Is any of this important, Doctor?
World building can be tricky business, particularly on Doctor Who. Too much exposition, often from a writer in love with his or her creation, bogs down proceedings, leading to long sequences of characters talking about the setting and elucidating the backstory rather than interacting with it; too little, by contrast, leaves viewers bewildered, wondering why they should care about the fate of Beta Seven or the plight of the Greebles. With the shift to fourteen episode seasons in Season Twenty-Three, three episode stories, like Ian Briggs’ “Dragonfire” (Story Production Code 7G), become commonplace, leaving scant time to create the world through which the Doctor will cavort. One solution, as in “Delta and the Bannermen,” is to make the setting paramount, the plot something of an afterthought relative to the narrative energy created by simply exploring the surroundings. Briggs takes the opposite tack, hurtling the Seventh Doctor, Mel, and future companion Ace (Sophie Aldred) through a series of action-laden sequences in the trade colony known as Iceworld, counting on the audience’s prior experience with generic (and some rather specific) science fiction settings and tropes to fill in the abundant background gaps left by the script.
Still, viewers need to be grounded in the world somehow, and Briggs, producer John Nathan-Turner, and script editor Andrew Cartmel solve that problem through the person of Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby), the lovable scoundrel last seen during “The Trial of a Time Lord” some eighteen months prior. Though his identity is not elaborated upon in “Dragonfire,” trusting the audience to remember his casual relationship with the truth and essentially amoral nature—a belief in the power of continuity that plagues that season-long story—context clues suffice. The Doctor’s ready rapport with the con artist signals that an adventure is afoot. For those viewers who remember him, the setting immediately makes more sense as a futuristic playground, even though it has been barely sketched out on screen.
Needing money to pay his debts to the colony’s ruler, Kane (Edward Peel), Glitz comes into possession of a treasure map leading into the caverns below Iceworld, on the planet Svartos, guarded by the legendary ice dragon. It’s the mystery of this very creature that has drawn the Doctor to the outpost, so when beleaguered waitress Ace curses her boss using a dragon-related insult, the Doctor’s curiosity immediately goes into overdrive. (It must be noted that the Doctor and Mel liken the dragon to the Loch Ness Monster, a being that the Doctor has, on two separate occasions, revealed to be an alien, albeit a different one each time.) Glitz, in need of the purported treasure to retrieve his impounded spaceship, rather too coyly lets himself be persuaded to seek out the dragon, on the condition that Mel and Ace stay behind.
Briggs and director Chris Clough intercut the scenes of Glitz, Ace, Mel and the Doctor in the colony bar, which features a motley of extraterrestrial species—extras in plastic masks and facial makeup, to be sure, but effective at creating a budget “alien cantina” nonetheless—with Kane and his second in command, Belazs (Patricia Quinn), discussing how they have tricked Glitz into entering the caverns on an as-yet unexplained mission. Kane seems to have hypnotic powers, to say nothing of his ice grip and liquid nitrogen sleeping chamber. The audience gets just enough of his creepy demeanor and strange physiology to sustain interest, even though his motive remains obscured, just like his command center, the BBC’s fog machines working overtime to suggest sub-freezing temperatures.
After Ace loses her job for chucking a milkshake at a snooty customer (Shirin Taylor), she and Mel retreat to her slovenly quarters, where the plucky teen reveals that she’s a student from Perivale, in London, with a penchant for the more explosive aspects of chemistry. An orphan, she has no desire to return to her home planet, having been suspended from school for blowing up the art room with her patented “Nitro Nine” before a “time storm” whisked her from, ostensibly, 1987, to the future. Ace then demonstrates the explosives’ potency by blowing up an ice blockage, leading to them both being arrested and presented to Kane, who seeks to enlist her in his growing army of frozen mercenaries. One threatened detonation with Nitro Nine later, the dynamic duo escapes to the ice caverns, where Briggs, aware that he only has three episodes to unspool the plot, drops them, on cue, right in front of titular beast…
A few perfunctory laser blasts—rather incongruous for a dragon—suffice to send Mel and Ace scattering, and indeed the entirety of the second episode involves much running through Doctor Who‘s proverbial corridors. For the second story in a row, the middle frame turns into a welter of chases and confrontations and set pieces that move the plot along but deepen nothing. In “Delta and the Bannermen,” the ineffectual and seemingly endless to and fro shows off the lush Welsh countryside and the unique architecture of the former Butlin’s holiday camp, to say nothing of the vintage motorcycles and scooters. The lack of threat or menace in these escapades takes on secondary importance to the broad vistas and loving cinematography. “Dragonfire,” shot entirely in the studio, must make do with painted flats and nondescript metal corridors; even the crystalline rooms inhabited by the dragon and the cavernous interiors, enlarged via CSO/greenscreen, have a bland, two dimensional feel. This could be any set of caves and passages on any random alien world, and likely these selfsame mesh metal stairs and open interiors have been used before with slightly different paint in earlier stories.
