“Oh, trust not appearances, Mel. You never know what might be lurking in the freezer chests. Think gothic.”
Welcome back to the weekly installment of “This is Space Stuff. Pay Attention!” where, as the resident Ace-ologist, I’ve been recruited to give a bit of a tour of Ace’s appearances in Doctor Who. Last week I gave a bit of an introduction to the character, and this week I’ll be giving a significantly more rambling summary of her debut in the first episode of the serial Dragonfire.
The serial starts with the best version of the Doctor Who theme to ever exist. No bias here, just facts. You’ve got some real nice synthy 80s jams and Sylvester McCoy’s beautiful face winking at you from space. Try and top that.
The episode proper starts in the land of dry ice, where Lando Calrissian in a kaiser helmet is telling some people how lucky they are. They are the Chosen Ones, Elite Mercenaries who will carry out some mysterious Kane’s wishes, spreading terror and fear.
Chosen Ones apparently have a market value of 17 crowns. Crowns being the chief currency in the spacefuture, it seems. When one of these Elite Mercenaries brings up that can’t even buy a dog in today’s spacemarket, Lando Calrissian agrees and says they aren’t even worth that.
I’m already getting some mixed signals, but I’ll make the assumption that Lando and Kane are solid bargain hunters.
A bit of a scuffle takes place when the market savvy Merc gets shoved at a container of liquid nitrogen. Luckily he only gets a bit of “freezer burn,” hitting the edge of it, and in a bit of setup for the next scene Lando tells him he’d have lost his arm if he’d landed in it. Elite Mercs are shoved into some pods for deep freezing, except for the market savvy one from earlier who, as Lando puts it, gets “cold feet.” Guards are knocked out, shots are fired, and the fella makes his escape.
The Kaiser Hat gang doesn’t put up much of a fight. “He’s in the Restricted Zone now,” Lando declares. “He’s a dead man.”
The Restricted Zone has a hobo doing some ice carvings, a coffin made out of ice, and a pipe organ which, yes, is also made out of ice. Oh, and another bin of liquid nitrogen, which turns out to be our Elite Merc’s undoing. Startled by the hobo he trips and his gun lands in the bin. As he reaches for the gun…Another man sticks his hand in and lifts it out, completely unharmed. Not so much for the gun, which shatters like glass as it hits the floor. Our newcomer reaches out. With his freakishly cold hands, he freezes the merc’s face off. Presumably.
Presumably, because all we see is a bit of smoke and the merc hitting the floor. It’s a family show, so we shouldn’t expect much more than that after all.
Slipping on some spiffy white gloves, he calmly tells the hobo that he may continue his ice carving. I’m sure we’ll be seeing them again later.
For now, the scene jumps to the Doctor and his current companion Melanie Bush. She’s a ray of sunshine with a photographic memory and a knack for computer science who’s been with the Doctor since his previous regeneration, when he looked like he’d walked off the set of Joseph’s Technicolor Dreamcoat. I won’t spend much time on her backstory, not because she’s not worth the time, but because this episode doesn’t require you to know anything beyond what’s already here. This is a period of Doctor Who’s time when just about any episode was accessible, not to say there isn’t any callbacks or continuity as we’ll see in a little bit.
They’re looking at the planet on the TARDIS scanner, and this is where we’re given all the prevalent information about the setting. This is Ice World, the planet…Wait, hold on, Iceworld the trading colony and tourist attraction which is ON the dark side of Svartos the moon…The planet? Planets can’t have dark sides. Well, according to the TARDIS wiki Svartos is a tidally locked planet so it can have a dark side. Never mind, the important part is that Iceworld looks really neat on the TARDIS scanner and there’s a distress beacon so it’s time for some investigatin’.
The TARDIS lands right in the middle of Iceworld’s Appliance Direct. Mel’s more than a bit disappointed, she expected something a bit more adventurous from a distress beacon than a sale on freezers. The Doctor reassures Mel that there’s still opportunity for danger, hence the quote from the beginning of this article.
