Dragonfire finds Doctor Who skating on thin ice
The fourth and final serial of DOCTOR WHO Season 24 brings us Ian Briggs’ DRAGONFIRE and a familiar chill to proceedings: the chill of dwindling resources and end of season lethargy that results in a story which never really feels like it knows what it’s about and that just kind of stops rather than ends. Although that’s not to say there aren’t endings, but as this is Doctor Who, every ending is a new beginning so as we bid adieu to Mel, we also welcome Ace onboard the TARDIS.
The muddled and underdeveloped plot involves the Doctor’s old friend Sabalom Glitz (Tony Selby) who’s fallen on hard times and finds himself indebted to the villainous Kane (Edward Peel), the cryogenically-challenged commander of Iceworld and would be warlord raising an army of the frozen dead decades before the White Walkers plagued Westeros. Of course, the Doctor and Mel are quickly drawn into the situation although it’s a story that never really finds its footing in the slippery setting and ends up slipping and sliding all over the place without making much progress.
A lot of time is spent introducing Ace and her character traits – pugnacious impulsiveness, a fondness for explosives and a mercifully short-lived habit of shouting her own name like some kind of overenthusiastic Pokémon. It’s an introduction that belies her eventual importance to the series, not just injecting a bit of late eighties teenage angst and sass to the series but also offering the perfect foil for the 7th Doctor to become his best self.
It’s all just a bit naff from a production view and the lacklustre and at times downright inept direction does little to mitigate the obviously tiny sets and cheap set dressing. DRAGONFIRE has the kernel of an interesting idea and is perhaps another story where the three episode structure doesn’t quite serve the narrative as well as a longer tale might have. With an extra episode -although it would have possibly stretched the production resources way, way beyond breaking poiont – would have given more time for Kane’s backstory to be fleshed out and for him to become a genuinely quasi-tragic figure rather than the somewhat cartoony Poundland Victor Fries he ends up being, and lend his eventual end a real emotional impact. The saving grace is that despite all the shortcomings the cast take their roles extremely seriously – occasionally a little too seriously – which helps to carry the adventure across the gaping chasm between its ambitions and its resources.
Talking of gaping chasms, no review of DRAGONFIRE can be complete without acknowledging DOCTOE WHO’s most literal and literally most pointless cliffhanger where the Doctor, perhaps conscious of the episode approaching end and with no actual peril in sight, elects to clamber over a safety rail and hang precipitously from his umbrella. It’s more an accident of filming than of scripting as it’s the poor set design and camera angles that obfuscate what’s going on, because later in episode 2 we see Ace and Mel attempt the same manoeuvre because the path they’re on is a dead end and it’s the only way to reach the next level of the ice caves. Bu the damage is done and the story never really recovers from the impression of forced jeopardy.
DRAGONFIRE is notable during the McCoy era, at least, for featuring a few scenes set in the TARDIS console room, something that would become rarer as the years marched on as the set became tattier and the money to maintain it dwindled. It also marks the final time in the classic series that we bid farewell to a companion and maintain’s the classic series’ often inept handling of exits. It’s not quite as botched as the cop-out revisionism of Peri’s departure but still Mel’s late in the story decision to remain in outer space with Sabalom Glitz of all people recalls Leela’s extremely impulsive decision to stay on Gallifrey with a guy she’d just met.
Still, it’s testament to the enduring appeal of DOCTOR WHO that even its most head-scratching moments can be remembered with a forndess that seems to be immune to the laws of time and space. At the time, though, this turgid end to season twenty-four would have a knock-on effect to season 25’s initial viewing figures – figures which would rapidly improve thanks to the between-the-seasons retooling of character and tone and the crowdpleasing celebratory stories – although the damage would be done and cancellation became all but inevitable. Had the McCoy era set off at the pace it adopted for Season 25 onwards, the history of the series may have been very different.
