| Chapter The 193rd, which features a quest for adventure, and someone venturing out after a long period of house arrest at risk of melting in the hot sun! |
Plot:
3000 years ago, criminal masterminds Kane and Xana face capture on their home planet of Proamon. Xana kills herself to avoid arrest. Kane, upset by this as he was in love with Xana, is captured and imprisoned on the dark side of the planet Svartos. He needs a very cold climate to survive. The spaceship used to take him there is his gaol, with the power source removed and hidden in the head of a biomechanoid creature, armed with laser beams in its eyes. Presumably it's the same ship used to take him to Svartos, because otherwise why provide him with a spacecraft - albeit a deactivated one - that could help him escape? The biomechanoid disappears off into the depths of the planet beneath the ship and becomes the stuff of legend - a dragon. Over the centuries, Kane sets up a trading colony called Iceworld based in the iced-over ship, as one does when in prison. Space travellers visit Iceworld, and Kane recruits many of them to his private army; some help in the running of Iceworld, and some are in cryogenic sleep waiting for the day when he can take his revenge. He seeks the dragon, and plants a tracking device on a map to its location, then rigs a card game so Sabalom Glitz takes possession of the map, and confiscates Glitz's spacecraft so he is motivated to seek out the dragon's treasure.
The Doctor arrives on Iceworld having registered the tracking signal in the TARDIS, interested in an expedition to find the dragon. The Doctor and Mel team up with Glitz and a 20th century girl from Perivale called Ace who has somehow arrived in this future world in a timestorm. They find the dragon almost instantly. Kane sends a couple of his team who kill it and remove its head. There is a power surge booby trap that kills Kane's people so the Doctor takes ownership of the power source (or Dragonfire), but Kane has taken Ace as hostage. There's an exchange of Ace for the Dragonfire, and it is inserted into the circuitry; the ship breaks through the ice and takes off from Svartos. Kane's instruments betray to him that his home planet Proamon is gone, destroyed 2000 years earlier. Deprived of his revenge, Kane commits suicide by opening a screen on the ship and letting in unfiltered sunlight, which melts him. While all this has been going on there's been a massacre of all the people on Iceworld and Glitz's ship has been blown up. He takes ownership of Kane's ship. Mel decides to stop travelling with the Doctor and instead travels with Glitz. Ace joins the Doctor, who promises to take her back to Perivale by the scenic route.
Context:
I watched this on the big screen of NFT1 at the BFI Southbank; they had a Doctor Who event to launch the Blu-Ray boxset of season 24 that's being released at the end of June with a screening of Dragonfire (see the Deeper Thoughts section below for more details). It was the first time for 15 months that I've taken a long journey on a train or spent a day in the capital (or anywhere so far from home). That last time 15 months ago, was - perhaps not entirely coincidentally - the last time the BFI were able to arrange a Doctor Who event, for The Talons of Weng-Chiang. One shelved resolution I had for 2020 was to use my BFI membership to watch a wider variety of things than just Doctor Who, but clearly these events are the sort that motivate me to get out the house. The meaning and risk of getting out of the house has changed since early 2020, of course, and just as I did in March last year, I seriously considered the circumstances right up until the last moment before travelling up. I was watching with David and Trevor, fan friends mentioned many times before on the blog, and afterwards Chris joined us for drinks. All of us had had at least one and some both Covid jabs; there were also standard restrictions in place at the venue (it was at a third of maximum capacity, making little ol' Dragonfire the most select and quickest selling of these BFI events so far!).
