Today is also the fifty-sixth anniversary of the premiere of Doctor Who, the BBC's long-running adventure series. It's been a part of the Museum ever since the beginning--in fact, Doctor Who: The Movie was one of the first entries from back when I thought I wouldn't have to put too much work into it. Seven years does indeed make all the difference, because it's time to take a closer look at the thing...with an eye toward the show's earliest and more recent days. (It will become more apparent as you read on.)
DOCTOR WHO: THE TV MOVIE
This was where my whole obsession with Doctor Who began. In a way, it was fate, as I'd already been obsessed with Bill and Ted, Back to the Future, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and had become at least somewhat aware of Who through the myriad video catalogs which came to our home. Critic's Choice, Signals...there were dozens more in those pre-Internet days, most of which had a fully-stocked Doctor Who section.
May 14th, 1996 rolled around, and...I can't remember anything except being terrified at the Master's gooey snake-form. To a nine-year-old with an overactive imagination and a penchant for wandering into the wrong part of a video store---the horror section---that was pretty eerie. (In hindsight, that qualifies as my first "behind-the-sofa" moment!)
It drifted away, nearly forgotten, until that summer, when our PBS affiliate WTTW ran ten weeks of the old series, the last three of which encompassed the show's final episodes from 1989. I was hooked right from the get-go and have never looked back.
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Doctor Who: The Movie came out on Region 1 DVD in 2010, and I got it for Christmas in 2011. These were the days of getting stuff through Columbia House, before I went region-free.
I popped it in, and, after the initial nostalgia wore off, it struck me that the story made no sense whatsoever. I'm gritting my teeth just writing the synopsis:
The Doctor's arch-nemesis, the Master, has been executed by the Doctor's even older arch-nemeses, the Daleks, who summon the Doctor to collect his foe's remains and take them back to his home planet, which he does. (Three questions: Why, why, and why?) The Master, now a puddle of...something, gets out of his box and slithers over to the main console with plans to hijack the time machine, prompting the good doctor to land in 1999Vancouver San Francisco, whereupon a gang of Chinese ne'er-do-wells pop several caps into him....and he dies on the operating table after being exposed to America's healthcare system, only to renew himself down in the morgue.
Meanwhile, the slippery Master possesses a walking plot-device who bears a striking resemblance to character actor and Julia's brother, Eric Roberts. Now in his new body, he plans to turn the time machine into a doomsday device that will end the world on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium, so that he can gain a brand-new life cycle and continue on in his evil ways. He just about succeeds, but the Doctor somehow manages to rewind time by programming the TARDIS like a VCR, thereby undoing the Master's nasty plan.
...Doesn't all that just make you want to reach for a vodka and tonic? I needed three after writing it.
For the longest time between 1996 and 2011, though, the TVM was "the one that got away." I was aware of it in some form, and remembered that it got the journey started, but the substance of it was lost to memory. Fortunately, Santa happened to leave this under the tree in 2001:
Since no video was available stateside, this volume served to mark the beginning of the journey.
Doctor Who ended with the third part of "Survival," broadcast on December 6th, 1989, ending a nearly thirty-year run on BBC.
That said, the property was far from dead and buried: It lived on through Doctor Who Magazine, Virgin Publishing's The New and The Missing Adventures, a steady stream of home-video releases, and the dreams and ambitions of a few big-name fans intent on reviving the series in a big way, a few of which were described in this book. Certainly, the show had ended, but there were several attempts to produce either a new series or a big-budget motion picture, none of which really went anywhere and none of which are really pertinent to this entry.
Except for one of the drafts. Remember how I said that the Doctor returns "on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium"? In the movie proper, the event is nothing more than a means for the Doctor to pilfer a processor chip from a new beryllium-powered clock that's being used to mark the occasion...and perhaps to add some apocalyptic "race against time" flair to a meandering script that's chock-full of little tidbits and Easter eggs for the fans but without much tension or even drive.
The millennium served a purpose in an earlier draft. It turns out that Matthew Jacobs, the screenwriter, wrote a draft which featured
All the same, no amount of pseudo-religious waffle could shore up the structural problem at the core of the production: It uses the mythology of Doctor Who, but clumsily. All that stuff at the beginning with the Daleks putting the Master on trial? Use that to introduce the Master on Earth, taking lives so that he might extend his own, viscerally and nastily. The Doctor gets to Earth when his ship picks up the news broadcasts...or UNIT gives him a call to say "We've been called to San Francisco, there's something going on that might interest you, can you check it out?" The Master 'kills' the Seventh Doctor as the Act One twist; the Act Two twist is his resurrection as the Eighth Doctor. Perhaps the Master can also fulfill the "monster" requirement that the production badly needed--have him badly deformed from some cosmic radiation or something, and he wants the Doctor's lives to restore himself to the Roger Delgado/Anthony Ainley look.
