The Doctor Who Movie

WHO AM I?

I'm going to go out and say that it doesn't bode well for a story when I take active steps to avoid watching it. One of my major weaknesses when it comes to television and movies is over-the-top melodramatic acting and you don't pack much more of that than into 1990's Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Attempting to watch something like Hercules, Xena, or even Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes me feel physically ill. I have found that even going back to old episodes of The X-Files makes me pause as some of these episodes are no where near as good as I remembered them. But opportunity presented itself again and I thought it only fair to give the Eighth Doctor his moment on the state other than Night of the Doctor. Would it be as bad as I feared or was I overreacting?

Plot Summary

The Doctor recounts how the Master was captured and tried for crimes by the Daleks on Skaro. The Seventh Doctor agrees to come and collect his remains and bring them back to Gallifrey. However while in transit, the Master is able to coalesce his essence into a plasmatic snake and escapes from his box. He sabotages the TARDIS and the Doctor makes an emergency landing in San Francisco on the evening of December 30, 1999.

The TARDIS materializes in front of a young man named Chang Lee who was engaged in a gang shootout. The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS and is shot by several members of the rival gang before they flee the scene. The Doctor observes the Master essence oozing out of the TARDIS keyhole and tries to warn Lee but passes out. Lee waits as an ambulance arrives and goes with the Doctor to the hosipital, pretending to be a friend of his.

The Doctor is taken to surgery where the bullets are removed but the doctors mistake his dual heartbeat for being in fibrillation and call in the cardiologist, Dr. Grace Holloway who had been attending the opera with her boyfriend. They begin surgery but the procedure punctures the Doctor's second heart and he dies on the operating table.

The Doctor is wheeled to the morgue where an autopsy is planned for the morning. In the storage unit, the Doctor regenerates into the Eighth Doctor, the process delayed by the anesthetic applied during the surgery. He breaks out of the unit and wanders to a part of the hospital closed off due to a ruptured ceiling pipe, fighting to regain his memories from his post-regeneration crisis.

Chang Lee is informed of the Doctor's death and is given his things. He states that he will inform the Doctor's next of kin but Grace gets suspicious of him. When confronted, Lee bolts out of the hospital with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver and TARDIS key.

The Master's essence slips into the jacket of the ambulance driver and later that night, it slips out again and lodges itself in the body of the driver. He rises in the morning, aware that the Doctor has regenerated and after killing the driver's wife, sets off to the hospital to find him.

Grace is informed of the Doctor's escape but when she raises it to the hospital director, he destroys the X-ray showing the double heart, which all the doctors had assumed was a double exposure. Angered by the director's actions, Grace resigns. As she leaves, she is confronted by the Doctor in his confused state. She initially doesn't believe him but upon seeing him remove the medical device that broke off from the failed procedure, she takes him back to her house.

The Master arrives at the hospital where he learns of all that happened. Learning that the Doctor's things were taken by Lee, he drives back to the TARDIS. Lee enters the TARDIS using the key and the Master confronts him inside. He tricks Lee into thinking that he is the wronged party and that the Doctor stole his body. He breaks into the Doctor's stash of gold dust (for fighting Cybermen) and offers it to him as reward for helping him.

The two men enter the cloister room and the Master uses Lee's human eye to open the Eye of Harmony, the source of power for the TARDIS. He uses the eye to observe the Doctor's new body and tap into his senses, learning of the Doctor's plans.

The Doctor recovers his memories while with Grace but also becomes aware of the Master opening the Eye of Harmony. Grace believes him mad when he begins to talk of the TARDIS and the Master's plans and runs away from him. The Doctor demonstrates that the opening of the Eye is altering the molecular structure of the planet and that he must get to the science center where they are debuting a new atomic clock.

Grace calls for an ambulance to take the Doctor to a psychiatric hospital and the Master and Lee arrive in one. Then end up caught in traffic and in the lull, the Doctor realizes the EMT is actually the Master. He attacks Grace, spewing slime on her hand but the Doctor beats him off using a fire extinguisher. The two commandeer a police motorcycle to go around the traffic. The Master and Lee pursue, using the ambulance siren to go around traffic.

Both parties arrive at the science center and the Doctor and Grace sneak up to the clock where the Doctor takes the atomic power cell. Seeing the Master and Lee looking for them, they pull the fire alarm and drive away in the confusion.

The arrive at the TARDIS and the Doctor enters using the spare key hidden up top. They close the Eye of Harmony but discover the power drained from the TARDIS and they cannot change the effects of the Eye being opened without operating it. The Doctor slips the atomic power source into the TARDIS and begins to hotwire it. However Grace, her mind taken over by the Master's slime attack, knocks out the Doctor to stop him.

