“There’s no place for animosity on a serious scientific undertaking.”
Welcome back to the weekly installment of “This is Space Stuff. Pay Attention!” where I’ve been giving a tour of Ace’s appearances in Doctor Who. Last week I gave a rundown of the first episode of the serial Dragonfire, where an intergalactic hobo and his computer-whiz companion teamed up with a waitress and a smuggler to search for some dragon’s treasure to keep a spaceship from being repoed. This week we’re looking at the second episode of this three-parter.
Last we left off, the villains were giving our heroes a sporting chance to run off, Ace and Mel were being menaced by the dragon of Ice World, Glitz was nowhere to be found, and the Doctor was hanging off a cliff. We catch up with the gals first where Ace, getting over her initial shock, is fascinated by the dragon. Mel has to pull her away before she gets blasted by the dragon’s fi–laser beam. This is the thing that clues Ace into the fact that the alien might not be a dragon after all, as opposed to the fact that it’s human-sized and looks just a bit like a xenomorph.
Back with the Doctor, Glitz has finally arrived. He casually notifies the Doctor that he found the Ice Garden, but there was no sign of dragon or treasure. The Doctor has to do some yelling before Glitz is willing to risk his neck to pull him back up onto the platform.
A quick cut to our villains Kane and Belazs. It turns out the sporting chance has turned into a lecture session. Kane lectures Belazs for not searching Ace for deodorant cans that register nine on the richter scale. He drops a hint that he and Belazs might have had a thing at one time, but that’s ancient history now. More importantly, Ace and Mel must be killed–and quick, before they can get to the Doctor and Glitz. And to accomplish this Kane brings out Glitz’s former crew from deep freeze. It’s fitting, Kane notes, Glitz betrayed his crew and now they can get their revenge. “Everyone should be allowed his moment of revenge.”
While the mindless crew now march off to carry out Kane’s orders, Belazs turns on the tracking beacon hidden on the treasure map from before to listen in on the Doctor and Glitz. Turns out the drop wasn’t nearly as dangerous as it looked before, since Glitz has apparently found a convenient ledge immediately under the Doctor, and with a bit of flailing around manages to get him to safety. Glitz admits that this whole expedition is a bust. He plans to hijack the Nosferatu, but the Doctor isn’t interested. He wasn’t here to help Glitz out, really, he’s “engaged in a project of scientific curiosity.” In other words, he just really wants to see a dragon.
Glitz makes a deal with the Doctor, if he helps get the ship back Glitz will give him the map and they can go back to their treasure hunt. The Doctor agrees.
Meanwhile Kane has gone back to the Forbidden Zone to admire the hobo ice sculptor’s work. Turns out it wasn’t one of Sgt. Pepper’s band like I suspected, it’s based on an old crush of Kane’s named Xana. A criminal mastermind who was killed when the two of them broke out of the hoosegow.
After escaping the alien offscreen in what I am forced to believe was an action packed fight that involved Ace and a power loader, or at least a couple of cans of nitro-9, the two ladies find their way to the same cliff the Doctor “fell” off of. Mel’s thrilled to see the Doctor’s brolly (his umbrella for us colonials) and know they’re on the right track to finding him. Ace is not nearly as excited. “You’re joking…What did he have to come this way for? I could break my neck.”
Despite this complaint Ace quickly pulls out the kind of ladder specifically made for caving from her rucksack proving that she is more prepared for random weekly adventures than the Doctor himself usually is.
Speaking of the Doctor, Glitz gets him to distract the guard watching over the Nosferatu. He does so by asking him existential questions. The guard is a bit of a philosopher himself. The Doctor keeps him going for a bit as Glitz slips on past.
The guard, so enthusiastic about finding a fellow intellectual, corners the Doctor and asks, “Tell me, what do you think of the assertion that the semiotic thickness of a performed text varies according to the redundancy of auxiliary performance codes?”
According to the script editor (essentially, showrunner), Andrew Cartmel, this rather obtuse phrase was lifted out of a “very pretentious book about Doctor Who” he plucked off the shelf. It was tossed into the script as a bit of a joke. The Doctor answers this tongue twister of a question with a simple “Yes.”
Ace and Mel, meanwhile, have made their way to the bottom of the cliff and Ace makes fun of that old bilge bag Glitz for saying this adventure was too dangerous for girls.