They walk into a diner filled with all kinds of alien tourists, and that callback I mentioned earlier. Sabalom Glitz. Glitz appeared in earlier episodes, where he met Mel and the previous Doctor. His introduction here, arguing with a teenage waitress over the price of a milkshake, tells you pretty much all you’d need to know. Mel and the Doctor are glad to see him, but he pretends not to recognize them. For the Doctor it’s not an act, however. Getting a good look at the gnomish man in the white suit and question mark vest he does a double take.
“You’re not the Doctor!”
The Doctor scowls a bit, mentioning offhandedly that he’s regenerated and “the difference is purely perceptional.”
Glitz takes that in stride. He’s got more important things to discuss anyway. A, as he puts it, “mission of a highly philanthropic nature” or as the Doctor more aptly puts it “one of his dodgy deals.”
When some of the Kaiser Helmet gang comes to pick him up, Mel jumps to the rescue, assuming that they’re going to kill him, but the woman in charge brushes that off with a line delivery that is delightfully hammy. Not Brian Blessed levels of scenery chewing, mind. The more “understated” type of ham. An overly proper, gleeful sort of British villain. The kind you might expect to see in the Death Star’s board room.
Glitz has cheated Kane out of one hundred crowns. Mr. Kane, we now learn, is the one running Iceworld and Glitz sold him some rotten cargo. The Doctor and Mel insist on him paying Kane back for the con, but Glitz admits he lost all of his money in a card game. Our hammy guard asks about the 102 crowns he made selling the crew of his ship to Kane. “Mutinous rabble” Glitz says–they tried to take over his ship and he sold them for 17 crowns apiece, more than they were worth. It’s a legitimately great reveal, answering some of the questions raised in the opening. We know the fate of those crewmembers, while the Doctor, Mel, and Glitz are still in the dark. Kane is, at best, a bit of a stodgy manager to them. But we know better.
Unsurprisingly, the money he sold the crew off for went “the way of all organic matter, I’m afraid. Down the tubes.”
My favorite hammy guard takes pleasure in declaring that she’ll take his ship, the Nosferatu, instead. She’s willing to give him 72 hours to come up with money before she takes the ship. Glitz turns to the Doctor for help. The Doctor doesn’t even look up from his book. “You’ve only got yourself to blame.”
The scene changes back to where the opening took place, where we now get to see the glass cases in which Glitz’s former crew is being flash frozen. The dude who froze a guy’s face off earlier is back. We’re finally properly introduced to him as Mr. Kane. Lando mentions this new batch of mercenaries might be hard to control once they’re defrosted, since they weren’t willing participants. Kane isn’t concerned. “The process causes complete loss of memory,” he explains. “With no memories they can have no past, no future. No will of their own. No purpose except to obey me. With them I shall be invincible. My power shall be absolute.”
In a nice bit of parallel, the scene cuts right back to the teenage waitress serving Glitz from earlier. Her boss pours out another drink for her to serve, as she stares listlessly off. “You will do as you’re told. Less of your lip or you’re out on your ear.”
She barely registers his bland statement as she returns to serving, passing by Mel as she calls over her shoulder, “I hope the dragon gets you in the night!”
Mel perks up at the mention of dragons, causing the waitress to pull up a seat and join their party. It’s just a legend, she explains, a dragon that prowls around the passages beneath Iceworld. Mel turns to the Doctor with a knowing grin, “I knew there had to be a reason you brought us here! You want to see the dragon, don’t you?” The Doctor meets her grin, and admits that the legend fascinates him. Travellers have claimed to see the dragon for centuries, but there’s never been any proof. “Like the Loch Ness Monster,” Mel surmises, and the Doctor corrects her pronunciation. She needed a bit more phlegm in her “Loch.”
The waitress gets back to the matter we’re all more interested in, the dragon. If there’s going to be a dragon expedition, she’s keen on joining. The Doctor thinks that might get her in trouble with her boss, but she responds flippantly, “Aw, I’m fed up with being a waitress. Oh, go on Professor, let me come too!” The Doctor, with his history of stealing time machines and kidnapping school teachers, sees the sense in this and is more than happy to take her on.
“ACE!” She cries, and in doing so introduces us to both her name and her self referential catchphrase. “Can we search for the treasure too?”
Glitz takes a sudden interest in the conversation, dismissing the whole thing as myth. Ace is all too happy to point out that this myth is connected to the treasure map he’s been fawning over the past few days, which she snatches out of his hands.
