Planet of Fire

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Planet of Fire

Author	Peter Grimwade
Published	1985
ISBN	0 426 19940 5
First Edition Cover	Andrew Skilleter

Back cover blurb: The Doctor is enjoying the sun on a holiday island - but things are soon hotter than he bargained for. The young American Perpugilliam Brown brings to the TARDIS a mysterious object that her archaeologist step-father has found in a sunken wreck. Kamelion, the Doctor's robot friend of a thousand disguises, reacts to the object totally unexpectedly, with bewildering consequences for the TARDIS crew. For Kamelion sends the Doctor and his friends to Sarn, a terrifyingly beautiful planet of fire. This strange world provides the key to Turlough's secret past - and once again the Doctor is pitted against the wily Master.

• Turlough's Song by Jason A. Miller

Turlough's Song by Jason A. Miller 4/7/23

The opening chapter of Planet of Fire is basically a short story telling the interlinked fates of two shipwrecks. A Greek trireme of antiquity, bearing a precious cargo of fine art and slaves, capsizes in a storm off a tropical island, with a merchant clinging to his valuable kouros as it's lost beneath the waves. And a starship, also carrying a precious cargo of slaves, is brought down by a magnetic storm over the planet Sarn, but not before letting loose a rescue beacon into the stars. On board the ship is the father and baby brother of one Vislor Turlough. We, the reader, know that both the kouros and the rescue beacon will wind up commingled on the ocean bed off the isle of Lanzarote, but Grimwade match-cutting the two shipwrecks (neither of which were show on screen) is a minor thing of beauty.

Planet of Fire on TV suffers a bit from being a "nightmare brief" story; every week, Peter Grimwade had some new demand thrust upon his in-progress scripts. It's meant to be Turlough's final story, wrapping up his mystery-boy arc and sending him out on a high note. But wait! You also have to write out Kamelion! ("Who the @#$! is Kamelion?", one can imagine Grimwade asking). And we need a new companion -- an American, so JNT can have someone to show off at US conventions ("Why does Peri sound Australian, then?", one can imagine Grimwade asking). And you need to include the Master! Oh, and you have to set 25 minutes of outdoor footage on Lanzarote, where the author had never even been.

In the book, though, Grimwade makes all this work, as if he'd conceived of every story strand himself. His prose is remarkably good. He's devoid of the run-on sentences that tended to plague Target books not written by Terrance Dicks. He always finds terrific vocabulary words (Kamelion, "the aristocrat of automata", here uses the word "inexactitude"; the words nabob and Grand Panjandrum both appear). His prose deftly weaves in little continuity references -- in Chapter 2 we get a reference to The Leisure Hive and a lengthy eulogy (simultaneously fond and sarcastic) to the just-departed Tegan. The similar plot of The Brain of Morbius is openly acknowledged, and Grimwade quotes directly from Logopolis, which he directed, in describing the mini-Master as "cut down to size". Grimwade calls back to K9 and his "cheerful loyalty", against which Kamelion ("this tin-pot Jeeves") is negatively compared. TV dialogue is converted into prose and internal thought processes, a technique well used by Christopher H. Bidmead in the past.

And Grimwade is just funny -- the Doctor "viewed the prospect of a vacation as only marginally less calamitous than the eruption of Krakatoa"; that's both a witty line, and it anticipates the volcanic plot. And a description of Timanov and his elders as "arthritic ayatollahs" is, frankly, a funny bit of alliteration and laugh-out-loud description that is criminally wasted in a book this short and out of print.

Grimwade dips back and forth among a dizzying array of POVs. Mindful that this is Turlough's book, we're clued in much earlier than on TV that Turlough is trying to avoid the Trion distress signal, still broadcasting across the years from the Greek trireme shipwreck off the African coast. What appeared to be random shiftiness in the early going on TV is all spelled out quite clearly in the book. We get a too-rare POV shot from inside Kamelion's head as he lies to the Doctor and can't figure out why. Timanov has a series of darkly comic complaints about his inexperienced Chosen One, and one of his acolytes has "a hearty dislike of all liberals and freethinkers" (that acolyte is now believed to be living on Earth and worked in the Donald Trump administration). Grimwade's Peri, with her memories of Bloomingdales and the Harlem Globetrotters, is far more American than Nicola Bryant ever was (the Master is more appalled to be defeated by an American than by an Earthling!). There is unbridled glee from the Master when he realizes he can exploit the superstitious elders of Sarn with their penchant for execution by burning and their laser-gun staffs. "Deification, he decided, was no more than his due."

