Planet Of Fire
(Season 21, Dr 5 with Turlough, Peri and Kamelion, 23/2/1984-2/3/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Peter Grimwade, director: Fiona Cumming)
Rank: 177
'Hello, we're the Sarn tourist board! Cold as an Ice Warrior? As stiff as a Myrka? Flat as Cassandra, the last Human, on her final round of facelifts? Then you need to visit Sarn now! We've got everything you would expect on holiday: Sun, sand, cliffs, strange locals in unsuitable clothing, disgruntled youngsters with strange tattoos, religious temples for the local Gods...It's just like being on Lanzarote! Funny that...'
Things are hotting up in the 5th Doctor’s story as he loses not one companion but two and his own br—[redacted] a story before regenerating himself. What on Gallifrey is going on out there? Peter Davison’s decision to quit came as a bit of a surprise: most of the scripts for the year were written already and with three regular cast members plus a robot to write out before the end of the year and John Nathan-Turner keen to give his newboy at least a story before the Spring break that all meant some serious criss-crossing plotlines in the few stories that hasn’t been written yet. It’s the Dr Who equivalent of clearing out your desks at the end of the year and finding all sorts of things you’d forgotten about but have to file away before the next class takes over your desk, working out which things to take home, to throw in the bin and leave for your successor to enjoy. As many reviewers have pointed out long before me, ‘Planet Of Fire’ is less a proper story than a method of writing a new companion in and two very different companions out. Worse than that, though, writer Peter Grimwade has been given the nightmare brief of explaining why for all sorts of things the production team have been umming and aahing about and kicking down the road to do properly: nobody ever fully decided who Turlough was including the writer who was asked to create him which was…Peter Grimwade, yet fans would have felt cheated if he’d gone without having revealed his back story so in it goes. Kamelion is more understandable: the android was created to be a full-time companion only for one of his two programmers to die in a boat accident without leaving any notes for how to use him and by now it’s become clear that it’s more than just teething problems and that he really isn’t going to work, so he has to be written out too in a story that ‘explains’ why. Rather than make the same mistakes again the production team want a solid real-life companion to arrive in time before Davison’s leaving party, someone more Earthbound this time with a family and character and all that sort of thing: add that to the pile too! Oh and Anthony Ainley’s retainer, which means he’s paid a fee in return for making sure he’s free for at least one appearance in the show, is coming to an end so he needs to be properly written out too. Oh yeah and if that wasn’t enough JNT has another little request: director Fiona Cumming, fed up of being ankle-deep in mud and gravel for her usual location filming, has sent the producer a cheeky postcard from her holiday in Lanzarote assaying basically ‘hey wouldn’t it be great if we got Dr Who here in the sun? It looks positively alien already!’ Fiona wasn’t wrong: Lanzarote had been home to many scifi heat-related Hollywood films already (the 1950s ‘Journey To The Centre Of The Earth’ and the 1960s ‘One Million years BC’, in which Raquel Welch wears even less than Peri) and was relatively cheap to travel to. She meant it too, taking a roll of film for possible locations that she took back to the production office as a ‘what I did on my holiday’ brief. The producer thought it was a great idea and decided to make this story the Dr Who team’s annual trip abroad. Only the writer couldn’t go. Sorry!
