What's Wrong With... Dragonfire

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. 

What's Wrong With... Delta and the Bannermen

The background to this story, in a nutshell, is that the Bannermen are engaged in a campaign of genocide against the Chimeron.

Why?

No reason is ever given for this action. We don't know if they are doing it because they themselves want / need it to happen, or if they are mercenaries carrying out their crimes for another party. If the latter, that's never mentioned so we have to assume that they want the Chimeron wiped out for their own reasons.

It would have been nice if some sort of explanation had been given on screen. A couple of lines from Delta would have sufficed.

(There is a reason given in the novelisation - a terribly weak one - but that's no good for the people watching this on broadcast).

Their fearsome reputation is definitely unwarranted if this lot are anything to go by. They are tricked easily and often, and beaten by a bunch of civilians using 1950's technology or homemade traps.

We're told they have a war fleet - but this appears to consist of a single ship. They had two, but a couple of Chimeron were easily able to steal it. Their massed ranks seem to add up to about a dozen troops.

They do at least have the power to time travel - as does Nostalgia Tours. The latter are evidently a company with a very poor reputation, yet they are able to travel in time for mere pleasure jaunts. At least one of these coincides with a key moment in Earth's technological progress - the early Space Race.

I thought that the Time Lords were supposed to be policing time travel? It wasn't that long ago they were sending the Second Doctor to stop Dastari.

If Bannermen do indeed have time travel technology, surely they could have used it to eliminate the Chimeron at any earlier point in their history when easier to achieve?

Being the 1950's there would have been all sorts of implications for Billy forming any sort of relationship with one of the campers, and people would have had a lot to say about Delta's status as a single mother. They've picked the nice bits of the '50's - the music and nostalgia factor - but ignored the social realities of the decade. (Imagine what an RTD2 / Gatwa story with the same set-up might have been like. Or maybe not...).

Mel, who has done a fair bit of space / time travel by this stage screams her head off at the green baby - but Billy hardly bats an eyelid?

Billy steals some of the child's food. What made him think it would make him turn into an alien like Delta in the first place? And why would a foodstuff cause a genetic transformation in an entirely alien species? If people turned into cows after drinking milk then we might see where he was coming from.

The Chimeron lifecycle appears to be based on insect life. I do hope Billy knows that a lot of female insects eat their mates after procreation...

No matter how much in love they are, is going on a picnic - without leaving any word of where you can be reached in an emergency - really the brightest thing to do when you know genocidal aliens are on their way, specifically intent on killing you and your child? It's no wonder the Chimeron are on the brink of extinction...

If you are fleeing genocidal aliens, it is probably best not to mention your species to a bunch of strangers on a holiday outing. One of the fellow passengers just happens to be a bounty hunter who knows all about the Bannermen / Chimeron conflict - so much so that he has a direct line to Gavrok. Considering that no-one knew Delta was going to turn up and join the tour, that's one heck of a coincidence.

Gavrok doesn't want to pay Kiellor the bounty, so kills him - but does it before he has bothered to get the exact location and so has to land and run around the countryside hunting for Delta.

Gavrok shoots the Toll Master, yet allows Hawke and Weismuller to live, even wasting a couple of soldiers to guard them - men who would have been more usefully employed on the search, surely?

Even with a special code, it is highly unlikely that you could ever have gotten through to the White House from a standard Police Public Call Box.

I have found evidence that Police Boxes could be found in Cardiff and Newport, but none in any rural district of South Wales.

I've stayed in a holiday camp, and there's no way that the grass in front of the chalets would be allowed to grow that long during the season. 

We hear the music for Housewives Choice when everyone is having lunch - even though this was broadcast between 9 - 9.55am on the Light Programme. And the music for Music While You Work is playing over breakfast, when this was broadcast between 10.30 - 11am, and again between 3.45 - 4.30pm, according to the BBC Genome project for summer 1959.

Most of the male Navarino tourists dress as Teddy Boys. Holiday camps catered primarily for families (competitions ranged from Bonny Babies to Glamorous Grannies), and people identifying as a particular youth sub-culture would be frowned upon due the potential for violence. It wasn't until the end of the 20th Century that camps began to specifically advertise themed musical weekends, now that the families were going elsewhere.

What's Wrong With... Paradise Towers

A lot of the blame for problems this story might have can be laid at the door of one man - guest star Richard Briers. We know he was a very good actor, though much of his career was based in situation comedy. In later life he was "adopted" by Kenneth Branagh and appeared in several of his cinematic Shakespeare productions.

