An Adventure in Space and Time

I've been a Doctor Who fan for forty years. My dad introduced me to it through reruns broadcast on our local PBS affiliate. I started with The Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, who will always be my measuring stick for Doctors (Tennant and Capaldi come closest). A story of the making of Doctor Who, then, should be right up my alley, especially one from the home of Doctor Who (the BBC) and written by Mark Gatiss, who has written several episodes of the modern era series. It was produced and broadcast for the 50th anniversary of the show, and features cameos of a number of actors who were in both the classic and modern eras. The love and reverence for Doctor Who is fundamental to the movie's DNA. Unfortunately, that is also its greatest weakness. AAISAT is a breezy run through the inception and three years of the tenure of William Hartnell, The First Doctor, told in a flashback he is having while filming his final scene. The movie explores how the show came to be -- it was created to plug a hole in the schedule and capitalize on audiences an executive felt the BBC was ignoring, and nothing more than that. How the executive bucked the old boy's club of the BBC and hired a young woman who had never produced before, and a young man that would be the BBC's first director of Indian descent. How the show got saddles with a microscopic budget and a ramshackle soundstage. How its lead actor struggled with self-confidence and health issues. How its debut episode got buried due to debuted on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And how in spite of all that, it persevered and became a sci-fi institution and the BBC's most enduring show. As I said, the love and reverence for Doctor Who is in every moment, and that's both good and bad. The fan service is heart-warming if saccharine enough to give you diabetes; for instance, Hartnell, after being let go due to his declining health, says "I don't want to go", a clear echoing of The Tenth Doctor's famous final words. Casting actors who had done guest spots on the show in various roles, so the whole movie becomes a game of "I remember them from [episode]!". The way that farewells are baked into the show, first losing Waris Hussein (played by future Doctor Who actor Sacha Dhawan), then original producer Verity Lambert (played by Jessica Raine), and then Hartnell. It's not like this stuff didn't happen, of course. It's just how the movie milks it like it's the regeneration of The Doctor itself that feels a little cloying. I guess that's where I should segue into how the reverence is a bad thing. Adventure has such a reverence for the show, it only wants to skim the surface of the history in order to tell its somber, maudlin story of love and the inexorable force of change. Why does Hussein leave the show? Or Verity Lambert? Or Carole Ann Ford, who played original companion Susan? Or virtually any of the other companions during Hartnell's tenure? At best, you get "it's time to move on". For others, like Barbara Wright and Ian Chesterton, the other two original Companions, you get nothing. They barely have lines outside of recreating scenes from the show. That's more than you can say about the actors who play other Companions like Vicki, Ben, or Dodo, who don't get speaking roles at all. Some might say "this is being told as William Hartnell's flashback", and to that I'd counter that the movie is FULL of scenes that Hartnell in no way could remember because he wasn't there. Adventure may cover his tenure, but it is about THE SHOW. I would think then that it would go deeper into everyone else on the show and not treat them as little more than furniture on the set. I give credit to the fact that it never soft-sells Hartnell's decline; his fumbling of lines and props, and growing ever more difficult to work with isn't glossed over. I once read in a biography of original Pink Floyd frontman Syd Barrett that the band couldn't have existed without him, but when his mental illness became crippling, it couldn't continue to exist WITH him either; Adventure takes the same approach with Hartnell, giving him his due as the OG, but also making it clear that he had become a hinderance to its growth. But for all it zooms in on Hartnell, it does so at the expense of reducing most everybody else to scrappy underdog templates or cardboard cutouts. The only time we really see Verity Lambert's struggles with the BBC's patriarchy, or Waris Hussein's struggles with racism, is one scene early on at the BBC bar, when they struggle to get a bartender's attention until they shout their order. I would've liked to have seen more of that. More of the STRUGGLE to make Doctor Who what it was beyond the shiny gloss of sentimentality this movie is buried in. It's still a fine watch for Doctor Who fans, but I have a feeling many will want more than this movie is willing to give, and non-fans won't get what all the big deal is.