Only I don’t think JNT was sorry. Much of this story feels like a petty punishment and point scoring from the producer setting the writer up to fail. If that seems far-fetched then bear this in mind: Peter Grimwade was maybe the only person who’d worked on Dr Who as long as JNT had by 1984 in his capacity as both writer and director and almost the only person left with any clout to question the producer’s decisions. He’d become particularly close to Eric Saward and after working so tightly on ‘The Five Doctors’ together the pair had gone out for a farewell drink after wrap day, just the two of them, to celebrate getting to the end of what had been quite a gruelling story they’d worked on closely. JNT felt snubbed: he was the producer, the big cheese, the numero uno and he loved parties and social gatherings: if there was one he wanted to be there! He angrily told Eric that Peter was getting too big for his boots throwing his weight around on JNT’s watch and maybe it would be better if he wasn’t commissioned the following year. Eric refused. Until now the script editor had been happy to acquiesce to even his producer’s weirdest requests, so pleased was he to be doing a job he (mostly) loved, but now he was being asked to snub a friend over nothing. It’s a rift that will grow and grow across the following couple of years as incidents and problems build up and will result in a civil war to rival ‘The War Games’ by the time of ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ but it starts here, over a harmless quick drink. Besides, the only part of production Eric had any say over were the scripts – they were his business and he could commission who he pleased. JNT couldn’t stop him but he could make life difficult, outlining all the things he wanted to happen in a particular story – and no doubt hoping Grimwade would just back off or say no. Even when Grimwade said yes and set off to research Lanzarote, which he had never been to, coming up with a plan to film on the other Canary Islands (that looked very different) and keep Lanzarote itself for the alien planet the producer came back and told him no: he’d been in touch with the Lanzarote tourist board and struck a special deal not to go anywhere else. That decision to drop Grimwade from the recce film crew who went to get a feel of shots and angles and settings was particularly cruel and clearly because the producer didn’t want to spend any time with him: what’s the point of sending a film crew to practice how it will look on screen if they don’t have the writer with them to see it too? Grimwade was forced to use his imagination and some guidebooks, which is how every Dr Who story set in space or the distant past was made; surely a contemporary story was supposed to be different from that? This story really brought out the worst side of the producer, who could be generous and kind and supportive but also mean and petty when he wanted to be, using Dr Who for his own vendettas. For no writer could be truly free trying to tick all those boxes; it feels as if Grimwade was being set up for failure, as any supportive producer would have seen that all the actors contracts were coming to an end at roughly the same time and hat the scripts would be better served if they were spread out. Even after Eric offered to write out Tegan, another character who had to be parked, at the end of his revived script ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ (and she does leave rather suddenly doesn’t she?) that still leaves far too much for one poor little four-part story, one which fairly groans at the seams of all it has to do, without any real space to breathe or do anything that isn’t telling the story of one or other of the main players.
Given all that ‘Planet Of
Fire’ is a story that’s a lot better than it has any right to be and which
ticks all its boxes well. Turlough turns out to be a goodie after all in a
satisfying end to his story, his life turning out to have closely mirrored The
Doctor’s in many ways. All those hints that he was a fugitive on the run turn
out to be true but not because he did anything wrong but more because he’s a
political prisoner who ran away from serving on his planet Trion’s military, a
renegade only in the sense that the Doctor is, because he spoke his mind and
chose to leave his restrictive home-world behind for something better rather
than protect a status quo that didn’t deserve protecting. Interestingly he’s
revealed to be an ‘ensign’ despite not apparently doing any fighting, with the rank
VTEC9/12/44. Long thought to be JNT’s birthday, back in the days when the
producer was cagey about his age and not as much background information on the
production team were available, actually it turns out to be Eric Saward’s date
of birth and ‘fits’ the theory that Saward wrote Turlough as his mouthpiece as
a direct replacement for Adric who was predecessor Christopher H Bidmead’s. Grimwade’s
clearly been doing some thinking about Turlough and invents a planet that’s
basically a drafty English boarding school like the one from ‘Mawdryn Undead’ in
space, somewhere hot. There are daft pointless rules that have to be obeyed
even though nobody can really remember why, authority is sacrosanct and even in
a place of learning you’re encouraged never to ask ‘why?’ while its getting
ready to make you part of the establishment that will unthinkingly maintain the
same rules for the next generation. No wonder a figure like Turlough, who hates
authority but is even more scared of bring seen to break a rule and always
listens to the last evil baddie who whispered in his ear, comes from a place
like this: it all makes sense. Turlough was actually really brave, even though
the fact that he’s been exiled to Earth with shadowy alien figures keeping an
eye on him have understandably made him jumpy, frightened that anyone could
turn him or assassinate him at any time (including one, in the story’s best bit
of characterisation, long reckoned to be just a harmless eccentric solicitor in
Chancery Lane that nobody’s noticed because all solicitors in London act weird
enough to be aliens). The Black Guardian is a little like the Gods the elders
of Sarn have been telling him about all his life too, so no wonder he threw his
lot in with the personification of evil so quickly. We learn about Turlough in
this story, arguably more than Grimwade was expected to reveal, but the writer
felt close to Turlough after having created him and added in lots of details:
the fact his mum died in a civil war on his home planet Trion, that his dad and
stepmum crash-landed into the planet Sarn when being taken there, a penal
colony that nobody expects to escape from (a particularly cruel punishment
given that the people we meet from Trion all appear to be ginger and burn in
the sun easily!) The fact he has a step-brother who was an infant the last time
they met, showing that Turlough has been on exile for a very long time indeed
and Turlough’s protective big brotherly instincts before he even knows who this
young and troubled lad Malkon are
wonderful, so different to how his character used to be and proof of how much
being around The Doctor has rubbed off on Turlough whose learnt kindness and
compassion. There’s a triangular logo on his arm that’s his equivalent of a
prisoner number that he can never escape.