And Professor Howard Foster is given the benefit of the doubt; we learn that he likes and respects his stepdaughter, Peri, even as their one conversation together craters into a bitter argument. Fandom has long suspected that Howard abused Peri when she was younger, but I honestly can't detect any of that from the text here. And the Doctor twice desires the archaeologist's presence on Sarn, long after the professor himself has been dismissed from the plot ("[Sarn] reminded him (the professor would surely have agreed) of the old Roman city of Ephesus"). You'd figure that Grimwade featured Foster more heavily in the original concept, with such lines as "Kamelion had enjoyed being Professor Foster. There was order, logic, and (as one would expect from the survivor of so many Faculty purges) a vein of pure ruthlessness", before all the added plot demands forced him to rewrite those scenes with other characters instead.

Grimwade gets style points for adding more ancient Greek flavor to the rest of the story, even though the Greek shipwreck is only the most minor of plot devices. Peri, momentarily stranded on a boat, is said to be madder "than Ariadne, abandoned on Naxos". A queue of Sarn citizens marches "like pious Athenians on the Sacred Way to the Acropolis". Beyond the Ancient Greeks, Turlough quotes briefly from Dante and at length from Paradise Lost, and Grimwade happily references two minor characters from his own Mawdryn Undead, Turlough's debut story. And the chapter titles are great, too: "A Very Uncivil Servant" is a witty introduction to Kamelion's first turn as the Master. And then there's this:

"When Moses came down the mountain to find the Israelites dancing around a golden calf, he must have looked something like Timanov as he strode through the Hall of Fire towards the impious stranger who was desecrating the precious relics. "Seize the enemy of Logar!" shouted the white-haired patriarch. "Arrest all Unbelievers!"

The action is somewhat slimmed down from TV. Back in the '80s you needed to film X percent of your story on location to justify the cost of a shoot, which resulted in a lot of langorous beauty shots of Lanzarote. Grimwade cuts most of that out, not even identifying Lanzarote by name, and simplifying business such as Turlough's short-shorts rescue of Peri, or the Doctor paying for his drink with alien currency. All the Sarn material from Part One is delayed for the book -- it opened the broadcast with five full minutes of location footage, all of which is moved back and regrouped into Chapter 4 here for better narrative flow. Grimwade adds a makeshift cemetery from the long-dead spaceship crash victims (including Turlough's family) and has Turlough weeping over it, a nice character moment that had been cut before filming.

There's lots of other added material, presumably cut TV dialogue restored for the book. There's more about Timanov having been an Unbeliever in his youth, and we get an explanation for why the Trions stopped visiting Sarn (even intergalactic empires have budget cuts, come to find out). Timanov gets a happy ending, which I prefer to Peter Wyngarde's stubborn exit on TV. We learn just what the Doctor is thinking as the Master dies, and the Master's ambiguous final line -- a Saward-penned overdub added in post-production -- on TV is not here and is not missed.

One of Grimwade's skills is to make humorous remarks about the story while keeping it serious, without descending into parody. Peri likens the volcano control room to the Hall of the Mountain King's boiler room, another genuinely funny line. On the other hand, Turlough displaying his criminal brand, sacred to Sarns, in what's described as a literal Nazi salute, is problematic for me. Speaking of Nazis, there's an intriguing look here at what Turlough might have become, had civil war not turned him into a political prisoner and exile. He's openly scornful of the egalitarian regime that ousted his family from power on Trion, leaving the Doctor to wonder "what sort of monster his companion would have become, had he continued to be brought up as the scion of an aristocratic ruling family".

For all the book's wit and narrative improvements and intelligent references (to Who continuity and Greek mythology), Grimwade got just one thing wrong, just one thing. As Turlough leaves the TARDIS forever, he reflects on newcomer Peri, "The cheery American would make an admirable companion". Um... We'll see about that.

We'll see about that, indeed.