Who Reviews Doctor Who 1996 Movie by Alex Wylie

Director: Geoffrey Sax

Writer: Matthew Jacobs

Starring: Paul McGann, Daphne Ashbrook, Eric Roberts, Yee Jee Tso

“By midnight tonight this planet will be pulled inside out!”

It was in 1996 that my old favourite TV show was finally brought back. They say there were negotiations involving an American executive called Philip Segal as his list of demands and concessions was considered. And the shoot began. And then they made their most curious decisions: the Daleks would have a justice system, the Doctor would be half human, and the TARDIS would belong to the National Trust, only respond to humans and contain the Eye of Harmony for some reason. And I, a teenage Who fan, would take this VHS back from HMV to watch with my friends before the Yanks saw it and a pepperoni pizza was placed into the oven. But was this project a pitch that should ever have been greenlit?

Before I go further, I'll will say this: imagine if your brief is to write something that will please a) the British and Americans in general, b) die-hard Doctor Who fans of many years, and c) a mainstream global audience. And this is if one is charitable enough to pretend to ignore a still hostile BBC biting at your heels like an untrained baby pit bull. Of course, the 6 million dollar budget was something the show had barely dreamt of before and CGI had come on a bit by the mid-nineties, and while this film now watches like any number of TV movies of the era it did seem very exciting and dramatic at the time. The trailers were everywhere. Doctor Who wasn't just a cheap old show for sad weirdos anymore. Possibly. Doctor Who would at least be back in the British public consciousness for up to unto entire summer.

But anyway, the plot. Everyone has one of those days of course. You're contacted by some of your worst enemies to let you know that they just executed one of your other worst enemies, and apparently his last request was that you should be the one to return his remains home. You are very clearly aware that the latter has a means of cheating death, is evil, and wants to kill you but hey, whatever. So, you voluntary go to the home of the evil dudes who want to kill you in order to be kind to another evil dude who always wants to kill you and who never dies. Some people worry about wearing crocs or trainers. I only recently made the switch from Cornflakes to Muesli. Anyway, there's this twist, right, where everything goes horribly wrong for some reason.

After what became known as the Wilderness Years, it seemed apt at the time that Paul McGann's Doctor would emerge, resurrected from death and literally emerging from a morgue wearing a shroud. I was also studying R.S at the time and...oh yeah, the galvanisation of Frankenstein’s monster. “It's alive!”

But I have skipped on a bit here. A new (largely American) audience would have to see a middle-aged Scotsman while hearing a young Paul McGann, and then work out that the Indiana Jones/Back to the Future World was inside the whatever the that blue phone kiosk is meant to be as it spins wildly in space. They turned over to the infamously unbearable death throes of Roseanne instead, and cannot quite be judged for this decision.

Once the business of observing continuity is over with and we have the new Doctor, something like a plot emerges and we have a budding Doctor, a reluctant companion in Dr. Grace Holloway (Ashbrook) and a villain in the Roberts interpretation of the Master – Eric Roberts would go on to say he'd seen some seventies Doctor Who but seemed to have gotten camp Terminator as his inspiration. Eric Roberts as the Master at least carried on JNT's tradition of stunt casting – and Roberts does his best, poor thing.

The Master's motivation – and therefore pretty much the plot, seem to come from The Deadly Assassin and Trial of a Time Lord. So at least we know screenwriter Mathew Jacobs had seen at least two classic serials! Nobody in the editing suite had ever heard a Dalek voice of course, but then you can't expect too much.

Certain tropes you expect in an US Doctor Who – a car chase, a kiss/ love interest...well, not that bothersome and Russell T Davies would go on to keep those anyway.

So, what do we have? A promising Doctor in McGann, and many would say an actor cheated of a better opportunity but at least a string of enjoyable audio dramas which, thanks to the minisode Night of the Doctor, we may nowadays call canonical. We got the Eighth Doctor essentially, even if the film itself is Nineties kitsch fun at best.