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
