Planet of Fire

Kamelion goes into spasm in the TARDIS, having apparantly intercepted a Trion distress beacon wghile plugged into the navigational computers. The Doctor knows they must help, but to Turlough the planet Trion means something altogether different; it's his home, and he's a political exile who has escaped his sentence. The TARDIS follows the signal first to Lanzarote but then to the planet of Sarn where a small colony faces extinction from an impending volcanic eruption. Together with a young American girl named Peri, the Doctor and Turlough find themselves up against the Master once more, but whose side will Kamelion be on?

Right from the opening minutes of part one, Planet of Fire feels different. It's a combination of two major make-or-break deals where the series is concerned; a striking visual on location (in this case Lanzarote in the Canary Islands) and a different kind of music score that goes light on the usual synthesizers. At first Jay was going to be all ho-hum at me about the show being shot in a quarry, but then he noticed volcanic rock as opposed to sand. And then we both noticed that neither of the first two characters seen on screen were wearing any underwear.

Yes, it's going to be one of those kinds of reviews.

Kamelion makes his first on-screen appearance since the closing moments of The King's Demons, but the android is pretty stationary the whole time, either laying on the floor or parked in front of the console. And screaming. Why does Kamelion never make it to the top 10 screamers list? For an android in pain he can really let it rip. "Oh look," Jay said. "It can stand," And it's a hellishly tall thing when it stands beside Nicola Bryant, making her first appearance as Peri.

There's a lot of companion transition in this one. It's the end of the road for Turlough and Kamelion, and the start for Peri. The girl makes an auspicious start as the first companion to be seen in a bikini. But lo there's more exposed skin as Turlough throws off his shorts to expose a speedo, but interestingly enough keeps his shirt on. I think we can thank the hidden gay agenda of producer John Nathan-Turner for that one, as well as his casting of what appear to be really gay actors in every part. And cute ones too, as we see in Malkon, Turlough's brother. Turlough's departure is an interesting contrast to others before him; he's not really the galactic adventurer type after all, he only left with the Doctor in the first place to.... well, to kill him, but more to escape from his exile on Earth. With his sentence lifted, he can go home now, and he still has family to go home to.

And then there's the Master. Anthony Ainley gets to do a stint that evokes a southern United States evangelical preacher as he addresses the Sarns, playing on their supersitious fears about their fire god. "I'd be pissed if I were him," Jay says, pointing out how everyone is wearing cooler clothes for this shoot on a volcanic island - from Peri's step-father and his jean shorts and nice pecs, Turlough's shorts, Peri's own bikini, and even the Doctor drops the sweater and jacket and carries on in his shirtsleeves - but the Master is as always clad in black, this time a 3 piece suit. Yeah that's fair. Ah well, he's evil, perhaps being overheated was motivation that day.

This is one of the adventures I am really dying to see come to DVD and hopefully they'll remaster the score into Dolby 5:1 as they did with Resurrection of the Daleks. And to see all that incredible Lanzarote footage in sharp detail after years of VHS madness will be a treat. And I am sure there are some extras to be shown, including Kamelion breaking down here and there.

So off the Doctor goes with Peri on board the TARDIS now, headed for unknown futures. Of course they went right into the next episode of the season, but over at Big Finish they have taken advantage of this one to one relationship and created a stretch of audios to explore the time where the Doctor and Peri get to know each other better; there are no less than 12 full length audios, one special release, and even another Telos novella placed in this gap.

So I had better get started.

NEXT EPISODE : RED DAWN

Imperial Moon

The TARDIS arrives in 1878, just as three spaceships set off from England to the moon. Knowing that no suche events ever took place, the Doctor is determined to find out what is going on, and together with Turlough and Kamelion journeys to the moon to find a sustained biosphere in one of the craters - and all of the plant and animal life is hostile. British explorers are no strangers to such environments, nor are the Doctor and his companions, but the presence of a race of brutal killers stacks the odds against them.