My journey into London was quiet; there was space around me on every train I took. I decided to walk from Victoria rather than take the tube as it was such a nice Sunny day, one of the hottest of the year so far. Twice on the walk I was complimented on my bag (I was carrying my faux-retro Tom Baker and Dalek-festooned satchel that I got from the Earl's Court Doctor Who Experience many years ago). Once I was at the venue, I saw lots of other groups of fans meeting up for what was probably the first time in a long time. One of the best parts of the day was seeing that, and much more later as photos of happy young fans meeting up adorned my social media timeline. Pretty soon, we all were trooped in to the theatre through an outside door - they are operating a one-way system to get audiences in an out. Watching something with a larger (albeit reduced) audience is always a different experience. The feelgood factor of the event happening at all would probably protect the relatively unloved Dragonfire from too much of a mauling. But there were a good few laughs at events on screen that couldn't be called intentionally funny. The biggest was for Tony Selby's gritted teeth close-up in part 3 when he snarls "Kane!" A bit unfair that, as he gives it his best shot.
The sunny day continued after the screening, and many drinks were had outside for the whole evening afterwards. The BFI's Riverside bar doesn't get much sun, as all the outdoor seating is overshadowed by Waterloo Bridge, but that meant we didn't burn. We saw Derek Handley to say hello to, and had a drink with Ed Stradling and Phil Newman. A lot of conversation happened about exactly what's wrong with Dragonfire. Everyone enjoyed themselves at this screening, but the story we were watching was no more than a qualified success in people's eyes. I'm normally the most positive, but this time I found I enjoyed it a lot less than others, more on that below.
First Time Round:
I watched this live on its broadcast across three Monday nights in November and December 1987. I was 15 and had started my final year at high school, and remember a few weeks earlier during the broadcast of an early episode of the season going to a careers and further education fair at the local Masonic hall. This memory is in my mind as my eldest child is but a few months away from being in exactly the same point in his education, though he's already signing up for (still mostly virtual) open days. It may be that there's a lot more people going to Sixth Form than there were in my day 34 years ago so they have to start it all earlier. Anyway, this is obviously making me feel old, as is the simple fact of typing '34 years ago' just then. "I have started to say / 'A quarter of a century' / Or 'thirty years back' / About my own life"; just like Philip Larkin, I'm becoming more of a curmudgeon the older I get. When Dragonfire was first broadcast I thought it was the best story of the year; the music, visual effects and model work better than the previous three stories to my young mind, and the story overall more enjoyable. My reaction this time, though, was not so favourable, as I'll get onto next...
Reaction:
A curious thing happened to me during the BFI screening of Dragonfire. After the third episode finished, there were various clips from the imminent Blu-ray boxset, including many scenes from Time and the Rani. To say that his opening story of the 1987 run is unpopular is a bit like saying that Hitler is a little bit naughty; it regularly comes close to the bottom of every fan poll, and in terms of consistent fan dislike is beaten to the wooden spoon only by the first story of the previous Doctor Colin Baker. Dragonfire is not considered a classic by any means, but it consistently polls higher than Time and the Rani. I've always generally agreed with this consensus, so it was a shock to be watching the Rani clips on that big screen and finding them borderline enjoyable, and significantly better than Dragonfire. Now, at the time of writing this, the box set including Time and the Rani is still two weeks away from release. When it comes out, I'll watch all four episodes of the season opener, and may well change my mind. As of now, though, I need to unpack exactly what is so so wrong with Dragonfire; I'll try not to take all day, but - believe me! - there are many, many contributory factors. Of all these, Ian Briggs's script would possibly not be top of anyone's list; there are more obvious offenders. The more I think about it, though, the more it's clear that even if every other creative contributor was giving a career best, it still could only be okay, not great. This is because the story is so flawed.
