Zygon: When Being You Just Isn't Enough

Overview

Zygon is an officially licensed Doctor Who spin-off made by an independent company called BBV. It is more an adult than a family film and features a lot of nude and sex scenes. In the UK the film is rated as "18". Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough is directed by Bill Baggs. The film is starring Jo Castleton as Lauren Anderson, Daniel Harcourt as Michael Kirkwood/Kritakh, and Keith Drinkel as Bob Calhoun/Torlakhl. Jo Castleton character Lauren Anderson had previously appeared in another BBV film called Cyberon. The earlier drafts of the film were written by Lance Parkin and Jonathan Blum. Bill Baggs rewrote the script. There were a lot of significant changes to the action and characterization and how they were presented on-screen. Parkin and Blum didn't feel that the changed script represented their story well. Thus, they had taken their name off the picture. Most of the film had been shot in 2003. According to Blum Baggs had done one more day of shooting in 2007 to finish the film. The film was released on DVD in 2008. The DVD also included the documentary Zygon – Behind The Changing Faces. It is a making of documentary, that includes deleted scenes and out-takes. The film shows that the Zygon have the ability to transform members of other species into Zygons and create a telepathic link between themselves and the newly created Zygon. So far this ability wasn't mentioned in any episode of Doctor Who.

Story

Michael Kirkwood goes to a psychiatry to see Dr Lauren Anderson. He has nightmares of being a shape-shifting alien called the Zygon. Lauren wants to help Michael to find out what these dreams mean. Soon she meets another Zygon disguised as the serial killer Bob Calhoun. The Zygon, who introduces himself as Torlakhl kills Lauren's room mate and turns Lauren into a Zygon. He hopes that this way Lauren will help Michael Kirkwood to find out who he really is, the Zygon Kritakh. Kritakh was sent to Earth to finish a mission along with Torlakhl. Kritakh has disguised himself as a human for too long and he has forgotten who he really is. Eventually Kritakh finds out who he is but he doesn't want to complete the mission any more. Instead, he plans to spend his life with Lauren. Torlakhl is angry. Disguised as Lauren he kills her colleague on camera. Lauren is blamed for the murder. She kills Torlakhl who still looks like her. The police finds the body of Torlakhl and thinks it is Lauren. Lauren watches the scene and leaves.

Cast

Critical reception

Zygon is a competent, if low-budget, science-fiction thriller, with an engaging trio of central characters, whose increasingly complicated lives you can't help but get caught up in. (...) It poses some surprisingly big questions and manages to tell a good story in the Doctor Who universe about the "everyday" lives of one of his most iconic, second-string monsters.

Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough (...) is almost certainly the only Zygon-based soft-porn film ever to have been made.

The only connection that Zygon: WBYJIE has to Doctor Who is that there are Zygons. The movie is very low budget and we rarely see the Zygons in their true forms. Despite these factors, it actually turned out fairly well. For a B movie, the writing and acting were usually decent. They got around the budget issue by making some of the special effects artsy, which particularly worked during dream sequences. One does not even have to have seen Doctor Who to appreciate or understand Zygon: WBYJIE. Check it out as a Whovian or show it to your non-Whovian friends who are into B movies.