Dragonfire

Three Episodes
Aired between 23rd November 1987 and 7th December 1987

Written by Ian Briggs
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Chris Clough

Synopsis

On the dark side of an ice planet called Svartos, there is a supermarket called Ice World. It is run by a megalomaniac called Kane. Not everyone knows this, but supposedly, there is a myth of a dragon in the caves underneath Ice World, and the Doctor takes Mel to the planet in the hopes of finding it.

They start in the cafe adjacent to the supermarket, and find their old friend, Sabalom Glitz, being harassed by the waitress, a young human girl called Ace. 

The Doctor and Mel make their acquaintances, and it's not long before Kane's henchmen soon turn up, led by officer Belazs. She tells them that Sabalom Glitz owes Kane 100 crowns for trying to pass off rotten fruit to her employer.

She suggests he repays back the 102 crowns he gained from selling his own crew into slavery to Kane, but Glitz reluctantly admits that he lost it at cards.  Belazs gives him 24 hours to come up with the money. If he doesn't, his ship, the Nosferatu will be destroyed.

It just so happens that Glitz has acquired a treasure map in that same game of cards, and it's believed to lead to the treasure guarded by the dragon.  He agrees to go with the Doctor to find it, but he refuses to let Ace and Mel go with them. 

Little does Glitz know that Kane made sure he lost the 102 crowns at cards, and he made sure he got the map as Kane doesn't want to risk his own neck personally. The map has been tagged with a tracking device and Glitz will inadvertently lead Kane to the treasure.

Once left  alone, the restless and obnoxious Ace ends up getting fired for pouring milkshake on a customers head. She takes Mel to her quarters and explains that she's actually human from 20th century Earth. She has a passion for making explosives, and was messing around in the school lab one evening when she was whisked away in a time storm and ended up on Ice World. She still has a passion for explosives and shows Mel her home made Nitro 9 - "like Nitro Glycerine but with more wallop".

Ace shuts down really quick when Mel asks about her parents, but she does admit that her real name is Dorothy.

Ace takes the cans of explosive and uses them to help the guards break through an iced up doorway to get to the Nosferatu. Belazs is called and arrests them, taking them to Kane.

It turns out that Kane has supernatural powers and can generate extreme cold from his hands.  In turn, he must keep himself cold and periodically goes in a chamber to keep his temperature down.  When he speaks to the girls, he offers Ace a golden crown - a regular occurrence to the people he has in his employment.

It's cold from his touch and would burn the shape of it into the skin of whoever touched it.  Ace refuses to take the crown and threatens them with some Nitro 9, allowing her and Mel to escape.

Meanwhile, in the ice caverns, the Doctor and Glitz are going around in circles.  The Doctor (for some reason) loses Glitz and decides to climb over a railing and dangles himself into an abyss, realising that his grip isn't as strong as it could be and he begins to slip down his umbrella.

Lucky for him, Glitz finds him and rescues him. He tells the Doctor that he'd rather take his ship away from Kane and then he will help the Doctor find his treasure. The Doctor agrees.

Kane has ordered the Nosferatu destroyed, but Belazs secretly countermands the order, as she intends to take the ship for herself. She finds the Doctor and Glitz on board the ship, but is convinced to let them both go. 

She then turns one of the other soldiers against Kane and they try to turn up the heat in his chamber, killing him. This fails and he ultimately kills them both, but not before the heat melts a statue of a woman called Xana he had specially made.

Once recovered, Kane sends his cryogenic frozen slaves (who lose their memory and become like zombies for a time) after the Doctor and the gang.

Ace and Mel continue to run, and come up against the Dragon, which looks more like an alien that shoots laser beams from it's eyes.

They run away from it and eventually meet the Doctor and Glitz.

The Doctor communicates with the dragon and convinces it to be friendly to them. It kills the cryo-zombies as they come after them though.

The dragon takes the group to its lair, and plays them a pre-recorded hologram of a recording. This recording spells out that Kane is from Proamon and is part of a criminal gang with Xana.  He was taken here as a prison. The supermarket is pretty much a ship, and the Dragon is his jailer.

The fabled gold of the dragon is actually a crystal in it's head and it's a sort of key that will allow Kane to start the supermarket space ship and allow him to leave the planet.

Thanks to the bug on the map, Kane thinks he's won his freedom.

He sends his soldiers to get the crystal and orders the rest to attack everyone in the supermarket, driving them onto the Nosferatu. The only one's to escape this are a young girl called Stella and her mother.  Once on the ship and it's launched into space, Kane blows it up with everyone onboard.

