Dr Who: "The Next Doctor" Premieres Saturday

There won’t be a weekly Doctor Who in 2009, but there will be a series of two-hour movies, starring the inimitable David Tennant as The Doctor, but without a consistent Companion. He picks up (and drops) new ones in each movie, including this one, which originally aired in the UK on Chistmas Day. And at that time it was also known that David Tennant would soon be leaving the role, as nine had before him, and someone would be taking his place as the Eleventh Doctor.

Why did it take six full months for the Christmas Special to appear on this side of the on?  Anybody’s guess.  But one of the clever centerpieces of the piece is blown to pieces by this, ah, time slip, so to speak. 

At the time of its original airing, much ink was spread and speculation swirled around David Morrisey, a well-respect British actor who appears to be a (slightly befuddled ) future regeneration of The Doctor who has lost his way. Would he be the new Doctor?  Was this the much-anticipated, even –dreaded, Regeneration Episode?

We won’t give it away entirely,  but it’s really not much of a secret anymore.  Any Who fan worthy of the name knows what nobody knows on December 25, 2008: this guy here is going to be the next Doctor, not David Morrisey.

And as of June 25, another Tennant-based Who-movie, The Land of the Dead, has already aired (it’s okay, but not as good as The Next Doctor).  And the next, The Waters of Mars, is filming now and will air in the UK in November.  When it will air in the US is anyone's guess.

As for The Next Doctor, you’re in for a rollckin’ good Victorian time, as The Doctor lands in London, 1851 and unravels a mystery that involves watches, memory, murder and the return of the biggest Cyberman you ever saw, not to mention the King – ah, Queen – ah, King? – of the Cybermen.  Great fun … just a little late out of the starting gate.  

Quite Possibly the Worst World-Whacker Ever Made. Seriously.

Asteroids, comets, moons, planets smashing into Earth and ending everything -- everything.  You'd think the all those celestial bodies ramming into each other, ending in total extinction events, would have enough inherent drama and visual potential to make a bunch of great movies. 

Apparently not.  Global annihilation just isn’t enough anymore.  You gotta go big, son, really big. 

At least that's what the makers of Impact, an 'original' (and never has the term been used so loosely) new miniseries on ABC seem to think .  It's everything but the kitchen sink, and bits and pieces from every bad world-whacker since 1951, all rolled into one big sticky ball, starring the guy from JAG and the babe from Species.  Check out the trailer…

Impact

An asteroid hitting the moon and sending it towards Earth?  Not enough.  So ... having a fragment of a brown dwarf star "hiding behind" that meteor shower, embedding itself in the falling moon, so now it weighs more than Jupiter?  Better, but still ... Okay, have some of the moon-parts moving a zillion times after than the bulk of it, so they arrive, like. minutes after the collision -- and more than a month before the rest of it?  You're getting there.  Okay, okay: have the moon-dwarf-star-thing so hyped up on "electromagnetic energy" (yeah, we don't know what that means either) that it actually overwhelms gravity, so people and trains and stuff can go floating into the air at random points and time -- whenever it's dramatic.  Okay, now we got a movie.

Unfortunately, it's a really awful movie, with bits stolen from every previous bad world-whacker of the last sixty years, from When Worlds Collide (1951 – Barbara Rush!  John Hoyt!  Really cool spaceships!) to Meteor (1979, the first truly awful star-studded extravaganza, with the likes of Sean Connery and Natalie Wood, among too many others) to Asteroid (1997, TV.  A pre-Katrina fantasy with Michael [Terminator, Aliens] Biehn as an actually heroic FEMA Director) to the nearly simultaneous entries of Deep Impact (1998, a true weeper with Tea Leoni being all serious and Morgan Freeman as a – get this-- inspirational black president! Ha!) and the still-embarrassing Armageddon (1998, Bruce Willis as a drilling expert who saves the world but loses his life and Ben Affleck at his most ineffectual [okay, except for Daredevil] has a long and distinguished and/or embarrassing history in literature and film.  Thinking back , there really hasn't been a good movie about the subject yet.  And judging by Impact ... there still isn't.

Not that the battle is over: far from it.  The very first world-whacker, When Worlds Collide, is slated for the remake express, directed by Stephen (GI Joe, The Mummy) Sommers  with a scheduled release date of 2010.  Look ouuuuuuut!