Best of all Turlough isn’t the coward we all thought he was – yes he ran away from war but an unjust war; the real cowards all died going along with the war anyway – it takes guts to be a conscientious objector when everyone else on your planet is telling you to just get on with it. It’s worthy ending all round, as Turlough is given the chance to go home, his name cleared and even though he wants to travel with The Doctor longer he knows he has responsibilities now to what remains of his family and his people. Turlough, then, leaves in the bravest way possible – and who’d have seen that coming when Grimwade last wrote for him in ‘Mawdryn Undead’? This is how you write a character out, not the half-hearted way Tegan suddenly ups and goes at the end of the previous story! That said it’s still too obvious that the character was never properly planned out from the start the way they are now with so many questions unanswered. Why wasn’t Turlough with his family when they crash-landed? Why wasn’t he sent to Sarn if it’s the home of all Trion political exiles? What on Gallifrey made his people exile him to a public school on Earth (we’ve never been sure how Trions age or how old Turlough is but the fact he’s been away rom home long enough for his infant brother to come of age suggests it’s been way too long to be at school.) How did an artefact from Trion end up at the bottom of the sea on Earth for Howard to discover? Mark Strickson finally has some character to get his teeth into and is never better than here, playing Turlough as someone whose learnt from time spent with good people like the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan to be heroic for no other reason than that its the right thing to do.
He’s clearly come a long way when he selflessly dives into the sea to save Peri, someone whose effectively his replacement and equally naive, on the one hand far more trusting and yet also far more sarcastic. She’s American, either a loving attempt from a producer to get away from yet more English characters or a brash attempt to ride the wave of how big Dr Who was getting stateside depending who you believe. If you can’t quite place the accent don’t worry: Nicola Bryant wasn’t actually American but pretended she was at the audition (and even fooled Peter Davison, despite him being married to Sandra Dickinson, an actual American and having a voice for accents); she got away with pretending thanks to her husband, singer Scott Kenndey famous for appearing in musicals on Broadway and had got through an entire amateur run of the musical ‘No No Nanette’ using a fake accent with no one picking up on it. Peri gets a, well, baptism of Fire that expects a lot from her from the word go as within four episodes she has a colossal fight with her family that seems the norm now after the mums of Rose, Martha and Donna but was deeply unusual back then (the spin-off novels ‘Shell Shock’ and ‘Synthespians’ both imply she was raped by step-dad Howard due to the way she wakes up in this story and calls his name scared before realising where she is, while a few Big Finish stories have her feeling hurt when her mum remarries and seems fonder of her step-siblings than her), tries to run away with a bunch of English kids she’s only met that day, half-drowns, gets accidentally abducted to a planet far from home, gets shouted at by a weird man with a beard and ends up seeing her stepdad come to life as a shiny robot, which is more than some Dr Who companions get to do across a full series. Peri starts her first story as a spoilt rich brat whose self-absorbed, part of this era’s attempts to have a companion who was different to the usual ‘yes men/women’ by giving them shaky morals, but even by the end of this story you’re cheering her on as she yells back at The Master and responds to most of the life or death situations she’s placed in not by screaming or bargaining but sarcasm. Even her worst trait, of befriending and trusting ther wrong people, is rather endearing after Tegan and Turlough both natural distrusting of everyone they meet – she’s the inheritor of the 5th Doctor’s natural optimism, until something goes wrong when she pouts worse than Tegan.
