Widely regarded as the best story of Season 24, Dragonfire still has its problems - the first of these being the whole background to Kane's imprisonment.
Why would you imprison someone on a spaceship - a means of escape - even if you had removed its power source? There was always the chance, surely, that he - or someone visiting - could have provided an alternative to the "Dragonfire".
Not only have they left him with a functioning spaceship, but they've left that power source on his jail with him. Why has he taken this long to get someone to go look for it, considering he's been here for thousands of years? The Dragon has built-in weaponry, but it is easily destroyed by a couple of his guards.
And why leave him unguarded? He could simply have taken over a visiting spaceship, after first disabling the thermostat, and fled.
Kane is building an army, but seems to have only recently started on this as it comprises only a handful of people bought from Glitz.
(Are there lots more in cold storage? What's Glitz going to do with them all now that he's the new owner of Iceworld?).
Iceworld must generate enough wealth for him to have funded a ready-made mercenary force ages ago.
He kills by touching people but they have a certain amount of body heat - so it would feel like grabbing a hot coal to him. Why not simply shoot folk he doesn't like?
Did Kane wake up one day and think "How should I go about building an invincible army to wreak revenge on my home planet?... How do I start?... I know - open a frozen food shop!".
He commits suicide the minute he hears that Proamon has been destroyed. Might it not have been a good idea to confirm this first? How does he know the Doctor hasn't simply tricked him?
And surely, during all this time, he would have checked on his homeworld every so often. There must have been visitors to Iceworld who could have told him that the planet had been destroyed.
He's planning on attacking it first chance he gets, so you'd think he would be keeping an eye on it.
Ace is a very popular companion, but personally I've never liked the character - mainly because the idea that she acts like a genuine teenager and was the programme's first real working class companion, is a nonsense. She's what the BBC of 1987 liked to think a teenager acted and sounded like, sanitized and watered down. If you can't have a character swear then don't even go there.
She tells Mel that she has never told anyone her real name - yet she's only known her five minutes.
The "ANT" hunt is just embarrassing. They are trying to do Alien / Aliens but in a harshly lit studio. The Dragon looks not too bad confined to the shadows, even if an obvious rip-off of the Xenomorph, but should never have been shown fully.
Does the little girl serve any function whatsoever in the story? She just wanders about the place - including into Kane's high security living area where even a slight temperature rise could kill him...
I'm no astrophysicist but surely something as massive as Iceworld would affect the orbit of Svartos?
Sylvester McCoy is the only person acting like the floors are slippery. A bit of consistency from the director might have helped here.
Mel's departure is terrible. She decides on a whim to go off with a man she hardly knows, other than that he once happily allied himself with the Master against the Doctor, lies, cheats, steals, cons and is not averse to selling his own crew.
Not even a note of caution from the Doctor about her irrational decision.
When Barry Letts decided to incorporate an audition piece into the series, we got The Daemons. When Cartmel does it, we get this...
And then there's that Part One cliffhanger... Trying to make out afterwards that it was really some post-modern comment on the nature of episodic television just doesn't wash. What everyone saw, on the night, was the Doctor climb over a railing and dangle above a precipice for no reason whatsoever.
No comments:
Post a Comment