Day 121 — May 1st 2021
The Space Pirates Episodes One and Two
The Space Pirates — Episode One
Poor unloved The Space Pirates. It lacks the excitement of bringing the Ice Warriors back or being Troughton’s final Doctor Who story. Even the fact that it’s the last of the ‘missing’ stories isn’t enough to make it very popular — indeed, it usually languishes somewhere towards the bottom of people’s lists of ‘most wanted’ recoveries. When the rumours abounded about the return of episodes from Galaxy 4 and The Underwater Menace in 2011 — two other fairly ‘unloved’ stories — there was a general air of ‘at least it’s not episodes from The Space Pirates…’.
During my last marathon, I broadly stuck to the rule of doing one episode a day, but I’ll admit here that I binged all of The Space Pirates in a single afternoon. It wasn’t because I was enjoying it so much that I couldn’t wait to move on, it was because I wanted to get it out of the way. I’d endured weeks of friends saying ‘You’ve got a week of The Space Pirates coming up, and that might bring a halt to the entire project’.
I can’t remember much of what I thought at the time, but I know I decided that it wasn’t as awful as I’d expected. I’ve a vague memory of something to do with tuning forks and drawing pins, so I’ll be interested to see how they play into proceedings later on. This time around I’m sticking to my system of only doing a couple of episodes a day. I survived the likes of The Web Planet and The Wheel in Space at that pace, so I can survive this.
Bloody hell, though, this opening episode is slow, isn’t it? I seem to have said that about several stories this season, but it’s perhaps never been truer here. There’s a pace to this which isn’t so much leisurely as it is stationary. The TARDIS doesn’t even rock up until 15 minutes in, and it’s another 30 seconds before our heroes emerge from it. I think I’m right in saying that this is the longest it ever takes for Doctor Who to arrive in a story, and I can’t help but feel it might have helped things along had he shown up sooner.
The quarter of an hour we have to sit through before he appears doesn’t help itself by being especially slow and tedious. We’re treated to a load of exposition, mostly. There’s a point where NAME turns on a microphone and gives an address to the crew of his ship which is almost pure exposition, and being on audio here it has the curious effect of sounding like the opening narration to an old radio serial;
‘Attention all personnel. This is General Hermack. Your V-ship is now fifty days and many billions of miles out from Earth. You’re entering the fourth sector of our galaxy. In this sector for some time now, Earth Government has been aware that a highly organised gang of criminals have been roaming the space ways, and preying upon defenceless cargo ships. The main target of these criminals is argonite, the most valuable mineral known to man and so far only found on the planets of the Fourth Sector. A government space beacon marking the approaches to the planet New Sarum has ceased transmitting its navigation signal. These beacons, as you know, are constructed of argonite. It is my belief that the criminals are attacking the government navigation beacons and plundering the argonite. There can be no other explanation for its failure. This being the case, I have decided to abandon our present mission and to investigate the missing beacon in the New Sarum sector. I want all section commanders on the bridge at twenty hundred hours sector four solar time. Resume normal duties until then.’
And it doesn’t stop there. Because they’re trying to set everything up you get characters talking in ways that are so unnatural as to sound like nothing more than they are — functional;
Hermack: ‘Now this planet Ta is the main one in the system. We’ll orbit here for a few weeks and see what happens.’
Warne: ‘So that’s Ta, huh?’
Hermack: ‘You’ve heard of it?’
Warne: ‘Yeah. It’s the head quarters of the Issigri Mining Corporation. The most productive planet in the entire galaxy.’
It stands out as especially bad coming directly after The Seeds of Death, where almost all the characters were fully rounded individuals that felt totally real. Robert Holmes is rightly praised for his characters in Doctor Who, but I think it’s fair to say that no one is thinking of this story when they do that.
I listened to this story in the car, so didn’t get to watch the surviving footage on the Lost in Time DVD until I got back home. This is an episode which massively suffers from being missing. There’s some great model work on show in the surviving clips, and the astronauts on the outside of the beacon look genuinely brilliant. I was actually a bit surprised by how well-done that sequence was, if I’m honest.
