So here we are with the big finale to season 24 where all those deep and meaningful intriguing plot lines from the last three stories will come together...
they seem to have spent the budget on the dry ice
Him off London's Burning makes a break for it, but Kane gives him the cold shoulder.
The Doctor and Mel check out Svartos on the TARDIS scanner. The Doctor has tracked a signal there.
Mel thinks it's boring, the Doctor tells her you never know what's lurking in the freezer chest...
They go to a milkshake bar (on a freezer planet, yeah), where they are reacquainted with Sabalom Glitz.
Glitz is in trouble with the local law after selling Kane a ship full of rotten (albeit frozen) fruit.
As the milkshake bar is obviously a 10p ripoff of the Star Wars cantina, does that make Glitz Han & Belazs Greedo?
The Doctor and Mel team up with bolshy waitress Ace, who tells them a dragon guards a treasure on the planet.
Glitz has a treasure map, but Kane's put a tracking device in it.
Lots of costume recycling going on in the milkshake bar, particularly from Blake's 7.
Kane threatens to give Belazs his icy touch when she expresses interest in Glitz's ship, the brilliantly named Nosferatu.
Ace has a row with a snooty customer & ends up tipping a milkshakes over her head.
She gets (Dragon)fired. Boom boom.
Ace takes Mel back to her bombsite of a room and whinges about Glitz and teachers.
"I ain't got no mum and dad and we don't need no education!"
she is quite unpleasent and hard to warm to at first, you would never guess she would become such a great companion
Ace sticks to what she's good at and uses her home made explosives to unblock a frozen door. The guards aren't very grateful.
It's good preparation though for her booming in #Battlefield years later. So to speak.
The Doctor and Glitz find the "singing trees" which look suspiciously like stalactites of frozen urine.
Nice little reprise of Glitz's music from Trial there.
Kane tries to recruit Ace, Mel's shrieks echoing in her ears.
poor old Mel
Another character thoroughly rehabilitated by Big Finish, I feel.
"Freeze! I mean, don't freeze, stay still!" Fair play.
Here comes the dragon! Cover your ears, Mel's seen it.
The Doctor decides to climb over a cliff edge and hang by his umbrella, because... cliffhanger. Get it? *weeps*
Clara should have pushed him off
Weirdly, I rather love that cliffhanger. It's daft, silly, iconic and batshit weird. #DoctorWho in a nutshell!
Glitz rescues the Doctor, and we skip the (scripted) explanation as to why he was there in the 1st place.
Glitz talks the Doctor into rescuing the Nosferatu.
Not sure why being put in cryogenic suspension brainwashes them to be honest.
Ace and Mel use Ace's rope ladder to get down the cliff a bit more sensibly than the Doctor.
Glitz's ship has furry dice. Good grief.
Belazs is lying in wait, desperate to escape her debt to Kane.
With the sculpture of Kane's dead ex complete, he freezes the sculptor to death rather than pay up.
Kane killing the sculptor is a metaphor for how the supermarkets are destroying suppliers #CartmelMasterplan #Leftie
With that kind of gratitude, he's not going to make it onto the top 100 employers of the year 2,000,000!
The Doctor and Glitz encounter the dragon, who shoots lasers from its eyes.
Meanwhile, Keff McCulloch retains his worst composer in Who history crown; Dominic Glynn gives us a few belts of Keff-Keyboard-Demo-Hell in action scenes, but some of the ice world themes are lovely atmospheric stuff. Still not a patch on Mark Ayres work, though, nor indeed on his own score for Survival.
Kane's control panel in his HQ does look like some sort of TARDIS console.
Belazs tries to recruit Kracaeur to her rebellion against Kane.
Ace tells Mel how her life didn't feel her own and she dreamed of another purpose...
Kane goes for nice cool nap.
Ace's real name is Dorothy.
Glitz bumps into one of his ex-employees. He appeals to his forgotten humanity but that means Pudovkin just recalls what a shabby employer Glitz was, and that he sold them! Own goal.
Kracaeur & Belazs have fiddled Kane's thermostat, melting his rather crappy snowman sculpture.
Must have sold him!
In the Fortress of Solitude's wee tree section, Superman's gran pops up to explain that Kane is a criminal exile.
The dragon's little flashback is over, and it's got a splitting headache...