Nicola Bryant was, at the time, a twenty-three-year old straight out of drama school, so inexperienced she didn’t even have an equity card (necessary for all TV acting jobs) and had to undertake a crash course in performing enough hours to earn one, as a nightclub singer, in the six weeks between her final audition and the start of rehearsals. She copes remarkably well at being thrown in at the deep end (literally in the first episode where she’s rescued from drowning – she couldn’t swim either despite saying she could at the audition, luckily having a medal-winning sister, Tracy Bryant, who taught her just enough to get through filming), coping with so many things experienced pros would struggle with, such as sudden changes in mood and finding a neat halfway house between ‘sulky’ and ‘rude’. Sadly Nicola will be rather wasted and will rarely get more to do than she does in this story too but she excels here, making Peri out of her depth in a universe more frightening than she understands from her choice of where to take a swim on down, but for now she’s a breath of fresh air, sassy and confident and she also gets the best banter with The Master we see from any companion, making sarky remarks to him and holding her own (would that Tegan had been given the chance to answer back to the figure who killed her aunt so cruelly in ‘Logopolis’).
Kamelion is rather less
well handled, given that he’s barely been mentioned in the past few stories and
pops up from nowhere, but then what could the production do? They’d been
lumbered with a half-functioning robot that had been intended to be such a key
part of this season but had ‘disappeared’ ever since programmer Mike Power had
died, but they had to mention it again sometime and they were running out of
stories if they wanted him to go out with ‘his’ Doctor. You have to say,
though, having this plot element in a story set on Lanzarote was asking for
needles trouble: the robot was an expensive prop and unwieldy prop that didn’t
travel well, while goodness knows what getting sand or gravel inside it would
do. Grimwade comes up with the inspired decision to have Kamelion do some ‘psychomorphic
fringing’ and take on the forms of different people during the scenes where
he’s on location, but even so this
further limits what the writer can do: it’s hard to have a plot that can go
anywhere when the robot itself can only be seen in a few short scenes shot back
in TV centre and that’s it. There’s something deeply unsettling about his
‘death’ though – Kamelion has been taken over by The Master and too easily
controlled so, in a rare moment of lucidity, Kamelion pleads for The Doctor,
the timelord who saved him, to kill him. The Doctor doesn’t even give him a
proper goodbye, just looks sad then delivers a fatal heart attack. Yes he’s a
robot but it’s hard to imagine anything similar happening to, say, the 4th
Doctor and K9 if he’d been taken over and there’s barely a word spoken in
kindness afterwards before things get back to normal. As much as the people on
the production team were glad to get rid of him it’s one of the saddest ways
any character can go, not just sent back in time or have their memory wiped but
to actually die from the person who vowed to save everyone. It’s a rare bum
note in the production of this story that ends the story on a very downbeat
note (they could have had him save The Doctor from The Master after all).
Then again the 5th
Doctor’s always been the most cruel and bloodthirsty of all The Doctors,
despite his apparent charm and innocence. Just look at how he refuses to save
The Master from burning at the end of this story. His oldest and bitterest
enemy (How old? See ‘negatives’ below for a clue…) does get a good send off though,
back in the days when everyone thought this was a send off (in the end JNT so
liked working with Anthony Ainley he simply sent another contract for another
three years after this story was over). I love the thought that The Master has
been brought down to size, quite literally, not by some great foe or even The
Doctor but due to his own arrogance and carelessness, accidentally shrinking
himself with his own tissue compression eliminator (I like to think he had it
the wrong way round and was pointing it at someone else to make them quake in
fear when it worked on himself instead).It’s a clever way of showing why he
needs Kamelion to do the physical things he can’t do anymore and in a very Dr
Whoy way makes him out to be a colossal threat right up to the reveal that he’s
a few inches high skulking in the corner of his Tardis. Had this been the final
showdown it would have been a fine one, against the backdrop of a planet much
like their own with its civil wars and political prisoners, two rebels fighting
for good and evil over a planet who
don’t know what to believe.
