Doctor Who (2005)
The Wilderness Years.
The Gap.
The 16 Year Void.
That Period when Doctor Who was Off the Air for a Really Long Time.
Virtually every Doctor Who fan knows about it, even if they didn’t experience it. To many fans who picked up with the show at or post 2005, it’s simply something older fans talk about, rather than something they experienced themselves, but it’s still pretty rare to meet a fan who isn’t aware of its existence.
Over at the Doctor Who Forum on Gallifrey Base, there have been discussions for years about what caused it, if it could have been avoided and whether there’s a danger of it happening again. There are times when it feels like the whole of Doctor Who fandom, particularly long term fans like myself, have something akin to PTSD when it comes to this period, constantly looking for the telltale signs that another such incident is on the horizon.
Because all those titles I used above came after the fact. At the time, we weren’t in some sort of sizeable-but-finite period of hiatus. No, at the time it was simple: Doctor Who was over. It wasn’t coming back. It was done.
…mostly.
Those who lived through that period (including some who actually discovered the show during it) know that it survived in several forms. Virgin’s New Adventures novels continued the exploits of the then-current 7th Doctor, giving us “stories too broad and deep for the small screen.” To many, the NAs became the very definition of what Doctor Who was, viewing them not as spinoffs of a television show but rather looking at the television show as just a prologue to the books, where they felt the series had truly matured.
Not everyone felt that way, of course. The NAs, while continuing the story of the 7th Doctor and his then-current companion, Ace, certainly felt very…different from watching the show and while some saw this as a welcome evolution, others saw it as a step away from the feel of the television series they’d enjoyed. It was the early days of the internet, but the trad(itional) vs. rad(ical) wars on the rec.arts.doctorwho board are pretty legendary, especially as the line moved on and introduced new companions and concepts. Myself, I have pretty eclectic tastes. I enjoy the NAs, but I will admit that when I think of the 7th Doctor, it’s his televised stories that pop quickly to mind, despite the fact that he has far more adventures in print than on the screen. I didn’t participate in the trad/rad arguments much, save to very occasionally mention that I thought there was a place for both approaches. I do think I would have liked it if they could have sneaked a few Dalek novels in, though.
Virgin eventually came out with their Missing Adventures line, giving us novels set in the “gaps” of the lives of 1st-6th Doctors. To a degree, this was throwing a bit of a bone to the more traditional fans, many of these novels feeling more like something the show would have done if it had a bigger budget. But even in the MA range, there were often novels that just felt like they fell far outside the spirit of the television series.
Of course, Virgin weren’t the only ones putting out new Doctor Who stories. Doctor Who Magazine had been giving us Doctor Who comics for years and they didn’t stop doing so when the show stopped airing new episodes. They also continued the adventures of the 7th Doctor and Ace and, while they shared a propensity with the NAs for playing up the 7th Doctor’s darker, more manipulative side, the continuity between the two ranges was tenuous as best. Don’t get me wrong, if you work at it, you can make it work (and I’ve always found “making the puzzle pieces fit” to be a fun game where Doctor Who is concerned) but it doesn’t just slot together nicely and without effort. But then, that’s always been the case for the Doctor Who comics.
So, there we were, in the early ‘90s, with books and comics for Doctor Who, with no sign of the show itself returning, when it was announced that there was going to be a TV movie. An American one.
I honestly don’t remember how I reacted to this news. This was probably…no definitely the point in my life in which my Doctor Who fandom was at its lowest ebb. I know I wanted to see it, contriving a way to watch it in the dorm room of a friend at college and record it onto videotape in the process. I also know I vaguely hoped it would lead to the creation of a new series.
When I saw the movie, I thought it was…ok. In retrospect, it really was exactly what I’d expect a Doctor Who movie in the ‘90s to be like. The filming style had a very “X-Files” feel to me, which you’d think I’d like because I was a fan of that show, but I recall thinking that I didn’t think that approach sat terribly well with Doctor Who. With the exception of a couple of small moments, I hadn’t been particularly impressed with this new, 8th Doctor. He seemed, to me, like a version of the Doctor where all the flaws and rough edges I enjoyed had been removed, leaving a more generic hero. It didn’t help that he ended the story’s conflict by just giving the villain of the piece a couple of swift kicks, which didn’t seem a particularly Doctor-ish solution to me.
But these were just first impressions. Over time I’ve come to appreciate certain parts of the TV movie more. It’s still far from a favorite of mine, but I definitely like it better than I used to. I also know that there are people for whom Paul McGann’s 8th Doctor is not just good, but the best Doctor ever. I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve heard people clamor for either some sort of concurrent McGann-led series in the present or just to regenerate the present Doctor into McGann again. While I’m not a particular fan of these ideas, I recognize that they are things that appeal to some fans. (Honestly, I don’t really like the idea of the lead role ever going back to a previous actor. Anniversary cameos and guest appearances are one thing. A full on retaking of the lead part by a previous holder of it is something else entirely and, to my mind, represents the show choosing to stagnate rather than push forward.)