Glitz, getting ready to take off with his ship, gets himself a rather unwelcome passenger, Belazs. Drawing her gun she declares that the ship is hers. Glitz protests that the 72 hours aren’t up yet so she’s breaking their arrangement. Which is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black at this point. The Doctor runs in and Belazs demands to know why he’s here, prompting him to ask why everyone on Ice World is so preoccupied with metaphysics.
Glitz asks if her boss is aware of her intent to steal his ship, and Belazs snaps back that Kane doesn’t own her. But the Doctor knows better. “Oh, I think he does. I think he bought you like he buys everything in Iceworld…I think he bought you a long time ago. He paid seventeen crowns for each of Glitz’s crew. How much did he pay for you? Was it worth it? Were you worth it?”
Belazs shows off Kane’s mark on her palm, the same mark Kane tried to convince Ace to take, and while she’s distracted Glitz takes her gun. “Go on then,” she says. “Kill me!” Glitz tries to convince the Doctor that they can make a break for it now, but the Doctor refuses. He tells Glitz he can’t keep on stealing everything he wants, he has to pay back his debt to Kane no matter what it costs. Then, with pity, turns his attention to Belazs and says he’s not sure she’ll ever be able to pay back hers.
Kane, meanwhile, is admiring the finished ice carving of his old flame. Turning up the melodrama he declares all of eternity has waited for this very moment. Personally I don’t think all of eternity is nearly as impressed with this work as it is with those ice sculptures people make with chainsaws.
Turns out Kane doesn’t really want anyone else knowing he commissioned a shrine to his crush so he tells the hobo sculptor to “Gaze on it and die fulfilled” as he freezes his face off.
As Mel and Ace get chased around by Glitz’s flash frozen crew, the Doctor and Glitz go back to searching for the dragon’s treasure. The Doctor gives the same kind of helpful directions I give whenever I’m in the role of road trip navigator, “I think we go straight on. Either that, or we don’t.”
Their wandering leads them straight into the dragon, who fires off a few lasers before they cut it off by slamming a bulkhead closed.
The dragon’s laser cuts right through it, and the Doctor surmises it must be generating heat well over 1500 Celsius. A rather specific estimate, which would seem to make sense at first since that’s the melting point of iron. However, iron loses its integrity well below that melting point and if the dragon had been shooting 1500 degree lasers the Doctor and Glitz would’ve jumped away from that door with a little more damage than burnt clothes.
On one hand the Doctor didn’t exactly pass the Time Lord Academy with flying colors, and has a long history of making things up as he goes along. On the other this show started out as a children’s educational program, and I think our children deserve a more accurate lesson on the heat levels required to melt bulkheads.
Mel gets a chance to use some of Ace’s nitro-9 on Glitz’s crew, and in doing so earns enough street cred to get one of those coveted Ace nicknames. Doughnut.
But they’re not in the clear yet. To their horror they discover even two cans of nitro can’t take out Kane’s mercs. As they make a break for it Mel slips and hits her head on the metal stairs. It’s not her fault, really, this is what happens when construction workers cut corners and make railing out of pvc pipe. Ace’s quick thinking saves them as she grabs Doughnut and hides under the stairs.
Glitz and the Doctor wait around to watch the dragon cut down the bulkhead instead of running off like sensible people. When Glitz tries to shoot it, the Doctor stops him, declaring “We have no right to kill!” The dragon doesn’t attack, instead it goes back where it came from. Glitz wonders why, and the Doctor suggests that maybe they should ask it.
Lando Calrissian meets up with Belazs and we find out his name is Kracauer. They both talk about how they sold themselves to Kane when they were younger. Belazs wants to fight back against Kane, Kracauer at first isn’t too sure about this. They knew what they were doing when they gave their lives to Kane, he argues. Belazs points out she was only sixteen, Kracauer responds that even at sixteen they had a choice. But Belazs’s plan wins him over, she knows that Kane has to frequently sleep in his refrigeration unit since even Ice World is too warm for his blood. They can sabotage him while he’s hibernating.
Ace and Mel, safe for the moment, decide to take a coffee break. We get more of Ace’s backstory in what is one of the best scenes in Dragonfire, and arguably one of Ace’s best monologues in the series.
“Do you know what I did for a job when they threw me out of school?…I worked as a waitress in a fast food cafe. Day in, day out, same boring routine. Some boring life. It was all wrong. It didn’t feel like me that was doing it at all. I felt like I’d fallen from another planet and landed in this strange girl’s body, but it wasn’t me at all. I was meant to be somewhere else. Each night I’d walk home and I’d look up at the stars through the gaps in the clouds, and I tried to imagine where I really came from. I dreamed that one day everything would come right. I’d be carried off back home, back to my real mum and dad. Then it actually happened and I ended up here. Ended up working as a waitress again, only this time I couldn’t dream about going nowhere else. There wasn’t nowhere else to go.”