Yes, the manhunt genre is worn so thin as to have holes in it, but adding the Doctor Who elements elevates the story. (Having thought about it, the Master's gimmick might have put it too close to that X-Files episode about the serial killer who can extrude himself into tight spaces. Never mind that The X-Files is largely a remake of the Third Doctor's first season, with the FBI standing in for UNIT and Scully standing in for Liz Shaw.)
The 90s revival of Doctor Who is, far from being a missed opportunity, a dodged bullet. It took about nine years and several more false starts before Doctor Who made a proper return in 2005.
Compare the openings of the TV Movie and the two first episodes, "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose."
The show starts in space, with a red planet helpfully subtitled "Skaro." Paul McGann intones that the Master, his old enemy, is the prisoner of the (unseen) Daleks, on trial for...some reason, and we get an orchestral rendition of the opening titles, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, signifying that this is a BIG, BIG, BIG THING. The logo and main credits zoom toward us amid asteroids and the fierce, Northern Lights-colored winds of the time vortex.
Following the titles, we pan across the gorgeous, Jules Verne-inspired TARDIS interior as the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) locks an ornate box. Satisfied, he goes off, puts on a record, and sits down to relax. Meanwhile, the watery blob that was inside the box breaks free and sabotages the main console.
Right off the bat, I can give you two big problems: The TVM takes its audience for granted. You have to know that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside; you have to know what the Doctor, the Master, and the Daleks are. That, and There. Is. Narration. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Here, it doesn't, because the main plot for the story does not work.
The series hits the ground running with whirling, psychedelic titles and an eerie theme tune, the likes of which audiences had neither seen nor heard before or since. We fade into a creepy, dilapidated junkyard at night. Broken dolls, an old baby-carriage, and other detritus frames a police box in a forbidding tableau. Once a familiar sight on British street corners, by 1963 they were superseded by two-way radio, so it might find a home in a junkyard, but this one seems alive, humming with some unknown power.
The rest of the episode consists of two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, commiserating over a student named Susan Foreman. By turns genius and fool, she complains about having to solve a three-dimensional equation without variables for the fourth and fifth dimensions, yet has a shaky grasp on world history.
Her home address is the junkyard we saw at the beginning. They follow her there, and find that she's living in that police box with an old man who calls himself her grandfather. (Yes, it is played as creepy as it sounds, though in an understated way. It's almost a relief that the opening title sequence has clued us in that things are not going to go as we would expect them to.) When Ian shoves the old man aside and barges through the doors, he and Barbara fall into Wonderland: that battered old police box contains the enormous, gleaming white control room of a spaceship. The ship takes off, filling the screen with the whirling patterns we saw in the opening titles. Finally, the camera pans across a blasted landscape where the box now stands, as a mysterious shadow looms over it. Those last few seconds contain the secret to the show's longevity: It can go anywhere, do anything, tell every kind of story imaginable.
The opening titles show the TARDIS police box racing through the vortex, accompanied by that original theme tune, but augmented with string and brass. We fade to the vastness of space, with Planet Earth in the distance. We hang on Earth for a moment, and freefall faster and faster. We see the cloud layer, followed by Europe, the United Kingdom, and London...and we settle on a digital alarm clock, one second before it starts blaring. In a high-speed montage, we follow young Rose Tyler through her life: doing her hair, having breakfast, saying goodbye to Mom, and checking in at Henrik's Department Store, scarcely considering that her life will change forever tonight.
Of course, with a then forty-plus year-old history, the revival of Doctor Who had to acknowledge the past in some way, and "Rose" did so with the Nestene Consciousness, an entity which could bring plastics to life--in this case, the department store's display mannequins, which are colloquially known as "Autons2."
As Who historian Shannon Sullivan writes in her website, "A Brief History of Time (Travel)", "The Autons appealed to [showrunner Russell T.] Davies...because their nature would allow Rose to spend much of the episode dubious of the alien origins of the threat." Indeed, her first instinct in the episode is to assume that her coworkers have dressed up as mannequins and are scaring her for a laugh. That's what "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose" get, but which the TVM does not: the gradual bridge from mundane reality into the grand fantasy of the Doctor's world.
