Okay, so first off this released way later than I was expecting. 2008?! That’s only five years before Moffat would bring back the Zygons in Day of the Doctor. Genuinely I had thought both this and Cyberon were made in the 90s. Man, I was wrong.

This is more what I imagined from Cyberon, btw. The acting is weaker though the actors aren’t given as good material to work with; the story is quite frankly a mess. And the time period of which these Zygons were trapped in Earth I would have drastically lowered if I had written this as it just seems like they’re terrible at their job.

The nudity and sex was certainly a choice, didn’t bother me too much, maybe because I’ve already seen Torchwood and some of this is just a bit more adult than that. But ultimately it’s the least of why I think this movie is downright messy compared to Cyberon. Sucks too because the character of Lauren Anderson (played by Jo Castleton) I really liked in the first movie. She does a lot more questionable stuff here, and something really tragic happens to her as well and she just shows very little emotion regarding most of it.

What I did like is the SFX/CGI stuff. That low budget sci-fi from the 00s that gives more of an impressionistic vibe at times. That was solid stuff. I do appreciate the story they were trying to tell about self and identity and yadda yadda, just wish it was better.

Thworping through time and space, one adventure at a time!

ZYGON: WHEN BEING YOU JUST ISN’T ENOUGH – WHEN LOW BUDGET AND ZYGONS JUST AREN’T ENOUGH

A muddled mash of sex, shapeshifting, and pseudo-psychology in Doctor Who’s most notorious spin-off.

Among BBV's grab-bag of low-budget Doctor Who-adjacent spin-offs, Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough is undoubtedly the most infamous—and not for the reasons anyone might hope. Initially filmed in 2003 but only released in 2008, this so-called “adult” Whoniverse story markets itself as a mature psychological thriller. In reality, it’s an awkward stew of identity confusion, limp sex scenes, uninspired shapeshifting, and baffling attempts at profundity.

On paper, the idea isn’t without promise. A lonely Zygon stranded on Earth, grappling with identity, disconnection, and suppressed memories? That could make for an eerie psychological sci-fi in the right hands. But here, all the interesting ideas are buried beneath a clunky production, a shallow screenplay, and the kind of sexuality that feels like it was written by a teenage boy with a subscription to Heavy Metal magazine.

WHO EVEN ARE YOU, MICHAEL?

Daniel Harcourt stars as Michael Kirkwood, a man plagued by violent dreams, spontaneous shapeshifting, and an all-consuming sense of dissatisfaction. What he doesn’t know—but what the audience quickly realises—is that he’s a dormant Zygon. And not just any Zygon: one with a power-hungry alien ally and a sexually forward therapist (played by Jo Castleton) hovering around him, each with their own barely coherent motivations.

Kirkwood’s “second-in-command” Bob Calhoun (Keith Dinkel, yes, Time-Flight’s Cobie) is actually Torlakh, a murderous Zygon who’s been masquerading as a serial killer for two decades. That idea—what if a notorious killer were secretly a Zygon?—could make for a gripping mystery or a psychological horror. But the film only uses it as a hook for generic manipulation and bland power struggles, not as a launchpad for character or tension.

SEXUALITY, IDENTITY... AND A WHOLE LOT OF SHAPESHIFTING

Zygon clearly wants to be about something: repression, identity, sexuality, even LGBTQA+ coding. There are intriguing hints, such as a sequence where Lauren shapeshifts into a man to sleep with her female colleague—a moment that touches on gender fluidity and repressed desire in a way that could be thoughtful. But like everything else in this film, these ideas are undercooked, surrounded by half-hearted plotting, and ultimately overshadowed by painfully awkward sex scenes.

Rather than exploring anything meaningfully, the movie uses its shape-shifting mechanic as a clumsy narrative crutch. People transform constantly—usually in the middle of an argument or seduction scene—and it quickly becomes impossible to keep track of who’s who. The film seems to forget that mystery and drama require coherence, not just special effects filters and body doubles.

CASTING, CHARACTERISATION, AND THE CRUMBLING PLOT

Jo Castleton does what she can with the role of Lauren, but the script gives her very little to work with. It’s a curious footnote that she once auditioned for the role of Bernice Summerfield—one that went to Lisa Bowerman, who thankfully escaped this project. Keith Dinkel fares a bit better, delivering probably the film’s most convincing performance as the unhinged, manipulative Bob/Torlakh, even if his motivations and personality shift faster than the characters do.

But where things really fall apart is in the third act. What little narrative momentum the film builds grinds to a halt, replaced by scenes that repeat themselves in frustrating loops—confrontation, escape in Bob’s van, rinse, repeat. The climax tries to shift into horror as Lauren’s identity is smeared by a massacre committed by Bob in her likeness, but the tonal whiplash is extreme and the bloodbath feels more B-movie slasher than psychological thriller.

