Doctor Who
Following the Master's trial and execution at the hands of the Daleks, the Doctor, currently in his seventh incarnation, is transporting the Master's remains to Gallifrey via his TARDIS. En route, the box with the remains breaks open and an ooze leaks out, infecting the TARDIS. The Doctor is forced to make an emergency materialisation in San Francisco's Chinatown on 30 December 1999.
As he exits and locks the TARDIS, the Doctor is shot by a gang chasing down Chang Lee, a young Chinese-American man. Lee calls for an ambulance and escorts the unconscious Doctor to a hospital, unaware the ooze from the TARDIS has gotten aboard. At the hospital, cardiologist Dr Grace Holloway attempts surgery to remove the bullet but is confused by his strange double-heart anatomy, and accidentally lodges a cardiac probe in the Doctor's body, apparently killing him. The Doctor's body is taken to the morgue, while Lee is given the Doctor's possessions including the TARDIS key. Meanwhile, the ooze takes over the body of the ambulance driver, Bruce, transforming him into a new body for the Master.
Later, the Doctor's body regenerates, and the new Doctor, suffering amnesia, gathers clothes from remnants of a recent party. He recognises Holloway, who has resigned from the hospital after the failed operation, and follows her to her car, proving to her he is the same man by pulling out the cardiac probe. Holloway takes him home to recover. Lee returns to the TARDIS where the Master arrives and puts him under his mind control by claiming the Doctor had stolen his body. The Master convinces Lee to open the TARDIS and then to open the Eye of Harmony within it, which requires a human retinal scan. When the Eye opens, the Doctor is flooded with memories and realises the Master is searching for him, and tries to block the scan. He warns Holloway that while the Eye is opened, the fabric of reality will weaken, and potentially destroy the Earth by midnight on New Year's Eve if they cannot close it. However, he needs an atomic clock to do so, and Holloway finds one on display at the San Francisco Institute of Technological Advancement and Research.
Outside, they find the ambulance with the Master and Lee waiting for them, offering them a ride. The Doctor does not immediately recognise the Master, but discovers his true identity en route, and he and Holloway escape, but not before the Master can spit an ooze-like substance on Holloway's wrist. The two continue to the Institute and obtain the clock, returning to the TARDIS. The Doctor installs the clock and successfully closes the Eye, but finds the damage to reality too great and that he must revert time before the Eye was opened to prevent the destruction of Earth. As he connects the proper TARDIS circuits to do this, the Master remotely takes control of Holloway's body, causing her eyes to become inhuman, and she strikes the Doctor unconscious.
The Doctor wakes to find himself chained above the Eye, the Master poised to take his remaining regenerations while Lee and Holloway watch. The Doctor is able to break the Master's control on Lee, and Lee refuses to open the Eye for the Master. The Master kills him, and then releases his control on Holloway to return her eyes to normal. He forces her to open the Eye and then begins drawing the Doctor's lifeforce. Holloway, under her own control, is able to complete the final circuits to put the TARDIS into a time-holding pattern, preventing Earth's destruction, and then goes to free the Doctor. The Master kills her, but this has given enough time for the Doctor to free himself and attack the Master. The Doctor gains the upper hand and pushes the Master into the Eye. The Eye closes and time reverts a few minutes, undoing Lee and Holloway's deaths.
With no further risk to Earth, the Doctor prepares to leave. Lee returns his possessions, and the Doctor warns him not to be in San Francisco on the next New Year's Eve. The Doctor offers Holloway the opportunity to travel with him, but she politely refuses, and instead kisses him goodbye. The Doctor departs alone in his TARDIS.
=== Continuity ===
==== The Doctor ====
Until 2013's "The Night of the Doctor", the television movie was Paul McGann's sole televised story as the Doctor. It has inspired an ongoing Doctor Who novel line, comic strip, and audio series that featured the Eighth Doctor for years, beyond the TV series' return in 2005. The Eighth Doctor was also featured in a series of BBC7 audio plays since 2007.
The Seventh Doctor is seen wearing a different costume from the one he wore during his 1987–1989 tenure: gone are the question mark pullover and umbrella. The costume does include the original hat, which is actually owned by Sylvester McCoy.
When reluctantly filling out an emergency medical treatment form, Chang Lee (who had only met the semi-conscious Seventh Doctor minutes earlier and did not know his identity) gives the Doctor's name as "John Smith", a recurring alias originally given to the Second Doctor by companion Jamie McCrimmon in The Wheel in Space.