The best thing about "Rose," though, is that it suddenly and unceremoniously introduces the Doctor: He grabs Rose's forearm and whispers, "Run!" No big introduction, no fanfare. As it should be--this is not "DOCTOR WHO: THE MOVIE," but "Rose," an Earthly Child.
The other best thing about Rose is how it introduces the secret of the TARDIS. Rose runs into the police box with the Doctor. We get only a closeup on her face as her eyes bug out in shock, and she bolts out of the box, back toward the advancing peril, and paces around its four sides like a skittish cat with an unfamiliar toy--"WHAT IS THIS THING?"
Within twenty-five of the forty-five minutes, we grasp all the basics of the show--humans, monsters, the Doctor, and the TARDIS. The TVM's problem was its self-awareness, presenting itself as the grand return of a legendary series, packed with fifteen-odd years' worth of characters and mythology3. "Rose," by contrast, understands that its biggest audience will be brand-new, and it keeps the fan-service to a bare minimum.
====================================================================
* Doctor Who: Regeneration, Philip Segal and Gary Russell, 2000, HarperCollins Publishing.
* http://www.shannonsullivan.com/doctorwho/serials/2005a.html
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1 Interestingly, he ends up doing almost that in Series Three's finale, "The Last of the Time Lords," from 2007, by hijacking the Doctor's TARDIS and converting it into a "Paradox Machine," whereupon he crowns himself ruler of the planet. John Simm's first Master gets a lot of flak, but give the guy props--he gets stuff done. Also, the "Master Race" idea was implemented in the two-part "The End of Time," wherein he futzes with a machine to turn everyone on Earth into copies of himself.
2 The name "Auton" comes from "Auto Plastics," the company which made the Nestene-infused goods in "Spearhead from Space." "Rose" treats this as the artifact it is, and never once refers to them by name, instead going for "living plastic."
3 I say "fifteen-odd years" because everything we take for granted--Time Lords, Gallifrey, all that--only started in the Jon Pertwee years and took hold with the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras.
It drifted away, nearly forgotten, until that summer, when our PBS affiliate WTTW ran ten weeks of the old series, the last three of which encompassed the show's final episodes from 1989. I was hooked right from the get-go and have never looked back.
=================================================================
Doctor Who: The Movie came out on Region 1 DVD in 2010, and I got it for Christmas in 2011. These were the days of getting stuff through Columbia House, before I went region-free.
I popped it in, and, after the initial nostalgia wore off, it struck me that the story made no sense whatsoever. I'm gritting my teeth just writing the synopsis:
The Doctor's arch-nemesis, the Master, has been executed by the Doctor's even older arch-nemeses, the Daleks, who summon the Doctor to collect his foe's remains and take them back to his home planet, which he does. (Three questions: Why, why, and why?) The Master, now a puddle of...something, gets out of his box and slithers over to the main console with plans to hijack the time machine, prompting the good doctor to land in 1999
Meanwhile, the slippery Master possesses a walking plot-device who bears a striking resemblance to character actor and Julia's brother, Eric Roberts. Now in his new body, he plans to turn the time machine into a doomsday device that will end the world on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium, so that he can gain a brand-new life cycle and continue on in his evil ways. He just about succeeds, but the Doctor somehow manages to rewind time by programming the TARDIS like a VCR, thereby undoing the Master's nasty plan.
...Doesn't all that just make you want to reach for a vodka and tonic? I needed three after writing it.
For the longest time between 1996 and 2011, though, the TVM was "the one that got away." I was aware of it in some form, and remembered that it got the journey started, but the substance of it was lost to memory. Fortunately, Santa happened to leave this under the tree in 2001:
 |
| The first page, with 90% of the main cast's autographs. (I'll consider it complete once I get Beryllium Clock Guy and at least one of the Morgue Workers.) |
Doctor Who ended with the third part of "Survival," broadcast on December 6th, 1989, ending a nearly thirty-year run on BBC.
That said, the property was far from dead and buried: It lived on through Doctor Who Magazine, Virgin Publishing's The New and The Missing Adventures, a steady stream of home-video releases, and the dreams and ambitions of a few big-name fans intent on reviving the series in a big way, a few of which were described in this book. Certainly, the show had ended, but there were several attempts to produce either a new series or a big-budget motion picture, none of which really went anywhere and none of which are really pertinent to this entry.