PRODUCTION WOES AND DATED TECHNIQUES

It doesn’t take long to realise this is a deeply low-budget affair. The synth-heavy MIDI soundtrack feels like it wandered in from a CD-ROM game circa 1997. Dream sequences are drenched in cheap filters that try to be surreal but come off as eye-rolling. The direction is static and uninspired, while the dialogue frequently sounds like it was written in the first draft of a student film script.

And yes, there’s nudity—but not nearly as much as the film’s notoriety might suggest. It’s frontloaded, very in-your-face, and almost always awkward. Rather than feeling mature, it’s juvenile—gratuitous without being erotic, supposedly edgy without ever being engaging.

ZYGONS IN NAME ONLY

Doctor Who fans hoping for any kind of continuity or deeper lore will be disappointed. The Zygons here are Zygons only in name, with little attention paid to how the species actually works. The shapeshifting rules are muddled, the biology of creating new Zygons is nonsensical, and even the visual effects (including a very brief appearance of a “real” Zygon at the end) don’t help ground them in recognisable mythology.

And the horror elements? Toothless. The dreams, transformations, and sudden outbursts of violence lack weight or rhythm. What could’ve been eerie ends up ridiculous—especially when the shapeshifting is used purely to disorient the audience rather than build suspense.

📝VERDICT: 4/10

Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough is a curiosity at best and a chore at worst. It’s a film desperate to be edgy and insightful, but ends up feeling like a muddled, misguided attempt to do The X-Files with a dash of erotic thriller, and none of the competence of either. There are seeds of good ideas—Zygon identity crisis, coded gender fluidity, psychological horror—but they’re all squandered by lazy writing, poor production values, and tonal incoherence.

It’s not entirely unwatchable, and its notoriety alone may make it worth a look for die-hard completists. But for most, this is best left as a bizarre footnote in the extended Doctor Who multiverse.

Today I watched Zygon: When Being You Just Isn’t Enough. The closest thing Doctor Who has to an official porno. Although it’s really not. It’s just got a lot of nudity.

And in total, I had a not bad time watching it. It’s weird, the effects are bad, there’s barely any Zygons in. It’s got two and a half sex scenes which all are far tamer than Torchwood tbh. Apart from the fact that you can see breasts and penises. Mostly it was kind of a weird thriller type thing. Went surprisingly violent towards the end. If you’re easily squicked out by gore, this isn’t for you. Also if you’re emetophobic, because the protagonist throws up around 20 minutes in.

What I really didn’t expect though was the trans subtext. The human protagonist gets sort of turned into a zygon and tries out a man’s body. That whole montage was just. Yeah, really trans. She appears to really love that body. Also has one of the sex scenes in that body and it looks like she’s having some real revelations. I was kind of jealous to be honest.

Mission Report by UNIT Agent Bill Filer to Trap One - Subject matter: (Zygon: When being you just isn't enough)

This is a story that keeps popping up in discussions, mostly it seems as a source of ridicule - I might even be the most guilty of bringing it up any chance I get. But thinking about it, it is probably a full decade since I last actually watched it - so guess what I did last night?

What mostly gets brought up about this story is nudity and the soft porn, but as our resident TARDIS Guide Swede @Tian recently said, it is on par with a great deal of Nordic films. It isn't that excessive when it comes down to it, with only two sexual encounters. The first shows Lauren and Mike getting closer to each other after they have had a long affection for each other but have been unable to move along with the relationship because of the Doctor/Patient situation. The second sexual encounter is when Lauren is in the body of that random businessman, and is basically an exploration of Lauren's sexuality as she has sex with a woman, as a man. Her attraction to woman was shown earlier in the movie when she was eyeballing her colleague in the locker room. There is actually something really interesting going on here in terms of Lauren's questioning nature of her sexuality, but unfortunately it isn't explored much further and is buried beneath the plot.

The plot of the story with Mike forgetting he is a Zygon, and getting treated for a mental illness when images surface in his dreams is super interesting. The other Zygon, Bob, trying to use Lauren's professional relationship to Mike to get him to remember his Zygon nature, is again a good narrative idea but not explored enough. The movie is just too short at around an hour to actually flesh out the plot and the intricacies of Lauren becoming a Zygon, and her exploration of her sexuality, it needed probably another half an hour.

But I am kind of grateful that it is so short, because the production value is appalling. Really low visual quality, shaky cams, the same extras everywhere in the same clothes, weird editing in post-production, bad effects when Zygon stuff happens, the script needed a bit of a rewrite, and sadly acting that isn't quite up to scratch.