Much of the movie's plot rests on a revelation that the Doctor is half-human, "on [his] mother's side". Following the movie, several Eighth Doctor Adventures novels seek either to explain or elaborate on this premise, often with conflicting results. Alien Bodies suggests that only the Eighth Doctor is half-human, and that his interest in Earth people is "something to do with his retroactive ancestry". Unnatural History and The Gallifrey Chronicles suggest that the Doctor is the child of a Victorian lady called Penelope Gate and a Time Lord named Ulysses. The Taking of Planet 5 takes a different approach, suggesting that the Doctor slowly became half-human through repeated regeneration in close proximity to humans, causing the Doctor to absorb aspects of their DNA. Although the issue has yet to be explicitly revisited on-screen, in "Journey's End" a second version of the Doctor is created through a combination of the Doctor's and his human companion's physiologies; unimpressed with his half-human body, this new Doctor wonders how humans can manage with only one heart. In the 2008 Doctor Who comic book The Forgotten the Doctor states that, upon finding out that the Master had escaped from the box, he used the Chameleon Arch to deceive the Master with the fiction of being half-human.
The Seventh Doctor's two hearts on the radiograph are seen but dismissed as a double-exposure. His newly regenerated third incarnation suffered the mistake in Spearhead From Space.
The Eighth Doctor steals his first wardrobe from a hospital staff locker room, as had the Third Doctor and, later, the Eleventh Doctor.
The Eighth Doctor examines a mask of Richard Nixon. The Third Doctor crossed paths with a Nixon waxwork figure in Spearhead From Space, and Nixon would be a significant supporting character in the Eleventh Doctor stories, "The Impossible Astronaut" & "Day of the Moon".
==== Daleks and the Master ====
Although the Doctor's most famous alien adversaries, the Daleks, are not seen in the film, they are heard condemning the Master to death during the film's opening sequence (sporting their trademark war cry of "EXTERMINATE!").
The Master tried to use the Eye of Harmony to obtain a new set of regenerations before, in The Deadly Assassin. He was also offered a new set of regenerations by the Time Lords in The Five Doctors, but his continued quest for regenerations in later stories like Planet of Fire implies that he never received them. Later, however, he would be granted a new cycle, as confirmed in the 2007 episode "The Sound of Drums".
==== The TARDIS ====
Although the TARDIS interior changed several times throughout the original series, the movie's set was the most dramatic change yet, replacing the sterile white corridors and "roundel"-based design. Several subsequent tie-in novels attempted to explain the change.
This film introduces the idea of including Earth-centric elements on the TARDIS control console, such as an early 20th-Century automobile handbrake, apparently used for a similar purpose. This was used again in the 2005 and 2010 designs of the console.
The Deadly Assassin (1976) established that the Eye of Harmony is held on Gallifrey; its inclusion on the TARDIS in the film conflicts with this.
The film further states that the "Eye" can only be opened with the scan of a human retina, a fact apparently tied to the Doctor's own partially human retinal pattern.
==== References to other stories ====
The book that the Doctor sits down to read at the beginning and the end of the movie is The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. The Doctor shared an adventure with Wells in the Sixth Doctor serial Timelash and would meet him again in the Tenth Doctor comic "The Time Machination". In 1973's Frontier in Space, the Master is seen reading Wells' The War of the Worlds. In the untelevised story Shada, Professor Chronotis can be seen with a copy of The Time Machine, which is later visible throughout the episode.
This is one of six Doctor Who adventures to be set on New Year's Eve 1999 and New Year's Day 2000. The comic strip Plastic Millennium, published in the Doctor Who Magazine Winter 1994 Special; Craig Hinton's Virgin Missing Adventures novel Millennial Rites (October 1995); Justin Richards's Past Doctor Adventures novel Millennium Shock (May 1999), the Short Trips: Seven Deadly Sins story "Suitors, Inc." (2005) and the Fourth Doctor's segment from the comic The Forgotten (2008) all take place on those dates, as do elements of the Torchwood episode "Fragments".
The "time tunnel" effect of the 2005 Doctor Who series onwards is reminiscent of the vortex that the TARDIS travels through in the opening credits and climax of the television movie which in itself is reminiscent of the vortex in the opening and closing sequences of 1974-1980.
=== Cast notes ===
Yee Jee Tso would later return in 2002 to play Major Jal Brant in the Seventh Doctor audio drama Excelis Decays and Doctor Reece Goddard in the Sixth Doctor webcast Real Time.
Daphne Ashbrook would later return in 2004 alongside Paul McGann's Eighth Doctor as Perfection in the audio drama The Next Life.
Tso and Ashbrook returned to Big Finish together playing Captain Ruth Matheson and Warrant Officer Charlie Sato of UNIT in the audio dramas Tales From The Vault and Mastermind, both part of the Companions Chronicles series, in 2011 and 2013.
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