Okay I am including this BBC novel for the sheer sake of giving Kamelion some more material. I hate it when characters with potential get chucked away before they can be properly explored. It is remarked by Turlough that Kamelion just sits in his room for days on end not actually doing anything but listening to the TARDIS systems, which is more or less what is said of him in the televised series. What I find a bit odd though is Turlough once more feeling lonely without Tegan on board (this happens a bit too often now; Lords of the Storm was written in 1995, Imperial Moon in 2000, so you'd think that there would be some kind of acknowledgement of other stories, that Tegan's absence would not hang so heavily in the TARDIS. Still, here it serves as a clumsy plot device for Turlough to confide his lonliness and lack of purpose to Kamelion; not something anyone normally does in someone they do not exactly trust. Kamelion does his best to be companionable, but in the end he's no K9 and he only serves the Doctor because he will obey the strongest will present. But fair dues to him, he does get to do things and actually take part in the adventure, even if the energy field maintaining an atmosphere over the moon traps him inside the TARDIS for most of the story. The Doctor is kinder to Kamelion than one might expect; he's more or less left the android in the closet all this time but when Turlough comments that they should make use of him the Doctor stands up for Kamelion's rights as an individual not to be used. Look back at some of the stuff K9 had to do, though. Apparantly robot rights are one of those things that are only acknowledged in the best of times.

Onwards.

NEXT EPISODE : LOUPS~GAROUX

The King's Demons

The TARDIS is drawn to Earth again in 1215, dropping the Doctor, Tegan and Turlough right in the middle of a jousting contest in the presence of King John. The time travellers are welcomed by the King as his demons and are regarded with suspicion by the local nobility and the peasants. The Doctor knows that it can't be right; the King would not welcome them as such and should not even be there; he should be in London signing the Crusaders' oath. With the King clearly an imposter, the TARDIS crew must find out why someone is playing with history, and what it is they hope to gain.

Another two part story, and like Black Orchid it is a cost-conscious one, using a lot of location work and a score of costumes from the BBC vaults to recreate a historical period in fine detail. Tegan gets a new outfit and runs around with her legs on display, which should have created more of a fuss even if it was pre-Victorian times. Turlough gets locked in a dungeon for most of the adventure, conveniently reducing the dialogue load as the show actually has a large cast, and to let everyone do something within the confines of 46 minutes is a bit of a challenge (something that is easily done now on the show but in those days they were still experimenting with this format as a way to fill out the season).

Oh yes. It's the Master. He escaped from Xeriphas. And he brought something with him; a shape-shifting android named Kamelion, which he uses as the double for King John. Kamelion is an interesting concept in many way; as a robot it's actually not a bad piece of work, capable of standing and sitting to deliver its lines. The shape-shifting capablities are a bit of a cop-out, as are the special effects surrounding it, but hey it's a cool looking android. In the end the Doctor takes it on board the TARDIS with him and it more or less becomes a companion, with a mind of its own and everything, but due to technical failures it is not used again for quite some time.

Back in the day when Target used to publish the novelizations of the Doctor Who scripts it became customary for authors whose scripts had been edited for television to put all the missing material back in, and in this case The King's Demons got itself a second chance at life, resulting in Terence Dudly penning a 153 page novel out of his two part script. Such an achievements may not exactly seem massive by the standards of the 300 page novels of today but back then a four or six part script usually only amounted to 144 pages on average, so providing a double length book was a feat, and also a joy for thos reading it who felt that two part stories were a bit of a ripoff.

Speaking of perceived ripoffs, BBC Video's release of The Sontaran Experiment, also a two part tale, onto DVD earlier this year means that The King's Demons will most likely see release as a solo adventure as well. My friend Derek is adamant that he will not buy these releases, as when they were on VHS they were bundled into double packs with an adjacent four part story. Myself, I'll buy andything related to Doctor Who so I don't mind at all; in fact I am curious to see what the extras package will be like on this one. Let's see some more footage - perhaps the sequence where Hugh Fitzwilliam gets annoyed at losing his jousting contest and takes off his shirt and hits the castle gym for a while... wait... wrong show. Dang.

NEXT EPISODE : THE FIVE DOCTORS