Who is this Doctor Who?

Gee whiz, it took 13 years after Star Trek premiered before Star Trek movies began being produced, but Doctor Who got a theatrical film just 2 years after it began airing on television--and this happened while the series was still being produced.

The good Doctor began his television adventures in November 1963. Its second story arc introduced his greatest enemy--the evil Daleks. In 1965, this particular storyline was adapted into a movie.

Peter Cushing was cast as Doctor Who--and, yes, in this version, he's literally named "Who." This Doctor isn't an alien. Instead he's an entirely human and absent-minded inventor who had built his own time machine. The movie simplifies his origin considerably in this regard, which also simplifies the exposition necessary to get the story started. The original serial ran for for seven half-hour episodes for a run time of just under three hours. The movie runs 82 minutes, so had less time to introduce us to the characters and get to the actual adventure. 

So the Doctor becomes a human being. His three companions are still Susan, Ian and Barbara. But Susan--a fifteen-year-old in the series--becomes a 12-year-old in the movie. Barbara morphs into another granddaughter and Ian becomes Barbara's clumsy boyfriend. (In the series, they were Susan's school teachers--and Ian was more straightlaced hero rather than bumbling comic relief.)

The Doctor is showing Ian his TARDIS (that's a picture of the TARDIS interior above) when Ian stumbles into a lever and sends them to another planet. Here, they soon meet the Daleks.

What follows is a fun adventure, with the humans getting captured by the Daleks, escaping, befriending the humanoid Thals outside the Dalek city, then working with the Thals to prevent the Daleks from setting off a huge nuke and wiping out the Thals.

It's all good stuff, with Cushing's performance as the Doctor being the highlight of the film. No one does absent-minded brilliance as effectively and with as much a sense of fun as did Peter Cushing. Yes, he could also play evil characters better than nearly anyone else (see his Frankenstein movies or Star Wars for examples of that), but when he wanted to be lovable, then he was pretty darn lovable. And even detractors of his two Doctor Who films will concede that he's the best part of the movie. No matter how much you might love your real-life grandfathers, you'll find yourself wishing Cushing's Doctor was your granddad as well.

The adventure stuff is fun as well, though some scenes in which the Daleks discuss things among themselves to provide us with exposition do drag. The budget was obviously limited, but the production design gives us some pretty nice looking alien landscapes and the Daleks themselves are always great villains.

In the end, the humans and the Thals team up in a battle to stop the Daleks from firing their nuke. Getting to that scene, though, involved some dialogue that actually adds an interesting level of depth to the story. The Thals once had had a great civilization, but this was destroyed in a nuclear war years ago when they fought the race that would eventually mutate into the Daleks. So now they are complete pacifists. They will not fight.

But if they don't fight, they will die. The Doctor as to convince a people who have a perfectly understandable reason for being pacifists that they are going to have to re-learn how to fight a war. Though the movie clearly favors the "You have to fight!" side of this argument, the sincere struggle the Thals have with this concept adds a nice thematic backbone to the story.

Not all Doctor Who fans care for these movies. That it has its own seperate continuity from the TV series apparently isn't an issue. Many simply do not think its a very good film. It also has its fans, though, and I count myself among them. Despite its flaws, its a varient of the Doctor that I'm glad exists.

By the way, there are two theories out there for how to fit this movie and its sequel into the regular Doctor's continuity. Peter Cushing said that he thought of his Doctor as a future incarnation of the Doctor that had been mind-wiped of his knowledge that he was a Time Lord by the Celestial Toymaker, a villain from the classic series. I kind of like this idea, but that means he had to have had an adventure almost identical to one he had already had with three companions who just happened to have the same names as his original companions.

The novelization of the Doctor's 50th Anniversary special suggests that the Doctor was a friend of Peter Cushing and gave Cushing permission to adapt several of his early adventures into movies. Since I love the idea of Peter Cushing hanging out with a Time Lord, I am tempted to lean towards this theory. But this would also mean that the Cushing Doctor never really existed and what fun is that?

So I think we need to stick with the idea that there is a parallel universe out there in which Doctor Who is a human who looks like Peter Cushing and makes you wish he were your grandfather.