"At last, after 3000 years the #Dragonfire shall be mine!" gloats Kane. Still another episode to go, mate, we'll see about that.
The gang play follow that dragon while Kane's extras rip off Aliens.
Kane's ice zombies go on the rampage, terrorizing the shoppers
Aw. The dragon's kind of loveable in a stupid sort of way. It rescues a little girl from Kane's muppets.
Glitz's ship is nicked by the escaping shoppers but he's lucky he wasn't on it; Kane blows it up.
Glitz suddenly goes all serious. "Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane!" he doesn't bellow. He should have done.
its directed wrong, as we know the Dragon is good the tension should be in the threat from the bug hunters to the dragon
The poor old dragon is killed and the hunters cut its head off, but they're zapped by the "treasure"...
Glitz sneaks into Ace's bedroom. That's TVC in the 80s for you.
Mel has the "treasure", Kane has Ace. Love the "hurry, while stocks last!" line.
Kane says he should have destroyed the archives. He must be mates with Pamela Nash.
The whole of Ice World is a giant spacecraft. The "treasure" is its power source, the dragon Kane's jailer.
The Proamonites (?) seem pretty stupid to have imprisoned Kane in a ship he could use to escape, but then the point was always that sick joke that the means of his escape was so near yet so far.
When the Doctor breaks the news that his home planet was destroyed long ago, and he cannot have his revenge Kane commits suicide by exposing himself to direct sunlight, which melts him away, Raiders style.
That scarred me for life when I first saw that when I was younger!
Never liked the so-called "Cartmel Masterplan", but Mel's leaving scene, that AC wrote for Sylv's audition, is magic.
Mel says that Ace doesn't have anywhere to go, so the Doctor offers to take her back to Perivale the long way round.
TTFN! K.
Coming Soon... The Happiness Patrol
One of my dominant memories of this serial, oddly enough, is the purple-haired extra in the silver spacesuit in the milkbar. Definitely a "blink and you'll miss her" kind of character, but I always found there to be something rather eye-catching and intriguing about her, and have often wondered what sort of adventures she'd had herself. Oh well, I suppose that's one of the reasons fanfic exists - to answer questions like that!
ReplyDeleteI always found it rather ironic that by exiling Kane, his people would inadvertently ensure he'd escape the calamity that would later wipe the rest of them out. Not that he seemed terribly happy to learn he'd outlived them all - he didn't take the revelation at all well, did he?
I was always a little disappointed Mel left so soon, as I actually quite liked her. I know that puts me in a (probably very small) minority, as I gather that only Adric is more hated as a companion than her; that said, I could never really understand why he was so unpopular either. Still, I'm someone who actually liked Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels too, so my opinions on such matters are probably best dismissed as the ravings of a nutter!
Mel's pretty much the first companion of the 80s that actually hangs around with the Doctor because she's enjoying it, and wants to be there! Fans, and fan wisdom for years, was dead set against her for ages but I think (like the 6th Doctor) Big Finish have done great work to rehabilitate the character's reputation, while we can now watch these stories back and appreciate what a breath of fresh air it was to have a positive, happy, companion after the likes of Tegan. Mel has aged very well compared to plenty of other companions!
ReplyDeleteOh, that's interesting about Mel. I understand that another reason fans initially didn't like her was because of the sort of TV shows the actress who played her had been largely involved with before joining the cast of Doctor Who; since I'd never seen her in any of those other shows (being from Australia), her previous acting roles didn't really have any influence on my opinion of her latest character. (Interestingly enough, though, she did remind me a lot of an Australian actress who was fairly popular at the time, and who I quite liked, so that probably also contributed to my positive feelings towards her.)
ReplyDeleteYes, I've heard about the 6th Doctor's "rehabilitation" through Big Finish audio dramas. Oddly enough, he's someone else I really liked during his TV run (is there no end to my heretical opinions?!), and I was disappointed that that run also didn't last as long as it might have.
Funny you should mention Tegan, as she's probably my own least favourite companion. I really, really wanted to like her (in part because of where she came from, and also because, I won't lie, she was fairly easy on the eyes), but her seemingly perpetual bad moods (and constant yelling) soon put me off her. Sadly, the fandom wasn't wrong when they christened her "the mouth on legs"!