It's a movie that has a bunch of faults, but at the end of the day I think it has gotten an unfair reputation. I won't be rushing to watch it again any time soon, but I would still say this is a 3/5 :star: story.

End of report. Logged and filed at The Black Archive.

Few bylines, on a Wiki listing, are as depressing as "Lance Parkin, Jonathan Blum, and Bill Baggs". A script by two of the Wilderness Years' most talented, interesting writers — and the extended Doctor Who universe's most lamentable hack? That can only mean one thing: a tortured production resulting in a fundamentally compromised final work, and that, in essence, is exactly what When Being You Just Isn't Enough is. Never mind the title that sounds like an adult parody, and the sleazy cover of the original DVD release: this film isn't the cheap adult cash-in that its reputation as a fandom punchline would have you believe.

It's much sadder than that.

There are, plainly visible in the final cut, the bones of a very good spin-off film indeed. The basic premise is of a conflict between two Zygon sleeper-agents, one of whom has grown to enjoy his life on Earth while the other still looks forward to raining terror upon the primitive apes — which is essentially the material Peter Harness would revisit on television in Series 9, presented here as more of a character piece than the ostentatious satirical parable of Zygon Inversion. That the humanised Zygon, Kritakh, has forgotten his true identity and believes himself to be the human he became is an interesting twist. One which, perhaps, isn't given as much room to breathe as it would have been in the novels to which Blum and Parkin were better used — but it's as good a reason as any to work in the psychiatry angle, permitting the return of Jo Castleton; Cyberon's finest cast member returns in fine form, and the character she and the scripts craft deserves so much better than the DVD backcover blurb's description of her as (sigh) "a sexy psychiatrist".

Alright, so, the sex. It would be simplistic to say the sex scenes are only there by Baggs's editorial mandate; sexuality was clearly a part of the original thematic vision for the film. Lauren's unwilling transformation into a shapeshifter plays, at first, as a fantasy of total hedonistic freedom, and part of it is her decision to not only buy herself all kinds of nice things on a rich man's credit card after stealing his appearance, but also bedding his mistress while still in his body. But… you know… that's interesting! I daresay it even explores some surprisingly complex queer themes for a film written in the mid-2000s — Lauren's clear inner conflict about having enjoyed being with another woman for the first time in her life, but only as a man, is played with lovely subtlety by Castleton; the reveal in the 2020 Cyberon anthology that a future Lauren had embraced genderfluidity very much flows out of the material we get here. And yes, there are all kinds of ethical red flags about the circumstances of that tryst — but, again, that's the story. Lauren is tempted by the Mephistophelean Torlakh into some pretty morally-gray behaviour indeed, before walking back from the brink. It's an adult drama, not in the euphemistic sense but the actual, serious, literary one. The problem isn't any of that. The problem isn't even that [shock, horror] there is a bit of onscreen male nudity. All this, while not everyone's cup of tea, and quite far away from your whole teatime Tom Baker japes, is really quite respectable; it's what Torchwood wanted to be, and only rarely succeeded. None of it is the problem.

No, the problem is that the film was produced by a cheapskate, directed by an artless workman, and reedited five years later by a venal, shoddy disaster-artist who wants to put in more nudity because Sex Sells. All three of those film-ruining hooligans are, needless to say, hats worn by William Baggs himself. Jo Castleton and Keith Drinkel's lovely performances — and Daniel Harcourt's entirely serviceable turn — are trapped in flatly-lit rooms and unimpressive locations. Only very occasionally does Baggs take a stab at any interesting angles, lighting, shadow-work. The crime thriller scenes are not tense, the body-horror scenes are not horrible, and the sex scene is not sexy. In Baggs's terminally incapable hands, a moody, sensual tale of murder and temptation feels nothing so much as grubby. It's Clive Barker directed by Tommy Wiseau. (Sex scene singular, you'll note; perhaps surprisingly, there's really only one, laughable in how clearly superfluous it is, spliced into what was clearly supposed to be a tasteful transition between non-graphic foreplay, and the characters waking up a few hours later. Although there is also a gratuitous scene with a topless Lauren, plus the notorious instances of frontal nudity from the male leads, both of which are resolutely non-sexual.)

In the end, the watching experience is not without value if you're morbidly curious, or even a generous enough viewer that you're interested in trying to make out the outline of the film Blum and Parkin thought they'd scripted. If you've given the film a pass on the assumption that it was just a grubby cash-in, perhaps reconsider (although I wouldn't recommend giving Baggs any money over it). But if it comes down to a yea-or-nay — then no, this doesn't work. Of course it doesn't. It might have, in another timeline, and that is remarkable enough; but we aren't so lucky.