Trailer
Plot summary
The Doctor, a time traveler from Gallifrey, is taking the remains of his enemy the Master home from Skaro. Mid-journey the locked box breaks open, and the Master slips free as a snake-like ooze that sabotages the TARDIS. The ship lands in San Francisco's Chinatown on 30 December 1999. A gang chasing the young Chang Lee shoots the Doctor outside. Lee calls an ambulance and has him taken to a hospital, where the cardiologist Dr. Grace Holloway finds his double-heart anatomy strange during surgery. The ooze rides along in the ambulance.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Doctor Who (1996)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Christopher Eccleston and Peter Capaldi were both invited to audition for the Doctor and declined: Eccleston did not want to be associated with a “brand name” so early in his career, and Capaldi felt he was unlikely to get the part. Both later played the Doctor, as the Ninth and Twelfth incarnations, in the series revived in 2005.
- Sylvester McCoy has revealed that in the sequence where he locks the casket with his sonic screwdriver he held the tool pointing the wrong way around; rather than reshoot it, the sonic screwdriver was blurred in post-production to conceal the error.
- A proposed bible for an American revival of the show, written by John Leekley, would have had the Doctor seeking his father, Ulysses, through locales such as Gallifrey, Ancient Egypt and Skaro, with old stories remade. Leekley's scripts were not well-received, resulting in him being removed from the project in September 1994.
- The movie was filmed on 35mm film in Vancouver, British Columbia, the first time any Doctor Who story had been filmed in North America.
- John Debney was commissioned to write the score and intended to replace Ron Grainer's original theme with a new composition; ultimately Debney did in fact use an arrangement of Grainer's music for the theme, although Grainer goes uncredited.
