“Nobody kills me twice!”

Justin’s rating: I’m getting strong shades of Neverwhere with this one

Justin’s review: What if I told you that there was a ’90s movie that was written by Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, featured dimensional hopping before Sliders came along, and starred The Matrix’s Carrie-Anne Moss and RoboCop’s Kurtwood Smith? I didn’t conjure this idea out of the void; Doorways is a very real thing that many people have slept on.

To be fair, this was a failed ABC pilot that got turned into a TV movie, so it’s not like the world was shattered by its debut. But that’s why I like TV movies from this era. You can find a whole lot of fun ideas and scifi concepts that were perhaps ahead of their time — as long as you know where to go digging.

While we’re drowning in tired tales of multiverses in the 2020s, this sort of concept was more novel in the 1990s. Doorways kicks off with a fiesty girl from parallel earth appearing in the middle of a busy highway in ours, uses an arm cannon to blow up a truck, and then gets knocked out. Then she bites the nose off a cop at the hospital, which is a daring move.

This is Cat (Anne Le Guernec), a fugitive from another earth who came through a “door” to our world. She tries to explain this to Thomas (George Newbern), a sympathetic doctor with the most billowy silk shirts in existence. He’s dating Moss’ character, a lawyer — because people in TV shows are only one of three professions — and finds that he’s Cat’s primary advocate when the government comes a-calling.

What’s interesting is that, for once, the G-men aren’t a bunch of jerks even if they are led by Smith (who plays Special Agent Trager). They clue in real fast that Cat is from a completely different reality due to her advanced gadgets and that she’s in big danger due to the grim-faced cyborgs that are chasing her down with Terminator-like tenacity. It turns out that Cat’s from an earth that’s been conquered by aliens — the “Dark Lords” — and enslaved what’s left of humanity.

Cat’s only hope is to find the next “door” to allow her — and Thomas — to pop off to the next earth and stay ahead of her pursuers. One of her gadgets is like a compass that points her to the portal while also informing her of Thane (that’s the evil cyborg) appearing in her reality. The doors don’t just appear in a particular place but a particular time as well, so there’s a pressure to get the timing right on these jumps.

The duo end up in a version of earth where an out-of-control microbe ended up eating all of the oil, gas, and plastics of the world, sending civilization back to pre-industrial times. After a bit of exploration so that we can get a sense of this world, Thane shows up again, and Thomas and Cat escape through another door to… somewhere. It’s stated that these portals are one-way trips, so the question of whether Thomas ever gets home again is never answered.

Doorways was slick enough to keep me entertained, a kind of world-hopping version of The Fugitive. It wasn’t anything that deep, but I immediately liked the characters and enjoyed the road trip scenery set to a futuristic synth soundtrack. Cat in particular is a unique specimen with her semi-feral attitude, limited command of language, and wild short hair. As far as I can tell, this was the only significant project that Le Guernec was ever in, and it’s a shame that ABC didn’t pick this up.

George RR Martin spent two years working on this series only to see it collapse. When Doorways was later resurrected as a graphic novel in 2010, he said, “Doorways is the great ‘might have been’ of my career in Hollywood. It was the closest I ever came to getting my own show on the air. Two years of my life went into it, and unsurprisingly, I came to love the characters and their world. Worlds, in this case. When Doorways slammed shut on me, and I had to say goodbye to Tom and Cat and all those stories that would now remain forever untold, it felt as though a part of me had died.”

It’s kind of ironic that the whole concept of Doorways posits “what if” scenarios, because after watching this, I kept wondering what if ABC had gone through with its intention to greenlight an initial season. But instead we got Sliders, Martin got bruised feelings, and HBO ended up being his first and biggest television victory.

Intermission!

• Just blow up a truck for no real reason, why don’t you?
• Doctors love to do slight-of-hand magic
• She punches the doc in the nuts and bites a cop’s nose
• “Find… find the officer’s nose.”
• Haha she bit another guy’s nose off
• “How many were killed?” “Only the air conditioning.”
• “My little female calls to me.”
• “Not needing leg!”
• Hello, Vasquez Rocks!
• “I hate to tell you this… but it’s a men’s bathroom.”
• Thane’s cyborg claws
• He’s not a man — he’s a man-hound
• Those are the most awkward pistols to use
• Gatling guns tend to freak horses out
• “Not my girlfriend!” it’s funnier when Cat says it
• Dang Thomas, it took you long enough to figure out the parallel world concept
• Oh you did not just drop a Casablanca quote
• OK I don’t think I can take an outlaw biker gang seriously when it’s on kid bikes with playing cards to make that twpppbbbt noise