The Doctor: A meteor storm... t-the sky above us was dancing with lights! Purple, green, brilliant yellow... yes!
Grace: What?
The Doctor: These shoes! [Stomps the ground happily.]
They fit perfectly..!
The Doctor takes a brief moment away from remembering his past to rejoice on how awesome the shoes he just got are.
A half-decade after its cancellation, there was an effort to return
Doctor Who to the small screen, but its lone fruit was a
Backdoor Pilot TV special that never got developed into a series.
During the TV Movie, the Doctor
- claims to be half-human (on his mother's side), and
- kisses his companion.
One or both of these
completely freaked out all of Who-fandom. Not to mention the fact that it was made by (shudder)
Americans.
And yet it's remarkable how true to the old series the movie
was, considering that some of the early scripts were about the Doctor as a kid, running around Gallifrey like a Time Lord
Dennis the Menace, aided and abetted by his brother, the Master...
yeah.
On to the plot.
—
The Master gets EX-TER-MIN-AT-ED by the Daleks for some random reason
* Then again, it's Daleks. Did they really need one?
, and the Doctor is charged with bringing his ashes back to Gallifrey for, I dunno, a really dignified and tasteful ashes-scattering ceremony over the seas of Rassilon or something.
Before the Master's ashes can be scattered by his heartbroken friends and family, though, they turn into a semi-intelligent blob of amorphous goo. This blobby thing escapes from the little casket and wreaks havoc with the TARDIS controls. TARDIS, Doctor, and Blob!Master crash-land in
San Francisco, on New Year's Eve Eve 1999, which isn't too bad as random destinations go. Unfortunately, they're also in the middle of a gang war. The Doctor has no sooner set foot outside the TARDIS when he catches several bullets from a nearby gang shootout.
One of the gang members, Chang Lee, is nice enough to call an ambulance. The ambulance arrives, carrying EMT Bruce. Bruce, Chang Lee, and "John Smith" are whisked away to the hospital, where "John Smith"'s physiology is sufficiently different from the human norm to cause serious problems. But not from bullet wounds, oh no! Instead, trauma surgeon Dr Grace Holloway inadvertently does more harm than good, and the Doctor dies on the operating table. From exploratory surgery.
* Congratulations, Grace! You're the first and only companion to kill the Doctor! You even beat the Master at his own game!
Chang Lee takes advantage of the confusion to swipe the Doctor's stuff; Bruce the EMT, for which this must be sad but routine, ambles off home... completely unaware that the Blob!Master has invaded his EMT outfit and has designs on the rest of him.
Death doesn't last,
as is routine for Time Lords. Hours later, a very confused Doctor, now looking like Paul McGann and clutching his death shroud around him, escapes and wanders the hospital. After taking a moment to scream "WHO AM I?!" dramatically in the run-down wing of the hospital, he swipes a stray costume from the employee locker room - explained as being there in preparation for the hospital's New Year's Eve fancy dress party.
* The screenwriters needn't have bothered—wearing Victorian formal dress around town is, by San Francisco standards, only mildly eccentric.
Now dressed, though still barefoot and sporting a toe tag, the Doctor tries to figure out who he is. The sight of Grace jogs his memory, and he follows her to her car, where she is even
further freaked out when he extracts a stray bit of medical probe from his person and explains that he's the two-hearted guy she killed the night before. Grace takes this about as well as can be expected, but eventually takes him home with her
(not like that... well okay, maybe like that) and gives him her ex-boyfriend's shoes. The Doctor's memory is soon restored, and he decides that he must, simply MUST have a beryllium atomic clock to repair the TARDIS. As luck would have it, one is being inaugurated that very night, at a posh party that Grace
(even MORE luckily) has tickets to. There's a traffic jam, so the Doctor swipes a police motorcycle by threatening to shoot
himself.
* Really, for all the whining and complaining about how this movie is a 'horrible story' and 'an insult to Who,' Paul McGann does wonders with what he's given. This scene simply has to be seen to be believed in how well it's played.
The Doctor finally gets his hands on the beryllium atomic clock, after pissing off half the fanbase by claiming he's half-human, and the day is saved from being wiped out by an overloaded TARDIS going boom. We think.
...oh, and the Master shows up in there and tries to steal the Doctor's body while blowing things up. You know, the usual for the Master. But since few really wish to remember the American version of the Master and this version of the Master is really never remembered again, it doesn't quite matter.
—
In spite of the rather sad version of The Master
* Seriously, the actor believed that cheesy camp was the best way to play the character - not menacing ham. This does make a difference, believe it or not.
, this movie wasn't that bad at all. Paul McGann did a pretty awesome job as the Doctor: most Doctors take a few stories to really settle into the role, but Paul McGann's Doctor lept onto the screen fully formed. The companions weren't overly annoying and... well... ok, so the Seventh Doctor went out for no fucking reason, but it's still a somewhat enjoyable movie.
Just don't expect it in America: rights belong to
Fox,
Universal and
the BBC - and none of them have airing or DVD rights in the USA.
Tropes