Despite my feelings on the TV movie at the time of its broadcast, I did still rather hope it would lead to a new series. Sure, I hadn’t been on board with everything the movie had done but it was effectively just a pilot. There were a few shows I enjoyed whose pilots had been less than stellar. Sometimes it took a while to get the kinks out. I was fine with them going forward. I was even pretty confident that I’d come to enjoy McGann’s Doctor once he had more time to grow into the role.
But that didn’t happen. No series was forthcoming from that source. The more I learn about that time, the more I come to think that was a bit of a blessing. The various plans for the series that I’ve read about are…not my cup of tea, to say the least. Delving into exploration of the making of the TV movie has also made it pretty clear to me that its chances of spawning a series were pretty much done and dusted before it ever hit the airwaves.
But none of that really matters. A series, good or bad, didn’t materialize, for whatever reason. No, for a long time, the TV movie was the finale of Doctor Who.
I recall not being too thrilled with that. I’d thought that Survival was a pretty good capstone to the series, tonally. The TV movie felt more like a false start to me. (Probably because it kind of was.)
The process of other media picking up the story of Doctor Who continued. The BBC, bolstered by the success of the TV movie in the UK market, allowed Virgin’s license to expire without renewal, taking up the mantle of producing prose fiction for Doctor Who themselves. They didn’t have two official lines, but they basically took the same approach, with half of their books continuing the adventures of this new 8th Doctor and others focusing on the previous 7. The question of continuity between the Virgin and BBC book lines got a bit thorny, with the official line, I believe, being that they were separate continuities but, in practice, there were links between the two since there were some shared authors between the two ranges. Another company, Telos, also gave us some rather nice little Doctor Who novellas.
Then there was Big Finish. There is definitely a sense that Big Finish’s audio plays are the closest we got to a resurrection of Classic Doctor Who. They started with the same serial format. They made use of actors from the original show. They felt far more like trying to recreate the feel of the original series, to me, than the novels had. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily better, but they definitely had, to my mind, a more Classic Doctor Who “feel” than the novels. That’s not to say they didn’t experiment a bit. There were definitely things in Big Finish, even early Big Finish, that I can’t imagine the show itself ever trying, and I don’t just mean due to budget restrictions.
But, while I enjoyed reading the novels and comics and listening to the audios, I will admit it still felt to me like Doctor Who was over. These other media versions never truly felt like adequate replacements to me. Doctor Who was finished.
I think that’s a bit hard to convey, sometimes, to people whose experience of Doctor Who began after the show returned. We didn’t feel like Doctor Who was on an extended hiatus. We felt like it was over. We varied on whether we found the books, comics, audios or some combination of those to be an adequate replacement, but we really felt like the last chance for the show to return to the small screen had passed. The TV movie, flawed though I found it to be, had been a brief ray of hope. But it had come and gone, leaving us without promise of something more.
There were some other scraps across this period as well. Dimensions in Time. The Curse of Fatal Death. These were either funny or terrible, depending on one’s taste. But they were also sad reminders that the show was over.
The turn of the century passed, the Earth managing not to be sucked into the Eye of Harmony, and I had resigned myself to the idea that Doctor Who was over. Despite this, my Who fandom had fully resurged and I was diligently collecting up all the previous adventures of the Doctor on television as well as working my way through plans to get more books, comics and audios (an uphill battle since I wasn’t exactly rolling in currency.)
Then a couple interesting things happened.
First, came Scream of the Shalka, a Doctor Who animated webcast. An official one at that. Because it was so quickly ejected from the show’s mythos, it can be difficult to remember that Shalka was actually presented as the legitimate continuation of Doctor Who at the time. There was a novelization. There was a short story continuation in the same continuity. Some of the BBC books obliquely referenced it. This was Doctor Who continuing, finally, in audio-visual form.
I liked it. Truth told, and I know this borders on sacrilege for some, I liked it better than the TV movie. I still do, if I’m going to fully confess my blasphemy. I liked Richard E. Grant’s jaded, yet grimly funny Doctor. I liked the mystery of what had happened between the end of the TV movie and the beginning of Shalka. I liked trying to ponder how the Master had ended up as an android. I think, most of all, I liked that there were monsters, something I felt had been largely missing from the TV movie.
And then, almost completely without warning, there was a little teaser trailer. It was short, just a picture of the TARDIS dematerializing in the London fog. But we knew what it was. We knew what it meant.
Doctor Who was back.
Previous Post: Leaving "Is it any good or not?" Behind
Previous Doctor Who Post: An Unearthly Child
Next Post: Rose
First Doctor Who Post: Discovering the Doctor
First Post: Stories
Comments