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
- Aliens
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