Dragonfire Part Two

The one where the Doctor finds the Dragonfire...

Edward Peel makes such a thoroughly nasty villain, perhaps the most convincingly wicked bad guy since Sharaz Jek. Peel plays the part totally straight, there's no over-the-top send-up like with Richard Briers, and Kane is given a good enough back-story and motivation to place him above the likes of Gavrok and the Valeyard. The Valeyard just wanted to pinch all of the Doctor's lives to extend his own, whereas Kane has a defined reason to seek revenge, based upon his love and respect for the late Xana.

Once the ice statue of Xana has been completed, Kane insists nobody else must have sight of such a beautiful rendition of his beloved, and so kills the poor sculptor. Those ice-burns he dishes out are nasty, and he doesn't stop at the sculptor: when he discovers there is a plot to kill him, he firstly murders Kracauer, and then tracks down the traitorous ringleader, Belazs, and kills her too.

Belazs is played by Rocky Horror Picture Show legend Patricia Quinn with her trademark fruitiness, but Quinn turns in a nicely nuanced performance in the little screen time she has. Again, this is down to Ian Briggs' writing, making her three-dimensional and more real by supplying back-story and motivation. Quinn may be delivering her lines with a plummy theatricality, but she is utterly committed to the role, and makes Belazs a sympathetic character.

Belazs joined Kane's cause when she was 16 (the same age as Ace) and has stayed by his side for 20 years, but now she wants to leave Svartos and lead her own life of freedom (she's basically an older version of Ace). Maybe she was lured by the promise of travelling the stars too (although the fact Kane is exiled to Svartos means any promise of travel is rather misleading!). Or maybe they fell in love, judging by the scene in which he accuses her of taking advantage of his former feelings for her ("The past is an empty slate"). Kane's relationship with Belazs started only 20 years previously, thousands of years after Xana's death, so he probably never meant for it to be long-standing. It does suggest Kane has a thing for 16-year-old girls though, but we'll gloss over that...

It's just nice to have a back-story for these guest characters which we can all relate to: unrequited love, broken relationships, youthful aspiration, revenge. These are emotional motivations you rarely got in classic Doctor Who. Usually people were motivated by greed, domination or hatred, motivations painted with broad strokes. But suddenly, in this new era, people act spiritually or passionately, like real humans do. And that makes it more relatable to the viewer, rather than just having baddies dressed in flowing black robes threatening to wipe out entire galaxies just because...

This is all typified in the gorgeous scenes between Mel and Ace when the teenager talks about her past (it's just so refreshing for characters to have backgrounds!). It becomes a sisterly one-to-one, in which Ace finds the strength to confide in her newfound friend (who she calls Doughnut!) about how she felt back on Earth, working as a waitress in a fast food joint. Ace says she never really felt at home in Perivale, and always felt her real home was somewhere beyond the stars. The fact she is then whisked to Svartos in a random time storm is given added weight, as you begin to wonder how and why that happened. Maybe she isn't from Earth at all? Ace's expression of feeling alien and other is a very teenagery thing to say, and the rebellion against her parents goes hand in hand with that.

When she reveals to Mel that her real name is actually Dorothy (which she hates), the pieces start to click. Just as Dorothy Gale of Kansas was whisked away in a storm to another world called Oz (after dreaming of a place "somewhere over the rainbow"), Ace has followed the same trajectory, with Oz becoming Svartos. And it's pretty obvious who the wonderful wizard is going to be...

Aldred is wonderful in these scenes, giving Ace a vulnerability beneath the stroppy surface, and although Bonnie Langford has very little input, the fact Mel stays calm and quiet, and just listens to Ace, is a nicely sororal thing to do (does Mel have sisters back home in Pease Pottage? Sadly, she never gets that level of development).

Meanwhile, Glitz convinces the Doctor to help him recover his ship, the Nosferatu, leading to a magnificent scene in which the Doctor distracts a guard with philosophical conversation while Glitz creeps aboard. It's barely 60 seconds long, but this scene is yet another Doctor-defining moment which Sylvester McCoy pitches just right. McCoy has that twinkle which makes his Doctor playful, but also a steel which shows he has a darker, more serious side, and he balances the two well most of the time. The dialogue in this scene is fantastically dense, but the comedy is not in the Doctor's use of this language, but the fact the dim-looking guard understands what he's saying, and actually counters the Doctor with deeper lines of questioning ("There are so few intellectuals about these days"). The philosophical guard's response puts the Doctor on the back foot, giving the character a fallibility absent since Davison left.

The Doctor and Glitz rejoin Mel and Ace to hunt down the dragon that stalks the icy tunnels, and they discover it's not a real monster at all, but a semi-organic vertebrate. I love the bit where the Doctor and Glitz first encounter the dragon, edging carefully around a corner, then running away when it shoots at them (it reminds me strongly of the Second Doctor and Jamie).

After befriending the Creature - a stunning but flawed design clearly inspired by the work of H R Geiger - our heroes learn more about the criminals Kane and Xana by using a poly-dimensional scanning imager (which rather wonderfully projects an image of Listen with Mother pioneer Daphne Oxenford). Kane stated that Xana was killed escaping arrest, while the archivist says Xana killed herself rather than be captured. Is this contradiction intentional, I wonder, or an error? We shall see...

It turns out the Dragonfire crystal Kane seeks is hidden inside the Creature's enormous, top-heavy head, but exactly why Kane wants this crystal has yet to be explained. Sure, Glitz says it's probably worth a few grotzits, but I doubt that's why Kane wants it. However, Kane is listening in to the Doctor's discoveries (via the bugged map seal) and knows where to find the crystal. "At last!" Kane tells us all at home. "After 3,000 years, the Dragonfire shall be mine!"

First broadcast: November 30th, 1987

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Sophie Aldred's soliloquy in the scene between Ace and Mel.
The Bad: Although the overall design is impressive, the Creature's huge head gives performer Leslie Meadows a telling wobble!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

Ace says "Professor": 8 - and still he hasn't corrected her.

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Dragonfire is available on BBC DVD as part of the Ace Adventures box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Adventures-Dragonfire-Happiness/dp/B0074GPGN4