Dragonfire

Dear Gary—

Dragonfire leaves me rather cold. The Christmastime pledge drive aura of the preceding serials is fading; it was refreshing to have some lighthearted romps to sweep away the residue of deadly grim seasons; it’s about time we got back to some quality Doctor Who.

Dragonfire comes up short.

The sets, the lighting, the monsters are shoddy, which is never a good sign, but Doctor Who has overcome worse. However it needs something to elevate it—plot, characters, acting, anything. Dragonfire has its share of good points, just not enough.

I’ll start with the acting and I’ll start with Ace. Ace might settle down into her role, but in this introductory serial she is awful. Doctor Who has reverted to the lamentable habit of casting a much older actress to play a teenager. Sophie Aldred flings herself into this sulky tomboy teen persona with all of the subtlety of an elephant. She does have a few quiet pockets of moments when she isn’t shouting ‘Ace,’ calling someone ‘bilge bag,’ or dumping ice cream sodas over people’s heads and the potential shows through, like when she is resignedly playing ‘I Spy’ in the Singing Trees, but overall she thrashes her way through the story like the proverbial bull in a china shop.

Then there is the character of Belazs. In her first scene as she confronts Glitz in the restaurant I can’t help but notice that she never looks at the people she is addressing. She keeps gazing off as though reading her lines from a teleprompter. It’s very distracting and I can’t connect with her character for the rest of the story. She should have some pathos, with the implied back story of a young girl seduced by the cold-hearted Kane and now a mere scorned lover and slave to the man of ice. But I just can’t work up any compassion for her. (How much better a similar scenario plays out in The Androids of Tara between Madam Lamia and Count Grendel.)When Belazs asks for Glitz’s spacecraft and Kane callously orders its destruction I should feel sympathy; however all Belazs is giving me is seething rage, there is no sense of longing or regret; I have no pity for her.

The Doctor has some good moments in Dragonfire. His philosophical discussion with the guard, for instance, is priceless. However his tendency to clown becomes a bit much; for example his exaggerated slips and slides through the corridors of Iceworld. I can understand his desire to convey the presence of ice underfoot, and it is curious that no one else (with the exception of Mel who does make a few tiny efforts) gives this impression at all. Perhaps Sylvester McCoy is trying to overcompensate for this lack on the part of his fellow actors, but it only serves to highlight the silliness. And his inexplicable ‘cliffhanger’ escapade is inane in the extreme.

I have to wonder, too, why the Doctor seems a little dense in not realizing that the so called treasure map is a fake and that the seal on it is actually a tracking device. Glitz is also taken in by this, and while I can understand him falling for the map (you can’t cheat an honest man, and Glitz is anything but honest) I would think he’d recognize a bug when he sees it. Also, the map doesn’t really seem to be a treasure map at all; there is no X marking the spot; it is only a layout of the lower levels of Iceworld, something one would likely find in a rack on the counter of a convenience store. That daft little girl wandering about the place probably picked one up at some point in her aimless journey.

That’s a fundamental problem with Dragonfire. Kane has been hanging around for 3,000 years in search of the treasure but never bothered to go below? Or at least send a couple of his slave army down there? How has Kane survived for 3,000 years anyway? Is he a Time Lord? An Immortal? Or has he kept himself cryogenically frozen for most of it, and if so, why hasn’t this wiped his memory like it does to his gang of cryosleepers? All it takes is one meeting with the dragon and the Doctor unlocks the entire mystery that Kane has been trying to work out for 3,000 years.

It also apparently has taken Kane 3,000 years to erect an ice sculpture of his long departed lover that any kindergartener could have made. He survived 3,000 years without it, yet he has a total melt down when it is thawed into a puddle. I have serious doubts about this guy.

His indentured servants aren’t much better. They have weapons; they could easily overpower this guy and be done with it. It’s not like they have anything to gain by serving him. Belazs and Kracauer finally try offing him by raising the temperature, but when this fails each stands idly by while he freeze dries them to death. I’m also not sure why some of his awakened cryosleeper slaves have personalities and minds (ala Belazs and Kracauer) but others, like the Nosferatu crew, are mindless automatons; but perhaps this has to do with the fact that the Nosferatuites are only recently defrosted.

Now about this treasure. But no, before that—Kane has been exiled to Iceworld for vicious and brutal crimes untold. But apparently his exile allows him to run a trading colony complete with space travelers and ice cream shops and creepy little girls with teddy bears. Sounds rather cushy to me. Couldn’t he take off in one of those visiting spacecrafts? What’s keeping him there?

But back to the treasure. Iceworld, it turns out, is actually a spacecraft itself, embedded into the dark side of the planet Svartos. The treasure is the energy source that will power up the spacecraft allowing for Kane’s escape. (Never mind that he could have taken off at any time without it.) The people of Proamnon, Kane’s home planet, don’t seem too bright themselves.

The power crystal has been housed these many years inside of the dragon’s head, and it is the dragon, shoddy though he may be, who provides the most tragic and poignant element to our story. Wordless and clumsy, he has a dignity that none of the humanoid characters around him possess. His death and beheading lend a genuine air of sorrow.

 I do like the wrap up to this story. There is a certain poetic justice to the fact that Kane, who has been wasting all of his 3,000 years in erecting fragile monuments to his lost lover and plotting revenge on his people with no follow-through, is thwarted by the passage of time. The time that he has wasted has done the work for him. His planet is gone; his people dead. (I do wonder why a time traveling Time Lord would not have heard of a planet simply because it has been nonexistent for 2,000 years. The Doctor has journeyed through the millenniums; a matter of 2,000 years is a drop in the bucket to his world view.) Kane’s act of self-destruction is credible, and the special effects depicting his final and literal melt down commendable. Although wouldn’t the unfiltered sun affect everyone in that room and not just the ice man?

“Well, I suppose it’s time” Mel, for some unexplained reason, has decided that traveling with Glitz through space would be more fun than traveling with the Doctor through time and space.

“No point hanging around wasting time,” the Doctor tells her when she attempts to make a meaningful farewell. The Doctor has learned a lesson from Kane it seems.

Time is an old friend and a hated foe of the Doctor. “That’s right, yes, you’re going,” he muses. “Been gone for ages. Already gone; still here; just arrived; haven’t even met you yet. It all depends on who you are and how you look at it. Strange business, time.”

Mel’s has been the strangest business of time in the Doctor’s life; her timeline with the Doctor’s the most confused. I don’t know if the Doctor ever got it straight in his mind who exactly she is or where or when he met her.

But not to worry. Ace is now on board. The twenty something teen with a penchant for explosives.

Strange business, time. Time is relative. Already gone; still here; just arrived; haven’t even met you yet. I send this out, Gary, into that strange time swirl of the Doctor’s, hoping that it will catch up to you in some far distant past, future, or present . . .