In Paradise Towers his performance as the Chief Caretaker is just too broad, as though he is hamming it up for the kids. Things get worse once he is possessed by Kroagnon. He's a caricature, in a story very much built along comic book lines (Andrew Cartmel being a huge fan of 2000 AD etc) where what it really needed was some verisimilitude. We can never believe that the Towers is a real place, inhabited by real people. Being studio-bound, with little or no budget for extras, doesn't help. 

Apparently the producer encouraged the performance by Briers, so he has to take some of the blame.

Most of the background to the story collapses under scrutiny. 

Kroagnon was turned against by the occupants of the Towers and confined as a bodiless entity in the basement. Why not just kill him?

If he's just a brain (or a lifeforce - it's never made clear which) how could he create the technology to hijack the Cleaners? They kill people and bring the bodies to the basement, but for what purpose? He's not using them to build a body for himself as he has the technology to transfer himself into another person and possess them. Again, how can a disembodied being achieve any of this?

Did the residents provide any of this and, if so, why?

Remember that the Time Lords were prepared to resort to assassination to prevent mind transference technology in Mindwarp, so why not intervene here as well?

The Chief Caretaker believes the Doctor to be the Great Architect - yet he's in constant communication with Kroagnon and is actively aiding and abetting his schemes.

The timescale is all wrong. There are young male Caretakers and we have the Kangs, so the war during which all the young men left can't have been all that long ago - unless these are very long-lived humanoid aliens. People ought to remember what happened. 

What sort of conflict was it that every single male failed to return, but no-one seems bothered about why?

If there are teenage female Kangs, then where are all the teenage boys who were too young to go off to war? Where are the men who were too old to fight?

There ought to be a wider age spread for both males and, especially, females here.

The Kangs would have worked far better had they been feral children, but they're obviously in their 20's, and there appears to be a drama school somewhere in the Towers.

Tabby and Tilda resort to eating animals (and people if they get the chance), but how does everyone else survive here?

The Caretakers have a rule book which numbers thousands of rules, most with sub-sections big enough to need paragraphs - yet it's the size of a pocket notebook.

The Towers are clearly dilapidated, yet Tabby and Tilda get a new front door in no time at all.

If they are somehow getting preferential treatment from the Chief Caretaker, why doesn't this include food?

The script had to be changed to avoid showing Mel being threatened by a knife, due to then current rules around violence. But showing her being threatened with a huge toasting fork is more acceptable?

The plan to get rid of Kroagnon is overly complicated. The Kangs have crossbows - so why not simply shoot him? And what sort of "pests" does the Towers have that requires the Caretakers to keep a supply of dynamite?

Mel tells the Kangs that she doesn't have a colour - said whilst wearing a bright blue top...

What's Wrong With... Time and the Rani

Time and the Rani is what Doctor Who would have looked like had JNT not had the influence of a Script Editor to keep him in check.

Andrew Cartmel is the credited Script Editor, but the story was already well advanced by the time he started and he has very much distanced himself from it. JNT had gone ahead and commissioned Pip & Jane Baker for another story, being a "safe pair of hands" (or two pairs of hands, rather) and could be trusted to get on with things whilst Cartmel got settled in. Bringing back an old enemy, played by a big US soap star, was an obvious way to get a new season launched.

We were also being given the debut of a new Doctor, someone well known to children's TV audiences.

On paper, it should have been a big success, but even the president of the biggest fan club felt compelled to go to the media slating it. What went wrong?

First of all, there's the absence of Colin Baker to participate in a satisfying regeneration scene. The Doctor appears to have simply fallen off his exercise bike after the Rani shot at the TARDIS. We see her with a relatively small gun, so how on earth did that weapon manage to target a TARDIS?

Later we'll see that she hasn't got any sort of navigation / targeting device on her Strange Matter rocket. It's the key to her entire scheme, yet it's stuck in a fixed trajectory and will miss the asteroid if it isn't launched at a precise time. Why have a gun that can target a small moving object precisely, and not a vital rocket aimed at a big hunk of rock in a supposedly stable orbit?

If the asteroid is as dense as is claimed, it ought to have drawn the rocket towards it anyway so there's no way it could miss. Also, Lakertya ought to be orbiting it, rather than the other way round.

Efforts are made to obscure McCoy's features when the Doctor is turned onto his back, but it just doesn't work.

As to the cause of the regeneration, the novelisation blames "tremendous buffeting" due to the gun.

McCoy's first couple of episodes are far from promising. He might have appeared with the National Theatre, but his acting is appalling in his first few scenes with Kate O'Mara, and the pratfalls are embarrassing.

