Dragonfire: Part One

DRAGONFIRE is a reasonably entertaining serial from Sylvester McCoy's time as the Doctor. It feels heavily indebted to STAR WARS throughout, not least in the presence of Tony Selby who plays a supporting character distinctly reminiscent of Han Solo. One scene in the first episode is a direct copy of the famous canteen sequence in the Lucas film. Otherwise, this is pretty imaginative stuff, with plenty of action and incident to stop it becoming boring. The dragon itself is disappointingly mundane, but sympathetic with it. Langford proves an irritation but the introduction of Ace is well handled, with all of the spirit we've come to expect from the character.

Review of all 3 episodes:

Dragonfire is, in my opinion, easily the best story of Season 24.

It introduces the much admired new companion, Ace. She is a fun, strong, young, female character and is a good role model for young fans. It also is a decent little story overall, much better than the rest of the season for my taste.

We get the return of Tony Selby as Sabalom Glitz and he is a charming addition. We also get Sylvester McCoy who is, as usual, entertaining and we say goodbye to Bonnie Langford as Mel.

The villain, Kane, and other cast are ok and there are no major problems really. It is still hampered by the cheesy style of this era (for example the literal cliffhanger in Part One and some over the top costumes and dialogue) so it doesn't reach the level of earlier glory years of the show in my opinion but it is mainly just a bit of fun.

It is a decent effort for this era.

My overall rating: 6.5/10.

The Doctor and Mel arrive at Iceworld and quickly get reacquainted with Sabalom Glitz who has a map that could lead to treasure and a dragon.

The Doctor also meets a girl called Ace who wants to shake things up with her fondness for nitro.

Iceworld seems to be run by the nefarious Kane who has a cold touch.

Despite season 24 being universally panned. The first episode of Dragonfire shows signs of a upturn in quality. There is life in the old Doctor yet.

There are nice touches such as the animatronic creature (from the makers of Spitting Image.)

Ace was a breath of fresh air and Edward Peel was sinister as Kane.

However some of the shots look cheap, it is overlit. That pointless and literal cliffhanger was a let down. Once again McCoy's acting switches to gurning.

My journey continues, exploring the show's universally hated stories, and see if they really are that bad, here goes........

Part one, as soon as it starts, my initial memories of it looking horrendous are justified, it's tacky, garish, cheap looking and poorly lit, so before the story even begins, it's up against it. The story, somehow feels like it's wanting to be from the Black and White era, a story that would perhaps have worked with Patrick Troughton, in black and white. I think the concept is pretty good, but the execution is poor, it seems like, a frozen man who owns a fridge shop, with a dodgy cafe attached is freezing people, to build up his empire of fridge shops. That unfortunately is how it comes across, whereas the reality is somewhat different.

Ace arrives, a companion as time went on I grew to really like, in her final episodes she was complex, interesting and rather dynamic. In this opening episode she suffers badly from poor writing, in the same way that poor Bonnie did. All that 'bilge bag' and 'dog brain' stuff is just silly. The cliffhanger ranks as one of the worst, absolute tosh, made worse by the cheap set.

It's not totally without merit, and it is definitely an improvement over Delta and The Bannermen, Edward Peel is rather good as Kane, reminding me again of a villain that would have been suited to Patrick Troughton's time.

It is marginally better then I remember, but if I had to some it up in one word it would be 'tacky.'