The Doctor is tricked by his oldest enemy - the Master - to land the TARDIS in a Canadian city San Francisco, where he is gunned down by some hoods with shitty trigger discipline. After regenerating into the guy from Withnail and I, the Doctor recruits a pretty young lady (gee, who would have guessed?) and formulates a plan to stop the Master from destroying the world. Motorcycles and Y2K hysteria abound! Would you like a jelly baby?
Because I fell off Doctor Who fandom for several years once it started to become Doctor Woke, I had no idea Target Books were publishing reprints of old Doctor Who novelizations until I recently ran across some by happenstance at a local bookstore. I picked up a few because I'm a cheap whore for nostalgia, and the first one I tore into was Gary Russell's The TV Movie - which I later discovered is an altered, souped up version of the original 1996 novelization which had the even more creative title of The Novel of the Film.
I suppose a word about the Doctor Who TV movie is in order before I proceed with talking about the novelization any further. Well... it's certainly a thing that happened. My stance on Doctor Who is that the series ended definitively in 1989 and never really returned. The original novels and later the Big Finish audio dramas kept the spirit of the series alive in an expanded universe format, but what we received in 2005 may have been called Doctor Who, but it was now loud and hyper-active and tended to eschew science-fiction in favor of emotional wankery. (And I won't even comment on the war crimes committed once Chris Chibnall got his claws into the show.) In between the actual series of Doctor Who and the pretender series we had this strange one-off television movie with all kinds of Americanized compromises on a decades old British institution. Of course it was never going to work. Even with the rose-tinted glasses on, it's still a tough watch all these years later. But there are moments of greatness. Okay, maybe that's a stretch. There are moments of potential greatness. Okay, that could be a stretch too. Well... there are moments.
This reprint has a chance to improve upon some issues contained within both the TV movie itself and the original novelization. Yep, it wasn't just the tele-movie that was a clusterfuck. The book was based upon an earlier draft of the script, which meant by the time it was released to the public there were quite a few discrepancies between the pages of the book and the events on-screen. So with the 2021 version we have a lot of lines of dialogue cleaned up to be more in line with the film and some minor continuity errors corrected. We also get a little mini-adventure with the Seventh Doctor actually collecting the Master's ashes on Skaro and comically evading a Dalek sentry while doing so. However, I think the one change most fans will be happy that this retooled version of the novelization rectified is the biggest flub from the tele-movie - you know exactly what I'm talking about, it's the stupid "half-human" line - which is now re-framed as the Doctor telling a joke. A near-perfect fix.
I actually enjoyed this book. The prose is about what you'd expect from an author highly influenced by the breezy style of Terrance Dicks and while it's nothing to really sink your teeth into, sometimes you're just looking for one of those carefree reads. I still think the plot is pretty threadbare and Grace, the Doctor's de-facto companion for this adventure, ultimately foils the villain's scheme by messing with some wires instead of the Doctor doing something clever or heroic to save the planet, but these are failings of the original script this book is based upon. There's still some moments of gravitas to savor, such as the Doctor trying to return to reality after a particularly traumatic regeneration or the horror scenes of the paramedic Bruce becoming the Master and then coldly offing his loving wife. If there's one thing I did genuinely enjoy about the TV movie, it's Eric Roberts hamming it up as the Master, so I appreciated all of his theatrical dialogue in this novel.
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