Day 246 — September 3rd 2021
The Pirate Planet Parts One and Two
The Pirate Planet — Part One
The biggest problem with the design work in The Ribos Operation being so strong — and opening the entire season with those lovely sets — is that everything which follows needs to live up to the same high standards. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that The Pirate Planet doesn’t manage it.
Now that’s probably unfair. I think the entire point is that the parts of the city we see are a bit plain and boring — they’re supposed to be entirely unremarkable, to make the idea of diamonds raining from the sky seem all the more incongruous. The problem is that trying to make a place look boring means that it does just that; it looks boring. There’s some decent scale to the courtyard set here, and some shots really show that off with Tom Baker pratting around in the back of the shot while Romana gets on with the job in the foreground, but the size of the sets don’t mean anything because there’s almost nothing to look at.
Even when we do get the big idea — that this is a world where precious jewels rain from the skies as a regular occurrence — it’s represented on screen by a handful of gems clustered together at one edge of the set. If you really want to make the idea work, you need the buildings to look as though they’re falling down, totally dilapidated, and then you need mounds of jewels piled up against them as though they’ve been swept out of the way like snow. It’s an idea which could work really well, but I don’t think has translated to screen at all. It doesn’t help that the model shot of the city isn’t the strongest we’ve ever seen, either.
There’s other elements which all come into the mix, too, and add to the sense of this not working. When the Mentiads begin their walk towards the city they cross some lovely open countryside, and even take part in a battle against the Captain’s soldiers. It’s a decent enough location and it feels nicely different to any others that we’ve had recently… but it bears almost no relation to the rest of the planet. I know we’ve seen the Citadel atop a mountain and this is clearly supposed to be the base of it, but it feels so disconnected to the rest of the places we’ve seen that it really threw me.
I’m fairly sure that this is one of the first times we’ve seen the suggestion that there’s nothing actually wrong with the TARDIS, and that it’s simply the case that Doctor Who doesn’t know how to fly the ship. His botched landing here was caused by the events of the story rather than his own incompetence, but it’s telling that when Romana tries to do things ‘by the book’ she manages a perfect landing first time. The series tends to be a little inconsistent about how much control our hero has over the TARDIS, so it’ll be interesting to see how that changes from here on.
Romana gets a great episode on the whole, from piloting the ship to taking the lead once they’re out in the city — the sequence in which Doctor Who tries and fails to attract anyone’s attention is brilliant, and I love K9’s observation that Romana has more luck because ‘she is prettier than you’. This new model of K9 has had a bit of a personality upgrade and I’m really enjoying it. He’s significantly quieter than the one they used last season, too, which helps massively.
I love Romana offering someone a Jelly Baby, and I can’t help wondering if we’ve missed a few ‘false-start’ adventures between Ribos and here, because she seems to have gotten a handle on Doctor Who pretty quickly. She also gets to be involved in the best exchange of the episode, and one which would usually be reserved only for Doctor Who himself;
Guard: ‘This is a forbidden object.’
Romana: ‘Why?’
Guard: ‘That is a forbidden question! You are a stranger?’
Romana: ‘Well, yes.’
Guard: ‘Strangers are forbidden.’
Romana: ‘I came with the Doctor.’
Guard: ‘Who is…’
Romana: ‘Don’t tell me. Doctors are forbidden as well.’
On the whole this one hasn’t done an awful lot for me, and I think I’m going in with a 4/10.
The Pirate Planet — Part Two
We’ve got even more examples of the planet just not feeling like a cohesive place in this episode, and I think it’s proving a real barrier to my enjoyment of the story. There’s a point about two-thirds of the way through here where Doctor Who and his friends make their way to the forbidden mine and we’re treated to a shot of the equipment. I genuinely thought I’d pressed the wrong button on the remote and switched over to some other programme. It just feels so out of place to cut from the high-tech environs of the Captain’s bridge to the kind of location where they filmed The Green Death. As with the shots of the hillside yesterday, this location feels like it bears no relation to anywhere else, and that makes the whole thing feel choppy.
When we go down the shaft and into the caverns below the surface we encounter another problem with the location work — it just doesn’t do justice to the size of the ideas in this story. The planet they’re on is hollow in the middle, and has materialised around another planet. That’s an incredible idea. People say that Douglas Adams was a genius, and it’s ideas like this which make me suspect they’re right. It’s nothing the programme could have ever thought of before he came along.
And yet, they’ve filmed this big revelation… in a boring old cave. The rock on the ground matches the rock on the walls and the roof of the cave, so it never feels like you’re looking at two different planets squished together. Realistically, this needed to be filmed in a proper gigantic cavern, where you can’t see the join between the floor and the roof. And then you need to get in a snow machine to cover the ground and make it look completely different. I can imagine this scene played out on the big screen, where you watch the lift descending through blackness to the planet below, and it looks incredible. Sadly Doctor Who’s TV budget in 1978 just won’t stretch.
It’s not all bad location work, though. They’ve filmed the engine room in a power station and that looks incredible. When we went to a similar place in The Hand of Fear I whined on for days about not being allowed to get a real sense of the size of the location — that’s not an issue here. We get some fantastic shots looking down at our heroes who feel like they’re a million miles away from us, and it’s genuinely exciting. There’s even bits of the location (the colour of the various bits of equipment) which tie in with the set of the Bridge, and it’s the first sign we’ve had of the designer trying to make a consistent world. It’s only a shame that we don’t spend long enough in this place to really appreciate it. I’d have happily given up all the caves and hillsides for more time in the engine room.
Aside from big ideas, the other thing Douglas Adams is known for is comedy, and this episode is trying very hard to be funny. And I think that’s why I’m not laughing at it — it feels like it’s trying too hard. There’s an element in the script here of trying thinking it’s terribly funny and terribly clever, but it’s coming across as more show-offy than entertaining. Take Doctor Who’s joke about working things out;
Romana: ‘But how? How did you know?’
Doctor Who: ‘Well, I just put 1.795372 and 2.204628 together.’
Romana: ‘And what does that make?’
Doctor Who: ‘Four!’
Romana: ‘Four!’
It’s technically quite a funny joke, and I rather like the idea of Doctor Who being deliberately obtuse and overcomplicating a common phrase, but there’s something about it which ends up just being incredibly clunky. The numbers just go on too long and it drains the pace from the scene, killing the comedy stone dead. See also Doctor Who’s comment when he’s being launched down a corridor at great speed;
Doctor Who: ‘I’ll never be cruel to an electron in a particle accelerator again!’
It just feels more like someone trying to be clever than actually funny, and little moments like that haven’t worked for me in the slightest, I’m sorry to say. It’s a 1.795372/10 and a 2.204628/10 for this one.
