Masterpiece Theatre: Dragonfire

Masterpiece Theatre

Number 6: Dragonfire

Dragonfire was my favourite story of Season 24 when it was first broadcast in 1987, mainly I think because of Kane’s death scene at the end of it. As a teenager I was rather partial to a touch of gore, and who needs a logical plot and decent characters when the main villain does a Belloq and melts? And clearly I was not alone, as it won the 1987 Doctor Who Magazine Season Survey.

But time goes by and tastes change, and it seems that time has not been kind to Dragonfire. From its lofty position at the top of the Season 27 manure heap, the story finds itself lurking at a lowly 186 in the DWM Mighty 200 Survey. It’s still ahead of Paradise Towers, mind, which shouldn’t be the case at all. It has gone from being a harmless little adventure minding its own business, to an object of scorn.

The main fault that can be pointed at Dragonfire is just how cheap and tacky it looks. Clearly the budget for the season had been slashed just to keep it on air, but never before and never since has Doctor Who looked so cheap. The sets are uniformly ridiculously poor, and there is never any real sense that the walls are made from ice. Cellophane wrapping maybe, but never ice.

This sense of tackiness is exacerbated by some of the acting too. Tony Selby was fine as Glitz in The Mysterious Planet, as a man just about keeping his sociopathic streak under control. But by the time we get to Dragonfire, Glitz has been reinterpreted as an intergalactic Del-Boy and Selby has decided to deliver every single one of his lines like he is appearing in a cheap and cheerful children’s programme. Any edge to the character has long since been lost, and that’s shameful.  Irritating space-moppet Stellar and her imbecilic mother are equally guilty. Stellar’s mother appears to be utterly unaware of a massacre taking place around her, whilst her cutesy-blonde daughter for some reason takes centre-stage in the final episode. Still, reassuringly, Stellar may have the look of a cute little girl, but she has the heart of a cold-blooded killer, as she freezes her teddy to death without a thought. She’s the pre-teen version of Dexter. Maybe Kane should have offered her the coin instead. She would have brought him the Dragon’s head in no time at all, probably wearing its intestines as a scarf.

Then there’s the plot, or lack thereof. Dragonfire shows a staggering lack of thought in its world-building. Kane, stranded on Iceworld, appears to run a freezer centre. He has made no effort at all to leave the planet or to kill the Dragon (his jailer) despite having thousands of years to do so. His second-in-command Belasz is obviously plotting his demise, yet he does nothing about her until she nearly succeeds in killing him. He also never meets the Doctor until his final scene and then promptly kills himself. In fact, Kane may well be the laziest villain in Doctor Who history. The man just can't be bothered.

It is hard enough to reconcile the freezer centre with Kane’s domain, but when Ace and Mel escape from Kane’s headquarters, they run into the Dragon within metres of leaving. Not exactly well-hidden is the key to Kane’s release, despite the fact that characters say that the Dragon has never been seen. The Doctor manages to lose Glitz down a corridor with only one other entrance. Kane’s soldiers massacre everyone on Iceworld, but we never see any bodies. And on and on it goes, down, down, deeper and down...

Still, we’ve got this far without even mentioning THAT cliffhanger. Oh, wait, I’ve just mentioned it. Damn. Just a word of warning: once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it.

There we are. The Doctor; the Oncoming Storm, conqueror of the Sontarans, the Cybermen, the Silence and Mestor the Magnificent; the man who wiped out Gallifrey and the Daleks single-handed; the man who sealed the Medusa Cascade, sliding down his umbrella into a bottomless chasm for no apparent reason. Even the makers of the programme don’t know what he is doing!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=tmNXj2W7yw4

But we are here to praise, not to blame,so...

Ten Reasons that Dragonfire can melt even the coldest heart

1.       Kane’s head-melting death. After Season 22 went too far and showed far too much violence and blood for a family teatime, Doctor Who played it safe for a couple of years, as if the programme had lost faith in itself to show anything that might draw negative publicity at a time when it was already struggling to survive. The nastiest it got was Katryca and Broken Tooth’s electrocution in The Mysterious Planet, although conceptually Peri’s ‘death’ in Mindwarp is much, much nastier. So it was a breath of fresh air to see Doctor Who working hard to send viewers scuttling behind the sofa again. This was Doctor Who pushing at the boundaries of acceptability once more, but without the gratuitous tone of Season 22. The scene had to be cut as well. Apparently one of Kane’s eyes popped out and rolled down his cheek as they were filming it...