A couple of Kane's soldiers manage to kill the dragon and remove it's head, but when they discover the crystal, they're killed from it's energy discharge, leaving the Doctor to pick it up.

Kane captures Ace and does a deal with the Doctor: her life for the crystal. The Doctor has no choice and Kane activates the ship. 

He takes off and tries to set a course for Proamon, but discovers that he's been imprisoned for so long, the planet has been wiped out. In despair, he opens the blast shields and kills himself.

With Kane dead, Glitz claims the large Ice world ship and renames it Nosferatu II.  He agrees to give Ace a lift back to Perivale (her home town) on Earth.

As the Doctor prepares the TARDIS for departure, Mel announces that she is going to stay with Glitz instead to keep him out of trouble, but suggests that Ace doesn't really want to go home.

The Doctor tells Ace the good news, and promises to take her back to Perivale via the scenic route.

As they depart, Stella is re-united with her mother, but watches the TARDIS de-materialise, an act which makes her giggle.

Trivia

• A lot of the character names were taken from film theory with famous people in the industry becoming character names. There's also more than a little reference to the movie "Aliens" in this story, as well as the white uniformed soldiers giving a nod to Stormtroopers

• Ace was named Dorothy as a reference to the  Wizard of Oz, given that she was whisked off in a storm to a distant and alien land.

• In the original script, Ace was actually to have slept with Glitz before the TARDIS arrived. Yuk!  Thankfully, this bit of background never made it to the screen. It was however referred to in a New Adventures novel.

• The script had someone of similar character to Glitz hunting the treasure. When John Nathan-Turner discovered this, he encouraged the return of Glitz instead.

• The eponymous cliffhanger seems pointless on screen, but the corridor he was on was supposed to have been a dead end, leaving the Doctor no choice but to go down

• Amazingly, the melting head scene didn't attract much in the way of complaints. One opinion is because people didn't really watch it as much.

The Review

Although Bonnie Langford's background is in theatre and having a reputation for being an obnoxious child star, her character, Mel began life as a much needed breath of fresh air.  This story is a harsh treatment for her then, a fact that detracts from the overall feel of it, because she goes in such a ludicrous, nonsense way.

In fact, truth be told, there are only two reasons to watch this story at all.  First. to see Ace come on the scene. Second, to watch Kane's head melt.  That's it.  The story is simple and very poorly executed to the point where it doesn't matter about the hunt. The sets are awful, and the concept of it all pretty bonkers (I mean, how bored must Kane have been to waste his time making an evil supermarket instead of hunting the dragonfire?).  And speaking of supermarkets it also doesn't make sense because like Dracula, he could have taken his coffin onboard any ship that arrived (the Nosferatu shall we say) and then left that way. 

The ONLY redeeming feature of this otherwise terrible story is the introduction of Ace. In stark contrast to Mel, we have a character with some back story, who is a bit edgy and like nothing we've seen yet from a companion.  For this reason only, it deserves a watch, but will unlikely be brought out again for a long time.

Rating

4 out of 10

Re-watchability Factor

4 out of 10 

Watch this if you liked...

• The Brain of Morbius

• The Pirate Planet (The Key to Time Part 2)

• Terminus

• Aliens

Trial of a Timelord - 13-14: The Ultimate Foe

Two episodes
Aired between 29th November 1986 and 6th December 1986

Written by Robert Holmes (part 13) / Pip and Jane Baker (part 14)
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Chris Clough

Synopsis

After all this trial malarky, the Doctor is still insistent that the Matrix footage has been tampered with, even in the face of the Keeper of the Matrix denying it.  The Keeper says it can only be accessed by senior Time Lords with appropriate keys, leading the Doctor to say that either someone high up has stitched him up, or someone has duplicated a key.

Surprisingly, Mel and Sabalom Glitz turn up, transported here by someone to help the Doctor prove he acted innocently. That someone is of course, the Master. He says he's been watching the trial with great interest and has decided now is the time to help the Doctor.

Sabalom Glitz reveals that he and Dibber were sent to Ravalox (See The Mysterious Planet) to retrieve secrets stolen from the Matrix. In retaliation for this theft, the Time Lords moved Earth to prevent them from being retrieved.

The Master it turns out worked with the Valeyard, a darker version of the Doctor, to frame the Doctor and set him up, in recompense he would have been given all the Doctor's remaining incarnations to prolong his regenerative cycle. The High Council also agreed to go along with this and let the Doctor take the fall for the theft of the secrets from the Matrix.

The Doctor is furious and accuses the Time Lords of being corrupt and evil. The only one who seems not to be in on it is the Inquisitor herself.

The Valeyard now exposed, flees the courtroom and hides in the Matrix. The Doctor and Glitz agree to go into the Matrix to retrieve the Valeyard and bring him to account.

