Planet of Fire

I have a mixed-up memory of Turlough stalking through the corridors of the TARDIS following the sound of Kamelion playing his lute. Looking back, the memory probably came from "Planet of Fire", with bits of "The Kings Demons" thrown in for good measure. There's an odd, unfamiliar feeling to watching the latter story today, as the outset intrudes upon a TARDIS team we never really saw in action.

There's an ironic, almost funny feel about the way Kamelion is brought back to be got rid of. One imagines JNT's tactic to be akin to someone who wakes up the morning after the party with an unwelcome bed-companion to get rid of. Kamelion was the nice-idea-at-the-time Season 20 gatecrasher, who was quickly abandoned in the cold morning light of the next years scripts. You can't blame them of course, as Doctor Who's tight filming deadlines simply couldn't accommodate a clumsy robot who no-one knew how to program. But he still could have worked.

The proof is in "Planet of Fire", in which we hardly see Kamelion in his robot guise at all. His impersonations of Dallas Adams and the Master required few special effects outside a pair of silver marigolds and a twinkly video treatment, yet provided the same tension, an aura that one of the Doctors good companions may be working against him, that it had taken an ambitious trilogy of stories to establish the previous year with Turlough. And with Kamelion, there was no need for all that anguishing over a glowing crystal, or coming good at the end of it. The key to Kamelion is that he is a tool, not living, and was never really on anybody's side.

The addition of Kamelion also allows the narrative to easily leap through hoops it couldn't have otherwise; the Master infiltrates the TARDIS despite being trapped in miniaturised form, and Peri is fooled by his guise as Howard. What fun could have been had in the future, for example, in having a disguised Kamelion lure one of the regular companions outside the ship at the start of the story? Better still, he could have provided a less cumbersome means to getting an old Doctor back in the next seasons "The Two Doctors" by simply having him adopting the guise of one of the Time Lords past selves to fool Chessene and the Sontarans. Or perhaps he could have allowed the Doctor to play Sharez Jek at his own game of Androids in "The Caves of Androzani". The possibilities are endless, and no need to ever use that rubbish silver prop again either. A new actor could have been hired to portray Kamelion's "human" form, which he would be ordered to adopt during downtime for the comfort of his shipmates.

It seems strange that JNT even contemplated inventing Kamelion, given his earlier axing of both K9 and the Sonic Screwdriver on the grounds that they limited writers of the series, let alone then dumping him for the very same reason. The blindness in the assumption that these devices limit, rather than inspire good stories, deserves a topic all of its own, but Kamelion was a companion with arguably less baggage or plot conundrums than Turlough, Nyssa or the continuity-buggering Mel. One suspects that like the good engineers on a doomed project, Kamelion was banished simply to clear away any reminder of his troublesome history. A pity, because of all the companion contrivances in the eighties, he was certainly the most interesting.