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Synopsis: The Tardis breaks down in mid-flight, stranding the Doctor and Carl in a strange otherwordly realm. They make their way to a forbidding castle, where a bouncing ball leads them into danger…

Review: From what I can tell, looking around, the consensus is that this is the best of the Benedetti stories. Personally, I’m not sure I buy into that. Broken Doors is good. But then, so is Eukor, which is as good, or even better. And Utomo, if not quite a match for the first two, follows closely behind. In the end, the three are so different that I don’t know how I’d rank them against each other. But Broken Doors definitely seems to have won followers.

The good: Ryan Johnson returns to his strengths: We have a small cast, very effective use of location in terms of the creepy old house and the outdoors, and as always, great chemistry between Benedetti and Rogin.

Freed from the requirement of naturalism or realism, there’s a really good ‘room of mirrors’ set, which is very effective, surreal and arresting, altogether unearthly. Sets of any sort are very hard to do, as we saw in Visions of Utomu. And a set consisting of mirrors should be just hellish – hint – mirrors reflect back, which is not good if you want your camera and crew out of sight. But they pull it off, good lighting, good placement, good camera-work, to create an environment which is transdimensional and otherwordly.

There are other things to like – there’s a scene in a quarry, which is accompanied by some rather nice Matte shots. According to the notes by Ryan Johnson, the crew were absolutely thrilled to finally be shooting in a quarry. The interior locations, as I’ve said, are well chosen. They’ve mastered some very effective smoke/pyro effects (compared, say, to Eukor) which adds a lot of production value.

Of course, Barbara Benedetti shines as the Doctor, although in this story she’s looking a bit worn. Actually, Barbara Benedetti looks very worn. In some shots you can see bags under her eyes, she looks physically tired. Her character comes alive though, particularly in her scenes with Rogin, who plays Carl.

But even without Carl… They get separated half way through, she turns in a strong performance. Her scene in the room of the ‘hopscotch of death’ is almost a tour de force. With no one to act off of, and a fairly neutral environment, she still manages to convey the Doctor at full force, fishing through various pockets for different gadgets, fiddling with things and throwing them away, and then finding a bag of jelly babies which she ingeniously uses to solve her problem. Meanwhile, Carl, wherever he is, copes rather more frantically with his own strange events, and this is done engagingly.

The bad: This is the shortest of the Ryan Johnson Doctor Who videos. Eighteen minutes isn’t really enough time to develop a story effectively. It’s the shortest of Johnson/Benedetti stories, and this economy tells on us. It feels like it’s rushed through, hitting all its beats, but you sort of want a bit more, perhaps some plot swerve, perhaps just more of Benedetti being the Doctor, or her Doctor kvetching with Carl, or even a few minutes to see what the Michael Santo Doctor is going to be like.

It could have been worse – Johnson wanted fifteen minutes. It’s pretty clear he was just tired of doing Doctor Who. The plot is linear to a fault, there’s no sub-plots, no side trips, no real swerves. It lacks that ‘twistyness’ that’s a hallmark of good Doctor Who.

Instead, the Doctor and Carl end up in a strange dimension where a godlike being forces them to play a series of lethal games. The godlike being shows up late to the party spends a little too long explaining itself and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Now admittedly, the godlike being showing up late is good storytelling. I always hated it when Q or Trelayne or Apollo or whoever showed up right at the beginning of a Star Trek story and said ‘I’m going to screw you around now.’ There’s rather more mystery and intrigue if the Nemesis shows up later, is a little more coy, you can milk dramatic tension, keep the audience guessing. So I don’t actually mind the late appearance.

But when he does appear… wow, does he talk a lot, and wow, does so little of it make sense. Parsing it out, the entity is saying both “hey, I am my entire dimension, I’m a conscious universe in here, and you’re just talking to my hand.” And “Hey, I’m actually you, the dark side of you.” It says a bunch of other things, including how it likes to play cat and mouse games and kill its visitors.

Then it does an about face, saying the Doctor has won and can go free, but it turns out, that’s just another trap, one in which Carl is tricked into killing the Doctor. It’s final line is “The Game is Never Over, the Prize is Never Won.” Which is pretty dickish, but then, it’s actually fitting for a godlike entity whose hobby is screwing with people.

It seems to me that the basic concept of the confrontation with the entity is good, certainly the surreal setting of the room of mirrors is excellent. It’s hampered by the fact that a lot of key information is the entity monologuing, there should have been more back and forth. Certainly, Benedetti was a strong enough actress that it could have been carried off.

The final trick by which the entity kills the Doctor is also well done, both as a concept, and in execution.

