Gloaming Crackle

Planet of Fire kind of reminds me of the 2007 episode “Utopia” in that it wraps an unremarkable plot around a laundry list of practical concerns. It has to write out the Doctor’s shifty companion Turlough, write in new companion Peri, get rid of the Doctor’s flaky shape-shifting android passenger Kamelion, and kill off Anthony Ainley’s Master — all while finally giving Turlough a backstory and a first name.

Let’s see if this makes any sense. While the Doctor and Turlough take a break in Lanzarote, a young American named Peri comes across an enormous metal dildo embossed with the same symbol branded on Turlough’s arm. Turlough saves her from drowning, and takes her aboard the TARDIS. While she sleeps, Kamelion becomes infected with the Master’s influence, who forces the TARDIS to land on a desolate planet filled with extras from Lawrence of Arabia.

On exiting the TARDIS, the Doctor and Turlough get caught up in local politics. Meanwhile Kamelion starts to cycle amongst the forms of Peri’s stepfather, of the Master, and of Peri’s stepfather slathered with silver makeup. When he looks like Peri’s stepfather he’s benevolent enough. When he looks like the Master, he effectively is the Master. He chases Peri around Lanzarote-as-alien-planet until she stumbles into the Master’s TARDIS and finds the real Master inside a shoebox, shrunken down to a few inches in height. Cue lots of greenscreen hijinks with a tiny Anthony Ainley and a huge Nicola Bryant.

After some more tedious local politics, during which it turns out that this random planet houses both Turlough’s long-lost brother and his father’s crashed space ship, the Doctor destroys Kamelion with the Master’s TCE device and then watches blankly as the Master first is restored by some kind of healing plasma then is disintegrated by some kind of super flames. Before he dies, the Master very nearly claims to be the Doctor’s brother.

And that’s about it. Turlough stays behind to reunite with his people, and Davison’s Doctor takes off with Peri for his final adventure. Over the next few seasons Anthony Ainley keeps reappearing as the Master, with no explanation as to how he manages to be not-dead. So his role in this story is both strangely handled and kind of pointless.

I’m not sure what role the dildo plays in the story.

Probably the best part of the serial is Mark Strickson’s performance as Turlough. With little more than body language, he steals just about every scene he’s in — as he tends to. He and Peter Davison’s Doctor have such an interesting dynamic. For all the prickliness of their relationship, you can sense irony and suppressed comic timing thrumming below the surface of every interaction.

The production had plenty of talent on board, and I guess they did the best they could. For all of the scripting problems during the early 1980s, they were probably wise to bring back Turlough’s creator Peter Grimwade to develop the character and get rid of him. Likewise they brought back one of the more artistic directors, Fiona Cumming — I believe the only female director to work on the classic series — who had previously worked on Castrovalva and Enlightenment, among other serials. Combine her talent with unusually extensive location work, and you’ve got one of the most visually striking stories of the 1980s.

Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to suggest this story, it would be a hoot on a quiet evening with a glass of red wine, a comfy sofa, and a bathrobe.

The redesign of the Silurians in the most recent series of Doctor Who was both perplexing and inane. Instead of weird orange reptiles with a third eye and puckered mouths, we got busty women with green bumps on their faces. Oh, the extras wore monstrous battle masks to avoid having to make up a dozen actors. Basically, though, they looked like generic reptile people as seen in every sci-fi show ever. Except less convincing.

As it turns out, the prosthetics team did a sculpt that closely resembled the original 1970 Silurians, except tastefully updated. They were going to go with that until the writer, Chris Chibnall, stepped in and vetoed it. Why he had that power as a mere writer, I don’t know. I can see why he did it; his script presents several distinct Silurians, and the masks would make them all look like the same, all like monsters.

That might help the point of the story, though. They’re alien, and therefore very difficult to empathize with — yet for the humans, and for the audience, it’s worth a try anyway. Despite the difficulty, they’re not necessarily all bad and it may be possible to work with them. Or not. It’s all about stretching the imagination to accept that one’s self is not the center of the universe.

I think making them more human essentially takes out the barrier. All we have to hold against them then is their behavior, rather than our preconceptions. Good thing then that they’ve got irrational zealots as emissaries, or the story would have gone nowhere.

I realize this is the opposite of what I was saying around and before the broadcast of the episodes, as I could understand the mentality of wanting to make the Silurians more like characters than creatures. In retrospect I’m not sure that the method was constructive. If anything it undermines the intended message.