Because that’s the real
theme of this story, hidden underneath the ‘gosh so that’s who Turlough is’
‘gosh look at Peri in bikini’ and ‘gosh how did they ever think a walking
talking robot would work in 1984?!’ however
much it gets drowned out by the coming and going in this story and however much
JNT made Eric Saward tone it down in the re-writes: trust. ‘Fire’ is a story
all about traditions and the repercussions of breaking them, about whether it
is better to uphold a stable society built on a comfortable lie or build a real
one based on an uncomfortable truth. The story cleverly makes you shift sides:
at first those nice priests seem to be keeping everyone safe and keeping them
from worrying about things they don’t
need to know, but then the plot does a ‘Krotons’ and has The Master to
come in and take advantage of everyone, the point when you realise that
everyone needs to be educated in the truth or people will just go on taking advantage
of their ignorance forever more.Fittingly this story about change and
traditions and whether we should carry them on down past generations that don’t
need them was written by one of the era’s longest serving writers in the middle
of a really turbulent time for Dr Who that changed every regular actor it had
across three stories (this being the second) and a time when nobody seemed to
be all that sure who or what Dr Who was for any more. ‘Fire’ is a story that
pits not so much planet or alien race on top of each other but generations who
have very different ways about how to live. Sarn is one of those planets that’s
lost its technology and turned back to being primitive, the vacuum of
technology filled by a religious sect that preys on the nations’ superstition. The
younger generation though now believe in science and know that the planet is
under threat of extinction not from religious Gods but volcanoes, which fits
this new, more science-driven era of DW where every plot had to be based on
science rather than imagination. Officially the made-up Gods are there to keep
people safe and happy but really they’re an excuse for keeping people under-fed
and obedient. Though Grimwade is careful to show that this is a fictional
religion he’s clearly based it both on the early days of the Christian Church
(back before people could read and the Bible was freely available so only
priests could reads it at sermons that laid down the law and kept peasants busy
working with severe punishments for infractions) and Islam (everyone here is
dressed in cloaks from head to toe despite clearly being in a hot climate where
everyone else is running around in shorts). However Grimwade is careful and ambiguous
enough to do the theme justice: religion is, just like any scientific
invention, as good or bad as the people wielding it. That’s a brave thing for a
Dr Who story to do given that religion is still about the one thing that can’t
be mentioned outright on telly in the 1980s without the BBC getting worried and
preparing for letters long after audiences stopped caring about sex and gore.
‘Fire’ is also a story about another inter-generational struggle between the elders in power who want to keep hold of it and the youngsters who are starting to ask questions. We had that more than a few times in the black and white days, when those crazy beatniks then mods and rockers then hippies tried to change the establishment only now, past Dr Who’s 20th birthday, the parent adult establishment are the very people who put the show on the air and the changing audience are knocking on the door asking them for change. Grimwade doesn’t have time to do moe than sketch this bit of the story in but it’s an age-old tale anyway, going back to the very first two Dr Who stories which both did this sort of thing in 1963 in stories set in the past and future: an old guard losing their grip on the traditions that have kept them in power and a young guard fighting against the changes. Grimwade is more subtle than with the cavemen of ‘An Unearthly Child’ or the Thals in ‘The Daleks’ though. The most rounded character is Timanov whose somewhere in the middle. He’s been spouting these lies so long he’s become to believe them himself and he’s terrified at the anarchy that will happen if the old ways aren’t upheld, though at the same time he’s sympathetic to those who have doubts and questions because he does too. He’s Autloc from ‘The Aztecs’ all over again, trying to do the right thing in a society screaming at him to keep things as they are. Peter Wyngarde, the latest example of JNT’s publicity-getting stunt casting, is surely one of the best: he hadn’t worked in years, since an unfortunate incident when he was caught ‘soliciting’ gay sex in a public toilet which killed his career as crime-fighter and writer Jason King stone dead (Ainley had guest-starred in the 1968 Department S episode ‘Ticket To Nowhere’, one of the best) and Wyngarde set nickname ‘Petunia Winegum’) really needed the work. He put his all into this story, at first wanting to play Timanov as being impossibly old as it said in the script by speaking slow and under tonnes of makeup and with a massive stick, before compromising by just playing him quietly, as if the weight of the world was on his shoulders and with a staff they found in the props room.
