Directed by Vanessa Yuille & Matthew Jacobs
Featuring Matthew Jacobs, Paul McGann, and Daphne Ashbrook
Unrated
Runtime 1 hour 20 minutes
Streaming and on Blu-Ray and DVD November 28

by Daniel Pecoraro, Contributor

(cw: mention of suicide)

The concept of a piece of culture “ruining one’s childhood” has been around for decades (KnowYourMeme cites its first reference in 2001, regarding the Star Wars prequels). It seems like with every intellectual property, there is invariably a decision—a reboot, a prequel, a recast—that leads those who hold it most dear to cry out, “What have you done?”

Such is the initial premise for Doctor Who Am I?, the new documentary co-directed by Vanessa Yuille and the film’s primary subject, Matthew Jacobs. Jacobs grew up surrounded by Doctor Who. The show premiered the same day as John F. Kennedy's assassination, in the midst of a tumultuous year for the Jacobs's family: In 1963, Jacobs's mother died from suicide. For Jacobs, Doctor Who became a place of respite and escapism, especially as his father (actor Anthony Jacobs) featured as Doc Holliday in an episode of the 1966 Doctor Who serial “The Gunfighters,” in which the First Doctor (William Hartnell) ends up in the Wild West. Jacobs saw his father on set filming the episode behind a partition, and the connection between his father and the Doctor was an indelible moment in his childhood.

And it’s in part what led Jacobs into television and film writing, including his script for the 1996 TV movie of Doctor Who (dir. Geoffrey Sax). A bit of backstory: after twenty-six years of serials and specials, the BBC ended the series in 1989. The series we know today—featuring Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Matt Smith, Peter Capaldi, Jodie Whittaker, and, uh, David Tennant again—launched in 2005. Within the intervening sixteen years, the only appearance of the Doctor on television was a one-off feature film, co-produced by the BBC and Fox, with the plan for a series if the film had strong ratings. This is actually the second documentary on the telefilm, with the previous short-subject The Seven Year Hitch (2010, dir. Ed Stradling) included in short clips here.

1996’s Doctor Who was not successful—Fox declined to order the show to series, and BBC couldn’t find another American buyer—and it turned off some fans because of two key changes to the canon. The Doctor (Paul McGann, seen here in his eighth incarnation) was half-human. The audience and the Doctor learn this in tandem, as the core premise of the film is that the Doctor has lost his memory. (The documentary’s title is a reference to a line from the film shouted by McGann with Kevin Sorbo energy.) And while previous regenerations were more emotionally detached, McGann’s was a romantic, kissing his companion, Dr. Grace Holloway (Daphne Ashbrook). These changes polarized fans: Philip Segal (executive producer of the 1996 telefilm) relates in the documentary how he was physically assaulted by a fan at a Chicago convention over the on-screen kiss, and Jacobs receives the “you ruined my childhood” remark mid-film from one fan, albeit somewhat playfully. Both Jacobs and McGann felt some guilt for the perceived damage to the franchise and stayed away from Whovian conventions.

Doctor Who Am I? shows us Jacobs’s return to the cons, signing photos, copies of the film’s mass-market paperback novelization, or the glossy Doctor Who: Regenerations retrospective book at $15 a signature. The central journey of the documentary is Jacobs seeing the importance of the series on his life, and his reappraisal of the mark he left on the series. What started as an attempt to cash in on his connection to the show (as with other former “pathetic middle-level writers like myself and producers who are now out of work,” as he puts it) becomes a heartfelt effort to get into the mind of the American Doctor Who fan.

Yet the clearer story of Doctor Who Am I? is that of American Whovians, a more outwardly passionate group compared to their British counterparts, and more willing to publicly embrace their love of the series. Their appreciation for the Doctor’s moral code of nonviolence and exploration is seen by many of the film’s commentators (including DePaul University professor Paul Booth, an actual scholar of Who and Whovians) as a kind of religion, with Jacobs as a minor idol in the pantheon. From Gallifrey One in Los Angeles to LI Who near MacArthur Airport in Islip, we see the multigenerational group of (almost entirely white) cosplayers and obsessives. And we also see how they have welcomed, even revered, McGann for his work in preserving the franchise, which outside of the telefilm included years of The Eighth Doctor Adventures audio plays with Big Finish. Jacobs also gets his moments in the sun, with one con attendee telling him on-camera that the film he wrote pulled them into the fandom.

Ultimately, it’s the portrayal of companionship and community that makes Doctor Who Am I? compelling, doing for Doctor Who what Trekkies (1997, dir. Roger Nygard) did for Star Trek. The film is a bit uneven; it bounces across the film’s pre-pandemic timeline and from one con to another and back, not unlike the TARDIS traveling from one anthological installment to another. There are some parts that appear to just pad the film’s 80-minute run time; Yuille and Jacobs would have been fine without a couple of features on individual cosplayers, and the piece on the Eighth Doctor’s TARDIS console being preserved alongside props by comic book writer and special effects artist Paul Salamoff could have been cut. But even some of the vignettes that seem least necessary—for example, a young Whovian strumming “Happy Birthday” to McGann on a ukulele, with Jacobs tearing up reviewing a phone recording of McGann’s birthday party later that night at the con—still have an emotional punch. Doctor Who Am I? is a thoughtful appreciation of what it means to be a fan, and how even the least revered parts of fan culture can be revered, and is a worthwhile extension to the extended Whovian universe.