“Look after him, will you? He gets in the most terrible trouble.”
The Master regains control of Kamelion, who’s been sitting in some closet somewhere since coming aboard the TARDIS, and uses the android to steer the ship to the island of Lanzarote on Earth, source of a signal from an alien artifact recently discovered by archaeologists bringing up relics from an ancient sunken ship offshore (who don’t know it’s alien, just think its some modern art piece lost over the side of a more recent ship). On Earth, Turlough rescues American college student Peri Brown from drowning, and she’s still in the TARDIS when Kamelion sets it to auto-follow the Master’s TARDIS to the volcanic planet Sarn. The Master is forced to work through Kamelion because he’s been injured (how is not revealed until the episode 3 cliffhanger & I won’t spoil it here) and needs the android to get him to a supply of the volcanic gas “numismaton” found only on Sarn, which has healing properties. The local inhabitants of Sarn are in upheaval about the imminent eruption of the volcano and the question of whether this is a test by their fire god, Logar, and so whether they should evacuate the area or else sacrifice all the heretics who suggest evacuation in order to appease Logar. The Master’s happy to play god to the locals in order to stir up trouble for the Doctor.
We finally get a backstory on Turlough in this episode, leading up to his departure from the series (we’re winding down the Fifth Doctor’s era now, seeing off his cast of companions). He’s from the planet Trion, and was exiled to Earth after his family was on the losing side of a civil war. His father and brother, meanwhile, were sent to a former Trion penal colony— Sarn, where most of this story takes place. It turns out most of their mythology about Logar derives from glimpses of Trion vulcanogists trying to control the volcano and delivering aid to the locals after past eruptions. Turlough spends the early part of the story trying to prevent the Doctor from learning the truth, before finally choosing to send a distress call to Trion for a rescue ship to evacuate the villagers before the volcano erupts. From the Trion crew he learns that things have changed back home and he’ll be allowed to return, and though he’s come to value his time with the Doctor he decides it’s time to take the opportunity. Oddly enough, given that he was introduced as a villainous companion, trying to kill the Doctor, he gets a far happier ending than Tegan’s traumatized flight last week, and one that lets him show just how much he’s learned from his time on the TARDIS.
The story also sees off Kamelion, which gets destroyed at the end to the relief of everyone, since the robot prop had completely failed to work out as JN-T had hoped when bringing it aboard. It was also meant to be a final end for the Master, both since actor Anthony Ainley’s contract was up and because his version of the Master had been as distinctly associated with the Fifth Doctor as Roger Delgado’s was with the Third. Accordingly he gets much more explicitly killed off at the end than usual, when he’s caught in volcanic flames and the Doctor, with a pained expression, steps back and refuses to help him. His final line is a tease to the viewers, “Will you not show mercy to your own—” leading to speculation that the sentence was going to end “—brother” which continued among fans until the Tenth Doctor expressly denied that when the Master returned in the modern series. In the event, it wasn’t the end of the Master in the Classic series either, as Anthony Ainley would return to play the part against both the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, without any explanation for how he escaped death in this story.
With all this going on, is there room for an actual story in Planet of Fire? Yes, and it’s a pretty good one, although I wouldn’t put it in my top ten. The “dangerous pagan cult that threatens to sacrifice our heroes” is a tried-and-true sci-fi trope in Dr Who and many other SF series. Planet of Fire, though, takes an interesting approach to it through the character of Chief Elder Timanov. The usual way this scenario goes, Timanov would be a self-serving fanatic, but the story doesn’t show him that way. Without making him any less misguided he’s presented as someone genuinely trying to do the best he can given his understanding. His is no blind faith— he actually saw “Logar” (a Trion vulcanologist) in his youth so he has every reason to believe. Confronted by the Master, a shining and shapeshifting android, a materializing blue box, and the Doctor, all trying to move him in different directions, he is increasingly confused and desperate but keeps trying to make sense of it all. He’s as willing to call off a sacrifice as to order one, if it seems that’s what Logar wants, and by the end he’s a more tragic figure than a villain (with the Master around, we don’t need extra villains anyway). He gets a surprisingly dignified end, as he and the remaining faithful gather in the temple rather than evacuate on the Trion ship.
Planet of Fire did its location filming on Lanzarote (one of the Canary Islands) a rare outside-of-England shoot for Classic Dr Who. The island plays itself for the early scenes at its beach resort, and then its volcanic landscape stands in for that of Sarn. The result looks far more impressive than if the standard Dr Who gravel quarry had been used, and the amount of location filming takes full advantage of the scenery. Unfortunately, the video-taped scenes in the studio don’t match up with it. One location scene used an actual visitor center (or something) near Lanzarote’s volcanoes as one of the Sarn homes, and it looks very good, but there’s no effort to match the sets built in-studio to the architectural style. The sets are pretty good on their own merits, but they just don’t look remotely like the setting shot on location.
