Day 247 — September 4th 2021
The Pirate Planet Parts Three and Four
The Pirate Planet — Part Three
I think the only part of this story that I can hand on heart claim to be really enjoying is the Captain. He shouldn’t work — it’s another over-the-top performance like we had in the last story, but every time he appears on screen shouting I feel my attention being picked back up. It helps that he’s given so many brilliant turns of phrase, and I don’t think I’ve appreciated before just how quotable many of his lines are. There’s loads in here that I’m saying along with him and I couldn’t have told you I was able to do that.
The design of the character is brilliant, half robot half man, but I think it also shows up one of the problems I’m having with the current era — it all looks a bit cheap. His robot half looks like it’s made of plastic, and there’s points in this episode especially where it sounds like plastic when he’s moving around — smacking the arm down on the side of his chair is a particularly obvious example. I complained a lot yesterday about this story being filled with ideas they couldn’t have hoped to realise on screen, but this is something I’d have expected them to be better at.
I think I want there to be more pirate elements in this story, and that’s one of the reasons I’m enjoying the character so much. I love the Polyphase Avitron (and it’s a great effect which serves as a good example of CSO — nice to see after the disasters of last season) and it feels totally right that he should try to dispose of Doctor Who by making him walk the plank. I want more of this, and less of the technobabble nonsense, I think.
The Captain is also the beneficiary of the best lines in the story, and he’s the one area in which I’m finding myself laughing at the jokes where I’m supposed to. There’s lots of little moments in this one which stand out for me, and I think it’s the strongest the writing has been in the story so far. I’m particularly fond of the almost Shakespearian line ‘wag your tongue well, Doctor. It is the only weapon you have left’. As usual, Tom Baker is raising his game in response to a strong guest performance, and it’s wonderful watching the two of them square up, trying to out do each other in bluster. Their confrontation among the crushed planets is probably the most Baker has really ‘gone for it’ with his performance for years, and you get a real idea of the threat he’s facing. My favourite exchange between the two, though, comes as Doctor Who taunts the Captain while tied up;
Doctor Who: ‘Hard to listen, isn’t it, Captain, when someone’s got a finger on
a nerve. What is it you’re really up to? What do you want? You don’t want to
take over the universe, do you? No. You wouldn’t know what to do with it,
beyond shout at it.’
In spite of my love for the Captain, the rest of this story is still leaving me cold. I just don’t care about the Mentiads, the design in most areas continues to feel flat an uninspired, and I’m not sure I could claim to be actively enjoying the story. All things considered, it’s another 4/10.
The Pirate Planet — Part Four
There’s an exchange in Part Three which I think sums up one of my problems with The Pirate Planet rather nicely;
Doctor Who: ‘There must be something more to it than that…’
Kimus: ‘Even more?’
There’s so many ideas stuffed into this one, so much going on, that I’ve been struggling to keep up. You’ve got a planet which is able to teleport around the universe eating smaller worlds, a group of psychics, a half-robotic pirate captain, a collection of shrunken worlds on the point of collapsing into black holes, a dictator suspended in the final seconds of her life and another character who’s the same person as the dictator but also a digital projection and secretly running the show. There’s so much thrown in — with new ideas added all the time — that it’s all become a bit convoluted. I think you could stand to lose at least one element, and I think I’d go for dropping the Mentiads. They don’t add much to the story, and I think streamlining the narrative would make for a more enjoyable story.
Especially because I really like the idea of the old queen trying desperately to cling to life, and having created this elaborate scheme simply to do so. She’s only a casual throw-away mention in the first half of the story, so the fact that she’s so important later on feels a bit like it’s come from nowhere. Give me a simpler story about the oppressed population rising up against a dictator who’s enslaved them for centuries any day.
One of the things I really liked in here was the resolution to the cliffhanger. We end Part Three on a pretty cliched note, with the villains laughing evilly having disposed of Doctor Who. This one picks up by having Doctor Who join in with the laughter, and it’s a great reveal, especially given Tom Baker’s distinctive tones. It’s a great way of advancing the plot, too, by introducing us to the idea of the projector.
I like, too, that we genuinely feel sorry for the Captain by the end, having learnt that he’s been a puppet in all of this. It’s perhaps strange that we get a moment of him pining for his recently-killed right hand man and swearing vengeance in his final moments, given that we had an almost identical scene in the last story. I’d suggest that it’s a theme developing, but I suspect it’s more just poor script editing.
We end with a pretty spectacular explosion, but overall I feel like the story just sort of comes to a halt a little too suddenly. There’s all these ideas dropped in — that the planets being moved in any way could create a black hole, for instance — which feel like they never quite get picked up on. In the end, Doctor Who does something clever with the TARDIS to save the day, then blows everything up as an after thought. With so much packed in, I expected the ending to be better seeded in.
Even with all this good stuff, there’s parts of this episode which are almost laughably bad. The sequence in which the Mentiads telepathically communicate with Doctor Who to move a spanner through the air looks dreadful. The CSO on the spanner isn’t the worst we’ve ever had (though it’s not a patch on the Avitron work earlier in the story), but the feathered oval overlays of the characters’ faces is so awful I can’t believe they broadcast it like that.
While there’s quite a lot to enjoy in this final episode I’ll say here that I’ve gone for another 4/10. I think I’ve reached the stage where I’d taken against the narrative too much and that’s the highest it was ever going to achieve for me. Adams will go on to have a big impact on the next run of the series, and I’m hoping that his style will appeal to me more by then.