Briggs merges two genre staples: bad guy revenge plot, and a fantasy quest with dragons and treasure. Normally, these would mesh together reasonably - the quest needs to be completed to facilitate the revenge. But Briggs creates two problems for himself. Firstly, in order presumably to bring some depth and irony to the bad guy's ultimate undoing, his home planet - and any hope for revenge - has been reduced to dust by the passing of time. To make this believable, the period of time elapsed has got to be reasonably lengthy; Briggs settled perhaps unwisely on an excessive 3000 years, but the problems would have been the same even if it were only say 30. It puts undue pressure on the quest plot to be extremely dramatic and harrowing and difficult, otherwise someone else would have found the Dragonfire in that long, long period of time. The quest already had to be wholly created within a studio in Television Centre, so that would be a tall order from the off; but, Briggs doesn't actually add much if any jeopardy in the quest plot. It's just a journey between different locations. There's one dead end that requires a climb down a sheer face of rock, but that's staged so poorly it has become infamous (the 'cliffhanger' sequence at the end of part 1). Aside from that, all the antagonism is borrowed from the revenge plot: cryo-zombies and guards are sent from Iceworld, the Doctor and Glitz go back to Iceworld and have confrontations with guards and exploding spaceships. This ease at which elements can go back and forth between the two genres - or two worlds - of the story fundamentally damages the quest plot. When one 'answers the call' to adventure, as per Joseph Campbell's lingo of quests, it's supposed to be an irrevocable decision. A protagonist isn't supposed to be able to commute back and forth from the new world of dangers and wonders.
It's so easy for the treasure to be discovered that it begs many questions. These are then exacerbated by Briggs's second main act of self sabotage: to make the setting for his adventure a trading hub for space travellers. The naff depiction of this as a being a Space Bejam isn't down to him as writer, admittedly, but even if it was realised by Ridley Scott with help from Moebius and H. R. Giger this setting still wouldn't make any sense for the story. Either Kane, a dangerous criminal prisoner lest we forget, has set all this up (why would he have been allowed to?) or it was already there and he took it over (but then, why exile him to such a place?). Why does he do it at all? Maybe to tempt people there so he can form his army. If so, though, why does he use them to continue his commercial enterprise for three thousand years rather than getting at least some of them to help him with his main project of escape? Many many spaceships visit Iceworld, and we know Kane can commandeer one quite easily. So, why doesn't he just use one of those to escape? Perhaps the dragon would have come out of hiding to stop him if he'd tried to escape in another ship. There's only one dragon, though, and in the end it only took a couple of Kane's troops to bring it down. It's plausible that Kane has to use the ship he's imprisoned in, as it's the only one that can keep him at the correct temperature. In that case, why not cut out the middle man and just send his own troops to find the 'dragon' and kill it. He's got a map. Why bother with all the subterfuge with trackers and rigged card games to get Glitz to do it instead?
There are loads of smaller questions. Who made the map? How did they do this, particularly as one thing marked on the map isn't a location but a living creature that can move around? Why has Kane not once in the last 2000 years enquired of any of the many staff and visitors to Iceworld about his home planet Proamon? Even if she was the youngest of her school year, how has Ace had time to start her A-levels, get expelled, work a job as a waitress, experiment with explosives, get caught in a timestorm, and then work another job as a waitress, but still not turn seventeen? Why does everyone think that putting the treasure inside the 'dragon' is the safest place to stop Kane getting at it? The planet has a bright side to which he can never venture, so why not bury it there or send the creature there? It would make more, if not exactly complete, sense for the quest to take place in an environment that's really hot rather than cold. Kane likes the cold; why put the thing he's not allowed to access in a cold place? It's as wrongheaded as hiding something from Dracula not in a string of garlic but in a vat of blood. The final unfortunate culmination of all the script flaws is that Dragonfire has another thing in common with Raiders of the Lost Ark other than melting heads (see The Big Bang Theory episode The Raiders of Minimization for full details): like Indy, the Doctor and his friends don't do anything to contribute to the plot except make it easier for the villains to find the treasure.
I know that's four paragraphs of invective about plot holes, but I promise the script is not the biggest problem. My younger self was right about the music, visual effects and model work; it's all more than adequate by the standards of the time. The costume and production design are okay too. There's the odd bit that's out of the place - the treasure map, for example, is something straight out Pirates of the Caribbean (the amusement park ride, not the movie), whereas everywhere else has a futuristic aesthetic. TV at the BBC at that time was made on something of a factory line, project after project with pre- and post-production of other shows overlapping with whatever was in the studio that week; the departments didn't have the time for tone meetings, so some inconsistency was always a risk. There was comparatively generous amounts of rehearsal time, though, so there's no excuse for the wild inconsistency in the acting. This is the real weakness of Dragonfire. Everyone's pitching their performance in a different register, as if they are all appearing in different shows, and there's no cohesion.
