Monday, April 18, 2011

Target: Planet of Fire

Peter Grimwade returns for this one, making many changes to dialogue and scene positioning. As usual in such cases I shall note only the ones which I think significantly alter our impression of the story.

He opens by contrasting the two shipwrecks - the Greek vessel and the Trion prison ship.

We're then straight to the TARDIS console room. Turlough suggests a holiday to cheer him and the Doctor up: the Doctor's not keen, because his holiday in Brighton led to 'unutterable chaos.' Mention of Brighton causes Turlough to remember a depressing visit to Weston-Super-Mare with the Ibbotsons one wet half-term. (Do public schools have half-term?) The disturbing phrase 'Mrs Ibbotson's weeping lettuce sandwiches' is used. No wonder Ibbotson was sick on the way back.

Kamelion's wails of pain introduce the first of several disparaging references. The Doctor has quite forgotten about him: 'the obsequious automaton had none of the cheerful loyalty of K9 and the Doctor always felt uncomfortable in the presence of this tin-pot Jeeves.' Making the Doctor a channel for meta-criticism is a dangerous path for an author, but that's a good comparison with K9.

The first archaeology scene is inserted here. (The intercuts between island and TARDIS are all at different points). Howard likes Peri, even finds her attractive, but they always end up arguing. There's some wince-worthy American characterisation for Peri: she rummages through a box of finds 'as carelessly as if it had been a pile of records in Bloomingdale's music department.'

Back to the Kamelion hate: he speaks with 'the bland, almost insolent, indifference of a speak-your-weight machine.' But the 'contact must be made' bit is thought, not spoken - it's made clear to us from the start that he's up to something.

The TARDIS materialises on the island 'as if to police some outpost of the Empire'.

When Peri comes to say goodbye, she gives Howard 'one of her Shirley Temple smiles'. I'm getting quite an unpleasant picture of this relationship. She goes on to remind him that he's 41 next birthday, like me. Incidentally, one of her rules is never to trust a man with a toupee (this is in relation to a certain Doc Corfield).

There are various extra bits of Kamelion dialogue, including one where he warns Turlough about getting sunburnt (Turlough interprets this as a threat). He only says 'You're finished!', and, having immobilised him, drags him away and dumps him 'like a pile of scrap'. There's no 'Earthlings!' comment when he sees Peri on the scanner.

The comedy with the alien coins and the waiter is omitted. It's beer that the Doctor was drinking, by the way.

It's not until Howard/Kamelion and Peri have both arrived in the console room that we first join the action on Sarn. The Sarn scenes are again intercut differently with the other action. Malkon is repeatedly described as a 'young boy' and a child, which don't seem accurate descriptions of the young man we see on screen. And later on he's a 'teenager'.

Turlough used to imagine Sarn when reading Dante at school with Mr Sellick.

The kick Peri gives Howard/Kamelion in the TARDIS 'would have repulsed a Globetrotter.'

Peri sees Master/Kamelion approaching her through the telescope. (It wouldn't focus that close.) She tells him 'Negative!' when he says she must obey him, because, having been brought up on a college campus, she's quite used to dealing with 'pompous little men who stamped their feet and behaved like spoilt children.' When he tells her to be reasonable, he's intriguingly described as adding 'an instant smile like a dab of lipstick.'

The Doctor quotes Paradise Lost at Turlough as they walk across Sarn, but Turlough isn't keen. Dante may have been on the curriculum at Brendon, but not Milton apparently.

The Doctor and Turlough are met by Amyand because he and Sorasta saw them coming on a scanner, which Roskal has worked out how to operate by trial and error (shades of State of Decay here).

Turlough doesn't like the Doctor's suggestion that they rescue the Sarns in the TARDIS. 'We can't turn the TARDIS into an orbiting refugee camp,' he says. The Doctor calls him a 'little racialist' and thinks that Tegan was right to say he was a nasty piece of work.

The Doctor wishes, on two different occasions, that he hadn't left 'Howard' in the TARDIS, because he would have appreciated the architecture of the Sarn city.

Peri says the volcano machinery is like Houston Control. Turlough says it's hardly that crude. He crosses his fingers when he turns the gas off.

When Turlough declares himself as the Chosen One, the gesture that he gives to display the Misos Triangle is described as a Nazi-style salute, which goes well with the 'racialist' accusation earlier.

Peri thinks the fire cavern is like the Hall of the Mountain King - 'or at least his boiler room.'

The blue flame reminds the Doctor of the blue flame guarded by the Sisterhood of Karn, and he suspects that numismaton's healing properties work in the same way. Wasn't the Sacred Flame more red and yellow?

The Master is in his 14th incarnation. There's some good stuff from his miniaturised point of view about Peri's 'hammer heels' and her deadly shoe. The thought of being defeated by an Earthling - 'an American even' - is particularly humiliating for him.

Turlough's 'into the Tardis! Quickly!' is expanded into an extended rant at the Elders. He enjoys thus 'playing the little nabob.'

The thunderous noise of the volcano is described as 'ophicleide'. (That's a kind of bugle apparently.)

The Doctor explains the purpose of the Trion visits to Amyand: volcano control, and supplies for the descendants of the colonists. They stopped, he thinks, because of 'cuts'.

There's a suggestion that the Master's TCE would not be fatal to a Time Lord (tell that to the cameraman in Deadly Assassin).

Amyand keeps the thermal suit on when he returns to the Hall of Fire because the catch on the helmet is stuck, and he can't get it off. So his Logar impression is accidental, and he doesn't do the 'So much for Logar' reveal.

The Master doesn't say 'to your own...' just before he disappears. The Doctor suffers greatly from having to kill (?) him. We're told he'd never before inflicted such pain on anyone, 'nor ever would again.'

The departing Turlough thinks that Peri will make an admirable companion. He walks 'smartly' to the transporter, a hint that he's returning to Trion military service? He turns 'without a wave'.

And we're left without the final TARDIS scene.

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