That raises another thing
people often say about this story: ‘Planet Of Fire’ has the reputation of being
the gayest Dr Who story on record. Peri aside, there are no female characters
seen all story and because of the location shoot everyone walks around in tiny
shorts. All the prominent actors besides the regulars were gay in real life:
Wyngarde, Anthony Ainley and Dallas Adams (step-dad Howard). The producer and
writer of this story were both gay too. Fans also point to the ‘close
relationship’ between Timanov and his young disciple Malkon and the phallic symbolism
of Howard diving in a wreck for swords, a symbol of masculinity if ever there
was one. I’m, not sure I agree though: quite aside from the fact that ‘The
Happiness Patrol’ is surely an even stronger contender this is a rare story directed
by a female (Fiona Cumming getting this story on the back of her Lanzarote
postcard) and with lots of long lingering shots of Peri in a ridiculously tight
bikini that seems to go out of its way to find all the right camera angles to
look down her top (why? Well apart from the obvious attempt to get ratings or
have it as part of Peri’s confident personality it might be significant that
this is the first story for a long time made without Janet Fielding in the cats
a future campaigner for feminism and equality in the acting profession who
wouldn’t have stood for that sort of nonsense on set). Of course it’s for a different
sexual incident that this story will always be remembered, the much loved
convention anecdote about Nicola’s first day at work splashing about in the
seas when a German tourist from a next door nudist beach swam into shot to
rescue her, beating Mark Strickson – he was
most angry to find out it was all a fake and spent the next hour trying to ruin
shots by walking past the cameras nude! Even though none of those actual shots
made the final version for obvious reasons, there are times in this story where
both genders feel as if they’re being exploited, something which makes this
story dated compared to its peers and a tad awkward viewing today, however
normal it was in 1984. It’s clearly a step backwards from the days of Leela and Romana when the ‘girl’ was The Doctor’s
equal.
‘Uncomfortable’ is a good
word for this sombre story, despite its apparent sun and sea frolics: it’s a
story all about growing up and hard truths you don’t want to face but to have
to anyway for the good of everyone, about how you don’t have as much control
over your fate and destiny as you think you do, about how life is what happens
to you while you’re busy making other plans. Both sub-plots, that of Turlough
and Peri, both revolve around shipwrecks of very different kinds, as her family
search for buried treasure belonging to people that have died and his family
desperately try to live. No one plans for a shipwreck and yet they happen all
the time changing or ending lives or leaving you stranded on an alien planet
for the rest of your life. Timanov knows that the church is a lie but is afraid
to let the truth out into the big wide world because he doesn’t know what will
happen next before events overtake him and force his hand anyway. The last
thing The Doctor ever wants to do is kill but when a companion asks to be put
ut of his misery and he knows it’s the right thing to do he can’t really say no.
It wasn’t meant to be like this: Kamelion was meant to be a force for good away
from The Master’s influence, but sometimes you don’t get to choose the end
story of the people around you. He long hoped too that The master can be
redeemed, that there’s good inside him (see series nine and ten of the new
series) but not, not today: to rescue The Master and his [whatever] means
putting more lives at risk so he has to watch his oldest [thingy] die instead,
despite a pact to save as many lives as he can. Turlough doesn’t want to go
back to his own people after so many years running away and thinking only of
himself, but seeing his family changes everything for where his
responsibilities lie. Peri has been trying to pluck up the courage to run away
from her family for a long time and only when the Tardis comes along does she
properly get the chance, having to face up to the fact that she doesn’t
actually want to go home and there’s nothing there for her now. Without the
Tardis would she really have gone halfway across the world to defy her stepdad?
Or would she just have meekly acquiesced and gone along with a career she doesn’t
want? Even The Master has to own up to the fact that he’s not the most perfect
ruler of the universe but someone whose just messed up big time (failure and
The Doctor laughing at him being his single biggest phobia, as seen in ‘The
Mind OF Evil’). Even at the end, with Sarn liberated and Turlough reunited with
his family and Peri free to go home and The Master apparently dead this story
doesn’t feel like a success with a sombre final scene that leads nicely into
the ‘goodbye’ story ‘Caves Of Androzani’: the big
message from ‘Planet Of Fire’ is that even victory sometimes feels like defeat
but morally you have to rebel if you feel something is harmful especially against
petty laws that serve no one the way they should. Incidentally Wyngarde and Dallas
Adams seem to have taken this advice to heart, getting drunk in their hotel one
night and concerned about a family of turtles that had been captured and housed
in the swimming pool; they got most upset thinking about how the baby one had
only known captivity and decided to set them free by taking them to the sea.
