Written by Matthew Jacobs, Sydney Newman, and Donald Wilson
Directed by Geoffrey Sax

Doctor Who is a British science fiction television series that has been around off and on since 1963. The main character is just known as “The Doctor” and is a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. This means he travels through time to various places. One of his favorite places to visit is Earth. Typically, he has a companion traveling with him, usually female, sometimes male, sometimes one of each. He travels in a time machine known as a TARDIS, which is disguised as a British Police booth. A Time Lord can regenerate if fatally wounded, which has accounted for all the different actors who have played The Doctor throughout the years.

After Doctor Who was finally cancelled as a series by the BBC, there were always rumors swirling about its resurrection.  Most of the projects never got off the ground.  Until 2005, there was only one Doctor Who project that got any attention.  A Doctor Who movie that was ostensibly the pilot for a run of the series on American television had the misfortune to air opposite the final episode of Roseanne.

The Doctor Who Movie was hard to find for quite some time.  It’s the only story filmed that stars Paul McGann as the Doctor.  The story begins with Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor traveling back to Gallifrey with the remains of his nemesis, the Master, from the planet Skaro.  This is probably not his most well-thought-out moment, as he ends up back on Earth in San Francisco in the year 1999.  He lands in the middle of a shoot-out in Chinatown and must regenerate.  Paul McGann then takes over the role.

The Master, meanwhile, has somehow escaped. He takes over the body of a Doctor (portrayed by Eric Roberts).  His intention is to steal the Doctor’s remaining lives, but in doing so, he will cause the end of the Earth.  This presents a problem.  Well, not really to the Master.  He doesn’t care, but the Doctor does.  The only problem is the Doctor is not quite himself at first, and then when he does get all his faculties back after regeneration, it’s a race against time, and the millennium, to foil the Master again.

There are several problems with the Doctor Who Movie that had nothing to do with Roseanne.  First of all, the story is unnecessarily complicated.  It could have simply been the Doctor versus the Master, with the Doctor trying to corral him once again. Instead, the story goes off on so many tangents trying to set up the big finale that many non-fans will be lost.  Here’s a hint: when you’re trying to appeal to a new audience, simpler is always better.  Second, it suffers from one of those plots that were repeated again and again on Star Trek: Voyager to the point that I was turned off of the series.  That is, you get to the end, and for a convenient reason, everything you just saw doesn’t count; doesn’t have any long-term implications. Except for the Doctor regenerating. And the Doctor battling the Master.  But everything else, just forget it ever happened.

The Doctor Who Movie is considered canon in the Doctor Who universe despite these faults in the story and existing outside of the two incarnations of the series.  It really has the flavor of being designed for a different audience, and that is the third problem. The target isn’t the audience that have been loyal to Doctor Who since it first aired in 1963.  They were looking for a new, American audience, yet were drawing quite a bit on history, with having the Doctor battle the Master.  When the new series began in 2005, they drew the audience in first with new aliens to battle or reintroducing old ones slowly, rather than dumping a story on the audience that they needed to have a bit of the background to fully grasp.

What was right here was the casting. Paul McGann is simply brilliant as the Doctor, and I do wish we were treated to more of him in the role.  There are books and comic strips of him as the Doctor, but leading up to Christopher Eccleston, he’s sheer genius really.  I absolutely loved watching him on the screen.  Eric Roberts does a good job as the doctor whose body the Master takes over.  He makes both roles believable and doesn’t steal the show from the Doctor, but makes the role strong in the film.  Daphne Ashbrook is good as Dr. Grace Holloway, the closest thing he has to a companion.  After saving his life, he enlists her help in saving the Earth from the Master.  There’s a bit more romance between them than has ever been seen before in Doctor Who, but that works better now, knowing what was going to come in the next incarnation of the series.

This is the American network version, which, surprisingly, is less heavily edited than the UK version.  The Director explains a lot of the reasons in his commentary, but was also mystified by some of the requests made to him by the BBC.  American audiences apparently can tolerate violence on television a lot more than our British counterparts.  The special effects here are greatly improved over the end of the series, as is to be expected, although it’s not even close to what we see in the new series.
As with all of the Doctor Who DVDs, this contains so much bonus material that they needed a separate disc for it.  For one, I loved the commentary with both McGann and McCoy in it.  That alone was worth the price of this disc.  There are so many featurettes talking about the movie itself, plus the bridge between the end of the series in 1989 and the beginning of the new series in 2005.  At one point, Steven Spielberg was seriously linked to the series until word got out of his involvement.  There’s talk of the comic books and the stories that featured McGann that many of us never knew about.

I don’t know that I would have liked the version of Doctor Who that the Doctor Who Movie would have spawned.  On its own, it’s not all bad, but it’s lacking the flavor of what made it fun and enjoyable for many years.  I liked Paul McGann a lot, and I think casting him as the Doctor probably saved this from being unwatchable.  Kudos to the BBC for knowing how to market their DVDs, too. They could teach American studios a thing or two.


SPECIAL FEATURES:

• Audio Commentary with Director Geoffrey Sax
• Audio Commentary with Nick Briggs, Paul McGann, and Sylvester McCoy
• Isolated Music Track
• Info Text
• The Seven Year Hitch
• The Doctor’s Strange Love
• Photo Gallery
• Paul McGann Audition
• VFX Tests June 1994
• VFX March 1996 
• EPK
• Behind the Scenes
• Philip Segal’s Tour of the TARDIS Set
• Alternate Takes
• BBC Trails
• Who Peter 1989-2009
• The Wilderness Years
• Stripped for Action The Eighth Doctor
• Tomorrow’s Times The Eighth Doctor