2.       Edward Peel as Kane lends the story and character a gravity that the part simply does not deserve. Kane is nothing more than a glorified freezer centre manager, too stupid to actually leave his prison and too slapdash to post security guards at the entrances to his so-called Forbidden Zone. Kane’s motives are nebulous to say the least, but Peel works hard to invest his villain with an icy menace. It’s a pity he didn’t get to have any sort of confrontation scene with the Doctor.

3.       Patricia Quinn, as Belasz, also works incredibly hard to give the story some realism. It’s a real pity her subplot runs out before the story ends. After all, it would not be difficult to imagine her eventually siding with the Doctor against Kane. Her desperate longing to be free from Kane’s slavery overrides her sense of what is wrong and right, and Quinn plays this trait as something Belasz is aware of and trying to ignore. She is head and shoulders above the rest of the cast.

4.       The scene where Kane tries to tempt Ace into joining his slave army is almost powerful. Sophie Aldred in particular sells the moment, and you actually believe for a fraction of a second that she might take the coin from Kane. Bonnie Langford’s plaintive cries to her friend create a tension in this scene that the rest of the story unfortunately fritters away.

5.       He’s an obvious joke, but the intelligent guard who proves more than an intellectual match for the Doctor is still funny. He seems to have strolled in from Red Dwarf. I like to imagine that the Doctor, unable to escape the guard’s attention, simply punches him in the face and runs. Or telepathically summons Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor to glass him.

6.       Sophie Aldred as Ace is excellent from her very first scene. She exudes an easy charm and has an interestingly brittle facade that manifests itself as belligerence. Her insistence on giving everyone an immediate nickname demonstrates her inability to allow anyone to get too close to her, hence her own nickname, and Aldred seems to really understand this element of her character. Ace would go on to become the best companion of the eighties, and the seeds of her character are sown right here.

7.       Mel’s leaving scene, described by Steven Moffat as the moment the Doctor slipped back into the room. The ‘Days like crazy paving’ speech is handled beautifully by Sylvester McCoy, and lays down a marker for where he wanted his Doctor to go. His sadness at losing Mel is palpable and he gives her departure an emotional kick that outstrips all previous leaving scenes right the way back to Romana in Warriors’ Gate.

8.       The Dragon – Alien on a child-friendly BBC budget. Almost every aspect is copied from the then-fresh Alien movies. The design is clearly ripped off from inspired by the HR Giger creation, from the elongated head to the metallic exoskeleton to the tubes that hiss gas. The only difference is that Ridley Scott and James Cameron shrouded their creations in darkness, making them a potent threat, but, like the Myrka before him, the poor biomechanical Dragon is exposed under harsh BBC lighting.

9.       Sylvester McCoy and his amazing ice acting. In every scene he moves as if he is slipping on ice – a not unreasonable assumption given that this is indeed Iceworld – yet the rest of the cast fail to pick up on his cue. So he just looks slightly embarrassing in his movements. A little more rehearsal time, and a little more leading from Sylvester, and we would have believed that this was really a world made from ice, rather than a series of cheap-looking and over-lit corridors.

10.   Ian Briggs has clearly decided that if he is going to steal the Dragon from Aliens, he might as well steal the plot as well. Therefore in part three we have Stephanie Fayerman and Stewart Organ (him off of Grange Hill), pretending to be the Colonial Marines in Aliens, creeping around the corridors with over-sized guns, with a motion detector giving off readings. But despite their efforts, director Chris Clough ain’t exactly James Cameron. Once again, as happens so often in these less well-regarded stories, it’s a case of imagination-budget mismatch. It’s CBBC does Aliens...

The money had run out. The programme was recovering after an unexpected shutdown. The new Doctor was still finding his feet. The script editor hadn’t yet fully implemented his vision of what was to come. The writer needed another couple of drafts. All these factors and more combine to trip up Dragonfire. It is inarguably a mess, but like so many before it, there are glimmers of what the story might have been. Dragonfire is a story that’s hard to hate, but impossible to love.

Next Time: The Space Pirates