The action, in other words, must suffice. While rousing and full of palpable danger and more than a bit of pyrotechnics, it does not. Over twenty minutes of screentime sees, in turn, Glitz and the Doctor attempt to hijack the conman’s ship via a metaphysical conversation with a guard; Ace and Mel escape the frozen commandos—Glitz’s former crewmembers whom he sold into captivity—sent by Kane to kill them; Glitz and the Doctor confront the dragon, which burns through a door only to stare at them and leave after the Doctor tosses aside Glitz’s gun; and Belazs and co-worker Kracauer (Tony Osoba) plot, and fail, to kill Kane by heating up his sleeping chamber, an attempted murder by thermostat that comes across on screen even less exciting than it sounds. It’s quite a bit of sound and fury, with no mean body count on screen, but, to riff off the Scottish Play, it signifies nothing, just empty narrative calories.
The remaining five minutes, then, sees Briggs (and, one assumes, Nathan-Turner and Cartmel) relent from the frenetic pace, turning to a holographic info dump via the now-friendly dragon to finally explain what is going on to set up the final episode. It is, frankly, a cop out, a loss of nerve, to have everything spelled out for the audience when, for forty-five minutes, the mystery of what was occurring helps obscure the fact that nothing is occurring. A hologram (Daphne Oxenford, presented much like a rebel princess and her trusty droid) triggered by the dragon reveals that Kane and his partner Xana were vicious criminals; she opted to kill herself rather than face exile on Svartos with Kane some three thousand years prior, with the dragon sent along to watch over him. Said keeper (Leslie Meadows), a bio-mechanical guardian whose presentation owes much to H.R. Giger’s conception of the eponymous xenomorph from Alien, contains within its head the “dragonfire,” the mythical treasure of Iceworld and a “source of intense optical energy” sought by Kane to bring about his revenge on his homeworld.
Briggs at least has the restraint needed to keep just what form that revenge will take a secret until a final, inevitable info dump near the end of the concluding episode. Kane has to acquire the dragonfire, after all, and sends a pair of brand new characters—McLuhan (Stephanie Fayerman) and Bazin (Stuart Organ), rather too cutely named after en vogue media theorists—after the dragon. Their dialogue about hunting extraterrestrials draws straight from James Cameron’s Aliens, which came out just the year prior, going so far as to emulate the rifle-mounted tracking device so crucial to that film’s tension and a little girl (Miranda Borman) put in danger by the chaos around her. The line demarcating homage and outright theft has seldom been thinner or less subtle. Between the direct film references and nods to Bazin and McLuhan, to say nothing of the Doctor’s semiotics interchange with the existential docking bay guard, one might be forgiven for thinking they were trapped in a grad student film project instead of watching a long-running science fiction serial putatively aimed at children.
Such on-the-nose referentiality is an awkward fit, at best, particularly when the comparison are to Hollywood blockbusters whose catering expenses alone outstrip the BBC’s entire annual budget. The valiant efforts of the effects team notwithstanding, the story devolves into little more than a ham-fisted visual pastiche of science fiction and action films of the ’70s and ’80s, robbing it of any originality. It feels shabby in comparison, which is quite rare for Doctor Who; any understandable material failings in what appears on screen have often been papered over by writing that leans into the series’ strengths of character and plotting, to say nothing of bravura acting and no little measure of audience goodwill. But not so here.
Kane unleashes his army of frozen commandos throughout Iceworld to herd the residents towards Glitz’s spaceship, with the intention of evacuating everyone before he uses the dragonfire to launch the colony—in reality a space craft—off of Svartos. His decision to then destroy the loaded vehicle comes as a shock, a level of callousness that feels at odds with somewhat light tone Briggs has struck throughout the story. The subsequent death (and dismemberment) of the dragon at the hands of Bazin and McLuhan continues the darker turn the third episode takes, particularly after a scene where the creature carries the lost child back to safety.
