This week I am writing intelligent replies to the comments my Fans made about my last Doctor Who article.
"Seven years later Paul McGann appeared in an American thing that had no discernible similarity to Doctor Who. Then there was radio silence until 2005."
METALLICMASK: I can't agree with that. For all the TV movie's flaws, it has a clear similarity to both Spearhead from Space and The Deadly Assassin. It's recognizably a Doctor Who story in a way that the Leakley draft wouldn't have been.
A Catholic would say that what makes the Pope Catholic is the Apostolic Succession. The True Church is the True Church because it stands in an historical relationship to the historical Jesus: it is the inheritor of the sacred flame. The Pope can’t not be Catholic: Catholicism is whatever the successors of Peter say it is.
A Protestant would say that what makes an Archbishop truly Protestant is his subscribing to the correct set of doctrines. The True Church is the True Church because it believes in the things the historical Jesus taught. A Church stops being truly Protestant, or, indeed truly Christian, when it stops having right beliefs.
On one view, the Paul McGann film is Doctor Who because of the appearance of Sly McCoy, the Master, the Eye of Harmony, the Daleks, the TARDIS, jelly babies, and because it said “Based on the BBC TV series Doctor Who” in the opening credits.
On the other, it is not Doctor Who because the Master, the Eye of Harmony and the Daleks departed so radically from established orthodoxy.
My nuanced view, thirty years later, was that the film contained some Quite Interesting treatments of established Whovian tropes. But it felt as if it had been written by someone who had had the concept of “regeneration” explained to him, but had never seen an actual episode of the Doctor Who. McGann himself, an obviously fine actor, seemed similarly to be dressed in a consensus impression of what a Doctor Who costume ought to look like. Kind of a mad scientist and kind of a superhero but with an incongruous Edwardian aesthetic.
Think of the jelly babies. I don’t think Americans know what jelly babies are: they have sometimes been translated as “jelly beans” or “gummy bears”. The writer got the memo that the Doctor liked a particular kind of candy, but he didn’t get the joke that he had a big bag of sweets in his pocket like a schoolboy. So he showed him eating them from a rather ornate dish, with a silver teapot, as if they were a rare delicacy.
And no, canonically, the Doctor eating jelly babies while drinking tea and listening to an old fashioned gramophone doesn’t categorically contradict any establish lore.
Some of the decisions in the story — that it should be told from the point of view of the companion who should have their own back story and supporting cast, and that kissy-kissy stuff was no longer off limits — were obviously good ideas and were taken over by the Welsh Series. “I’m half human on my mother’s side” seems to have been a fossilised hangover from a rejected treatment and need never be thought of again.
This Chinese-whispers impression of what Doctor Who is probably like fell into a bog-standard 1990s action-ish thriller, not un-entertainingly.
I can see elements of the BBC mythos in this American revamp: but I truthfully can see that the episode or the storyline had much overlap with any episode of Doctor Who — except, I suppose, in so far as Doctor Who has embraced so many kinds of story that almost any kind of story would inevitably resemble some aspect of Doctor Who.
Of course you never play your edgiest card in your pilot episode; and the McGann characterisation was strong enough that I would like to have seen more of it.
It’s kinda sorta like my relationship with Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. It’s certainly not Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, but I'd quite liked to have seen Movie Merry, Movie Pippin and Movie Frodo in the sections of the story Jackson cut out.
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