Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

It's anniversary time! What better excuse than to bring out some past Doctors and do up a full on blitz of Nostalgia!

For those of you just catching up - from 1963 to 1989 (and a couple of false starts thereafter) the BBC ran an immensely popular family program called Doctor Who. The main character is called The Doctor, a Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey. He travels the universe in the TARDIS, a wondrous spaceship that can go anywhere in time and space - provided that the Doctor can steer it correctly. During his adventures, he and his companion (usually a young human female with weak ankles and good lungs) combat evil and injustice wherever they find it. Key to the longevity of the series - Doctor Who can do what the James Bond movies have done several times. When fatally injured, Time Lords have the ability to regenerate, totally changing their faces and personalities, allowing the ability to swap out the lead roll when the actor wants to leave the series. So there have been several Doctors with different faces (ten, so far), but all of them the same character.

Oh, and the name of the show is Doctor Who. The main character is simply called The Doctor.

We open with the (yet unnamed) planet of the Time Lords under siege. It seems that all of their energy is being drained by a black hole, and the only one who can save them is The Doctor (of course). Running out of options, they decided to transgress the first Law of Time (yet obeying first law of plot convenience) and bring all three incarnations of the Doctor together at one time to battle this evil!

We catch up with Doctor Three (the one with the smoking jacket) and UNIT also under siege by these protoplasmic blobby things, attacking UNIT headquarters with great vigor. As things look bad, Doctor Two (the one with the Moe Haircut) appears out of nowhere. Ducking into the TARDIS for safety, the Doctors proceed to argue until Doctor One (the crotchety old one) appears on the view screen to tell them both to shut the hell up and take the TARDIS into the black hole to meet the problem head on.

On the other side, the two Doctors encounter Omega, the engineer who worked with Rassilon (and the Other, if you believe the books) to give the gift of time travel to Gallifrey. Thought killed in the experiments, Omega has been trapped in the formless universe, where he's been plotting revenge against the Time Lords for abandoning him. And now it's up to the Doctor(s) to stop the quite insane Omega, reverse the power drain of Gallifrey, and get everyone home safely!

The first major landmark of Doctor Who sees the production team roll out a big event with all three doctors at the time, and surprisingly it doesn't collapse in on itself in a self indulgent fan-wank session like the Five Doctors did. Ok, it ain't all that great, but it's reasonably watchable stuff.

First - it's a damn shame that Bill Hartnell was so ill by the time of shooting that they could barely include him in the episode. He looks so weak and emaciated from the robust old man that played the roll for three years. No comment against the production, mind you - just a sad statement that we all get older.

On the other hand, you really have to feel for poor old Jon Pertwee. Throughout all four episode, he is in constant danger of being totally eclipsed by the much more flamboyant Troughton, who easily steals every scene he appears in. Still the two have some great chemistry together, playing off each other like snippy little children. It's great stuff.

Unfortunately, with two and a half Doctors threatening to upstage each other at every turn, other aspects fall by the wayside - like the secondary characters. UNIT regulars like Benton and Jo don't get a lot to do, the Brigadier gets to be exceptionally irritating as he shamelessly ignores the Doctors' explanations for everything, and the minor parts - like the poacher - are either poorly written or largely superfluous. (And what does Doctor Who have against poachers anyway? The poor guy in Pyramids of Mars, the chap in Spearhead from Space, the one on the bike in Claws of Axos - all meet nasty ends. Free the poachers now! Or at least put them in the new series so we can get back to proper poacher abuse again).

Still, we get to finally see the Brigadier's reaction to the inside of the TARDIS. That's worth the price of admission right there.

Speaking of the guest stars, I'd be remiss if I painted Stephen Thorne with the same brush as the others. He's clearly the best non-Doctor thing about the episode. Here's this tragic, insane figure that set his people up amongst the gods at the cost of great personal sacrifice, and Thorne plays it perfectly. There's a sadness lurking just around the edges of the madness, an expressive emotion that's evident despite having a stonking great big mask covering his entire head.

It's fitting that the Doctor's freedom (in this case, pardon from the Time Lord exile) comes in counterpoint to Omega desperate to gain his own at any cost.

Sadly a large section of the script is taken up padding, people being captured, and corridor acting. The fight between UNIT and the blobby monsters isnt very convincing either - certainly not compared to gripping action scenes like out of The Invasion or The Ambassadors of Death. Ah well, it could be much worse - the plot actually goes somewhere and does something, naff as it is - unlike the Five Doctors, which is a vaguely connected scenes strung together for maximum nostalgia value.

Ah well, I'll always have Timecrash.

THE DVD -
Yet again, the Restoration team works it's magic, giving us another great looking video. I could go on about how many scratches were painted out by hand with Scratchbox, or how the audio was remastered from the ground up - but why bother. It looks damn fine, and that's all we need to know.

THE EXTRAS -
We get an amazingly entertaining commentary from producer Barry Letts, Nicholas Courtney, and Katy Manning (the Brigadier and Jo Grant). There's a couple of trailers - one from 1973 and one from 1981 (a repeat from the Carnival of Monsters DVD), there's a section from Blue Peter hosted by former companion Peter Purves with Pertwee, some clips from BSB's Doctor Who Weekend back in the early 90's, and some clips from PanoptiCon '93 with Jon Pertwee on stage at the 30th anniversary convention (which makes me sad that we'll never get him to commentate on any of his DVDs. I met the man in person ages ago, and he's just as cool and entertaining and vibrant on stage as he is in the clips). Oh, and we get the usual text commentary track and photo gallery.

THE BOTTOM LINE -
While the story has its flaws (Okay - occasionally great big glairing flaws), I'm willing to overlook them because I some priceless interplay between the Doctors out of the deal.

OTHER DOCTOR WHO EPISODES ON DVD:

DOCTOR ONE -
* The Beginning * Doctor Who and the Daleks * The Aztecs * The Dalek Invasion of Earth * The Lost in Time Collection *
DOCTOR TWO -
* Tomb of the Cybermen* The Seeds of Death *
DOCTOR THREE -
* Spearhead From Space * The Three Doctors * Carnival of Monsters*
DOCTOR FOUR -
* The Ark in Space * Genesis of the Daleks * The Pyramids of Mars * The Robots of Death * The Talons of Weng-Chiang *
DOCTOR FIVE -
* Earthshock * The Five Doctors * Resurrection of the Daleks * The Caves of Androzani*
DOCTOR SIX -
* Vengeance on Varos * Revelation of the Daleks*
DOCTOR SEVEN -
* Rememberance of the Daleks * The Television Movie*
THE NEW SERIES -
* Doctor Who - Series One * Doctor Who - Series Two * Torchwood - Series One * Doctor Who - Series Three * The Infinite Quest*


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12