The Hotel weren’t amused as they were really rare and expensive and even
brought in the police, assuming they’d been stolen and sold for money, before the sheepish actors came clean!
That’s a lot for a little
four-part story to fit in, most of which ‘Planet Of Fire’ does well. It’s the
bits that would usually go between the plot that this story lacks: there’s very
little banter, not many jokes, pretty much every scene linked to one of the
main plots in some way. There’s simply no room to breathe, to get to know this
planet or these characters and by necessity most of what people do say to each
other is mostly plot exposition. It’s a story that’s always rushing headlong
from big set piece to big set piece without giving the audience a chance to
really appreciate any of it. Despite all this there are times when it could do
with rushing a bit further too, especially in the story’s first half when everyone
is sat around discussing religion or The Master is leading Peri on a merry
dance across the rocks of Sarn. There’s a little too much talking and not quite
enough doing, with the only ‘big’ spectacle things happening at the start and
the end as Peri near-drowns and The Master nearly burns (neat mirroring though
I have to say: this is a story about natural forces as much as anything and how
humans or Trions or timelords alike have any control over the natural world and
the way things are meant to be. It’s also about change and how it can be
uncomfortable yet life-changing in all the best ways: Peri nearly drowns in
water, ‘baptised’ into the series’ ways of change, but she survives to see the
universe she always dreamed of; the finale on Sarn is meant to bring new life
but The Master uses it to kill – and accidentally kills himself; nearly. Drowning
or rebirth, renewal or death through burning – there are no other choices, for
nothing stays the same). There’s little to no atmosphere, with one of Peter
Howells’ least suitable scores, all cutting edge synths in a story that’s about
traditions and needs to feel grand and old (plus there’s a moment in episode
three where it feels as if he’s swatting a fly on his keyboard and the recording
kept going, as it sure doesn’t fit what’s happening on screen!)Though all of
this story is competent and very little goes wrong (the only special effect,
the flame, is well handled looking better than the one on the similarly named
planet Karn in ‘The Brain Of Morbius’) very little of it soars, with no great
ambition other than telling the plot and the big main one is all too easily
dispensed with anyway, coming down to hailing down a rescue ship and evacuating
a planet.. ‘Planet Of Fire’ isn’t a story you put on to be wowed eve with the
best use of location filming since ‘City
Of Death’ five years ago; it’s a story to mop up continuity and while it
does that rather well it doesn’t really do anything else.
Still, all the strands
are well handled in themselves: Turlough gets a worthy ending (his comment to
Peri ‘look after The Doctor, he gets in the most terrible trouble’ while
looking at us because he can’t bear to look at his fiend directly, is really
moving and makes us at home feel as if we’re involved, being asked to carry on
alongside him as much as Peri), Peri herself gets a worthy beginning where she’s
an lot more interesting than the peril monkey she’ll become and there’s one of
the better showdowns between the Doctor at his most angelic and the Master at
his most devilish and this is a story that’s a lot better than its reputation
suggests. It manages to feel both grand and epic (mostly thanks to the location
filming) and small and humble, with well drawn characters doing small simple things
that create big ripples and Grimwade’s script does well at summing up a civilisation
that dates back centuries and feels as if it had a life before we saw it on
screen. There are stories that can’t do any of that despite having lots of room
to go anywhere and do anything which come out the other side feeling like far
more restricted and disappointing stories than this one. I’d go so far as to
say that ‘Fire’ is Grimwade’s best story for the series with a depth missing
from ‘Timeflight’ and a believability missing from ‘Mawdryn Undead’ and while
it’s understandably overshadowed by the noisier, shoutier stories next to it
where everybody dies pretty much in its own way its darker still. No it’s not
the best meal Dr Who ever served but this is a lot better than its reputation
as a pot-boiler suggests, as even if it’s mostly an exercise in box ticking at
least ‘Planet Of Fire’ ticks those boxes well.