The Doctor is tied up and secured to a position to allow the Master to absorb his remaining regenerations. The Doctor convinces Lee that the Master is lying but when he tries to stop the Master, the Master breaks his neck. He then removes Grace's possession and forces the Eye of Harmony back open using her eye.

The Master begins to absorb the remaining regenerations and the Doctor yells to the recovering Grace to remember. She runs back to the console and manages to jump the power back to the TARDIS. The TARDIS lifts off and enters a temporal orbit, reversing the absorption of the Doctor's regenerations.

Grace heads back to the cloister room and partially frees the Doctor, but the Master comes up on her and throws her off ledge, killing her. The Doctor manages to free himself from his remaining restraints and battles the Master around the Eye of Harmony. He manages to knock the Master off balance so that he falls into the Eye of Harmony.

The Doctor pulls Grace and Lee's bodies away but a temporal discharge emits from the Eye of Harmony just before it closes and brings both Grace and Lee back to life. The Doctor lands TARDIS outside Grace's home just as midnight hits. Lee returns the Doctor's things, including the sonic screwdriver but the Doctor tells him to keep the gold dust. Delighted, Lee leaves.

The Doctor invites Grace to travel with him but she declines, suggesting the Doctor stay here with her instead. He also declines although not without some reluctance. He then takes off, the TARDIS disappearing into the night.

Analysis

The movie was both as bad and better than I was expecting. Some areas were just as I feared they would be, but other areas I found surprisingly good. I was also surprised at how my own personal opinions didn't quite jive with certain aspects of fan opinion.

First the Doctor. I was rather disappointed in how the Seventh Doctor was portrayed in this story. Some fans complain that the Seventh Doctor is a bit too omniscient in the stories of his era but if that was a concern for the writers here, they went way overboard. The Seventh Doctor is a bit too dottering and easily deceived. It is very strange to see him being surprised by the Master and his death at the hand of blatantly incompetent physicians is unsatisfying.

The Eighth Doctor was pretty good, especially once he started to get over his regeneration crisis. I didn't like the big "Who am I" moment as that was just over the top and rather forced. But once he began to recover, I enjoyed his performance with it's nice blend of underplay and seriousness. I can understand why the Big Finish plays with the Eighth Doctor became so popular and I certainly would not have objected to seeing more of his Doctor.

The Master is generally derided by fans for an over-the-top hammy performance but I have to disagree there. Granted, his "I always dress for the occasion" line is pretty bad, but it's also meant to be funny in that painful 90's homosexual way (see Will & Grace). Problems with his voice acting in later scenes I can't really chalk up to Eric Roberts as he was clearly being overdubbed to sound more bestial, which I didn't quite get. I also didn't get the eye thing, although I'm guessing that was supposed to be a residual effect of reforming his essence into a snake. Still on the whole, I wouldn't call his performance any more campy than that of the Anthony Ainley Master. If anything, his lack of mustache twirling laughter felt less campy, even if he was clearly adding a gay dynamic that Ainley would never of dreamed of.

Grace did fairly well as a companion, although I'm not sure the writing did her any favors. Her dialogue resorted to cliché a number of times and she was very inconsistently written. She is a great cardiovascular surgeon but doesn't both to check the X-rays just because someone tells her they are double exposed. She believes the Doctor is crazy, becomes convinced that he's ok and then goes back to believing him to be crazy after inviting him into her home. Then she decides that he is her special man right out of nowhere. She also shows complete ignorance of non-medical science at one point but makes an observation about transcendental physics upon entering the TARDIS.

Daphne Ashbrook does a pretty good job with Grace. I think you can see an obvious Dana Scully influence with her, but she is portrayed much softer and with a stronger sense of humor and femininity. She does go a great deal with her eyes and had the show been picked up with Grace as a series regular, I think there would have been a few memes made with her eyes in full bug out mode. But I liked her portrayal, even if her lines weren't that great.

Chang Lee is the first major flaw in this story. He is both inconsistent in his character portrayal (fault of the writers) and his acting is very weak in my opinion. He is initially shown as a gang banger, complete with a gun, yet he stays behind to ensure the Doctor gets proper medical care? That makes no sense as any character of this type would have simply run off into the night. Likewise he buy into the Master with no proof other than his own greed. He stays consistent to the Master throughout the Master letting his mask slip and then turns on a dime over a simple conversation. That the Master kills him almost immediately afterward just demonstrates that his character needed to be removed for dramatic purposes.

The acting of Chang Lee is rather deadpan. He doesn't seem to demonstrate much emotion and when he does, it is very quick and strong and then off again quickly, like a faucet. It comes across as very insincere and not at all believable. Of the four principle characters, his was clearly the weakest.

The secondary cast was also a bit weak. Nearly all of them gave somewhat stilted performances that just didn't grab you as believable. There were odd halts in line delivery, odd and over-the-top facial reactions, and weird quirks that I think were supposed to be in lieu of character personality. Some you can just dismiss, but others, such as the motorcycle police officer, really punted the viewer out of the story. I get that that scene was supposed to be played for comedy, but a cop acting that ineptly took the scene from comedy to outright farce.

