The Space Pirates Episode Six

The one where Caven gets his comeuppance...

Madeleine's continued attempt to get Dervish to turn on his boss and help her get her father back falls on deaf ears. Dervish's allegiance is very strongly to Caven, despite his conscience, and it would be great to see the scenes between Lisa Daniely and Brian Peck because they're performed so well.

Most of this final episode concerns the Doctor's attempts to rescue the LIZ-79 from Caven's booby-trap (which he does) and then his race against time to defuse Caven's remote-controlled explosive device in Ta's atomic fuel store. The trouble is, the scene where the Doctor, in protective suit, tries to do this is so interminably long and drawn out that, as we're unable to see it, the pace is slowed right down to a crawl.

Even the soundtrack CD narration by Frazer Hines is obviously drawn out, and Hines himself sounds like he's purposefully speaking more slowly to fill the achingly long three-minute Scene 78! "Now it's Milo's turn to glance at the clock" ... "The Doctor looks both nervous and deeply concerned"... yawn...

It did give me time to think about other things though, such as the fact that Jack May (Hermack), Donald Gee (Warne) and George Layton (Penn) don't share a single scene with the Doctor, Zoe, Jamie, Caven or Dervish. For most of the story they are entirely removed from the main action on Ta, either pratting about in Lobos's orbit, or on their way to somewhere equally as irrelevant. It must have been a very strange six-week job for these three actors, who probably wondered what the heck they were doing had to do with anything else!

I also had time to remind myself how much I love Gordon Gostelow as Milo Clancey, a larger than life character who sticks out from all of the others because he's practically the only one with any form of personality (Caven's thorough evilness aside). If Doctor Who hadn't gone all Earthbound and terribly serious in the Pertwee era, it would have been great to see Milo back alongside the Doctor for another adventure. He's essentially Robert Holmes's 1960s version of Sabalom Glitz. Actually, now I come to write that, imagine how absolutely bonkers, but strangely entertaining, it would be to have a story featuring Milo Clancey, Sabalom Glitz, and Holmes's other fast-talking wide boy, Garron from The Ribos Operation!

It apparently takes Hermack 55 minutes to get his V-Ship to Ta in time to blow up Caven's Beta Dart, a summary execution which is rather too celebrated by the Doctor at Issigri HQ for my liking (there's a lot of hooraying and cheering, which I assume the Doctor and co are part of). This links up with a concern I had in episode 4 which I failed to mention in my review (perhaps because I was fighting my way out of a coma), when the Doctor lashes up a potentially lethal booby-trap which electrocutes a space pirate. I much prefer a Doctor who escapes from a locked room by tripping his captors up with candle wax and marbles!

The ending of The Space Pirates is AWFUL, one of those forced hilarious endings where someone says something distinctly unfunny and everybody falls about laughing like loons, as the end credits fade in. It's like something out of Acorn Antiques, as everybody gathers round for one last guffaw as if they're a big happy family who've enjoyed some jolly fun scrapes together these last few weeks. No, they haven't. It's not been fun at all, it's been bloody torture, thank you very much!

So that's The Space Pirates over with. It's officially my worst Patrick Troughton story simply because it's so bloody boring, and I don't think it'd be any better thought of if every single episode existed. Episode 4 in particular is the nadir of the entire Second Doctor era, up there with the head-bangingly awful sixth episode of The Daleks (The Ordeal) for unspeakable dreck. As a six-episode average it actually scores higher than both The Wheel in Space and The Dominators, but I'd rather experience either of those stories again than endure The Space Pirates a second time. The serial's average score is skewed slightly by the passable episodes 2 and 5, but the rest is just plain awful. The production code for The Space Pirates is YY. Why, why indeed...

In better news, The Space Pirates Episode Six is the last missing episode of Doctor Who, which means I'll never have to review an episode on audio only ever again. To be able to see some of the lost episodes would be manna from heaven (Marco Polo, The Smugglers, The Evil of the Daleks, Fury from the Deep), so it's cheering to think that every time Doctor Who gets good again, I'll be able to see it be good. Works both ways, of course...

First broadcast: April 12th, 1969

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The Doctor finally takes an active - and heroic - role in proceedings, even if he is on pre-filmed inserts only!
The Bad: Robert Holmes spends too long with the Doctor defusing the bomb in the atomic fuel store, and allows no time at all for an on-screen reunion between Madeleine and Dom Issigri (they never share a scene). Surely the Issigri reunion should form the core of the final farewell scene, not a cheap crack about the LIZ-79?
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆ (story average: 4.5 out of 10)

NEXT TIME: The War Games...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode One; Episode Two; Episode Three; Episode Four; Episode Five

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-space-pirates.html

The Space Pirates soundtrack is available on BBC CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Pirates-Frazier-Hines/dp/0563535059.