We cut back to my favorite hammy guard, updating Kane on Glitz. He knew about the card game, it was fixed from the start. What he wants to know, is what Glitz thinks of the treasure map. “He’s convinced it’s genuine,” she says with a downright devilish sort of glee. Kane’s just as pleased. Now that Glitz’s ship is on the line, he’ll have to go hunting for the treasure. “And when he does, I shall be with him. Every step of the way.” There’s just one hitch, the guard points out. He may have sold his whole crew, but Glitz still has accomplices. “Space travelers. A man and a girl. Do you want them eliminated?” Kane commits the sin every evil mastermind does, not recognizing protagonists when he sees them, and says there’s no reason to take them out. They don’t know the seal on the treasure map is a tracking device.
Cue the dragon hunting team sitting over the treasure map. “Fascinating,” says the Doctor. “Looks like something from a jumble sale,” says Mel. “He probably bought 200 of them in a job lot,” says Ace. Glitz, insulted at the ladies lack of trust declares that the map is “the real McCoy” in a nice little reference to the seventh Doctor’s actor, Sylvester McCoy.
The Doctor confirms it’s a map of Iceworld’s underground, which Ace says no one’s been down there forever, too dangerous. Which, based on some of the sights mentioned on the map, sounds about right. Lake of Oblivion. Death of Eternal Darkness. Dragonfire. All of which fascinate the Doctor and Ace too. “This sounds brill!” Ace chirps. “My sentiments precisely,” the Doctor agrees. Having hit it off so famously he introduces himself and Mel and gets Ace’s name.
Glitz once again warns about the danger, and insists because it’s his map he can decide who goes on this treasure hunt. The girls, he demands, have to stay behind. Ace calls him a “male chauvinist bilgebag” for it and marches off. The Doctor frowns, unwilling to go with just Glitz, and resigns himself to not seeing the dragon after all. But Mel insists that he go on ahead, she’ll stick with Ace, and “If Glitz burns his fingers in the dragon’s fire then it serves him right!” The dude expedition gets off to a great start as Doctor nearly gets his finger bitten off by a werewolf child that he tries to pet on his way out of the diner.
As the scene changes again I’ll take a moment to mention how much I love the set design of Dragonfire. There’s some really neat art deco sort of style going on with Iceworld outside of the diner, along with all the ice crystals and industrial mess of pipes. My favorite sets come later in the serial, but this one we’ve returned to where the mercenaries are frozen is really great.
My beloved hammy guard is back, updating Kane on the Doctor and Glitz, and while she’s at it ask if she can keep Glitz’s sweet ride since they’re as good as dead anyway. Kane approaches and circles her, as he finds the request both amusing and displeasing. Both the actors do well here, he’s imposing, and her cringing away from him helps hammer that home. We learn from Kane that she came to him with nothing and took his offer willingly. She wasn’t put into cryosleep like the others, so she’s got all her memories. But her wanting to take the ship shows she still has some will of her own. He grabs her by the wrist and we get a glimpse of a mark on her palm, which Kane says is a sign that he owns her. And she’d do well to remember it. He turns on the intercom and demands that Glitz’s ship be destroyed.
Back to Ace and Mel at the diner, which has gotten much busier since the Doctor and Glitz have left. Ace gets herself a rude customer and Ace deals with the situation by dumping a milkshake on the chick’s head. In a shocking turn of events she gets fired over it, and since she’s got nothing to lose she dumps a milkshake over her boss’s head too before running off with Mel right behind.
Back at the Restricted Zone we get to see what that hobo was working on finally, and it’s a member of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Kane gets into the glass coffin, and we return to Ace and Mel. In Ace’s room we get a nice subtle look at some things that give us our first real glimpse into Ace’s character, beyond the snarky waitress. It’s decorated a lot like mine is, which is to say there isn’t a square inch of space that isn’t covered in clothes or various other nicknacks. There’s chemistry equipment all over the place, with some experiments left half finished. We also get to see the iconic bomber jacket here, sprawled out on the mess of a bed that Ace throws herself onto.
