Doctor Who The TV Movie (The Target Novelisation)

Books  Probably an odd choice of reading given, hands gesticulating, everything.  But between catching up with the Eighth Doctor audios, spending a hundred odd hours playing Star Wars Jedi Survivor, work and life, I've fallen behind on the books.  This felt like a good way to get back in the habit, what with it being a novelisation of a story I only rewatched a couple of weeks ago thanks to the gorgeous 4K restoration and a book I've most read before, albeit over twenty years ago.

Looking back at my first review from back in 2005, originally written for the Behind The Sofa group blog but archived here, it's noticeable how little my writing style has really changed in the ensuing decades, apart from describing them as Time Lords rather than timelords, something which was drilled into me pretty quickly by friend of the blog Graham Kibble-White.  I like the ending of the review although it fails to notice the reference to the last time Doctor Who went off air in 1989.

Most of my opinions still stand although my understanding of how the Seventh Doctor "dies" is clearer thanks to the film itself and this book.  It's not the gunshots which kill him, they remove the bullets which should lead to a relatively straightforward recovery.  It's the surgeons including Grace, misunderstanding the Doctor's anatomy, that his increased heart rate is due to having two hearts, a fact which is explained away in their heads by a double exposure on the x-ray.  It's the probe which Grace pushes into his body which kills him.  I am an idiot.

As Gary Russell says in the new preface, this TARGET edition allowed him to put back in some of the material which his editors in 1996 suggested be removed because this was supposed to be a bold new era for the franchise and embellish in other ways.  We get to enjoy the details of the Doctor's mission to retrieve the Master's remains (the younger version of me is very pleased).  When Chang Lee opens the Eye of Harmony, we're given descriptions of all of the previous Doctors rather than the glossing over from the previous version.  

Not only that, but he's embellished a bit too with concepts which have only become spin-off continuity more recently: It's clearly President Romana who gives the Doctor his mission to retrieve the Master's remains.  When the Doctor considers Ace's fate, A Charitable Earth is mentioned tying it in to the lockdown era continuity around his former companion.  There's plenty more listed on the TARDIS Wikia page although which says they're deviations from the film but seem more like someone's done a line-by-line comparison between the two books.

Between the TV Movie itself and the various novelisations, which is canonical?  All of them, none of them, who's to say?  People have all kinds of fanilisations of how continuity works in Doctor Who, including Gary himself at various points, that the TV series is one universe, the audios another, the books another.  But I'm a completist.  It's all canonical.  But it's also constantly in flux so in some versions of history the Doctor is half-human on his mother's side and in others, as portrayed in this book for example, he's clearly joking.  

Placement: LOL.

We Need To Talk About Kara Zor-El.

Film  Just briefly.  There are typically two indicators that I'm not really enjoying a movie: either (a) I fall asleep, or (b) my film studies brain cells kick in and start looking for flaws. Supergirl (2026) currently has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 57%, which, even given what's about to appear below, still seems like a particularly rough score. It's six percent below The Marvels, a score that should arguably be 73%, given that you generally have to automatically add 10% to any RT aggregate if it's an action feature with a female protagonist, as the predominantly male review corps doesn't tend to like that sort of thing. Ballerina is an 85%, Salt is a 71%, and Cleaner is 61% (which is still too low). This makes Supergirl a 67% picture, which seems about right.

As I suggested on the socials, unlike some other similar releases, it's not one from which I left punching the air. I tried, I wanted to, but as a few reviewers have noted, it begins well yet eventually becomes an unsurprising, generic mess of sci-fi tropes of the kind I usually enjoy but somehow fails to resonate. Perhaps it's the deeply average, one-note villain. Perhaps it's the clichéd approach to the outback universe, where everywhere is a shithole planet full of miscreants. Could it be that in creating a story around a pretty much invincible character, it spends much of the runtime finding ingenious ways of physically de-skilling her when, much like Superman, she has enough mental scars to hold her back? Or is it the sense that we're watching a sub-par Guardians of the Galaxy featuring only Star-Lord?

I think the most damaging aspect, and this is where my analytical side takes over, is that after a while, Supergirl stops being the protagonist of her own movie and lacks agency in many of her scenes leading up to that point. The most obvious examples happen in the flashbacks, particularly the key moment when she lands on Earth and meets her cousin. She can't speak "standard" yet, but the whole scene is played from Clark's POV as he shambles about trying to make her feel welcome. Shouldn't we be seeing her perspective on suddenly being on a planet where she doesn't understand the language or what is happening in general? We shouldn't be able to understand what Superman is saying in these scenes; David Corenswet's dialogue should be gibberish.

However, it's the back half of the film when the structure really becomes unstuck. In the comic that inspired the project, Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, much of the story is told from the perspective of a new character, Ruthye Marye Knoll. This is repeated in this loose adaptation, where she fills the role you might find for a Doctor Who companion. On screen, she cuts a very Arya Stark figure, even if she only has one name on her list. Whereas the comic was part of a continuum of Supergirl stories in which stylistic shifts add depth, it's very odd that in Kara's screen debut, they've chosen to distance the audience from her for much of the second half while this other girl's struggles move to the forefront. Supergirl is lying in a cave, waiting for a different coloured sun to rise.

The biggest mistake for me is perhaps in the final shot of the film.  Apparently a reference to the Superman and Lois conversation in Superman (2025), which had the Justice Gang fighting a kaiju in the background, Kara sits opposite Clark and gives him the news that she's remaining on Earth for now, trying to make her home there.  Again, the scene is mostly played from her cousin's perspective and the final beat is Clark running off screen to deal with Krypto and it's he who has the final line.  It's admittedly very funny, because everything Krypto does is funny, but it's extremely odd that we don't then have a close-up of Kara relaxing into her new home, happy that she's completed her journey.  But it feels redolent of a film in which the title character's feelings aren't always at the forefront.