I don’t think it’s enough, though. It certainly enhanced my opinion of the episode in retrospect, but even these sequences are slow. They come during a couple of lengthy dialogue-free sections of the story, too, which only serve to make things drag on a little more. At least when The Seeds of Death went dialogue free it gave us some arresting incidental music to cover the gap! Here we’re treated mostly to silence, presumably in an attempt to make space feel more ‘real’.
I think I’m going to have to go in low for this one, with a 2/10 right off the bat. I feel as though I’m not really giving the episode a chance, and that the great sequences we can see deserve to pull the score up a bit, but I just can’t forgive being so bored while watching Doctor Who.
The Space Pirates — Episode Two
This is my last ‘orphan’ episode of the marathon. From the next time we get to see an episode moving, it’ll be all complete in the archives right through to the end of the year. That’s quite an exciting prospect.
Less exiting is this episode, sadly. I was hoping that being able to actually watch the story would give things a boost, but sadly not. Indeed, I think it’s actively a shame that we’ve got this episode instead of the first one. I mean for starters it’s an episode of The Space Pirates which doesn’t actually have any pirates in it…
A side note here; there’s something ironic about the fact that the penultimate adventures for the first two Doctor Whos — The Smugglers and this one — both feature pirates. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated that fact before. I love a little coincidence like that. See also Michael Furgeson directing the third-to-last stories of the first two Doctor Whos (and no others in those eras), and the penultimate stories of both the second and third Doctor Whos featuring Donald Gee in the guest cast…
Being able to see this episode does reveal something interesting; the title, author credit, and episode number are all rendered as black text on a white background, which I think is a first in this story? We’re in another era where they’re trying interesting new things with the titles — The Seeds of Death is overlaid on specially shot model work of the Earth and Moon, while The War Games will go all out with guns and explosions.
Unfortunately, being able to see this one also reveals just how silly the costumes look almost across the board. It’s strange how some of Martin Baugh’s more ‘out there’ space costumes in Season Five seem to work in a retro kind of way, while these just feel like cheap science fiction nonsense.
I’m particularly not a fan of the big collars which I guarantee would do your head in if you had to wear them as a uniform every day.
And don’t even get me started on Madeline’s big metallic wig. I’m amazed that wasn’t cast aside during camera rehearsals. Watching it now it has the unfortunate effect of reminding me of the ivory headpiece worn by a character in Community, although there you’re supposed to know it’s meant to look stupid.
The sets don’t fare much better — when we first see inside the bridge of V41-LO we get an impressive display screen featuring back-projection and it looks great. I even made a note to say how good that set was, using levels again which is something I praised in the last story. But then when they need to look at another screen there’s been no attempt to make it fit in with the set — they’ve just plonked a contemporary television on a table and left it there. It takes you completely out of the story.
It’s not all bad, though. This episode also sees the introduction of Milo Clancy. I’m fairly sure he comes in for a bit of stick in Doctor Who fandom, usually decried as being silly and over the top. But I have to confess that I love him, and he injects some much needed humour and lightness into a story which is otherwise taking itself far too seriously. I’m especially fond of his line while cooking his breakfast — ‘Rubbishy new-fangled solar toasters!’ — and plan to start saying that in the mornings from now on.
Clancy is the only source of lightness in this episode, though. Even Doctor Who is unusually morose today, with Troughton playing the part as though he’s exhausted and has given up. There’s a point where he tells Zoe not to be so pessimistic which I’d usually expect him to play as a bit funny but here it’s delivered dead straight. I’m glad he didn’t play the part like this every week, or I suspect he’d be lower down on people’s list of favourites.
A 3/10 for this one — and only that high because Clancy has genuinely brightened my day.
Oh, and one last thing to note here — Doctor Who’s gone back to using a regular screwdriver instead of his Sonic one. That surprised me a bit, given that it’ll be popping up again in the next adventure.