This is doubtless in some cases down to the experience of the performer. Sophie Aldred comes over as a lovely person, and certainly improved in the role of Ace, which she started here when new to TV and very inexperienced. In Dragonfire, though, it pains me to say that she is mostly unwatchable; the script is doing a good job of showcasing the auditioning companion favourably in comparison to Mel: one screams, the other doesn't; one's a bit prim and won't sit on a big pile of clothes in a messy room, the other's down to earth and real. This is undermined though by the artificial performance of Aldred, which seems to reach the levels of an Eliza Doolittle pastiche: "I ain't got no Mum and Dad, an I never 'ad no Mum and Dad, not nor nuffin' nor nye-ver, up the old Kent Road, apples and pears". But seasoned performers like Tony Osoba don't fare much better; he delivers his (admittedly pretty thankless and expository) lines in a stilted manner throughout. McCoy has some good moments (the scene where he tells Patricia Quinn's Belazs that he doesn't think her debt can ever be repaid is an early standout of his time in the role, and a lot of his clowning also must work as it got people laughing in the BFI).
Elsewhere, even down to the small roles, nobody seems to know how the story as a whole is being pitched on the realistic to theatrical, or drama to comedy, or kid-friendly to horror scales. There's a massacre sequence that has a certain energy and fear displayed, with a little girl put in danger; but, a couple of scenes later, the girl's Mum breezes in wondering where she's been, still performing in the light sit-com style of an earlier scene she appeared in when she had a milkshake tipped on her head. McCoy has told an anecdote over the years about how he came out of rehearsals thinking everyone was going to act slipping and sliding on the studio floors to sell their iciness, but then found that he was the only person in the studio doing it. In episode 3, there is a derivative sequence ripped off from Aliens where two guards hunt the 'dragon', but it's intercut with a scene of other characters sitting around bored playing I-Spy. (Also, and I know this is back to script problems again, but why kill off Patricia Quinn and Tony Osoba's characters in episode 2 of 3 when you need a male and female villain team in episode 3 to do the alien hunt? Couldn't Kane's sadistic revenge on the characters after they've betrayed him be to send them on this suicide mission rather than kill them swiftly? That's got to be better than losing two more experienced actors and bringing the subs on.)
To me, the job of making all these contradictory performances cohere falls to the director, so most of the blame for how Dragonfire turned out should be levelled at Chris Clough. It's a pattern I've noted in his other Doctor Who productions of this era. I think he clearly was a good guy and wanted to give it his all, but his focus was probably more on the technical than the cast. He might have been okay with a small number of players (as in The Ultimate Foe), but the tendency once script editor Andrew Cartmel took over was for larger casts of different characters spread out through the narrative: this is the model for not just Dragonfire but all Clough's stories for Sylvester McCoy and they (Delta and the Bannermen and Silver Nemesis particularly) suffer from the same issues with consistency of performance . It's not all bad: Quinn, Edward Peel as Kane and Tony Selby as Glitz comport themselves with something approaching dignity, bar the odd duff moment. And ultimately, the end of Dragonfire delivers the Doctor and Ace, a partnership of promise that will act (much better) as the engine driving the final two years of classic series Who.
Connectivity:
Both Dragonfire and The Name of the Doctor are the final story of a season of Doctor Who that consists of 14 episodes (the latter being the 14th episode of a run starting with Asylum of the Daleks and including The Snowmen Christmas special that was broadcast in the middle of its interrupted run). Both see the Doctor make an emotional goodbye at the end to someone he's travelled with (Mel, River) and both include a scene of the Sylvester McCoy Doctor hanging off an ice face with his umbrella (it's the same clip reused in the later story, of course).
