Another of those cases where it might be quicker to list the good points?
Let's start at the beginning, with that pre-credits sequence. It's narrated by Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor - despite the fact that we won't see him for another half hour. We go from him talking to McCoy as the Seventh Doctor, so this probably confused the casual viewer.
The dialogue mostly concerns the Master, and we know that actor Gordon Tipple, playing the "Old Master", did record a version - only for them to go with the McGann version instead.
Then there's the narration itself...
The Master has been captured and put on trial by the Daleks, on their homeworld of Skaro. His last request is for the Doctor to be allowed to collect his remains and return them to Gallifrey.
Lots to unpick here.
Last time we saw it, Skaro was being destroyed by the Hand of Omega (Remembrance of the Daleks). Even if this is a new Skaro, or the planet at an earlier time before its destruction, since when did the Daleks have any sort of judicial system, especially one pertaining to inferior alien races? The Master would simply have been exterminated on sight.
The idea that they would honour any kind of request from any other species is another nonsense - and that they would allow their greatest enemy to visit the planet and collect the remains and freely depart an even bigger one.
We don't even get to see the Daleks. They're just noises-off and sound terrible. The voices on Day of the Daleks are great in comparison.
How exactly does the Master survive being blown to bits? One theory is that he was in league with the Daleks all along, which is how he survived - and also might go to explain their extraordinary behaviour in allowing the Doctor to turn up and leave again without killing him.
If this was the case, it certainly isn't mentioned. A single line of dialogue might have gone a long way to explain some of the problems above.
Assuming there was one, and this isn't all just improvisation, what was the Master's plan if the Daleks had refused his final request?
As it is, the Master does make it - but how does he know what the Doctor is going to do with his remains? How does he know he will be in a position to break free and infiltrate the TARDIS? Do all Time Lords have their remains stored in caskets which the Master is able to work out in advance how to break out of?
It all starts to look pre-planned - but, as I've said, there's absolutely no evidence of this on screen.
Read any fanzine or Doctor Who Monthly of the early 1990's and you'll see a common theme in the letters pages, once talk got out that Spielberg was showing an interest. That was the dread of the series being "Americanised". It would be all car chases and shoot-outs.
These letters from UK fans were always accompanied by some from t'other side of the Atlantic actually agreeing. The reason they liked the programme was because of its quirky and eccentric "Britishness", and they certainly didn't want to see this element reduced.
What do we see happen about ten minutes in? Teenage gang members involved in an urban gunfight, straight out of any derivative brain-dead action series / movie. And later on we get the chase. It's not cars, but it has the same function.
This TV movie is clearly aiming itself at the average US viewer who has little or no knowledge of the series, instead simply serving up stuff they are used to.
No doubt this is also why the hero of the show has to, at some point, kiss the heroine. Usually, it goes further than that - they actually couple up, but mercifully we don't see the Doctor and Grace jump into bed together. There are two kisses between them. The first is when the Doctor is ecstatic about remembering who he is, which is pardonable under the circumstances. The second time, after the Master has been defeated, is more of a romantic snog and harder to justify. He's only just met this woman after all.
Going back to the shooting of the Doctor, why didn't he check the scanner before opening the doors and stepping outside?
Why does the gang not carry on and kill Chang-Lee, who appears to be their main target as they mention him specifically by name. They've just killed two men so the man from the blue box's death shouldn't put them off their stride. They only run away when they hear a siren - which isn't even coming for them as we never see any police arrive. If they are that jumpy, why did they not run away when a box materialised out of thin air in front of them?
A young man is found down a dark alley standing beside the corpses of two other young men of similar background - plus a badly wounded man who doesn't appear to be local - and yet we never see the police take any action regarding Chang-Lee, like dragging him downtown to headquarters for questioning.
Four paragraphs in, and I've hardly got beyond the opening section of this story...
The Doctor gets taken to hospital, and we've heard ambulance driver Bruce say that you need to be rich to go there. The Doctor is a John Doe found in an alleyway, victim of a gang feud judging by the other bodies found with him - but no-one checks if he has money or credit cards.
Talking of not checking, the Doctor's X-ray shows an anomaly - but no-one seems to confirm if the image is right by taking a pulse or using a stethoscope, or studying the ECG print-out?
For such a wealthy hospital, it also seems to be semi-derelict.
Would a group of presumably wealthy patrons / potential donors of the hospital really be getting shown around in the middle of the night?
Why did Grace not simply go home that night? If she had done, she would have seen her boyfriend magically moving out of their home taking big items of furniture like the sofa with him, all in the middle of the night if he stayed to see the end of the opera.