O'Mara having to dress up and act like Bonnie Langford for two episodes is another embarrassment.

At what point did the Rani know she was going to impersonate Mel? If it was always the plan, why leave the real one lying in the TARDIS, free to get away, when she took the Doctor?

The Rani is watching Sarn run away, during which she bumps into Mel - yet a short time later she's surprised to learn that Mel is on the loose.

And at what point did she and Mel meet in order for her to know what she looked, acted and sounded like? There can only be a missing story somewhere - except Mel doesn't recognise the Rani...

The Rani's plan is to create a Time Manipulator which will alter history throughout the universe, back through time and not just henceforward. That would mean that all the genii she has collected to help her big brain with its calculations might never have been born - creating a temporal paradox.

One of the people she abducts is Einstein. Not only is this a bit of a cliché, but he was no fan of quantum physics so surely his mental input would either be disruptive as he fiercely disagreed with it, or simply useless as he would have zero talent in this field.

The Rani changes her mind about saving the Lakertyans as a slave labour force - despite the fact that the entire planet is going to be destroyed when her rocket hits the asteroid.

The Doctor gets locked in the Rani's laboratory, yet there's a second door which Mel is able to just walk through.

The Bakers always prided themselves on their research, with Pip often reminding interviewers that his brother was a scientist. But there's some very dodgy science on show here.

The Doctor uses fibre optic cables to bypass the deadly ankle bracelets as though they were electrical wires - even though they don't conduct electricity. (Pretty pointless of the Rani to employ the bracelets when she has her killer insects. All she's done is provide the Doctor with a quantity of explosives).

The Rani wants the rocket to launch at the Lakertyan solstice. A solstice is simply the date on which the sun reached either maximum or minimum declination, giving us on Earth our longest and shortest days. It should have nothing to do with the orbit of an asteroid.

K.O. Round 1.11

This time we have Season 10 versus Season 24, so this shouldn't take long. McCoy fans might want to look away...

Both seasons represent a period of change in the programme, with a companion departure in the final story, and a rogue Time Lord in the first.

Season 10 marks the first big anniversary that the series celebrated. It opened with the first multi-Doctor story, which saw the return of both William Hartnell (his final appearance and the only one in colour) and Patrick Troughton. This was in The Three Doctors, which had as its villain a powerful Time Lord, Omega, and saw the termination of the Doctor's exile to UNIT-based stories. Considering its ingredients, it is handled like a normal four part story and isn't given any special "epic" treatment.

It is followed by the colourful Carnival of Monsters, which combines sci-fi and historical elements.

The following two stories were originally going to be a massive 12-part epic, but the last director to have attempted such a thing advised against this. Instead we get a set-up story featuring the Master and the Ogrons, plus some great new aliens in the Draconians. This is Frontier in Space, and marks the last appearance by Roger Delgado as the Master, before his untimely death.

The Daleks turn up at the conclusion - leading into the second story, Planet of the Daleks.

The season ends with the final "UNIT Family" story, as this is when Katy Manning departs. Jo Grant leaves UNIT to get married at the end of The Green Death. Even non-fans knew "the one with the maggots".

Season 24 is the first to feature Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor. After the sacking of Colin Baker, he declined to return for a regeneration so the first story - Time and the Rani - opens with McCoy in Baker's costume, wearing a Harpo Marx wig. It makes for an ignominious start. 

It's a throwback to the Baker era, set up before new script editor Andrew Cartmel has established himself. McCoy looks lost and his performance is rather amateurish, lacking any subtlety.

Cartmel starts to make his presence known with the next story - Paradise Towers - and McCoy starts to settle into the role after that poor start.

These are four-part stories, and the next two are only three episodes apiece. These days the series consists of only 14 episodes, comprising four stories. Season 10 had been 26 episodes in length.

The third story is a real oddity - Delta and the Bannermen - which can't quite work out how jokey or how serious it wants to be.

The series ends with Dragonfire, in which companion Mel departs and Ace arrives - the final part of a jigsaw that will see the series finally getting back on track. But not yet.

It will come as no surprise to learn that I much prefer Season 10 over Season 24. The same would apply to all but the most die-hard McCoy fan. He did make for a good Doctor - but not here - whereas Jon Pertwee was at his height in Season 10, accompanied by Katy Manning as Jo, the UNIT regulars in two of the stories, and Roger Delgado in his final appearance. Daleks, Draconians, Ogrons, Omega, Drashigs and giant maggots beat the Rani, Richard Briers and an Alien knock-off hands down.

Next time: Hartnell's first versus Troughton's first...