Ace then asks if Mel would like to know a secret, something she’s never told anyone. Mel says of course, more than happy to let Ace pour her heart out some more. What she gets is Ace revealing that her real name is Dorothy, and that’s how she knew her parents couldn’t be her real mum and dad. No self respecting parent would pick such a naff name. Ace smirks and nudges Mel with her elbow, revealing it as a just a bit of ribbing after so much serious talk.
Coffee break over, they finally catch up with the Doctor and Glitz. The Doctor is thrilled to see that Mel brought his umbrella, and has to stop Glitz from straight up punching a teenager after Ace calls him “bilge bag” again. No time for squabbling when there’s science to be done. And by science he means chatting with a dragon. Or rather, the Doctor specifies, “a semi-organic vertebrate with a highly developed cerebral cortex.” With laser beam eyes, Ace adds.
They get stopped by one of Glitz’s crew, who Glitz tries to talk out of killing them. But like Kane said in the first part, they can’t remember anything before being frozen. Well, unless they were really really angry about something. Like being sold for 17 crowns for instance. As the group back away from the man they don’t notice the dragon appear behind them.
Lucky for them the dragon’s on their side this time, taking out the merc with a well placed laser. It then beckons for them to follow.
Kracauer’s attempt at sabotaging Kane during his hibernation goes a bit sideways when he wakes up early. He’s severely weakened by the warmth, but he’s still got enough energy for another face melting. Angrier at the fact that his ice sculpture is melted than the assassination attempt, he decides to go have another talk with Belazs.
The dragon has lead the team back to the Singing Trees, where the Doctor discovered the technobabble in the crystals. It shoots some lasers at the crystals and more technobabble causes a hologram of Daphne Oxenford to pop up. For the Brits, they probably expected her to ask the Doctor and Co. “Are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin.” For us ignorant colonials, that’s not a WarGames reference. Daphne was one of the voices behind the long running radio program “Listen With Mother” which coined that famous phrase.
Daphne gives us some backstory via a planetary archive, Kane and Xana led a pretty brutal gang that terrorized the planet Proamon. Kane was exiled to the permanently frozen dark side of Svartos.
Speaking of Kane, he catches up with Belazs. After some soul searching he says he’s decided to let her go. She’s free to leave, and seek her fortune and happiness.
Just kidding he freezes her face off.
Honestly she probably should’ve seen that one coming.
Daphne finishes up her report by saying that Xana killed herself as the space police broke into their supervillain hideout to avoid arrest. Glitz wonders if this hologram is the real treasure. The Doctor thinks that can’t be the case, if the treasure is being protected from Kane it wouldn’t be somewhere he could find it so easily. The only thing that keeps him away is heat, the very same kind of heat the dragon produces. The Doctor surmises this means the dragon itself must be the treasure and he asks the dragon if he’s right. It’s head opens up, revealing a crystal.
Glitz notes the crystal must be worth a fortune, but the Doctor tells him to “look past the gold and gemstone.” The crystal is a powerful source of energy.
Kane listens to this all through the tracking beacon in the map. Then he looks straight into the camera and tells us:
“At last. After three thousand years, the Dragonfire shall be mine!”
Well, Kane’s three thousand years in a freezer doesn’t beat Rita’s ten thousand years in a dumpster but he’s still got a whole episode left to show her up. And that’s it for part two of Dragonfire!
The Ace to English Guide
Mega – Exclamation. Used in reference to something that is “wicked” or “brill.”
“Mega! That’s not a real dragon. That’s a laser beam.”
Shift – Verb. To get going as quickly as possible, as if to shift into a higher gear.
“I don’t believe it. Not after two cans of nitro. Nothing can survive that. Come on, Mel, shift!”
Naff – Adjective. Severely uncool.
“My real mum and dad would never have given me a naff name like Dorothy.”
What’s Ace Carrying Today?
- Once again proving that she is ready for every possible occasion Ace has got herself a caving ladder. Because of this fact I have no choice but to presume that Ace is a regular spelunker.
- She also has a huge thermos of coffee on hand at all times. So, she may have flunked out of school but she’s ready to be a college student.
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