I’m of two minds about this story. On the one hand, it’s an entirely comical episode of Dr Who, and that’s fun. On the other hand, it’s an entirely comical episode of Dr Who, and that’s kind of annoying. The bottom line of the story is that while most of the humor is indeed quite funny, it fails to strike the right balance between that and the serious side of the story.
That balance has often been tricky for the series. Back in the earliest days, Dr Who largely played it straight. The occasional comedy episode mixed comedy and adventure by having the story take a deliberate turn from one to the other (for examples, the William Hartnell stories The Myth Makers and The Gunfighters are three episodes of outright comedy capped by seriously dark final episodes). It wasn’t until the Second Doctor’s era that Dr Who hit upon its distinctive pattern of eccentric humor overlaying the scary stuff, both going on at the same time and serving as counterpoints to each other.
The problem here is that the villain of the piece, known only as the Captain, turns out to be guilty of mass murder on a scale matched only by the Daleks. The Doctor tells Romana fairly early on, “We’ve stumbled upon one of the worst crimes in the history of the Universe.” Later, in what should be a very powerful moment because it is so rare for the Doctor, his rage at the destruction boils over as he screams his accusation directly in the Captain’s face. And yet a minute later he’s back to being the comical Doctor cheerfully bantering nonsense with his adversary, while the Captain is portrayed as an equally comical buffoon— and the Doctor might tell us that the Captain is actually a brilliant and dangerous man only using his blustery eccentricity as a cover, but the story never shows us that. The script cracks jokes at the buffoonish Captain’s expense right to the end, there’s never a trace of a genuinely skilled villain behind the façade.
The Pirate Planet would have done well to take a lesson from those William Hartnell comedies, and save the reveal of the Captain’s crime until late in the story (say, at the episode 3 cliffhanger) and then let that change the mood of the story going into an entirely serious final episode. Discovering what our clownish villain has really been up to could have been a truly dramatic shock. Instead the episode tries to keep the comedy going— which Dr Who can do (as I said above, it’s the series’ defining trait) but fails to do in this case, so the comedy and the underlying story just end up undermining each other.
Okay, I’ve been criticizing it for its misfires. Let’s turn to the positive (it’s a better way to finish): the comedy is really quite funny. No surprises there, as it’s written by Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame, making his first contribution to Dr Who. At the time he wrote this episode, the original Hitchhiker’s Guide radio series was on the air, but Adams hadn’t written the books yet, and the series had not yet achieved its cult status. So Dr Who didn’t score a major coup by getting someone so famous to write for it— Adams wasn’t famous yet. But he did already know how to write good comedy. The only jokes that fall flat are a couple that Adams lifts from his Hitchhiker’s Guide scripts and tries to shoehorn in where they don’t fit (just as a shout-out to his other work, I suppose). The rest is really good. You’ll spend quite a lot of time laughing, outside of some of the jarring intrusions of the should-have-been-more-serious side of the story.
The Story
The search for the second segment of the Key to Time takes the TARDIS to the planet Callufrax, an uninhabited and dreary rock the Doctor describes as terribly boring. But on the first landing attempt the TARDIS can’t materialize, something’s blocking it. When they do land, they find themselves unexpectedly on the planet Zanak, where strange things are happening. The people live in a fearful police state under the rule of the mysterious Captain, whose capitol is called “the bridge” as if the planet were a ship. The Captain acts like a comic-book pirate and even has a robot parrot on his shoulder. Bad as the Captain’s tyranny is, everyone knows things are better than they used to be. The Captain has just declared a new golden age of prosperity and everyone will be rich— “I know we’ve had quite a lot of them lately, but it’s still very exciting” explains one local. It turns out the planet’s wealth comes from automated mines of precious jewels and minerals, and whenever the machinery has exhausted the mines the Captain just declares a new golden age of prosperity and they magically fill up again.
The Doctor realizes soon enough that the Captain has equipped the planet with dematerialization engines large enough to teleport the entire hollow world through space, and he’s been materializing it around other planets, extracting their minerals, and then moving on. Of course this crushes to death every living thing on the target planet, and while Callufrax was lifeless that hasn’t been true of every victim in the past. One at least that the Doctor knows about had over a billion sentient inhabitants, all killed when Zanak materialized around their world. So besides finding the Key to Time, the Doctor has to stop the Captain and his pirate planet before more billions of lives are snuffed out.
(See? That ought to be an awesome story, and no matter how funny the jokes are it shouldn’t be spent on rather small-scale comedy.)
Details
- A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it joke that I really like: the Captain at one point describes the technology of his robot parrot, in passing, as “polytronics.” (Polly-tronics)
- Another that I love: One of the people of Zanak is protesting to her father about the various issues with the Captain’s rule. He tries to say that’s just how things are, and she answers, “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” He replies, “Oh, so many questions!”
- The Doctor and Romana continue to butt heads as she’s still sure her superior academics outweigh his experience. At the start of the episode, she’s found an old operating manual for the TARDIS and has read up on it (“Didn’t you study anything at the Academy?” he asks. “Antique vehicles was an elective,” she answers). From her reading, she’s sure the Doctor’s working the TARDIS all wrong. He rejects her advice, says he knows better, and then of course can’t materialize the TARDIS. “Let me try, shall we?” she asks smugly, and proceeds to land it perfectly— but then to the Doctor’s delight it turns out they’re on the wrong planet. Of course (see story above) it turns out to be neither of their fault.
- After the last episode gave us our first specific age for the Doctor in a long time (though with some debate between him and Romana over whether he’d lost count), this time around we get our first ever definitive statement of how long it’s been since he stole the TARDIS and left Gallifrey. “Do you know how long I’ve been piloting this TARDIS?” he demands, during the argument mentioned above. “Five hundred and twenty-nine years,” Romana answers instantly. The Doctor blinks. “Five hundred and… has it really been that long?”
- Besides this episode, Douglas Adams also submitted a script to Dr Who called “Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen” somewhere around this time. It wasn’t accepted, and Adams eventually used the story for the third Hitchhiker’s Guide novel. So now, you can go reread Life, the Universe and Everything and picture it as a Dr Who episode. This wouldn’t be the last time Adams took something he contributed to Dr Who and reused it elsewhere.
Next Week:
“The Stones of Blood,” 4 episodes.
