Planet of Fire Part Four

The one where Turlough returns to his home planet...

Part 4 is packed with answers to questions which were never really asked in the first place, concerning Turlough's origins and why he was masquerading as a public schoolboy in 1980s England on Earth. The Mesos Triangle is revealed as a branding applied to political prisoners from Trion, a planet once subject to a civil war. Sarn was a prison colony where Trion insurgents were sent, and the ship in the forbidden zone was piloted by Turlough's father. Turlough's mother was killed in the Trion civil war, and his family (including baby Malkon) was exiled to Sarn. However, Turlough was sent to Earth (reason unspecified), and monitored by one of many agents Trion has peppered about the galaxy: "An agrarian commissioner on Verdon, a tax inspector on Darveg... and a very eccentric solicitor in Chancery Lane."

It brings Turlough's story full circle, harking back to the solicitor in London that Brendon School's headmaster used to deal with ("A very strange man he is too"), as mentioned in Mawdryn Undead. Turlough was in exile on Earth, a prisoner of the regime that ruled Trion. So why was Turlough so keen to return to his home planet all that time, if he was in exile and the son of a political revolutionary?

Planet of Fire Part Three

The one where Peri discovers a mini Master...

Some of the dialogue Peter Grimwade gives Anthony Ainley to say as the Master is ridiculously turgid and overblown, yet somehow Ainley gets away with it. "Your cremation will deprive me of our periodic encounters," he says, delivering effortlessly what might sound awkward coming out of anyone else's mouth. "Your puny mind no longer affects me," he adds. It's comic strip bad guy dialogue, but Ainley gets away with it.

Ainley is actually rather good in Planet of Fire. Usually his performance is ten times grander than anybody else's, resulting in the pantomime villain image he has, but here he's thought about the fact K-Master isn't the real Master, and adjusts his performance accordingly. Granted, he adjusts it to send it even further into madness, but that feels right because this is the real Master (wherever he be) trying to hold on to his control of Kamelion. Ainley has a presciently cat-like presence, his eyes wide and demented, and you actually believe this man would stop at nothing to achieve his aims. He's more than happy for the Doctor to burn alive, and is unusually brutal in the way he drags poor Peri around. "Journey's end, Doctor!"

Planet of Fire Part Two

The one where Peri steals a bit of the TARDIS...

The opening scenes of part 2 might be confusing for someone just tuning in. Anyone who missed part 1 will be utterly baffled by the procession of bizarre images presented as K-Howard morphs into K-Master, then into the real Kamelion, then back to the K-Master. But then there's another Master - the real Master - controlling Kamelion from somewhere else, somewhere very green with turtle shells hanging on the wall. Oh, and if all that's not enough to get your head round, there's a version of K-Howard wandering around with silver skin too. I reckon Auntie Margaret's probably turned over to ITV by now.

Anthony Ainley is very good though, dressed in suave "gangster" suit and giving a quieter, more understated performance than usual. It's mainly when he's playing K-Master that he's more effective - deliciously menacing and threatening, sometimes even brutal in the way he manhandles Peri - as he's given some traditionally overripe lines to say as his "real" self (as well as the tiresome "my dear Doctor", there's also the pantomime villain material Ainley got so bogged down with, such as describing the TARDIS as a "preposterous box" and Peri as "positively evanescent").

Planet of Fire Part One

The one where there's an awful lot of bare flesh...

Wow! Whoever decided to film a Doctor Who story in Lanzarote was a genius. Lanzarote - a Spanish island off the coast of North Africa - has such a naturally alien-looking landscape due to the volcanic terrain, and allows sweeping vistas for as far as the eye can see that knock British quarries into a cocked hat. The colours on Lanzarote are stunning, and perfect to stand in as an alien planet such as Sarn. The episode opens with two scantily clad young men clambering across the rocky terrain, and we soon cut to another scene filmed at Mirador del Rio, a lookout opened just a decade earlier which looks both very alien and also very Spanish! The fact it looks like nothing ever seen before in Doctor Who makes the location a roaring success.

Just when you think your eyes couldn't boggle any more - at either the stunning location or the amount of flesh on display - Peter bloody Wyngarde turns up! Seen here in flowing priestly robes and handlebar moustache, Wyngarde was a mainstay on British TV and cinema screens in the 1960s and 70s, until an unfortunate case of gross indecency with a crane driver destroyed his reputation overnight. Nevertheless, Wyngarde always had a compelling screen presence, so it's great to have him cast in Doctor Who, against type.

Resurrection of the Daleks Part Two

The one where Tegan leaves...

It's great that the Fifth Doctor's first encounter with the Daleks on screen sees them rush into the room from off-camera and pin him to the wall, screaming "Exterminate!" over and over like crazed lunatics. That's the Daleks of children's nightmares! The strange thing is that the Daleks want him dead instantly, because he is their sworn enemy, but in truth their boss, the Supreme Dalek, wants him alive so that he can be duplicated (we'll come on to that). As Lytton says: "They'll kill anybody, even if they need them." Did these bloodthirsty Daleks not get the Supreme Dalek's memo?

