Now Doctor Who has been on the air for 18 years and the future ahead looks bright with Russell T Davies and Ncuti Gatwa. There was a time though after it was cancelled in 1989 during the Sylvester McCoy years, when its future looked doubtful. There was no clear future in sight and the possibility of it returning was not assured. It eventually returned in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston’s Ninth Doctor. However, there was an unsuccessful attempt to revive it in between with Paul McGann in the lead role, a co-production between the BBC and 20th Century Fox. The TV Movie was meant to be a pilot that would eventually launch a new series, but this never happened. I’m gonna now be delving into why the TV Movie didn’t work.
The plot of the TV Movie involves the Seventh incarnation of the Doctor taking the remains of the Master back to Gallifrey but after a malfunction, the Doctor ends up in San Francisco in 1999 and the Master escapes and takes over the body of an innocent man. Being shot down by a street gang and wrongly operated on, the Doctor is reborn as he must stop the Master from stealing the rest of his lives.
The script of the TV Movie is written by Matthew Jacobs but at that point, it had become very messy; with creatives trying to please the likes of the BBC, 20th Century Fox, and other executives and as such the TV Movie has 100 different voices and isn’t really a singular vision that anybody has control over. It’s a mishmash of different ideas and I think that’s the reason that it feels so messy and confusing. It is aimed at and trying to draw in an American audience but at the same time, it’s trying to be appealing to fans and becomes inaccessible and confusing for newcomers as a result of all the lore, references, and technobabble.
The plot and story of the TV Movie is rather thin on the ground, but it’s just badly told overall. In my mind, the central problem is that it just does not feel like Doctor Who. The TV Movie has lost the quintessential British adventure feel that the show is well known for and the scare factor and sense of fun which the show is about. It’s been driven so far down in its place within American media and in trying to appeal to its market that it’s lost the nature of what Doctor Who is. The TV Movie just feels like it’s the product of studio interference and trying to please 100 different voices and as a result, the whole thing feels like it’s been through a blender five or six different times before it went into production.
Because of this it does not feel like an authentic and driven story but a cynical corporate product produced by a studio and isn’t pleasant to watch. The whole thing feels more like a 1990s American hospital drama than it does Doctor Who. It has all the imagery of Doctor Who with the Tardis and the Master, but all the natural ingredients feel incredibly lacking and diluted, and it feels like a mistake more than anything else. The biggest thing I object to in the production is the unpleasant and grim violence and tone. Seeing the Doctor gunned down by gangs and even the hospital procedure afterwards as the Doctor once regenerated pulls a surgical probe out of his body is just unpleasant and uncomfortable to watch. Doctor Who can be fairly violent and scary sometimes but there is a line and most of the time it gets away with it, with fairly fantasy-focused violence that you would expect. This feels out of line for the genre and audience, and not suited to Doctor Who.
The Master in this film is played by Eric Roberts who is easily the worst incarnation of the Master that there has been. I’m sure he did his best with what he was given to work with but the performance and portrayal of the Master in this story is simply terrible. Eric Roberts in this film is the result of several different villain cliches and tropes from the 90s that feel incredibly tiresome and irritating. He spends the first half of the film trying to replicate the Terminator and is very unemotional throughout. The performance is most certainly trying to channel Arnold Schwarzenegger but that does not feel like a fitting performance for the Master and feels more like a forced impression than a performance and lacks much originality. However, in the second half of the film, you can see Eric Roberts getting bored of playing the Terminator as he starts to badly switch his approach. He becomes a kind of generically evil monster with no kind of substance to him whatsoever and the character feels inconsistent and totally falls apart.
This is personified badly at the end of the story with his confrontation with the Doctor in Gallifrian dress as he remarks: “I always dress for the occasion.” He becomes this very camp and unbearable Dracula figure. Eric Roberts then plays the Master in this incredibly exaggerated and comical way where he becomes a laughable parody of a villain that does not work at all. It is certainly intentional in the way he has decided to play it, but it becomes incredibly cringey and difficult to watch. There is also no kind of nuance and complexity in the relationship between the Master and the Doctor; Matthew Jacobs has not written the dynamic with any kind of hidden layers. You get an overly simplified hero vs villain relationship that strips the dynamic of what makes it most interesting, and this version of the character simply does not work or feel at all like the Master.
The main motivation of the Master across the film is to steal the body of the Doctor and the rest of his regenerations. It’s not a particularly complex idea at first glance but the execution of it feels incredibly difficult to get your head around and understand and contains loads of little intrinsic elements which are difficult to follow. It’s mainly because of the background and the lore of the Eye of Harmony and the Time Lords which is simply unnecessary and confusing for a casual audience. Matthew Jacobs ends up making a simple idea much more complicated than it really needs to be.
The problem with the main story is that it becomes purely reliant on exposition based on lore and technobabble. It’s exposition on something that does not really mean anything, as such the dialogue blends together and ends up feeling totally meaningless and useless and doesn’t serve the function it’s meant to in helping the audience understand the plot. The plot also has numerous holes which isn’t always a dealbreaker, but it feels so clumsily and weakly plotted and so reliant on contrivances and conveniences that it totally breaks the suspension of disbelief. There are strange things like only being able to open the Eye of Harmony with a human eye which makes no sense considering the Tardis is of Time Lord origin, and it’s ridiculous. There are a lot of pieces to the overall plot that feel like they are there for convenience more than anything else and the logic of the overall story and universe break consistently.