As they are gone, the Master harps on about how the Valeyard would have been a good ally, but even more powerful and cunning than the Doctor, so ultimately he's too big of a threat. This way, they might well kill each other and he wins both ways.  The Master is however upset at the High Council for what they have done to Earth and has tapped into the Matrix feed, showing the trial to everyone on Gallifrey so they can see just how corrupt the Council is.

Inside the Matrix, the Doctor and Glitz find themselves in Victorian London, a world created by the Valeyard.  He has a giant lair called "The Fantasy Factory" that is manned by an officious bureaucrat called Mr Popplewick who sends them around in circles and to multiple versions of himself, until the Doctor agrees to sign a paper that forfeits his remaining regeneration's to the Valeyard, should the Valeyard defeat him here.

With little option, the Doctor agrees, steps through a door, and finds himself on a beach. Hands come from the sand and drag him down, whilst the Valeyard laughs. Glitz arrives and tries to save him but it's too late. 

To his surprise however, the Doctor miraculously rises from the sand unharmed. He explains that's because it's all fantasy so long as his belief is stronger than the Valeyard's.

The Valeyard turns up and tries to kill them with nerve gas.

They take refuge in a nearby hut which turns out to be the Master's TARDIS. The Master re-iterates that the Valeyard is too evil and unpredictable so he wants to stop him. He then manipulates the Doctor into waiting in the console room, and springs a trap, debilitating the Doctor. The Master will beat the Valeyard in his own way.

He sends the Doctor back to the Fantasy Factory hypnotised as bait. The Valeyard comes out and the Master tries to kill him with his Tissue Compression Eliminator, but it bounces off the Valeyard, who in turn throws explosive quills and forces the Master to flee.

Meanwhile, Mel manages to get inside the Matrix, finds the Doctor and brings him back to the courtroom. There, she gives evidence that the Doctor is innocent of his accused crimes, but the Inquisitor deems the Doctor is indeed guilty of genocide.  The Doctor takes the news with surprising calm and agrees. It turns out that this wasn't the courtroom at all, but another illusion from the Matrix. The real Mel in frustration steals a key from the Keeper and really does enter the Matrix. She finds the Doctor being led to his execution and he tells her he knows it was fake, and was trying to draw out the Valeyard for a final showdown.

Together with Glitz, they go back to the Fantasy Factory. There, Glitz finds the stolen secrets from the Matrix and offers to give up the Doctor in return for them, being paid a shed load of money from the Master to do so.  Popplewick agrees, and Glitz goes.  Popplewick is then revealed to be the Valeyard in disguise. The Valeyard in true Bond style, explains that there's a laser pointed into the courtroom and is willing to kill everyone.

The Master meanwhile tells the court and High Council that Gallifrey's population are in revolt and they have been deposed. He now intends to release their secrets and take control himself. He uploads the secrets onto the screen, but it turns out they're fake and instead it's a trap that captures both him and Glitz in the Matrix.

The Doctor sabotages the laser, sending wild beams of energy flying everywhere. Mel rushes off to evacuate the courtroom whilst he creates a huge feedback loop. The Valeyard is wounded and left to die in the Matrix as the Doctor rushes out before the entire Fantasy Factory goes up in a ball of fire.

Back in the courtroom, the Doctor is cleared of all charges and he is told that Perri actually survived and is living as a warrior queen with Yrkanos.

He is offered the presidency once more, but refuses and suggests that the Inquisitor takes it instead.  He also suggests that leniency is given to Glitz as he can be reformed.

He goes to the TARDIS and is despondent when Mel says she's going to make him exercise again. He intends to drop her off back in her own time.

Back in the courtroom, we discover that the Keeper of the Matrix is somehow the Valeyard.

Trivia

• And so, we bid farewell to Colin Baker. This is his last televised adventure as the Doctor. He did go on however to be majorly popular in the big finish audios (and is still going). He was supposedly invited to do one more story to regenerate, but given the fact that the BBC effectively used him as a scapegoat for the series being dull, and firing him, he unsurprisingly turned it down

•  So, over the course of the Trial, we've seen that all is definitely not well with the production team.  Eric Saward was increasingly disillusioned with JNT caring more about the Cons and publicity than he did about the show. The final straw came in the guise of writing this story.  

• Originally, Robert Holmes was to pen the tale, but he got incredibly ill and died, only having written the first part and notes for the second half.  Eric felt honour bound to carry the story through in the vision Robert Holmes had given for it.  The problem was that the show was to end on a cliff hanger with the Doctor and the Valeyard falling in a vortex, similar to a Sherlock Homes and Moriarty ending.  John Nathan-Turner did not like this at all, as it gave the BBC too much opportunity to simply axe the show and say he died.  