As Ace plaintively demands, “Don’t come all clever dick with me. What’s going on?” “Dragonfire” falls apart as a coherent narrative by the time Kane reveals his plan: to fly Iceworld back to his home planet of Proamon to seek revenge for three thousand years of imprisonment. When the Doctor points out that Kane’s home planet no longer exists, having been destroyed in a supernova two thousand years earlier, our villain just sort of shrugs and kills himself by opening a window and letting sunlight in, his face melting, flesh peeling away, revealing teeth and bones, in the most gruesome scene ever shown on Doctor Who. That the grotesque visage looks more like a puppet from Spitting Image than the analogous disintegration in Raiders of the Lost Ark does little to lessen the revulsion of the moment, one that seems tacked on simply because the story’s run length has been reached.
Glitz, at least, receives a happy resolution, becoming the new proprietor of Iceworld, now rechristened the Nosferatu Two after his destroyed ship. Tony Selby’s return as the character stands out as a bright spot in the story, his presentation of the affable rogue on point as ever, Glitz’s self-interest always tempered with the barest hint of humanity. His timing opposite Sylvester McCoy’s Seventh Doctor works better than with Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor, and given that audiences are still getting used to the new regeneration, a call-back to a familiar face helps ease the transition.
Accompanying Glitz in his new role as the owner of a mobile interstellar trading post is Mel, who takes her leave from the Doctor in “Dragonfire,” Bonnie Langford moving on after six stories as companion. The Doctor’s hesitant, indifferent behavior as Mel tries to depart reveals this Doctor’s inherent vulnerability, and Sylvester McCoy plays the Gallifreyan’s feigned disinterest in her departure brilliantly, showing the extent to which he will, truly, miss her; this is a moment the Doctor has experienced too often, and McCoy carries the weight of all of those goodbyes.
Langford brings a sense of vibrancy to Mel throughout her relatively short time in the TARDIS. Mel’s scripts, when they play to both the character’s and Langford’s strengths—as in “Terror of the Vervoids” and “Time and the Rani,” not coincidentally written by Mel’s originators, Pip and Jane Baker—help usher in a slightly more upbeat and positive tone for a series trying to find its way after several seasons of increasingly gloomy and introspective stories. The character deserves more time to develop, but Mel stands as one of the most independent companions for quite some time. Shame the scripts always made her scream, though.
Sophie Aldred’s Ace steps into the companion role at the story’s conclusion, an obvious attempt to skew the series towards a younger audience with a contemporary teenager given to calling everything “brill” and “naff” in equal measure. The character feels somewhat like Matthew Waterhouse’s Adric, a precocious youth who can but look up to the Doctor, combined with the alienated mien of Mark Strickson’s Turlough and the sparkling innocence of Sarah Sutton’s chemical genius Nyssa. Briggs’ script does little to flesh the character out beyond her catchphrases and penchant for explosions, but one can see Aldred already developing a rapport with “the Professor” whom Ace will spend the remainder of the series accompanying as the sole companion.
As Season Twenty-Four comes to a close, Sylvester McCoy can feel satisfied at having made the Seventh Doctor his own, and we have now this regeneration’s essential nature: modest but firm, sentimental yet reserved, and given to action as a means of demonstrating McCoy’s innate gift at pratfalls rather than any effort to solve issues by force. This Doctor fights with his words, rousing others to a cause as in “Paradise Towers” or pointing out errors in bad-guy logic, as here in “Dragonfire.” When scripts lean into that penchant for wordplay throughout, rather than as pithy solutions tacked on, unearned, at the end, the Seventh Doctor can stand alongside his predecessors with pride.
Both “Dragonfire” and “Delta and the Bannermen” before it point out the signal difference between earlier two episode stories, like “Black Orchid” and “The King’s Demons,” and this new class of three episode stories. Where the two-part tales seem custom built for the limited run time, with intimate stakes and a restrained scale, the three-parters feel like four episode stories pruned to fit their smaller narrative pots. Each, given an additional episode, would have room to expand on the setting and the depth of characterizations while keeping the requisite share of action demanded by Nathan-Turner and Cartmel in their efforts to aim Doctor Who at a wider, or at least younger, audience. The option of three four-part stories and one two-part per season was right there, but for the sadly dwindling remainder of Doctor Who‘s run, three-part tales are here to stay, for better and worse.
(Previous Story: Delta and the Bannermen)
Post 157 of the Doctor Who Project