The Doctor himself is in fine form through this story, continuing the pattern this season of writing the Fifth Doctor better than in his previous two. I’ve mentioned before in this series the irony that the writers seem to have figured out how to use Peter Davison’s version of the Doctor only as his time on the series drew to an end. But the end is near: we’ve now written out the Fifth Doctor’s cast of characters, introduced a new companion who was designed to pair with the incoming Sixth (see below), and all that’s left now is the Fifth Doctor’s final story.
Details
Joining the series in this episode is American college student Perpugilliam “Peri” Brown, played by Nicola Bryant. She’s the stepdaughter of archaeologist Howard Foster, and as Planet of Fire opens she tells him she’s bored just hanging around the dig and is going to spend the summer in Morocco with some friends. Thinking that’s a bad idea, Howard strands her on the expedition’s boat so that she’ll miss her plane. She tries to swim ashore but can’t make it, and Turlough rescues her from drowning and brings her into the TARDIS to recover. While she’s sleeping in Tegan’s old bedroom, the Master puts the ship in flight, and so she’s on board for the adventure. At the end of the story, she tells the Doctor she had been planning to spend the summer traveling and asks if she can travel with him— just for three months, until it’s time to go back to college (no one’s told her about the time travel yet) and he agrees.- The above is not the normal picture to choose of Peri in Planet of Fire. Given her swimming-to-shore introduction, she enters the story in a bikini, and with a particularly blatant cheesecake shot from the camera. Normally this gets mentioned in articles along with some disparaging remark about the sexism of the whole bikini thing (while taking the opportunity to include the picture, of course) but I’m going to disagree: yes, the scene is cheesecake, but Planet of Fire is equal opportunity: Peri’s stepfather Howard and any number of male background characters on Lanzarote wander around shirtless, and Turlough strips down to a Speedo when diving into the water to rescue Peri from drowning. The opening episode takes place at a beach resort and the show takes the opportunity to entertain both male and female viewers accordingly (I don’t know whether the various shirtless men are as pleasing to female viewers as Peri is to male ones, but at least the series tried).
- Hearing that Dr Who was looking to cast an American actress for the role of the American Peri, Nicola Bryant put on her best American accents when she went to the audition, and said she was from the US but now lived in England and held a US/UK dual citizenship. In fact she just said that hoping to get the part: she wasn’t from the US and her natural accent is 100% England. Once she got the part, the shows’ producers told her to keep up the pretense and throughout her run on the series outlets like Doctor Who Magazine dutifully reported Bryant was an American actress. Only after she left the series did the truth come out. When US fans noticed that her accent wasn’t quite as American as it was supposed to be, the explanation was that she’d lived in England most of her life and had picked up local pronunciation. Other discrepancies, like Peri often using British rather than American words (e.g. “lift” instead of “elevator”) were not the fault of Bryant’s performance but were a decision by the writers who thought their primary UK audience would be confused by American vocabulary. (How they could think that with the number of US-import shows on TV at the time is another question.)
- One moment with Peri early in the story raises a surprisingly dark issue which the story never addresses again. Asleep in Tegan’s bedroom after being rescued, Peri has a dream involving her stepfather Howard which causes Kamelion to take on Howard’s form (recall that Kamelion shape-shifts into forms it gets from minds around it). But Peri’s dialog during the dream doesn’t reflect her being mad at Howard for trying to make her miss her plane: instead it’s a nightmare that seems to reflect a childhood memory of abuse at Howard’s hands (she’s terrified, keeps saying she’s sorry, and begging Howard “don’t turn out the light”). This is a surprising thing to raise in Dr Who at this time, and a surprising thing to raise in any story if the writer has no plans to make any use of it. And yet nothing is made of it, in this story or any other during Peri’s run on the show. (A “missing adventures” novel did eventually revisit Peri’s backstory and built on this scene to confirm that as a child Peri was indeed abused by Howard, but the novels are not canonical.) I suspect the writer had nothing more in mind than to justify Peri’s dream being intense enough to cause Kamelion’s change, which became an important plot point, but still— it’s a strange and disturbing moment in the middle of the story.
- Turlough’s departure marks the last time the Doctor will have a male companion in the Classic series (there won’t be another until Adam briefly joins the TARDIS in Christopher Eccleston’s season on the new series).
Next Week:
“The Caves of Androzani,” 4 episodes, Peter Davison’s finale.