• With this, JNT ordered the ending re-written. Given this dilemma, Eric Saward refused to change it and quit, taking the story with him and forbidding JNT from using it. John Nathan-Turner was in a tight spot, so turned to Pip and Jane Baker, handing them some continuity notes and asking them to effectively write a story blind with little reference to how things had played out or would go.

• This is a point where we should lament the end of the Robert Holmes stories. The best in the game, he ushered in many of the Golden Age Dr Who stories. Unfortunately, these final ones were not as good as his earlier works, but it is indeed worth mention that this is the end of an era.

The Review

Doing a story about the Matrix is always going to be hard as the laws of physics don't apply, so much of what makes logical progression is thrown out the window.  So, we have a bonkers surrealist nightmare for most of the episodes, coupled with an overly complicated tying up of the trial, and on top of it all, shoehorning in the Master to end it all with a bond villain super weapon.

None of this works. In part this is due to all the behind the scenes fisasco, but I feel it's just as much because there's so much to get in on this story that you can't focus on any one aspect and the result is a very diluted, very half arsed effort to bring everything to a close.

I understand the ending JNT wanted, but it just exaggerates the anti-climax.

Nothing more to say than it being a very sad story for Robert Holmes to go out on, and it's one quite frankly that you would only watch because you've suffered through the rest of the trial.  If this was what was offered up as the best of Doctor Who when they had one last bite of the cherry, I for one am amazed that it didn't get cancelled anyway.

Rating

4 out of 10

Re-Watchability Factor

4 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• The War Games

• The Deadly Assassin 

The Trial of a Time Lord - 1-4: The Mysterious Planet

Four episodes
Aired between 6th September 1986 and 27th September 1986

Written by Robert Holmes
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Nicholas Mallett

Synopsis

The TARDIS arrives on a strange space station and the Doctor finds that it is home to a courtroom full of Gallifreyan officials.

The prosecutor known as the Valeyard explains that the Doctor is on trial for meddling in the affairs of other races too often, breaking the Time Lord's code.

The trial is overseen by members of the High Council, and led by the Inquisitor, a female Time Lord.

The Doctor accepts that he is on trial and refuses the use of his own lawyer, preferring to mount his own defence.

The Valeyard begins the prosecutions by using the Matrix to show the court the events that took place on the Planet Ravolox...

The Doctor and Perri went to Ravolox on a hunch of the Doctor's that the planet is not all that it appears to be.  Gallifreyan records show that this planet was devastated by a fireball, but in actual fact, it looks just like Earth. 

It's not long before they find evidence that it is in fact earth, with the London tube stations being overgrown by vegetation. The Doctor explores the ruins of Marble Arch station and gets separated from Perri.

Perri meets a barbarian tribe known as the Tribe of the Free, and is told by the Matriarch - Queen Katryka, that she will be used to bear children for the tribe. 

Perri is temporarily placed in Jail where she meets two unlikely mercenaries known as Sabolom Glitz, and his apprentice, Dibber. They are here to get into the underground complex near Marble Arch and destroy a robot that's running it all so they can retrieve some vital information for an undisclosed employer.

Meanwhile, the Doctor comes into contact with the residents of the underground complex. They view him as hostile and a thief, and sentence him to death via stoning.

Thanks to the workings of the L3 robot (Drathro) who has placed itself in charge above the humans and is referred to as the Immortal, the Doctor is saved from this fate and taken to Drathro for questioning. The Robot is sufficiently clever enough to work out that the Doctor can help it. It commands him to fix a black light converter that is malfunctioning and putting everyone in danger.  The Doctor agrees, but says he needs to go outside to fix it.

Drathro won't allow him to leave, so he has to come up with a plan to stun the robot long enough to run and escape. Drathro responds by sending out his L2 robot to re-capture the Doctor.

Back with Perri, Glitz and Dibber explain that the black light converter, an artefact that is being treated as a totem by the primitive tribe needs to be destroyed in order to take down the L3 robot. They come up with a plan, overpower the guards and destroy the converter. As they're on the run, they find the Doctor, but ultimately all four of them are trapped in the entrance to "Marb Station" between the L2 robot and the pursuing tribe. The tribe shoot and disable the L2 robot, and capture the gang, putting them back into prison.

The L2 robot is re-activated and goes after the Doctor. Breaking through the wall of the prison and stunning the Doctor.

 It hauls him up with cables and tries to take him back to Drathro. 