POSITIVES + At least it
ticks the boxes while looking beautiful, thanks to the location filming in
Lanzarote which looks suitably alien and un-Earth like as well as being a
mini-holiday for cast and crew (pity poor Janet Fielding who missed it by a
single story!) Unlike Amsterdam in ‘Arc Of
Infinity’ or Seville in ‘The Two Doctors’ it feels more than just window
dressing: this is a world all about volcanoes and sudden eruptions and it needs
to look hot, an effect you just couldn’t get in a drafty BBC London studio no
matter how good the actors. Although it’s annoying that Lanzarote stands in as
both itself and Sarn; they could have at least chosen opposite ends of the
island to make it look a little different but instead it looks for all the
world as if Peri nearly drowns on an alien planet in the beginning, while
Timanov and co could easily be members of an ageing pack of 18-30 tourists that
got lost on holiday, rather than two separate entities on two separate planets.
‘Kill The Moon’ was filmed here too and
uses Lanzarote as the surface of the moon, not as convincingly as here.
‘A Town Called Eternity’ (2000)
is a brief tale from the first ‘Short Trips’ anthology book. Written by Lance
Parkin it’s a re-match between The Master and the 5th Doctor and
Peri in a rather oddball story about dinosaurs loose in a Western town in 1880s
(Butch Carnataurus and the Stegosaurus Kid?!) This is the first time the trio
have met since ‘Planet Of Fire’ and The Doctor is amazed at how his bro…sorry,
arch enemy survived being burned to a crisp on Sarn. It turns out that he only
has barely, that he’s in emaciated form similar to that in ‘The Deadly
Assassin’ and has been patched together with bandages. After staggering out of
the flames to his Tardis he made his way to this town where he drank from a
magic elixir that worked as a fountain of youth which restored his cells. It
turns out it was in a cave in the Wild West the whole time, surrounded by
dinosaur fossils that can also be brought back to life by the holy water, which
The Doctor hastily fills in again before they attack the town. . So now you
know (and it’s why The Doctor’s not at all surprised to see him back in one
piece in ‘Mark Of The Rani’ even though the audience is).
Finally, over on
audio, ’The Reaping’ (2006) is number
#86 in Big Finish’s main range and one of their all-time classics, a real
‘character’ driven story about what happens when you try to pick your ordinary
life back up after life in the Tardis. A 6th Doctor story by Joseph
Lidster, it fills in a lot of gaps about Peri’s background and what happened to
her immediately before the Tardis arrived in ‘Planet Of Fire’. The Tardis
travels to ‘Gogglebox’ (yes, Dr Who invented the word!) which gives news about
every person on every planet in the universe. Peri is hooked and looks up
everyone she knows to see how their lives turned out without her, but hears
word of the murder of an old friend and, feeling homesick, gets the Doctor to
take her back to a time just before she left so she can visit him again, only
of course the Tardis gets it wrong and she arrives four months late. Her family
have been worried sick, her mum and stepdad have split up due to the tensions
around her disappearance and a homeless man has been convicted of her murder.
Peri feels dreadful and tries to hang out with her friends, but they find her
changed and hard to be around – matters come to a head when she hears them
talking about how they were happier when they thought she was dead and they
could mourn her. The Doctor. Meanwhile, has been investigating the murder of
Peri’s friend and discovers…a Cyberman in the coffin! It turns out he’s still
alive, but has been partly converted. This leads tho the usual sort of Dr Who
runaround, but Peri’s plotline has consequences as she chooses to stay behind
with her mum and sadly bids goodbye to The Doctor at the end. Only (spoilers)
there’s no happy ending: a tearful Doctor heads back to the Gogglebox to find
out if Peri is happy, only to find that a cyber conversion unit activated
inside her house and converted her mother. He rushes back only to find a
tearful Peri tell him that he is her only link to her past now – everyone else
she loves is gone. Powerful stuff and the actors give a performance of a
lifetime, with Nicola Bryant especially breaking your heart – there’s still far
too many people in fandom who think she can’t act, given that she was straight
out of drama school when she got the part of Peri and I’ve never known why;
every time I see a comment like that I feel like heading over to the poster’s
house and playing them this CD.
Previous ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ next ‘The Caves Of Androzani’
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