Mel’s attempts to clean the room and vouch for Glitz’s heart of gold only serve to agitate Ace more. Mel’s just like her old teachers, Ace complains. “How d’you expect to pass your chemistry A level if you can’t even store the equipment properly?”
That’s what clues Mel into the fact that Ace doesn’t belong here.
She’s from Earth. Perivale to be exact. Mel thinks the place sounds lovely, and Ace incredulously asks if she’s ever been there. Ace explains how she ended up on Ice world after something went wrong during her attempts at extracting nitroglycerin from gelignite. She’s not really sure what went wrong, but regardless a “Time Storm blows up from nowhere and whisks me up here.” Mel asks how long it’s been, and Ace doesn’t know or care. She has no intentions of going back. Mel’s asking about her parents hits a raw nerve and Ace declares she’s never had any parents, doesn’t want any, and it’s always been just her. She’s a bit too sensitive to buy into that fully, but Mel wisely turns the conversation back to her A levels.
“No good,” Ace answers casually, “I got suspended after I blew up the art room.” Just in case Mel thought it was an accident, Ace assures that it was only a small explosion and, in one of her more iconic lines, says “They couldn’t understand how blowing up the art room was a creative act!”
No more time for backstory, though. An announcement over the intercom requests emergency services to the upper docking bay. Ace figures it’s about the ice jam blocking the docking bay, which no one ever bothers to take care of. She jumps up and starts pulling some silver canisters out of her rucksack, which she hands over to Mel. Just some old cans with some homemade nitro-9 in them, she explains. “It’s just like ordinary nitroglycerin, except it’s got a bit more whollop. Careful you don’t drop them.”
As they set off to deal with the ice jam, our hammy guard takes a look in on Kane who’s gone into cryosleep. We finally get her name, Belazs, as she gets on the intercom to change Kane’s order about Glitz’s ship. Then a quick check in on the men who are lost. Not that the Doctor seems to mind, he’s in full tourist mode. And we’re back with Mel and Ace, who find Lando Calrissian and some pals trying to deal with that ice jam. Ace calmly takes up two cans of nitro-9, slaps them onto the jammed door, and informs everyone that they’ve got eight seconds. “Last one out’s a gooey mess!”
The explosion is a bit less creative act and a bit more whollop, easily taking out the door and the ice. Ace is delighted, calling out her self-referential catchphrase. Mel’s reaction is more enthusiastic than one might expect from her earlier attempts at being Ace’s responsible adult-guardian-figure.
When Belazs decides to sneak into the Forbidden Zone to check out Kane we find out the dude’s target blood temperature is -193 Celsius and that the purpose of that ice coffin is to keep him properly chilled.
Kane gets woken up, and she informs him emergency services has been missing ever since they went to check out that ice jam problem. Kane sends her to check it out.
The Doctor and Glitz, meanwhile, have finally made some progress. They’ve reached the “Singing Trees” which turn out to be a bunch of stalactites that apparently look like willow trees, I remain unconvinced. The Doctor points out the crystals have some technobabble in them, which means this whole place was built as opposed to forming naturally.
Belazs decides to arrest Ace and Mel for doing emergency service’s work, taking them both directly to Kane for this great injustice. Kane, however, takes quite a bit of interest in the teenage explosives expert. He draws a parallel between Ace and Belazs, defiant young women with no home to go back to and no hope for a future, and he offers her a place in his elite mercenary team.
Ace is puts up a fight until he offers her the chance to see the twelve galaxies. “The diamond sparkle of meteorite showers. The rainbow flashes of an ion storm.” He offers her a real home, and claims he understands her like no one else possibly could. The only thing she needs to do is take a hold of his golden coin, which we see has the same mark on it that’s on Belazs’s palm. Mel tries to warn Ace away from him and almost gets thrown into the freezer for it.
Ace nearly gives in, but at the last possible second slaps the coin away and pulls out another can of nitro-9. She holds it up, with the implication being that she’s perfectly willing to blow herself up and take everyone out with her unless they let Mel go.
Kane’s only slightly miffed by this rebuttal “You stupid girl! Do you think it’s that easy to walk away from me?”
Ace fires back with another one of her most iconic lines, “Do you feel like arguing with a can of deodorant that registers nine on the richter scale?”