The character of Chang Lee played by Yee Jee Tso is kind of a secondary villain throughout the story helping and assisting the Master out of greed. What I don’t like though is how gullible and stupid the character is as he does not seem to have any kind of common sense; I find it preposterous that Lee does not catch onto how obviously evil the Master’s intentions are. Given he is bribed then this could have worked if Lee had been purely in it for the sake of money and power but given, he is talked into siding with the Doctor then it’s quite obvious at least on some level he feels he is on the right side, and I don’t think it works.
The Doctor at the start of the film is played by Sylvester McCoy playing the Seventh Doctor. He plays a very limited role in the TV Movie and never really makes an impression as his only real purpose is to regenerate. I don’t feel he was needed and wish he had been left out of the story entirely. Regeneration works best when you have grown connected to the past Doctor and must get to know them all over again. When the audience in question is barely familiar with the Seventh Doctor this does not work. It also fails to be a satisfying conclusion to the run of Sylvester McCoy and the story feels embarrassed by him with the way they have presented his Doctor in costume, stripping him of his most recognisable elements. He is one of my favourite incarnations and therefore to see him just be gunned down and die being wrongly operated on feels horribly dismissive and mean-spirited.
I would rather the film had just started with Paul McGann already as the Doctor, it would have made much more sense. Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor is easily the best part of the film. If there is one thing the TV Movie got absolutely spot on and perfect, it was the casting of him. I think personally that Paul McGann as an actor is the best ever casting for the character, he brings back great elements to the Doctor that hadn’t been there since William Hartnell, as a reforged version of the out-of-place Edwardian gentlemen. Right from the start Paul McGann brings this youthful and energetic lively persona to his Doctor and a sense of giddy excitement and energy that is brilliant. His love and admiration of humans and his understanding of them also come through in his conversations with Grace which is a quality I really like, and also a distant and alien nature from humanity that is portrayed strongly. Yet he also has a believable sense of lived history to him as a character and comes across as admirably brave and heroic. He feels like he has believably travelled and had experience throughout history which adds a good, weathered quality to him. He has a sense of vast knowledge beyond us and an understanding of the weight and responsibility of his actions as a Time Lord which adds age to him very well. Paul McGann’s Doctor is a relaxed gentlemen traveller with a strong presence.
There are qualities of the writing that does let the Eighth Doctor down during the TV Movie, mainly with the idea that the Doctor is Half Human on his mother’s side. It feels like an attempt to make the Doctor more palatable and relatable to an American audience with him being not fully alien but that simply isn’t necessary and feels incredibly silly. The companion serves the human role of being the relatable character you see everything through rather than the Doctor, so this inclusion isn’t needed. Being Half Human does not add anything of any substance or conflict. I think the biggest problem McGann’s Doctor faces though is limited time. He spends a good amount of the time recovering during his regeneration crisis and trying to figure out who he is, once he has done that the main drive of the plot kicks in which requires a great amount of exposition. Therefore, the time spent fully playing the Eighth Doctor is limited.
Grace Holloway is played by Daphne Ashbrook and is basically the companion of the film, and I’ve never really clicked with her character. It’s not Daphne Ashbrook’s fault as she plays the role as scripted, but you have a lot of integrated and tiresome tropes. Grace crying at the opera and rushing into work with her dress still on in slow motion ready to go is nothing but a 90s trope and stereotype that is eye-rolling. She is a very mature character but feels unlikeably bitter, sour, and pretentious and as a result, is a difficult person to like and gravitate towards. She’s not particularly relatable or vulnerable which makes her a bad fit for an audience surrogate character. She feels weakened by her relationship with the Doctor who from her perspective insistently stalks her, and yet she puts up with it just because she fancies him which is an uncomfortably misogynistic trope. Grace being whisked off her feet and swept along by the Doctor, unfortunately turns her into a generic love interest who is just meant to be in awe of the Doctor. It weakens her role and makes her feel too submissive and a surface-level and bland character. Grace feels very badly written overall with a really poorly defined intelligence, with her ability to grasp complex science and the nature of the Tardis feeling incredibly unbelievable and preposterous.
The TV Movie was directed by Geoffrey Sax and some of the directing of the story is very good, but some of it has a lot of overused cliché elements. The inside of the Tardis looks brilliant, and the best look up until this point, and it’s presented in terms of framing incredibly well. I like the opening moments with the Seventh Doctor reading his book with the gentle movement of the camera around the set, and it introduces the audience naturally to the main environment. The intercuts of the Master escaping also adds an inner layer of suspense into the drama which is worked in very naturally. The Tardis materialisation during the gang shootout is also made into a good dramatic moment with the blowing of the wind, and I like the movement in the way the Master and Chang Lee are shot in the Tardis. The use of slow motion becomes kind of tiring though, the use of it when Grace runs into the hospital makes me roll my eyes and then its use is rather cringey during the Master’s demise. The flashes of imagery and intercuts are also quite tiring and irritating, especially with the birth of the Doctor and the Master put together; some moments it feels like are too obviously dramatised in the direction and could have been presented with greater subtlety.
So overall, how do I feel about the TV Movie? I know some fans these days enjoy it, but I’ve got to be honest I think the TV Movie is absolutely dreadful and simply a terrible way to introduce a new audience to Doctor Who. I’m not going to blame anyone in particular because it was made with good intentions and the fault lies with the co-production. Having so many different clashing interests involved, it simply feels like you have too many cooks in the kitchen. The silver lining is the fact that Paul McGann as the Doctor is perfectly cast and is quite easily the best thing in the film as he really gets the character. Yet Eric Roberts as the Master is incredibly inconsistent, Grace as a companion is dull, the Doctor being Half-Human is very strange and you have a confusing plot full of lore and technobabble that comes across as inaccessible. It’s too ingrained in American influences to feel like Doctor Who and yet does a poor job selling itself to a new audience which unfortunately is why it doesn’t work.
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