Believing the L2 to be the Immortal, the tribe attack it and destroy it, taking themselves to be free of it finally, they go off to pillage Marb Station.

Seizing their chance, Glitz and Dibber return to their ship to get bigger guns to deal with the L3 robot.

Perri, having stayed behind in the chaos, revives the Doctor and they go off to stop Katryka and the others from getting themselves killed. As they get to the complex, they're confronted by a member of the underground complex known as Merdeen. He raises a crossbow to them, but he shoots a colleague, revealing that he has helped many of the former inhabitants into the outside world to join the tribe. He always disbelieved the Immortals claims that the outside was a giant wasteland, scorched by fire.

Katryka and the tribe come unexpectedly face to face with Drathro, who electrocutes the Queen and the head warrior and scatters the rest of the tribe.

The Doctor makes it back to Drathro and explains that now the convertor is destroyed, it's going to feedback and cause an explosion that could destroy the universe. He asks Drathro to shut down in order to prevent this. Drathro however does not agree, believing that life is meaningless without him there.

Waiting outside, Perri convinces Merdeen and another inhabitant called Balazaar to help her. They're joined by Glitz and Dibber and attempt to infiltrate Drathro's domain via the rubbish chute.  Drathro activates the fans and defences in the area and nearly kills them, but Glitz and Dibber blow a hole in the wall and they escape. 

Reaching the Robot, the mercenaries lie and say that they have black light on their ship that they will give to Drathro. The L3 robot agrees to go with them, and they take the secret files they wanted as payment. 

The Mercenaries aren't bothered that the system will explode and leave the Doctor and Perri trying frantically to stop a chain reaction. This all culminates in the L3 robot overheating and damaging the secret files, but the Doctor saves the universe by containing the explosion to the complex itself.

Glitz and Dibber leave the planet, having taken solace in finding a bunch of rare minerals instead that they can sell on.

The Doctor and Perri take their leave, instructing Merdeen and Balazaar to take the people of the complex out into the wide world as it's not devastated as they believed.  When alone, the Doctor does question the reason why Earth was moved from its point in space and renamed in the archive as Ravolox.

Back in the courtroom the Doctor glibly states that he saved the universe, but the Valeyard claims that the case isn't over and more evidence is about to be presented...

Trivia

• This story sees a new take on the theme tune introduced, but the titles remained the same since the Twin Dilemma.

• As noted in the previous story, the entire run of Season 23 was re-thought from the point of view as a trial, hopefully showcasing the best things that it could offer, and mimicking the reality that the show was "on trial for it's life".

•  The opening scene of this story was one of the last model shots on film ever to take place on the show. The model was over 6ft long, and cost £8,000 to make and film.  The scene, although spectacular and stands up to this day, basically blew the budget and many corners had to be cut throughout the season to make up for it.

• Because the production team wanted to make this season a great showcase for the possibilities that it could be, Eric Saward returned to veteran writer Robert Holmes to outline this and the final story as the overall arc of the series. Holmes wasn't feeling well at this time, and the quality of the story is a reflection of that

The Review

And so we begin the final season of Colin Baker's Doctor. The start is a strong one, with the visual effects being top quality and the introduction of the story being intriguing indeed. If you look back into the seventies episodes, you will see that I've never been one to put effects above the quality of the story, but... in this case it does feel like it is an issue.  It's not so much the special effects even, it's more about the costumes and to some extent the supporting cast. The contrast between the opening and the story itself is such a stark contrast.

The robots themselves are reasonably robotic, and okay, and Sabolom Glitz is Holmes doing a re-hash of Garron and Unstoffe from The Ribos Operation, which is fine. The issue comes with their costumes, the quality of the Tribe's costumes, and let's be honest, the use of Joan Simms as Katryka.  She has been such an ingrained part of the Carry On franchise for so long that it is very difficult to see her in any serious light here, and she looks about as far away from a warrior queen as you can get.

Even Linda Bellingham is an odd choice for an Inquisitor, seeing as most people at the time were more familiar with her in the OXO cubes adverts, still I do think she manages to pull the role off with some measure of gravitas.

The logic behind all the story is somewhat lacking, as we will come to see, the Valeyard is actually shooting himself right in the foot by even presenting this as evidence, showcasing how he's done stuff to manipulate things, but as a story in it's own right, it's a halfway decent start to the series. I just wonder if they could have redeemed the god-awful Celestial Toymaker in the story that was orignally scheduled for this spot.

Rating

6 out of 10

Re-watchability Factor

5 out of 10

Watch this if you liked...

• An Unearthly Child

• The Enemy of the World

• Colony in Space

• Invasion of the Dinosaurs

• Robot

• The Face of Evil