Which, seems to be Ace’s reasoning for naming her invented explosive nitro-9. She and Mel both book it out of there and Kane, being a sporting man, stands around and gives them a head start on their escape. Ace and Mel get lost down in the lower levels, which causes Mel to get just a touch worried. This is, after all, where the dragon is supposed to be. Ace brushes it off saying it’s all fairy tales meant to scare little kids. Her bravado doesn’t last very long, since the dragon shows up right on cue. Or rather, a chinese bootleg xenomorph does.
Instead of letting us see Ace follow in Ripley’s footsteps and find herself a flamethrower or a power loader, we get to check in on the Doctor and how he’s doing.
….Well, I mean we’ve all been there.
And with the Doctor putting himself in the precarious position of dangling over an abyss by his umbrella, we’re left with a very literal cliffhanger for the end of the first part of Dragonfire. Of all the questions raised in this episode, why the Doctor climbed over perfectly safe railing is the most important. While I have for the most part refrained from offering much information from outside the episode itself, it feels right to spend just a bit of time discussing the most (in)famous scene of the entire serial. You’ll be happy to know there are quite a few answers to choose from in the wide, confusing canon of Doctor Who. The original script explains that he’d hit a dead end, and had no choice but to scale the sheer cliff face. The novelisation says he was trying to reach a lower ledge and slipped. A more recent episode of the show, The Name of the Doctor, blamed it all on The Great Intelligence. But the best explanation comes from Ace herself, Sophie Aldred, “It’s a cliff, it’s a cliff-hanger, it’s Sylvester McCoy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmNXj2W7yw4?
Next week we’ll be covering the second episode, and I’ll reserve most of my proper commentary and review until after all three have been looked at. But I think it’s safe to say the serial’s off to a great, charmingly hammy, start. I’ll leave you with two things that I’m going to be keeping track of during this trip around the twelve galaxies. Two vital pieces of Ace’s character as a whole. Ace’s Hip and Relevant Youth Slang and what she is carrying in those massive bomber jacket pockets.
The Ace-to-English Guide
Ace – Exclamation. Often used to express joy.
“Nonsense, Glitz. Time for a quick adventure then back for tea.”
“Ace!”
Birdbath – Noun. An insult emphasizing a person’s thickheadedness.
“I know what unimpeachable means, birdbath, but what makes you so certain this map’s pedigree is twenty four carat?”
Brill – Adjective. Denotes something is worth a lot of street cred.
“I was doing this brill experiment to extract nitroglycerin from gelignite, but I think something must have gone wrong.”
Bilge bag – Noun. Someone who is distinctly lacking in refinement or manners.
“Right, you male chauvinist bilge bag, just you wait.”
“Gets up my nostrils” – A phrase denoting that someone or something has caused agitation.
“He really gets up my nostrils, that Glitz.”
Div – Noun. Short for “divider” the lowest job a prison inmate could get. Commonly used as an insult.
“No. He’s a grade A hundred percent div, that’s what he is. Underneath.”
“Gordon Bennett” – Exclamation. A phrase used to show surprise and/or disbelief which is a reference to James Gordon Bennett Jr.
“Gordon Bennett, what a bunch of Spocks. They’ll never get it open at that rate.”
Spock – Noun. An insult of mysterious origin, possible reference to the Star Trek character or a derivative of jock. Often used in conjunction with “Gordon Bennett.” See above.
What’s Ace Carrying Today?
As you might expect from a kid who wears a bomber jacket and also carries around a backpack, Ace is a veritable swiss army knife. The entry won’t be terribly interesting today since we’re just getting started.
- She only has her standard nitro-9 in this episode.
- If you factor in the novelisation, her stuffed dog Wayne is added into the bag.
Nicole Petit
Latest posts by Nicole Petit (see all)
- This is Space Stuff. Pay Attention! - The Coolest Guide to Dragonfire Part 3 - November 2, 2017
- This is Space Stuff. Pay Attention! - The Well Brill Guide to Dragonfire Part 2 - October 24, 2017
- This is Space Stuff. Pay Attention! - The Raddest Guide to Dragonfire Part 1 - October 16, 2017