Which leads us to the tone problem of the movie. Unlike the classic series, there is very little in the story that is intended as scary. The Master snake and the killing of the wife are probably the only moments that drift near that territory. The rest is meant to be a bit more action-drama with comedy sprinkled in to relieve tension. The problem is that the comedy is way too over the top. It doesn't relieve tension, it dispels it all together. We are also left confused as to whether we should take any of this story seriously or treat it with the same attitude we might a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

A good example of this is when the Doctor and Grace reach the TARDIS. There is drama because they are racing against the clock, but they cut it with a light scene involving finding the spare TARDIS key and that works fine. Then, just as you are awaiting the "bigger on the inside" moment, a random police motorcycle comes barreling through with the brakes having failed on the bike. The motorcycle dives into the TARDIS, you hear it fade Doppler-style and then race back out the TARDIS. It totally kills the mood of the scene in a WTF! moment. This is such a shame because the Doctor and Grace had been building their scenes together well. I actually laughed out loud when she and the Doctor made a sly small penis joke, which was well underplayed. But to have things like that cut with heavy slapstick just ruins the slow build of mood.

Another major flaw of the movie for me was the cinematography. This is very, very 90's and could easily be passed off as episode of Buffy. There are action scenes where the footage seems to speed up slightly, just to get through it. There are odd jump cuts and random slow motion cuts in the action scenes. There are also dramatic flashes of light, whether through lightening or just a random strobe effect to add to the scene. All of it is just so strange and works so hard to create a sense of action. Yet at the same time, the footage is shot with such a crispness that it makes the scenes and sets look cheap. It is very heavily influenced by American television and especially the pulp sci-fi action shows of the time and it just makes it look awful.

Then there is the fan controversies. This story was working overtime to try and placate the old Doctor Who fans with cute references and throwbacks, but at the same time, it totally missed the boat and created things for fans to froth at the mouth over. The Dalek execution of the Master makes no sense and certainly the Daleks would never have consented to return the Master's remains to Gallifrey. It also doesn't help that the Daleks (you can't see them) don't even sound like Daleks in their cries of "Exterminate!" So you start off on the wrong foot.

The two other big moments are the Doctor kissing Grace and the Doctor being half-human. I don't have any real issue with either. The Doctor kisses Grace while coming out of his post-regeneration crisis so I don't imagine the producers would have made that a truly regular thing. What's more, I don't have a problem with the Doctor being a sexual being. He's been married four times in the show's run and the whole series started off with him as a grandfather so clearly the man has seen action before. I only get bothered when things get overblown like with the Tenth Doctor pining over Rose. That is where I want to just shut things down and be done with it.

I also don't have any problem with the Doctor being half-human. He clearly has an affinity towards Earth and to give him a familiar connection is a fair pretense for this. I personally have a feeling that many of the fans who object to this idea are deep into the backstory espoused by Lungbarrow and decry anything that might go against that. While this was hinted at in the unfulfilled Cartmel Master Plan, none of that was ever filled in within the context of the show itself so I see no inconsistency in pushing the envelope in the Doctor's backstory.

My only confusion is whether the key to opening the Eye of Harmony being a human eye was set up by the Doctor or not. Because if it wasn't, that's a very odd security feature for the Time Lord's to have set up. But if the Doctor set it up, it is understandable since no other Time Lord would be able to override that feature without bringing a human aboard. So it's more a case of head cannon being required.

While the subject of the Eye of Harmony, I have to say that I didn't really care for the new TARDIS design. The medieval castle look just didn't quite work for me in the cloister room as it reminded me too much of the pretend TARDIS sets in The Invasion of Time. I preferred the small intimate garden cloister room seen in Logopolis. I also thought the main console room was too large. I get that it was supposed to be living quarters as well and I did enjoy the ceiling celestial viewer, but even that was a bit washed out due to the size of the room. I just think a smaller, more intimate setting would have felt better. Again, to me it smacked of Buffy and trying to get that 90's faux gothic look.

In the end, I'd have to say that the movie wasn't as bad overall as I was expecting. I'm not going to call it good, but it has good aspects to it. Most of those being directly tied to the performances of the Doctor and Grace. Still, it would be foolish to acknowledge the debt that the new series owes to the movie as it laid out fully what can be done and what should be avoided when the series relaunched with Rose. It has it's importance and should be recognized for it. But that also doesn't mean that I'm going to go out of my way to watch it again. I've seen it once and I can get the context when other people talk about it, but I didn't enjoy it enough to warrant revisiting it anytime in the near future.

Overall personal score: 2 out of 5

Link: Night of the Doctor