are unconscionably oblivious to. The death and subsequent dramatic regeneration are equally effective (although I cringe a bit at the Frankenstein cuts and the resurrected Nazarene comparisons).

In my original rankings I placed Colin Baker dead last with Paul McGann slightly above him. These rankings were based on recollections of vague impressions from infrequent viewings. After considered reflection and upon a more studied screening, I retain these rankings through no fault of the actors. Both suffer from their productions. I came to appreciate Colin Baker’s Doctor, but he was given sufficient time to rise above and he couldn’t quite break free from the confines of the mostly mediocre material. Paul McGann, on the other hand, did not have any time to rise above the dreadful material he was handed. In the little air time he was afforded, however, he is charming. While I don’t necessarily feel any need for more Colin Baker, I would dearly love a chance to get more of McGann’s interpretation.

Parenthetically, Gary, I have recently discovered the McGann mini-episode The Night of the Doctor, and I am aware of various books and audio adventures involving all of the Doctors. I haven’t yet decided when I have finished on my slow path of the official Doctor Who series if I will venture on into these various mediums.

In the meantime I journey on, Gary, leaving behind this bridge between the Classic and the New. It is a brief and regrettable look at the Eighth Doctor who deserved better.