Grace leaves the hospital at 3.40pm, but it's 3.20pm when she gets home...
That isn't the only problem with Time here, for it appears to be midnight across the entire planet simultaneously at the climax.
Was San Francisco only chosen as a location for this story because Vancouver can pass for it? A story about the Millennium really ought to have been set in London, home of the Greenwich Meridian, and home from home for the Doctor.
And everyone knows that the new Millennium didn't start until the following year. We only went daft about this because the numerals changed from 19-something to 20-something.
The new TARDIS looks great, but the destination things on the console are wooden rollers that would only fit a handful of times / places on them.
And just what is the "Rassilon Era"? Does this mean that the TARDIS can go back into Gallifrey's own history? That could surely mean the creation of all manner of paradoxes. And does the "Humanian Era" simply mean Earth history, or anytime in the universe after the human race has evolved?
The biggest issues revolve around the Eye of Harmony.
In The Deadly Assassin this was buried deep beneath the Panopticon and even the Time Lords had forgotten all about it, despite it being their power source. Just tampering with it, let alone opening it up, causes serious damage to the Capitol.
Here, however, the Eye is inside the TARDIS, and is seen to open a couple of times. What opens it is the eye-print of a person - and seemingly any old human being can do this. Indeed, it looks like only a human eye can do it...
Why? Because it responds to the Doctor's eye, and he's half human (on his mother's side).
They've already referred to the TARDIS as having a Cloaking Device, no doubt because some viewers might not know what a chameleon is, or how it relates to camouflage.
Therefore, go down the Star Trek route of explanations.
Having the Doctor half-human instead of fully alien is probably done for similar reasons. He's just like Mr Spock.
Did they think that the audience simply wouldn't accept a hero who is an alien? Hard to believe, as all the principal characters throughout the Star Wars franchise hail from a galaxy far, far away.
I can't think of any other reason, however, for making this change. Luckily it has never been revisited - and, indeed, later developments totally discount it being true.
So, is this the Eye of Harmony, or does every TARDIS have one of its own?
The other thing about the human eye opening the Eye is that the Master assumes any human can do it - which is why he uses Chang Lee in the first place. It's only after he does this that he realises / remembers the Doctor's parentage.
A problem which the Master really ought to have thought about, and not for the first time either - destroying a planet that you happen to be on at the time. Does he not remember what happened to him the last time he tried to mess about with the Eye of Harmony?
The new Doctor has developed the sudden gift of knowing little details of random people he meets on Earth. He tells Gareth what questions to answer on a future exam, and advises Chang Lee to be elsewhere the following year. And yet he doesn't know that Grace will turn down his offer to travel with him in the TARDIS?
This new talent may be down to his knowledge of future events, but it seems unlikely he would know such tiny details as how Gareth came to pass that exam, even if he does go on to become a noted scientist. Has he simply cheated and looked up Chang Lee's future before leaving the TARDIS? Is his advice to Chang Lee specific to him, or is something bad going to happen to San Francisco in 2000? If so, shouldn't he do more than warn one person?
Did he always know that Grace would turn him down, and is just being polite in asking her?
Or does he somehow have the hitherto unseen gift of foreseeing people's individual futures?
It's a terribly unlikely coincidence that there just happens to be a clock component nearby which the Doctor needs to fix the TARDIS - and he's met a woman who's on the board of the place which houses it.
The TARDIS can move backwards, forwards and sideways in Time - but can it really alter time within itself, and so bring dead people back to life? Just because it goes back a day, Grace and Chang Lee should still be dead within its confines. The Doctor's age doesn't vary every time he travels back and forth. He doesn't suddenly grow a beard if he goes two days into the future, or revert to being a baby if he goes back a few centuries.
Why does the Master care what he looks like - dressing up for the occasion - if he's about to steal the Doctor's body and discard Bruce's?
The Master is a skilled hypnotist, so why did they resort to having him spew up some weird gloop to possess people?
Grace is a surgeon who claims not to be able to set an alarm clock, so how was she able to rewire an alien space / time machine, using alien tools?
And finally, why does Grace turn him down at the end? She's lost her job, her boyfriend and half her furniture, and she's just met a man who can bring her back from the dead. What's not to like?
Doctor Who - The TV Movie has its problems, lots of them, but at least they are self-contained problems. In purely television Doctor Who terms, so long as you don't mind someone looking like Paul McGann turning up in flashback sequences every so often, you could just jump from Survival (3) to Rose and be none the wiser - as just about everything we see here gets discarded in the revived series.
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