Except for one of the drafts. Remember how I said that the Doctor returns "on New Year's Eve, just before the millennium"? In the movie proper, the event is nothing more than a means for the Doctor to pilfer a processor chip from a new beryllium-powered clock that's being used to mark the occasion...and perhaps to add some apocalyptic "race against time" flair to a meandering script that's chock-full of little tidbits and Easter eggs for the fans but without much tension or even drive.
The millennium served a purpose in an earlier draft. It turns out that Matthew Jacobs, the screenwriter, wrote a draft which featured
"the Master harnessing the power of...the Millennium Star, which is passing overhead on New Year's Eve 1999. With this, he will severely damaged Earth [sic] and appoint himself as a false Messiah and rule. [It] was described as: an intergalactic roving force field that gives out a massive light so bright it can be seen like a glowing star moving through both the day and night sky...Every thousand years this shining force field loops around Earth for a few days and moves on. 2000 years ago the three wise men followed its path to discover the Christ child. 1,000 years ago it marked the start of the Crusades. And now it's due back...The Master is bringing the TARDIS and the Doctor to Earth to meet it. Here, he will open the Eye of Harmony, creating another force field as a beacon.
The TARDIS' presence on Earth at the exact point the Millennium Star approaches will act as a magnet to keep the star in orbit long enough for the Master to exact his plan. The two will be drawn together...As they come closer and closer all the laws of relativity will be progressively broken until finally the entire thrust of the Universe's existence will be thrown into reverse, the slate will be cleaned, and the Master will rule...he needs the Doctor's humanity to carry out his plan and act as an Adam and Eve to sire a master race over which he will rule." (Regeneration 109)Wow. Now that would have been some pretty delicious characterization for the Master. What a pity the Millennium Star premise got neutered until it became "The Master wants to get the Doctor's remaining lives, and..." so on1.
All the same, no amount of pseudo-religious waffle could shore up the structural problem at the core of the production: It uses the mythology of Doctor Who, but clumsily. All that stuff at the beginning with the Daleks putting the Master on trial? Use that to introduce the Master on Earth, taking lives so that he might extend his own, viscerally and nastily. The Doctor gets to Earth when his ship picks up the news broadcasts...or UNIT gives him a call to say "We've been called to San Francisco, there's something going on that might interest you, can you check it out?" The Master 'kills' the Seventh Doctor as the Act One twist; the Act Two twist is his resurrection as the Eighth Doctor. Perhaps the Master can also fulfill the "monster" requirement that the production badly needed--have him badly deformed from some cosmic radiation or something, and he wants the Doctor's lives to restore himself to the Roger Delgado/Anthony Ainley look.
Yes, the manhunt genre is worn so thin as to have holes in it, but adding the Doctor Who elements elevates the story. (Having thought about it, the Master's gimmick might have put it too close to that X-Files episode about the serial killer who can extrude himself into tight spaces. Never mind that The X-Files is largely a remake of the Third Doctor's first season, with the FBI standing in for UNIT and Scully standing in for Liz Shaw.)
The 90s revival of Doctor Who is, far from being a missed opportunity, a dodged bullet. It took about nine years and several more false starts before Doctor Who made a proper return in 2005.
Compare the openings of the TV Movie and the two first episodes, "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose."
1996
The show starts in space, with a red planet helpfully subtitled "Skaro." Paul McGann intones that the Master, his old enemy, is the prisoner of the (unseen) Daleks, on trial for...some reason, and we get an orchestral rendition of the opening titles, like Star Trek: The Next Generation, signifying that this is a BIG, BIG, BIG THING. The logo and main credits zoom toward us amid asteroids and the fierce, Northern Lights-colored winds of the time vortex.
Following the titles, we pan across the gorgeous, Jules Verne-inspired TARDIS interior as the Seventh Doctor (Sylvester McCoy) locks an ornate box. Satisfied, he goes off, puts on a record, and sits down to relax. Meanwhile, the watery blob that was inside the box breaks free and sabotages the main console.
Right off the bat, I can give you two big problems: The TVM takes its audience for granted. You have to know that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside; you have to know what the Doctor, the Master, and the Daleks are. That, and There. Is. Narration. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Here, it doesn't, because the main plot for the story does not work.
1963
The series hits the ground running with whirling, psychedelic titles and an eerie theme tune, the likes of which audiences had neither seen nor heard before or since. We fade into a creepy, dilapidated junkyard at night. Broken dolls, an old baby-carriage, and other detritus frames a police box in a forbidding tableau. Once a familiar sight on British street corners, by 1963 they were superseded by two-way radio, so it might find a home in a junkyard, but this one seems alive, humming with some unknown power.
