'Doctor Who: The Movie' (1996)


New Year's Eve 1999, Earth is about to run out of time...

Returning home to Gallifrey with the remains of his arch-enemy, the Master, the TARDIS is forced off course, plunging the Doctor into the middle of gang warfare in downtown San Francisco.

Critically wounded in the shootout, the Doctor has to regenerate to save his own life. And he's not the only one – the Master now has a new body with whih to wreak havoc, and his ultimate goal is to take the Doctor's own existence.

As the clock counts down to the start of a new millennium, the Doctor has to stop the Master destroying all life on Earth, but at what cost...?

This has proved to be one of the more difficult 'Doctor Who' posts to write as I've got nothing to frame it round. Most 'Doctor Who' stories featured here have been really formative for one reason or another. This one though... All I can really remember, from the first time that I saw it, is a vague sense of anti-climax and smoking a slightly forlorn cigarette afterwards. Not the best place to start a post from really but we've got to start somewhere so lets start here... ;o)

So why the big letdown? For me, and from where I was sat, it's funny to think that what held the movie back was that it's approach to storytelling was a forerunner to how 'Doctor Who' stories would be told only nine years later. Namely to do it all in one episode, in this instance a feature length episode, and then move on to whatever comes next. In the case of the movie, I still don't feel like this approach worked particularly well with not an awful lot of story feeling like it's being stretched to make the run time (and that's a shame because it's not a bad story, just stretched further than perhaps it should have been). It feels lightweight for what it is but if it had been part of the new series, maybe as a two-parter because it's the Master, I think it would have felt just right.

Another place where it fell down for me is the imbalance between plot and characterisation. Given what's at stake, the plot should take precedence (and it does) but we don't really get much of a feel for the people following the Doctor (and the Master) around. The pace is frenetic, which is brilliant, but you don't find out anything about Grace and Lee and that felt like a missed opportunity to flesh things out a little bit.

And that's a bit of a shame given how great McGann and Roberts are in their roles as Doctor and Master. They are clearly both having the best time ever, especially Eric Roberts who hams it up superbly and steals the show as far as I'm concerned. He is so evil as the Master. Don't get me wrong, Paul McGann does a brilliant wide-eyed 'new' Doctor; it's just Roberts' show though and although he's done some Big Finish stuff, it's a shame that we never saw him reprise the role on screen.

'Doctor Who: The Movie' sits squarely between 'Old' and 'New Who' and probably suffers a little for not being either. It is fun though, just not without it's faults, maybe a tighter plot could have made a difference? I don't know...

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