N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!
Seriously, how good is Peter Wyngarde in Planet of Fire!
In truth it’s a story I remember little of other than — somewhat shamefacedly I have to admit — a gratuitous cleavage shot.
But watching it again I’m reminded how Wyngarde as Timanov is head and shoulders above pretty much everything else in this story. Even a small moment such as his desperation for a sign from Logar is wonderful.
Check out this clip on the Doctor Who YouTube channel and it showcases all that is good and bad with Planet of Fire. The ever-unreliable Kamelion, the glorious location footage, said moment of Timanov’s despair and relief, and of course the afore-mentioned camera lingering over Peri in a bikini. (Ah, the 80’s!)
“I’m Perpugilliam Brown and I can shout just as loud as you can.”
Peri, Planet of Fire: Part Two
It’s otherwise a pretty good introductory story for Peri (even if she does forget how to swim), for one showing she’s not going to take any shit off the Master.
And it’s a strong final story for Turlough too, whose people we finally meet and who finally gets to go home. We also get an explanation of who that ‘eccentric solicitor in Chancery Lane’ who paid all of Turlough’s school fees was. (Spoiler: a Trion agent.) I also liked how Turlough had come to regard an English public school as ‘the worst place in the universe’. Lofty praise indeed from a man who’s travelled the galaxies.
But Peri and Turlough, the superb location footage and Peter Wyngarde for me aren’t enough to lift Planet of Fire above the average story. It’s not terrible, but as with much of season twenty-one to date, it’s not great either.
As part of my mopping-up of the DVD extras I hadn’t yet watched, I gave the Planet of Fire: Special Edition disc a viewing.
Whether the effects are any more special is debatable and the chopping of the aspect ratio from 4:3 to 16:9 is as unsatisfying as you would expect, but the real interest for me lay in whether the increase in pace, made by cutting out more than 20 minutes of material, improved things.
In some ways it does — there’s little fat on the meat here and plot-wise it all still makes sense. There does seems to be a lot less of Peri’s stepfather Howard in this version, but I’m not going to credit my memory of watching it in late 2019 with filling in all of the gaps!
As with the omnibus edit of Genesis of the Daleks, it reminded me of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and how the Grindhouse cut of that movie — almost half an hour shorter — is in many ways the more enjoyable edit. That said, I’m probably more of a traditionalist when it comes to Doctor Who and, while the Special Edition suggests Planet of Fire would have worked perfectly well as a three-part story back in 1984, all things considered, I prefer the original version — with its 80’s pacing and episode cliffhangers intact.