Yes, I gave away the ending. My bad. Michael Santo was an enthusiastic young actor and major Doctor Who fan who desperately wanted to play the Doctor. He was actually the driving force, pushing and possibly funding Ryan Johnson to take one more outing. Johnson himself sat back sticking to the role of producer. The script was written by T. Brian Wagner, and Steve Hauge directed, so you can see Ryan Johnson backing away somewhat.

Ryan Johnson had been making his Doctor Who stories since June of 1984. Broken Doors would be shot in November of 1987 and released in March of 1988. Four years is a long time to be working on this, people simply get tired.

As well, the moment had passed – the crisis of the 18 month hiatus and near cancellation was over, and with it, that strange perfect moment when fans could wildly embrace a fan film. Doctor Who was back, the real Doctor Who, and we were half way through the tenure of a new Doctor, Sylvester McCoy. Eukor and Utomu were years ago, Pentagon West had flopped…

Ryan Johnson was tired and ready to move on.   He’d spent four years at it. He’d put in a lot of time and money. Eukor had cost somewhere between three and ten thousand dollars out of pocket, the other films had been cheaper for being shot on video, but still, you were looking at thousands of dollars in real money, and tens of thousands in sweat equity. He was done.  If not for Michael Santo, there probably wouldn’t have been a Broken Doors.

Oddly, for all Santo’s enthusiasm to be the Doctor, this single minute or so of footage was the only time he would play the Doctor. He never got to play the role again. By this time, Johnson had done four films in four years,  this last one had been done reluctantly, he just wasn’t up to doing it one more time.  T. Brian Johnson did write a script for a Santo Doctor story, but it took so long that whatever impulse or energy to do it dissipated. Santo ended up doing Shakespeare, which made it harder to find the time to work on Johnson’s projects.  It just never happened.

Frankly, I don’t mind. Benedetti was something special, the whole concept of the female Doctor was groundbreaking. For all his enthusiasm I’m not sure that Santo was going to bring anything more, or that Johnson had any new places to take him. Is it really worth it to be known as ‘the guy who came after…’ I dunno.

In one of life’s ironic twists, Santo found his big fame in fandom making ‘Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation’ where he parodied Picard. Ironic because he hated Star Trek as much as he disliked Doctor Who.

So what’s the bottom line for Broken Doors? It fits into the surreal genre of Doctor Who, it’s of a piece with stories like the Mind Robber, the Celestial Toymaker, Warriors Gate or Timbase’s Paradise in Chains. If you like those, you’ll like this, and as I’ve said, some fans see this as, hands down, the best of the Benedetti stories.

Ryan Johnson would go on to do one more Doctor Who story, Death Takes a Holiday, roughly sixteen years later. That seventeen minute short would actually feature Colin Baker (yes, him), Frazier Hines, Wendy Padbury, and Nicholas Courtney with some of the cast actually froliking around genuine Mayan ruins. No Michael Santo in that one though. It is online, I’ll review it a bit further down the road.

Barbara Benedetti passed away in November, 1991, at the age of 38, only three years after Broken Doors, I am sad to say. Although an active and talented actress, most of her work was on stage. In mainstream film, she had small parts in Shredder Orpheus, Bomb’s Away, Dogfight and Waiting for the Light, all shot in the Seattle area. Her last film role was with Ryan Johnson once again, called the Wolfe Project, where she played the title role as a psychic investigator.

Barbara Benedetti, for my money, is one of the finest fan film Doctors ever, one of the few that deserves a place with the real Doctors. She took the role and she was The Doctor. Only Rupert Booth was overall better (I’ll talk about him eventually), and Benedetti had a much better rapport with her companion. I miss her.

It’s ironic, given that although she was a terrific Doctor, she wasn’t a Doctor Who fan at all, and until Johnson approached her, hadn’t even seemed to have heard of it at all. She didn’t seem terribly engaged with the role. She enjoyed playing the part, but she was equally willing to let it go to Michael Santo. That said, she captured the spirit of the Doctor almost perfectly from get go. Her Doctor was witty, unconventional, eccentric and unflappable, smarter than anyone around her and ready to do the unexpected.

So how do the four Benedetti/Johnson stories stack up?  Well, it’s an actual body of work. Four stories, 108 minutes. I would say one brilliant episode, two very good ones, and one mostly embarrassing misstep. One of the things I like is that there’s a range to the female Doctor – she goes from adventure, to light comedy, to experiment to surrealism. It doesn’t sit still and just do the one thing, tell the same kind of story. Rather, it chose to tell not just different stories, but different kinds of stories.

A lot of it looks and aspires to professional quality, in both the story, the acting, the shots and settings. There’s the usual glitches and hiccups, and some things definitely need to be forgiven.

