{"id":175,"date":"2013-10-06T15:56:04","date_gmt":"2013-10-06T20:56:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keithgoodnight.com\/blog\/?p=175"},"modified":"2013-10-06T15:56:04","modified_gmt":"2013-10-06T20:56:04","slug":"dr-who-the-pirate-planet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithgoodnight.com\/blog\/2013\/10\/06\/dr-who-the-pirate-planet\/","title":{"rendered":"Dr Who: The Pirate Planet"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Doctor_Who__The_Pirate_Planet\"<\/a>I\u2019m of two minds about this story. On the one hand, it\u2019s an entirely comical episode of Dr Who, and that\u2019s fun. On the other hand, it\u2019s an entirely comical episode of Dr Who, and that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> and The Gunfighters<\/i> are three episodes of outright comedy capped by seriously dark final episodes). It wasn\u2019t until the Second Doctor\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cWe\u2019ve stumbled upon one of the worst crimes in the history of the Universe.\u201d 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\u2019s face. And yet a minute later he\u2019s back to being the comical Doctor cheerfully bantering nonsense with his adversary, while the Captain is portrayed as an equally comical buffoon\u2014 and the Doctor might tell<\/i> us that the Captain is actually a brilliant and dangerous man only using his blustery eccentricity as a cover, but the story never shows<\/i> us that. The script cracks jokes at the buffoonish Captain\u2019s expense right to the end, there\u2019s never a trace of a genuinely skilled villain behind the fa\u00e7ade.<\/p>\n

The Pirate Planet<\/i> would have done well to take a lesson from those William Hartnell comedies, and save the reveal of the Captain\u2019s 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\u2014 which Dr Who can do (as I said above, it\u2019s the series\u2019 defining trait) but fails to do in this case, so the comedy and the underlying story just end up undermining each other.<\/p>\n

Okay, I\u2019ve been criticizing it for its misfires. Let\u2019s turn to the positive (it\u2019s a better way to finish): the comedy is really quite funny. No surprises there, as it\u2019s written by Douglas Adams of Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/i> fame, making his first contribution to Dr Who. At the time he wrote this episode, the original Hitchhiker\u2019s Guide<\/i> radio series was on the air, but Adams hadn\u2019t written the books yet, and the series had not yet achieved its cult status. So Dr Who didn\u2019t score a major coup by getting someone so famous to write for it\u2014 Adams wasn\u2019t 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\u2019s Guide<\/i> scripts and tries to shoehorn in where they don\u2019t fit (just as a shout-out to his other work, I suppose). The rest is really good. You\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

The Story<\/h4>\n

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\u2019t materialize, something\u2019s 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 \u201cthe bridge\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2014 \u201cI know we\u2019ve had quite a lot of them lately, but it\u2019s still very exciting\u201d explains one local. It turns out the planet\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

(See? That ought to be an awesome<\/i> story, and no matter how funny the jokes are it shouldn\u2019t be spent on rather small-scale comedy.)<\/p>\n

Details<\/h4>\n