Deeper Thoughts:
Planetary Archives Criminal History Segment 93-12-0-4; BFI Dragonfire Screening, 12th June 2021. The biggest worry I had was whether my glasses would steam up with a mask on for several hours in a cinema, but it did not come to pass. Once the assembled crowd were settled, the first person that I saw on stage through my unmisted vision was Justin Johnson, our usual host for these events in the Before Covid Era. He got a lot of negatives out of the way up front in his introduction. As with the Talons screening last year, the ongoing pandemic impacted attendance by guests with Sophie Aldred and Patricia Quinn wanting to attend but being unable to make it. He also mentioned that they'd tried very hard to get an event together earlier this year to show Terror of the Autons when the season 8 Blu-ray boxset came out, but lockdown prevented it. Current restrictions mean no audience interactions, so the traditional quiz where people shout for Dick to answer Doctor Who trivia questions and win a DVD could not take place. All this was disappointing, but Justin cheered up the audience when introducing Dick Fiddy by saying "I haven't seen Dick in over a year" which elicited applause as well as laughter from the assembled fans who have no doubt missed this particular double entendre.
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| "I haven't seen Dick in over a year!" Johnson (L), Fiddy (R) |
Before the first episodes were shown, a guest was invited on stage: William 'Bill' Dudman, film cameraman on a number of Sylvester McCoy stories; for Dragonfire, a story shot in the studio with video cameras, this meant that he was involved in shooting the work of the model effects team. He came prepared with a few notes for a technical but interesting talk, with the odd question being asked by Messrs Johnson and Fiddy. A lot of the tricks of the trade for shooting space miniatures (Dudman was involved in filming the magnificent model work for Star Cops shortly before starting on Doctor Who, so he's got form in this area) were familiar - shooting at high frame rates, suspending models on their side or upside down to avoid displaying gravity; but, he also discussed more subtle techniques. The shots of the planet Svartos were shot through a high-quality pane of glass that William had edged with an anti-flare paint; this was to give the illusion of the planet's atmosphere. He also revealed that in his role he would deal mainly with the effects designer not the director, and would never see a script. When doing the filming of the story before Dragonfire, Delta and the Bannermen, that meant his not knowing the context for why a Sputnik-a-like satellite should be colliding with a bus in space. A final anecdote involved his work on the series much earlier in his career on the Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep. The climax with the weed creature (actually an effects assistant in a suit) was supposed to involve said creature bursting through the door into the main set. When they came to shoot it, the man in the suit discovered that the hinges on the set door had been put on the wrong way round, so on the first take the fearsome creature had instead to open the door slowly and politely step through, no doubt waving a frond in greeting.
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| (L to R) Johnson, Fiddy, Dudman |
The first two episodes of Dragonfire were shown next, and after that a brief interview with Russell Minton, the executive producer of the Blu-ray boxsets. He has been mentioned many times on this stage at previous BFI events, and I think has been in the audience, but has never before been coaxed up onto the stage. He confirmed that every episode of the Season 24 series has an extended version included in the package, so it's really a 28-episode boxset. He talked about his original pitch for the range being like a set of encyclopedias of every year of the classic series; this aim for comprehensiveness of coverage drives which Value Added Material is created where there are "Still stories left to tell". For example, there was no sign of Patricia Quinn on the DVD release of Dragonfire, so an interview feature was created for the Blu-ray. What archive material exists is also a factor: there is enough studio and location footage from the making of season 24 to fill up multiple sets, so they have had to be selective, but there's still an extensive amount on the boxset that comes out later in June. Covid is still having an impact on shooting the accompanying features. The lockdown that started in December 2020 in the UK kicked in a few days before a couple of shoots; this time, it was still possible to do the work with restrictions, but there is also the question as to whether the contributors feel comfortable. Luckily, everyone did. Throughout the work on the many features for the range, everyone contacted has been happy to be involved, even if some were bemused at first as to why they were being asked about jobs from long ago, and everyone is generous with their time. The current Doctor Who office does not get involved editorially, but there is some discussion about timing of announcements so they don't clash.