I think that one of the strengths that Ryan Johnson brought to his Doctor Who stories was that he was a film-maker first, rather than a fan. An amateur film maker, but still a film maker, that’s no small thing.

No question, he is a huge Doctor Who fan. You don’t do five fan films, and put on live shows (‘The Tardis Home Companion’) and put the sort of money and work in without love. But that wasn’t the limits of his interests. His most popular film probably Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation, and he did his own MSTR3K movies riffing on Star Trek V and Highlander II. His body of work includes more than a dozen other shorts.

He has a broad appreciation, both of fandom and pop culture, as well as film making, and that allows him both to make better films, and to be willing to experiment more. In this sense of being willing to experiment, I’d rank Utomu as his best – not even the Timebase Production people dreamt of crossing Doctor Who with a Crosby/Hope yarn.

Of course, the downside of being willing to experiment means that you have to be willing to fail, which gives us Pentagon West, but at least it was a failure with an interesting idea. Johnson also seemed willing to share the load, which both helped and hurt. I think his most polished scripts were Eukor and Broken Doors, both credited to other people. Being willing to solicit help, and respecting that help gave him Benedetti and Rogel. Then again, it also gave him some fairly bad results elsewhere.

The Doctor Who stories are definitely a body of work, although the individual stories don’t really fit into a greater narrative, rather, their strength is their diversity. It’s held together by the continuing characters in the Doctor and Carl who together bring a consistent identiy and sensibility to the productions. But each story is unique. Nevertheless, as a body of work, the whole is somehow greater than the sum of the parts, particularly for being diverse.

18 minutes. Betacam video. Filmed November 1987, released March 1988.
Cast. . . Barbara Benedetti as The Doctor, Michael Santo as The Doctor and the Manager, Randy Rogel as Carl Evans, Gareth Davis as the Soldier.
Written by T. Brian Wagner. Produced by Ryan K. Johnson. Directed by Steven Hauge

FOR MORE INFORMATION

http://www.eskimo.com/~rkj/doctor.html#Doors

YOUTUBE

Synopsis:   The full title is ‘Pentagon West: Doctor in the House.’  The friends and associates of Doctor Komar are worried. The Doctor’s been acting more and more strangely, even while he mumbles about a radical new breakthrough. Meanwhile, a mysterious police box appears in the park and there are disturbing glimpses of a woman in a red jacket and a man in a black suit….

Review: This is the third of the Benedetti/Johnson female Doctor stories.  I loved Wrath of Eukor as an adventure and I loved Visions of Utomu as a flawed but ultimately successful light comedy.  I can’t say the same for Pentagon West.   It’s like the Benedetti Doctor stories were on a downward trajectory. Eukor is a small masterpiece, Utomu is visibly flawed but worthy, and Pentagon West…. ugh.

It’s like Ryan Johnson forgot everything that worked for him in Eukor and Utomu. Locations? Parks and Living rooms, god help us. The story – heartbreakingly linear. Wit? Where? The cast – oversized, poorly handled, amateur and it all shows.

Painfully, the Doctor and Carl are barely even in the story. There’s an appearance of the Tardis at the very beginning. There’s a series quick shots of the Doctor and Carl watching, 8.5 minutes, 9.5 minutes, 11.5minutes and 13 minutes, into the 28 minute run – no dialogue, no action, just kind of there… watching, no more than a few seconds at a time. They’re just a presence that the main cast keeps noticing.

On the one hand, that’s irritating, because it feels like we’re waiting for the story to start and waiting and waiting, and it’s not happening. The Doctor just keeps lurking, and we’re waiting for the Doctor to kick things off.

On the other hand, it’s kind of an interesting or potentially interesting approach:  The Doctor as a lurking, looming presence. It builds a kind of tension. The problem is that there just isn’t enough happening in the foreground to really allow this to work.  There has to be a strong A plot for the subtle background stuff to take hold.   Here, it’s effectively just the Doctor and Carl standing at the back of an empty room.

The Doctor doesn’t actually get a line or become an active character in the story until 19 minutes in, when she shows up and explains the crisis for two and a half minutes:   Komar, the mad scientist, is breaking down the dimensional barriers, which isn’t a good thing. Not a good thing in this case equals kaboom!   The Doctor suggests believing her and stopping Komar would be a good idea.  Then the Doctor steps out for a couple of minutes while the rest of the cast has a debate over it.

They eventually decide to go with her.  After that, though, the Doctor is part of the crowd, has a few more lines, but really, she’s just a bystander.  The story resolves without her when Komar decides to die of his cancer and not destroy the universe. Count it all up, Benedetti and Rogin are maybe in for 7 minutes of a 28 minute running time, and they don’t get to do a whole lot.