Meanwhile, devious Davros is recruiting like there's no tomorrow, having first converted Kiston to his side, who then converts an unnamed chemist, followed by some of Lytton's troops and eventually, two entire Daleks. They willingly flip their lids up to allow Kiston to inject them with Davros's mysterious toxin, and I love the disgusted expression on Leslie Grantham's face as he peers inside the Daleks' innards.

Resurrection of the Daleks Part One

The one where the Daleks rescue Davros from imprisonment...

At last, the Fifth Doctor gets to face his oldest enemies, the Daleks, in a story originally slated to end Season 20 before industrial action put the kibosh on it. Resurrected for Season 21, the story was filmed as a traditional four-parter, but was re-edited into two 45-minute episodes in order to free up slots to cover the 1984 Winter Olympics. This made the story even more of an event, doubling its episodic length in a move that would become the norm for the following Season 22.

The story opens with an eerie tracking shot through the dank, grey, abandoned location of Butler's Wharf at Shad Thames. Malcolm Clarke's baleful music is reminiscent of the otherworldly output of Lasry-Baschet's Structures Sonores, used during the black and white era. Director Matthew Robinson succeeds at building a spooky tension, which is interrupted by warehouse doors flying open and a crowd of confused and frightened escapees flooding out. These escaping prisoners are then mercilessly gunned down by two ordinary-looking British policemen wielding machine guns! The sequence is shot with uncompromising grit, and as well as being shocking, it's also intriguing, such as when Lytton appears, dematerialises the corpses, and the other two bobbies return to their beat as if nothing happened. Wonderful! What an opening!

Frontios Part Four

The one where the TARDIS is pulled back together...

It's amusing how the Gravis is treated completely seriously by those around him, despite the fact he looks like a giant constipated rubber snail. The Doctor chats away to him conversationally, offering a handshake but then realising the Gravis's shortcomings in that department. I also like Tegan's brief fake smile when the Doctor introduces her!

Best of all, of course, is how the Doctor pretends that Tegan is an android, his "serving machine", in an effort to draw the Gravis's attention away from his companion. It's hilarious how he explains that he got Tegan cheap because "the walk's not quite right, and then there's the accent..." The look of suppressed fury on Tegan's face is priceless, and I'm surprised she doesn't pick him up on it later on!

Frontios Part Three

The one where Turlough dredges up some traumatising race memories...

Resourceful as ever, Tegan chucks a phosphor lamp at the Tractators holding the Doctor and Norna, resulting in a comical scene where the creatures scurry away screaming and flapping their little arms. It's not meant to be funny, but you can't help chuckling as the creature operators scamper off-camera. It's another good example of Christopher H Bidmead's excellent writing here though, giving Tegan an active role in the Doctor's escape rather than becoming part of the problem.

Sadly, the Doctor and Tegan spend most of the ensuing episode wandering around the cave system trying to get out, achieving very little, although the scenes where they are being drawn towards the Tractators by gravitational force are realised well, with both Peter Davison and Janet Fielding successfully selling the fact their bodies are being compelled. I love the bit where they're sliding along the ground on their bottoms!

Frontios Part Two

The one where our heroes find creatures beneath the surface...

The Doctor, who continues to be written with a classy sarcastic edge by Christopher H Bidmead, delivers the perfect rejoinder to every Doctor Who cliffhanger that ends with our heroes having a gun aimed at them. "Oh marvellous! You're going to kill me. What a finely tuned response to the situation." However, the Doctor goads the pompous Plantagenet just a little too much, as he ends up ordering his execution after all ("This wasn't what I had in mind at all!").

Then a wonderfully Doctor Who-ey thing happens, something you'd never see in Star Trek or Blake's 7. Turlough threatens their aggressors with a hat stand! This item of TARDIS furniture has enjoyed an unusual prominence in the story so far, and now Turlough is pretending it's a powerful weapon to save the Doctor. Obviously they don't have hat stands in the far future (perhaps hats have been abolished?).

Frontios Part One

The one where the TARDIS is reduced to a hat stand...

It's the return of former script editor Christopher H Bidmead with his third and last story for the TV series, and as is traditional, his script is named after the planet on which events take place. He's good at naming planets, but his story titles aren't the most dynamic in the canon (having said that, Castrovalva's working title was The Visitor, which is even duller).

The opening scene is intriguing enough, as we meet a bunch of military men who've found something in the earth, but it's not long until the earth beneath their feet begins to collapse like a sinkhole, aided by a little red straw which I am sure is not supposed to be in shot! We can laugh, but it's actually so visible that you wonder whether it's supposed to be part of the scene, and begin to imagine a mischievous worm beneath the surface poking his little red stick through the soil! The shaft collapses as the ground moves, crushing the curiously mute Captain Revere (played by the uncredited John Beardmore), but then it's discovered that his body has disappeared altogether, eaten by the hungry earth!