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| Fiddy (L), Minton (R) |
Following Russell, there was the final episode of Dragonfire followed by a highlights package of the boxset's Value Added Material. We were treated to long clips or clip selections of the following: the Behind the Sofa watch of Time and the Rani; The Doctor's Table with Sylvester McCoy, Sophie Aldred, Bonnie Langford and Clive Merrison enjoying a meal while answering questions; Holiday Camp, a new making-of documentary about Delta and the Bannermen; a career-spanning interview with Patricia Quinn which looks to be a highlight of the set (that segment got a round of applause in NFT1); Matthew Sweet in Conversation with Sylv; and the amusing '24 Carat' trailer for the set. All of it was very enjoyable, and I'm very much looking forward to watching every one in full. Once this was finished and the lights came up, the final interviewee of the day was invited onto the stage; this was Ian Briggs, the writer of Dragonfire, who was softly spoken and thoughtful throughout. He talked about working at the BBC Script Unit and receiving a stand-out script by a young writer called Andrew Cartmel, then meeting with him; they hit it off immediately. Around this time, Briggs was interested in writing for Doctor Who (one of his "bucket list" jobs) and had already had a meeting with mid-1980s Who script editor Eric Saward that came to nothing. A little later, Briggs left the unit, and the tables turned: Cartmel, who had since replaced Saward, invited Briggs to send him a writing sample, and from that he was commissioned for the story that became Dragonfire.
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| Johnson (L), Briggs (R) |
Briggs shared interesting and amusing glimpses of writing Doctor Who at that time, for example how he had learned to limit his sets and indicated how they could be reused with different lighting to represent the lower and lower levels of Iceworld as our heroes journeyed downward. An anecdote recalled that producer John Nathan-Turner had been concerned that the main villain being called Hess (as he was until a late stage) might cause Rudolph Hess (Nazi war criminal who was then still alive, imprisoned in Spandau) to sue the BBC for defamation of character! The replacement name had to be four letters long as the scripts had already been typed out, and this allowed them to just tippex out 'Hess' and type over it with 'Kane'. When discussing the infamous cliffhanger of episode 1 - something you get the impression that Briggs has explained many times over the years - he talked about getting the balance right in a script between giving enough information versus being patronising to the creative departments working from the script, or cramping their style. For the cliffhanger moment, the climb down the ice face was supposed to be the only option open to the Doctor to proceed, but this was not reflected in the set that was created. It didn't help in Briggs's opinion that set building had to happen in parallel with rehearsals, meaning any learning from the actors and director blocking movements was too late to have an impact on the sets. It also wasn't supposed to be the cliffhanger; the episode was supposed to end with Mel and Ace coming face to face with the dragon creature.
Briggs briefly talked about writing for the Doctor; he only had a 90-second screen test to go on in terms of tailoring the material to Sylvester McCoy; he thought of the characterisation as being something like a male Mary Poppins. More discussion centred on Ace, a character that Briggs created as a prototype companion. Until very late in the day it was unclear whether Bonnie Langford would be leaving or not in season 24, and which companion would replace her if she did. Briggs had prepared two endings with either Mel or Ace going off with Glitz and the other accompanying the Doctor. Ace and Sophie Aldred were a big hit during the production, so when that late decision was made, Briggs had to give up his copyright in the character. He said this was an easy decision to make: he wouldn't have made anything financially either way - if he hadn't surrendered the character to the BBC, the character would not have become a regular. As such, it was the only option to allow Ace to live on, and he was happy to do this and happy to develop the character further in The Curse of Fenric.
In Summary:
How close were they to creating a coherent production? Cold, getting colder, FREEZING!
"(see The Big Bang Theory episode The Raiders of Minimization for full details)"
ReplyDeleteI never realised that until that episode of BBT....