That’s taking a huge risk: Benedetti’s Doctor is really good, and her Doctor and Carl are really good together.  They have been from the start.   It’s generally best to play to your strengths.  It’s a gamble to put that to the side and try and bring out something different.

It actually was, and is, an interesting narrative trick – the Doctor as an outsider or peripheral character to his story, I will give them credit for that, and it’s one of the few things  in Pentagon West that earns my respect. This idea would be used a couple of times in the relaunched series with David Tennant in ‘Blink’ and ‘Love and Monsters.’ It worked brilliantly in those episodes based on the strength of the stories and the foreground characters. Not so, this time. You can do interesting things by moving the Doctor into the backbround, making her the B-story. But if you’re going to do that, the A-story has to be strong, and… this one isn’t.

The cast isn’t strong either, a group of five less able actors or amateurs get the lions share of dialogue and action, what there is of it.  Even worse, the way the story mechanics work, they’re hamstrung. They literally have nothing to do but stand around and talk about Doctor Komar, who himself doesn’t show up until later in the story. Not as late as the Doctor, but late enough.  Look, you don’t just put a character in a story.  They need to have something to do, some purpose.   Mostly, that’s not happening.  So what you really have is five characters hanging around waiting, while the key characters, the ones who drive the story, spend most of their time off screen.

Just no. Please no. There’s this woman in an appalling pink tracksuit, wearing a pink scarf around her head in an awful bow, that’s just nightmarish. She’d be tolerable in any other wardrobe, but she’s just hard to look at. The primary cast, a group of five, literally get in each other’s way. They don’t have enough to do, none of them establish an identity. They’re just not very good actors. I’m sure that they’re very nice people, but they help to sink the story like a lead weight.

The lead hero/villain is Doctor Komar, played by Michael Santo. It’s Komar that the plot revolves around, he’s one the rest of the cast are connected to – he’s the glue that connects them to each other. He’s the one whose actions precipitate the conflicts and he’s the one that the Doctor is interested in.

It seems that Doctor Komar is working on a cancer cure, urgently so, given that he’s got cancer (represented by an awful prosthetic tumor on his bald spot). Komar, feeling desperate, has zapped up his intelligence to mad scientists levels, pierced the dimensional barrier releasing cancer-curing radiation. The trouble is, that it really will blow up the universe. They including the Doctor,  try and stop him, but bungle it all up,  literally falling over each other.   Komar knocks them all out with a stun ray or something.

Then, left to himself, Komar has a soliloquy over the big moral quandary: “Should I keep trying to cure my cancer and blow up the universe, dying myself anyway and killing everyone else?” Which isn’t actually a moral quandary, when you stop to think about it.   I mean:   “Hmmm, my course of treatment will not work, in that it will kill me and lots of other people.”  How is that a dilemma?

Unfortunately, Santo plays Komar with a fake European accent and a sense of theatrics channeled from Bela Lugos’s performance at the hands of Ed Wood in Bride of the Monster. Santo may be a decent actor, his turn as Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation is spot on and hilarious. But here he’s wrongheaded as hell. He’s handicapped all sorts of ways, he doesn’t have a chance to carry the weight.

Structurally, it’s simply a bad script, and it doesn’t do the actors, any of them, any favours at all. Sure, there’s an occasional good line. There’s a brief interlude where two of them speculate mockingly about alien life coming to earth. But a few light spots, that doesn’t save a sinking ship.

The settings – someones living room, we’ve got living room furniture, the Doctor is working against wallpaper! Wallpaper! There’s a cluttered lab. There are some nice exteriors – but these exteriors even if nicely shot, are so utterly generic that they’re just not interesting. Only the shots at the University, with its stonework facade and yawning hallways are decent. Compare the shots to the lush rain forests of Eukor or the place of mirrors in Broken Doors. Even the original scorring is sub-par.

There are some good aerial shots taken from a plane flying around Seattle, but these are problematic – yes, it’s some potentially nice production value, but they don’t know what to do with it, so they just use it for framing at the beginning and end of the story. That’s kind of a problem – you have a really good shot, but you don’t have any use for it? Then suck it up and don’t use it. Or you find a real use for it.

Sadly, what it is, is what we’ve got. Benedetti’s Doctor has a nice physical gag or two, and she and Rogin work with what the script gives them. There’s a scene that the two of them have with an easy chair that reminds you just how good they are together.

