Without a doubt, this was Doctor Whos most contentious and universally reviled plot point up to that point and youll still be hard pressed to find a Whovian who doesnt consider it one of the worst Doctor Who ideas ever realised. The 1996 Doctor Who film was co-produced by Fox and created from the ashes of an attempt to make an American reboot that changed enormous amounts of Doctor Who mythology; most notably the plans to give the Doctor a mission statement of looking for his long lost father Ulysses and to make him half-human. The latter was the only part of the planned remake that filtered into the film that was eventually made. A key plot point of the film relate to eyes. The Master (and those he hypnotises) have snakelike alien eyes and the Eye Of Harmony can (nonsensically) only be opened by human eyes. Which means that the Master needs a human or half-human to open the Eye and steal the Doctors body. This resulted in a scene where the Doctor tells somebody that hes half-human on his mothers side as a distraction, and another where the Master uses the Eye to spy on the Doctor and determines that hes half-human. As you can probably guess, fans were united in uproar. The film was meant to be the building blocks for a Doctor Who revival but this plot point rode roughshod over twenty-nine years of firmly established mythology (the Doctor first being explicitly confirmed as an alien in 1967s The Evil of The Daleks) and tore down a lot of the characters background and mystique for the sake of the plot. The half-human Doctor has yet to be officially retconned within the TV series but the 2008 comic The Forgotten implied that it was a ruse to trick the Master, and fans have come up with a number of rationalisations for it in the past eighteen years. This was one of the few post-Classic Series plot points that didnt hugely divide fandom. Except that the unity came from the fact that everyone agreed on how ridiculous it was. What other moments did Doctor Who fans react poorly to? Let us know in the comments section below...
JG Moore is a writer and filmmaker from the south of England. He also works as an editor and VFX artist, and has a BA in Media Production from the University Of Winchester.
