Le seigneur du temps

It is now twenty years since the US/UK co-production of Doctor Who: The Movie was broadcast. Shown seven years after the cancellation of the television series and nine years before the relaunched series with Christopher Eccleston.

It was the only new Who in the 1990s. It also brings a lot of ingredients that was used in the relaunched series as Russell T Davies studied what it did right and what it got wrong.

Sylvester McCoy returns as the seventh Doctor, he gets shot and after receiving botched hospital treatment, regenerates into Paul McGann's eighth doctor.

The Tardis lands in San Francisco in 1999. The Master escapes in a snakelike form from the Tardis and plans to take control of the Eye of Harmony once he has occupied the body of a paramedic (Eric Roberts).

The Doctor must find a beryllium atomic clock and stop the Master with the help of Dr Grace Holloway.

British director Geoffrey Sax made use of the higher budget with good use of special effects even though he was hampered with a reduced number of shooting days.

The Tardis is much bigger but I guess the HG Wells like interior setting does not make it look like a Gallifreyan time machine.

The visuals were grand and obviously some of the morphing techniques were inspired by films such as Terminator 2.

The casting of Paul McGann was the master stroke, with the 60 minutes screen time he had, you really felt that he was the Doctor. A Byronesque romantic (he even got to have a kiss) and man of action.

It was a shame we have seen so little of McGann's time lord apart from the mini adventure, The Night of the Doctor; although there are plenty of Eighth Doctor audio adventures.

I also liked the malevolent interpretation of the Master by Eric Roberts who really pushes up the dial with his campiness when he puts on the time lord regalia. He shifted the emphasis of the Master from the moustache twirling villain of Anthony Ainley and it has been carried on by the subsequent Master's since then, male or female.

The story was not that great, you felt it needed a bit more reworking and it had rather a lot of continuity which was fine for fans of the original show, but what about new viewers?

A point not lost in the 2005 re-continuation which started afresh and only added continuity in small measures over subsequent seasons.

Some of the elements of the television film might have introduced a few groans. The cloaking device to describe the Tardis chameleon circuit and the Doctor being half human. However it was a lot less Americanised than people feared and had it contained lots of links to the television series.

There were a segment of fans who were disappointed after this was shown in 1996. Yet the movie received very good viewing figures in the UK and two decades on it was worth revisiting McGann's outing.

At last people can stop taking the proverbial out of the special effects in Dr Who! Instead they can take the proverbial out of the limp plot (if you can call it that). Eric Roberts isn't a patch on either of the previous incarnations of the Master. Paul McGann, however, makes an original Doctor and it's a shame a potentially interesting incarnation of the great Time Lord wasn't allowed to develop. There was a lot of complaining about the kissing scene, but I personally didn't see what was wrong with it as long as the Doctor doesn't turn into James Bond or Captain Kirk. Anyway, since the Doctor has a grand-daughter (Susan) then he must have done more than kiss a woman at some point in his life! But I did see what was wrong with the 'half-human' business. Can't people accept somebody who is an alien?

This film certainly has its moments and shows great potential for a new series, but it's just a shame Fox couldn't get their act together and make that series instead of allowing it to fall back into the clutches of the money-minded BBC where it'll probably never be seen again.

Not an example of Dr Who at its best by any means, but if you're a fan of the program like me then it's worth watching just to see the Doctor back in action, if only for one adventure.

Just suppose the film had been a reasonable success and maybe gained 10 million viewers in the United States, not that I agreed at all with a US co-production. £3.3 m is not a lot of money, even in 1996 for the BBC themselves to fork out.

According to Bidding Adeau, there would have been at least 6 other films. Perhaps the next set in the future on a space station penned by Terry Nation? Maybe another with The Cybermen and one with the Daleks?

I think if the TV series in 2005 works. There should be in parallel like DS9 ran along with Voyager, there should be an attempt to fill the gaps without running into Attack of the Cybermen syndrome. Maybe a few McGann films to see what happens between him and Christopher Eccleston's first appearance.

The half-human thing and kiss can be all but forgotten. A new TARDIS set.

If anything I would like to see more of McGann's Doctor. In that rape programme Lying he looked fantastic, still young enough.

In 1996, seven years after the original Doctor Who series was canceled, the American network Fox thought a USA reboot of the show might be a good way to bring everybody's favorite Time Lord back to the small screen. The resulting TV movie was notoriously lambasted by critics and fans alike, who responded with more warmth to the BBC's revival of the character in 2005. Perhaps the biggest problem lies in the very fact that the Yanks tried to do their own version of a quintessential British creation: you don't see the Brits try and remake Star Trek, do you? Nevertheless, as messy as it is, this 1996 version of Doctor Who (which is part of the official mythology) has a few valid selling points that make it worth tracking down on a boring Saturday afternoon.

The original show ended with the Doctor being played by Sylvester McCoy, the seventh incarnation of the character, and it is still McCoy, albeit credited as a guest star, who controls the TARDIS at the beginning of the story. The year is 1999 (as a matter of fact, the specific date is December 31st), and the renegade Time Lord is transporting the ashes of his archenemy, the Master, back to their home planet Gallifrey. However, due to a series of mishaps, the machine crash-lands in America, with the Doctor presumably dead and the Master's spirit free to take over the body of a paramedic (Eric Roberts). His plan is to use some temporal anomaly to steal the Doctor's remaining lives (each Time Lord has thirteen of them; the Master's used them up). As for the Doctor, once he's regenerated into a half-human eighth embodiment (Paul McGann), he has to stop his nemesis once and for all.

The plot is a classic good vs. evil confrontation, and that's one of the TV movie's main flaws: instead of reintroducing the Doctor, like Russell T. Davies did in the new series, the narrative proceeds as if no time had passed between the original show's finale and this Americanized version. This can prove particularly alienating to US audiences, for whom Doctor Who isn't an essential part of popular culture, and McGann's clumsy voice-over doesn't do much to sort things out in that department. And that's without mentioning the holes in logic: why introduce two new (American) sidekicks, one of whom a potential love interest for the protagonist, and then suggest they would have no major role in other episodes, had the US show been picked up by Fox? And since when do Daleks and Time Lords cooperate, as shown prior to the opening credits?

That said, McGann and Roberts are good enough to compensate most of the other rubbish, one giving that undeniably English quality to the quirky time traveler, the other adding a bit of OTT menace to one of the show's seminal villains. In addition, the special effects are state-of-the-art, as is the new rendition of Ron Grainer's immortal theme music.

Overall, a one-off experiment that is best remembered as a guilty pleasure for die-hard fans. Fortunately, the Yanks were wise enough to let the BBC handle everything Who-related from this point on.

6,5/10

Whenever anyone talked about the possibility of America doing "Dr. Who" (especially after BBC cancelled the show), people would joke, "Oh, right! They'd add car chases and gun fights and the Doctor would fool around with his companions!" Then they'd have a hearty laugh at these stereotypes of Hollywood, confident that they were being sarcastic and, if it ever DID happen, certainly people involved with the show would try to preserve the sensibilities of the series. That'll show 'em for over-estimating the intelligence of our media! I think America should revive the Lend-Lease Act, providing funding for any future movies but letting the Brits actually make them. In turn, the BBC should file for a gun law exemption so they can shoot any Fox producer trying to visit the set.