When Doctor Who eventually came back on our screens, it had style. The past was still there, it was still the Doctor and his companion running towards danger and old, familiar monsters. But there was a new, perhaps American style, admittedly cribbed from wildly popular and influential shows like Buffy.
And it also pays lip service to Terminator 2: Judgement Day I noticed, after seeing the wildly popular and influential sequel the other day (I know, what kept me so long?). Both have mysterious leather jacketed time travellers going on the run with the girl, who's been noticed and death follows in their wake. And it steals the imagery when the plastic duplicate of Mickey develops flat blades for hands (no gory stabbings at 7pm) and destroys a restaurant, an unstoppable figure chasing after the Doctor and Rose. And upon seeing the finale of the film set in a steel factory, I finally saw the direct reference in the Nestene Consciousness's underground lair, lit up red and embodied in the lava. I still think the episode owes more to the Hollywood film than it does to Spearhead from Space, barring the Auton Invasion near the end.
Released in 1991, the film - hailed in places as the greatest science fiction film of all time - was too late to influence the TV series itself. But then I thought back to the TV Movie in 1996, set in America with the same brief to update this dated time traveller for a new audience, with movie style effects and not so many bug eyed monsters. Heere's the other half of Terminator 2, as it almost cribs the plot: two time travellers, one good and one bad, one out to change history and one who's trying to stop them, though the heroine doesn't know that yet. There's cool motorbikes and hospitals and nighttime chases to a scientific establishment and outwitting cops and a streetwise kid and body swapping and everything, followed by a fight in which both hero and villain are dangling over the edge, with an ominous destruction of the world hanging over them all. It's very T2.
And as such, it didn't really work as Doctor Who. Sure, the show had mined plenty of science fiction in the past, and there were plenty of Hammer ripoffs in the 70s. The series had both predated hits (The Ark in Space is the same idea as Alien, infamously, but a few years earlier) and mined them (the bit in Dragonfire that goes all Aliens, but with nothing like the production values), and that's fine. Indeed, if you're looking for accessible modern science fiction, T2 would be in the back of your mind.
I think one of the reasons Rose worked is it only used different imagery, but built it around the Doctor Who formula. The strength of Rose was the story enabled it to go straight into thwarting an alien invasion rather than dealing with regeneration, Time Lords and other 'core concepts', irrelevant to a new audience. The TV Movie was criticised for straying too far away from the show, even with these references, but that's probably because the plot's thin. What makes T2 thrilling is the drama and the danger: it had Arnie protecting Sarah and John Connor from the other, unstoppable Terminator. Here, the Master doesn't have much of a plan at first other than to survive, and so the Doctor has to go on a wild goose chase involving shutting the Eye of Harmony. Perhaps they should have stuck to what the Doctor does best - fighting monsters and villains.
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