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…