Publisher: Virgin
Year of Publication: 1997
Price: $5.95 (U.S.)
Ever since Doctor Who made its first big splash in the USA in the early 1980's, the possibility of making Doctor Who into a movie had never been entirely dead. In fact, since 1987, the BBC has sold the rights to make such a movie to various entities. The idea for a Doctor Who movie, however, became of extreme interest to fans only after the program was cancelled by the BBC in late 1989. Now a big-budget movie became the show's best hope for revival, and it was hoped that a successful movie might lead to a new TV series. The Nth Doctor chronicles the various attempts to turn Doctor Who into a movie over the last decade, including plot synopses and extracts from various scripts, up to, but not including, The Enemy Within (the Fox telemovie aired in the US in May 1996), and interviews with the script writers themselves.
Doctor Who has never been a favorite of top BBC executives, but the show had been tolerated for over twenty years because it could be produced at a low cost and was a ratings success, with an average audience of over 7 million viewers as late as 1985 (cf. The Sixth Doctor Handbook ). By the late 1980's, decreasing ratings and increasing production costs led the BBC to cancel Doctor Who. Nevertheless, the BBC has always recognized that the Who franchise is a potentially lucrative one. Sales of videos, record albums, comic books, novelizations, toys, etc. have earned the BBC millions of dollars (or pounds, if you will), and since the cancellation of the show, the BBC has made various attempts to exploit this commercial potential at a minimum cost. One of the most effective ways of accomplishing this goal is to license the right to use the Doctor Who character in a movie to a production company, with this company absorbing most or all of the cost of actually producing the movie. As early as 1986, the BBC sold the rights to make such a movie to a production team known alternatively as Daltenreys, Greenlight, and Coast to Coast. The resulting script, The Return of Varnax and its various successors, dealt with an attempt by Varnax, an evil Time Lord who had once been a friend of the Doctor, to either create his own universe or gain immortality. In doing so, he would devastate Earth, but in each version of the script he is foiled by the Doctor. Some of the versions of this script involved the devastation of Gallifrey and the end of the Time Lords' power. Most of them involved a character named Gongii, an old friend of the Doctor's and professional soldier, who ultimately sacrifices his life in helping the Doctor to defeat Varnax. The Doctor's sexuality is explored to a much greater extent than in the original BBC series, and these scripts include Zilla, a former love of the Doctor's who is now Varnax's ally, and they also incorporate various different love interests for the Doctor.
When the rights of Daltenreys expired, Lumiere Films gained an option to produce a Doctor Who film, but their option expired in April 1994. Nevertheless, the script that was commissioned, The Jewels of Time is quite good. The plot in many ways mirrors that of season sixteen of the series (the Key to Time season), with the Doctor trying to find the six segments of the Key while also trying to prevent the Master from gaining the Key. Along the way, we find out that the Doctor and the Master were once friends and travelling companions, and we meet the Fourth Doctor, who aids the new Doctor in his quest, as well as Amelia Earheart, whose life is saved by the Doctor and who also helps the Doctor fight the Master. Major problems with this ipt include the fact that it requires us to believe that William Hartnell was not the First Doctor, in spite of The Five Doctors, and it also contradicts The Armagaeddon Factor, in which we learn that Princess Astra was the sixth segment of the Key.
Around the time of Doctor Who's thirtieth anniversary in 1993, the BBC tried to produce its own Doctor Who movie, but the project was dropped when it was realized that it could not be produced in time. The resulting script, titled The Dark Dimension, is probably the strongest in terms of continuity with the original series, and for that reason may prove to be the favorite amongst hard core fans. Its weakest point is that it involves an active role for five different Doctors, as well as the Brigadier, and the writer's trying to give everyone something to do gets tiresome after awhile. The plot deals with an attempt by an entity known as The Creature to destroy mankind and repopulate the Earth with his own kind (sound familiar?). This script has the appeal of an extended role for the ever-popular Fourth Doctor, a more in-depth exploration of the concept of parallel universes (the Fourth Doctor's body is snatched from the Pharos Project after his fall from the tower, so that the Fourth Doctor is held captive by The Creature even as he regenerates into the Fifth Doctor), and a climactic fight with The Creature in which the two parallel timelines are ultimately reconciled.
Finally, we get to the Amblin scripts, the first of which was delivered in September 1994; the last of which was The Enemy Within, which is the only of these scripts to ever see the light of day. If either of the first two scripts had been chosen, the fate of Doctor Who may have been entirely different, since both of them are in my opinion better than Jacobs' script. The production team had reached an agreement with Terry Nation, and the Daleks were incorporated into the plot. Both had the Doctor leaving Gallifrey to find his long-lost father and fight the Master, who has teamed up with Davros and the Daleks. These scripts provide some fairly significant continuity problems: the Doctor is said to be half-human (something which was also claimed in The Enemy Within ), and the new view of Dalek history presented here is at odds with the versions presented in The Daleks (1963) and Genesis of the Daleks (1975). On the whole, however, they were good stories.
Generally speaking, these scripts range in quality from very good to not very exciting. None of these is as much of a dud as were such classic BBC era clunkers as The Twin Dilemma and The Gunfighters, but even the best of these scripts falls short of the cream of the classic Whovian crop: none of these is as good as The Caves of Androzani, Pyramids of Mars, Logopolis, or Inferno to name a few, and most of them contain severe continuity problems to boot. In a sense, the comparison may be unfair, because none of se scripts ever led to a movie, so I am comparing not entirely fleshed-out ideas of writers to BBC TV episodes which represent the end product. Nonetheless, many fans, including myself, would have had problems with these movies as official Doctor Who canon.
On the whole, however, I would still recommend this book. Whether or not you like these scripts, they are great fun to read. It also gives some insight into the creative processes of writers, and above all is a good primer on the various attempts to make a Doctor Who movie. While this book may not fully fill the void left in these lonely days as the prospects for a regular Doctor Who television series returning to the air remain bleak, it will at least give Doctor Who addicts a much-needed fix.
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This page © 1997 David Zientara dzien@nic.com