The rest of the episode consists of two teachers, Ian Chesterton and Barbara Wright, commiserating over a student named Susan Foreman. By turns genius and fool, she complains about having to solve a three-dimensional equation without variables for the fourth and fifth dimensions, yet has a shaky grasp on world history.
Her home address is the junkyard we saw at the beginning. They follow her there, and find that she's living in that police box with an old man who calls himself her grandfather. (Yes, it is played as creepy as it sounds, though in an understated way. It's almost a relief that the opening title sequence has clued us in that things are not going to go as we would expect them to.) When Ian shoves the old man aside and barges through the doors, he and Barbara fall into Wonderland: that battered old police box contains the enormous, gleaming white control room of a spaceship. The ship takes off, filling the screen with the whirling patterns we saw in the opening titles. Finally, the camera pans across a blasted landscape where the box now stands, as a mysterious shadow looms over it. Those last few seconds contain the secret to the show's longevity: It can go anywhere, do anything, tell every kind of story imaginable.
2005
The opening titles show the TARDIS police box racing through the vortex, accompanied by that original theme tune, but augmented with string and brass. We fade to the vastness of space, with Planet Earth in the distance. We hang on Earth for a moment, and freefall faster and faster. We see the cloud layer, followed by Europe, the United Kingdom, and London...and we settle on a digital alarm clock, one second before it starts blaring. In a high-speed montage, we follow young Rose Tyler through her life: doing her hair, having breakfast, saying goodbye to Mom, and checking in at Henrik's Department Store, scarcely considering that her life will change forever tonight.
Of course, with a then forty-plus year-old history, the revival of Doctor Who had to acknowledge the past in some way, and "Rose" did so with the Nestene Consciousness, an entity which could bring plastics to life--in this case, the department store's display mannequins, which are colloquially known as "Autons2."
As Who historian Shannon Sullivan writes in her website, "A Brief History of Time (Travel)", "The Autons appealed to [showrunner Russell T.] Davies...because their nature would allow Rose to spend much of the episode dubious of the alien origins of the threat." Indeed, her first instinct in the episode is to assume that her coworkers have dressed up as mannequins and are scaring her for a laugh. That's what "An Unearthly Child" and "Rose" get, but which the TVM does not: the gradual bridge from mundane reality into the grand fantasy of the Doctor's world.
The best thing about "Rose," though, is that it suddenly and unceremoniously introduces the Doctor: He grabs Rose's forearm and whispers, "Run!" No big introduction, no fanfare. As it should be--this is not "DOCTOR WHO: THE MOVIE," but "Rose," an Earthly Child.
The other best thing about Rose is how it introduces the secret of the TARDIS. Rose runs into the police box with the Doctor. We get only a closeup on her face as her eyes bug out in shock, and she bolts out of the box, back toward the advancing peril, and paces around its four sides like a skittish cat with an unfamiliar toy--"WHAT IS THIS THING?"
Within twenty-five of the forty-five minutes, we grasp all the basics of the show--humans, monsters, the Doctor, and the TARDIS. The TVM's problem was its self-awareness, presenting itself as the grand return of a legendary series, packed with fifteen-odd years' worth of characters and mythology3. "Rose," by contrast, understands that its biggest audience will be brand-new, and it keeps the fan-service to a bare minimum.
====================================================================
* Doctor Who: Regeneration, Philip Segal and Gary Russell, 2000, HarperCollins Publishing.
* http://www.shannonsullivan.com/doctorwho/serials/2005a.html
====================================================================
1 Interestingly, he ends up doing almost that in Series Three's finale, "The Last of the Time Lords," from 2007, by hijacking the Doctor's TARDIS and converting it into a "Paradox Machine," whereupon he crowns himself ruler of the planet. John Simm's first Master gets a lot of flak, but give the guy props--he gets stuff done. Also, the "Master Race" idea was implemented in the two-part "The End of Time," wherein he futzes with a machine to turn everyone on Earth into copies of himself.
2 The name "Auton" comes from "Auto Plastics," the company which made the Nestene-infused goods in "Spearhead from Space." "Rose" treats this as the artifact it is, and never once refers to them by name, instead going for "living plastic."
3 I say "fifteen-odd years" because everything we take for granted--Time Lords, Gallifrey, all that--only started in the Jon Pertwee years and took hold with the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras.