There’s actually an interesting wrinkle or two on the Doctor here, there’s a suggestion of her as a machiavellian force, glimpsed but not understood. She plays the Doctor darker, she’s not going to cure cancer for us, the world has to save itself sometimes, and her one decent line ‘I can live with what I’ve done, can you?’ is almost cruel.

This is a version of the Doctor we seldom see. This is the outsider who intrudes into the known world, the unknown quality whose very presence is an omen of bad things. The Doctor may not be trouble, may not be evil or the source of trouble. But when the Doctor comes, you know that trouble is around, and the safe, normal world you’ve enjoyed so much…. That’s over with. There’s a sense here of the Doctor not as someone who stumbles into situations, but is actively policing threats. It almost raises it from failure to near miss. Sadly, there’s just not enough of the Doctor and Carl. And without them, there’s not enough of anything else to make up for it.

There’s a nice shot or two. Some of the scenes and dialogue aren’t too painful. And I’ll give them marks for a really interesting narrative idea that would be used by the new series. But overall, it just doesn’t work, it misfires on practically every level. The nicest thing I can say about it is that it’s a failure with some interesting points.

It’s for completists at best. If it had been a stand alone, I wouldn’t have bothered reviewing or even watching it. It’s main calling card is that it’s part of the Johnson/Benedetti body of work. I suspect that this is one of those productions where the DVD commentary would be a lot more interesting than what’s on the screen.

I don’t think that it had the same reception that Eukor and Utomu got. It couldn’t, it’s just not nearly as good as the first two, perhaps not good at all, and whatever cachet it had was riding their coattails. But this is the third female Doctor story, and you know, it’s just not new and shocking any more as an idea. It’s established, the novelty is worn off.

As well, the hiatus was over. It’s released in May of 1987. Doctor Who, the real Doctor, is back. Colin Baker’s completed the Trial of a Time Lord. It hasn’t aired in North America, but it will, and there’s anticipation over that. Colin is about to be fired, there’s going to be a new Doctor, and there’s a new season coming up. The attention of fans is elsewhere. The subject of gossip and anticipation is elsewhere. Whatever credibility or following the female Doctor as ‘the Doctor of the hiatus’ had managed to gather was dissipating. It wasn’t the fresh new thing any more.

Technically, this takes a further step down. Eukor was shot on 16 mm film, Utomu was shot on 3/4 inch commercial videotape. Pentagon West is shot on betacam.

As for Ryan Johnson… Reading between the lines of his ‘making of’ essay, I really had the sense that it was the most dispiriting. From his descriptions, I’m not even sure if this was originally intended to be a Doctor Who story.  That aspect may well have been added in.  This production had been very hard to get off the ground, it had been frustrating, it had morphed continually, it was just a headache. This seemed to have been much more of a struggle, and a struggle in negative ways – overcoming obstacles to get something done is one thing, overcoming obstacles to be allowed to try and do something can be disheartening. The final product could not have been satisfying to him. The reception was certainly poor, Pentagon West was not knocking anyone on their ass. With Eukor, and to an extent, with Utomu, he had hit a moment, but that moment had passed, was passing. It just wasn’t fun any more. Maybe it was time to move on and do something else.

Behind the scenes things seemed to be a mess – the original plan was for a much more ambitious two part story – a serial, but the money fell apart and there were problems with the script. This was replaced by a sci fi soap, which in turn fell apart. There were money issues, coordination issues, people issues.  Roadblocks kept coming up. Ultimately, the project kept getting revised, retuned and compromised into insignificance.  That’s one of the risks, sometimes you start out great, but then life kicks you in the teeth, and in the journey along the way…  well, where you finish sometimes isn’t fun.

It’s a shame that they never got to follow through on their original ideas.  Johnson’s other work, in and out of Doctor Who is interesting enough that I’d be willing to grant potential.    If only something like Kickstarter had been around for the time, or the fan community that had embraced Eukor and Utomu had been willing to fundraise for it, we might have seen a more ambitious, more disciplined production.

I really would by the way, recommend reading Ryan Johnson’s pages and making of. He’s terse and he glosses over things, but if you read carefully and read between the lines, you can get a sense of how difficult it is to make these things, what sort of commitment it takes and what people go through.  Go check it out.

28 minutes. Betacam videotape. Filmed September 1986, released May 1987.
Cast. . . Michael Santo as Komar, Laura Kenny as Iz, Laura Sweany as Robin, Josh Conescu as David, Jonathon Stewart as Alex, Eric Anderson as Simon, Barbara Benedetti as The Doctor, Randy Rogel as Carl.
Directed by Howard Carson. Written and Produced by Ryan K. Johnson.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

http://www.eskimo.com/~rkj/doctor.html#Pentagon

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