The Pirate Planet Part Four

The one where the real Queen Xanxia reveals herself...

It wasn't the Doctor who fell 1,000ft to his doom last week, it was actually an image of the Doctor projected using a gadget he found in Xanxia's throne room. But if the Doctor we saw giving himself up on the Bridge last week was a projection, how did he manage to hand the dead Polyphase Avatron to the Captain? How could a non-corporeal projection carry a solid metal object? I won't dwell on that too much, I'll let you readers do that...

The discovery of the image projector lets Queen Xanxia's cat out of the bag when the Doctor reveals that the Captain's severe young Nurse is actually the newly regenerated form of the tyrannical ruler of Zanak. The decaying shell in the throne room is merely a husk, and the real Xanxia has been busy projecting a new image of herself - a younger, foxier, sexier image - using the power generated by Zanak's planet-crunching shenanigans. The imagination in this story is astounding.

However, the young, fresh and new Xanxia is not yet fully corporeal. The Doctor tries to convince Xanxia that she'll never reach fully corporeal form, as the time dams require a level of power which increases exponentially. There's not enough energy in the universe to complete the projection. "I shall live forever!" spits Xanxia, played with venomous fire by Rosalind Lloyd. "Bafflegab, my dear!" retorts the Doctor. Love that word.

Now that Mr Fibuli has switched on his psychic interference transmitter, the Mentiads have lost all their psychic abilities ("So much for the paranormal!"). This means they cannot defeat the Captain, which means Xanxia's plan for Zanak to swallow up Earth is within her reach (give or take ten minutes). Earth has the PJX-18 (or quartz) that she needs to fix the macromat field integrator which was destroyed in part 1 when the TARDIS and Zanak tried to materialise at the same time. This is actually a key point, because it's the idea of simultaneous materialisation that forms the basis of the Doctor's plan to save Earth. It's rather neat that the reason all this started in the first place is the solution in the end!

The Doctor (inspired by Romana) plans to materialise the TARDIS at exactly the same time as the Captain tries to materialise Zanak around Earth, making everything go all wibbly-wobbly in a Mirrorlon sort of way. K-9 is able to open a small channel of psychic balance to counter Mr Fibuli's jamming machine to allow the Mentiads to regain some of their psychic powers. They then manage to psychokinetically manipulate a spanner in the Engine Room to smash into the megaphoton discharge link, causing a chain reaction of big bangs.

Got that? Still with me? It's challenging, and reeled off ten to the dozen so that it's quite difficult to keep up with what the Doctor's doing and why, but the essence is clear. Having said that, I find it a little difficult to believe that smashing a spanner into a control bank in the Engine Room would cause quite as much damage as it does. Lovely visual of the Mentiads and the Doctor communicating though.

I was holding on to all the explanations and jargon right until the end, when the Doctor does something very clever with Zanak in order to obtain the remains of Calufrax aka the second segment of the Key to Time (remember that?). There's an awful lot of science spouted which I'm sure makes theoretical sense, but for me, it was just a load of bafflegab. Love that word.

What I do like about this episode is that Bruce Purchase finally gets to act, rather than shout. The Captain's usual bluster and rage is tempered considerably by the emergence of Xanxia, who has a remote control for his cybernetic appendage, and the Captain realises that he is not the all-powerful ruler he thought he was. It's the death of Mr Fibuli when the Bridge blows up that finally does it, and the Captain vows to avenge his friend by turning on Xanxia. Tragically, it doesn't work, and he is destroyed by the venomous villainess. Queen Xanxia is surely one of Doctor Who's greatest female villains. She has absolutely no compassion, she's just a murderous, selfish warmonger, played with wonderful spite by Lloyd. Xanxia is often overlooked when it comes to thinking about the programme's greatest female villains, but Xanxia should be up there with the Rani, Missy and Morgaine!

One thing I don't like is the Doctor's suggestion that it was he who told Isaac Newton about gravity. It completely strips a real-life genius of his claim to fame, when I think it should be the Doctor empowering people to be the best that they can be, to invent and discover and explore. It's a cheap joke to say it was the Doctor who "gave" Newton the secret to gravity, but it undermines the spirit of human creativity. In the Thirteenth Doctor's era, there's lots of admiration for the achievements of Earth's historical geniuses - Ada Lovelace, Noor Inayat Khan and Nikola Tesla, for example - but I find it disappointing when the writers make the Doctor the central inspiration for a human's genuine, and very personal, discovery. Let Isaac have his three centuries of fame.

In the end, the Doctor decides to blow up the Bridge in order to bring a final end to Queen Xanxia's tyrannical rule. "A bit crude, but immensely satisfying," he says, acknowledging the fact that too many Doctor Who stories end with the Doctor blowing something up to solve a problem (he certainly likes blowing up old houses and priories). I suspect it's another of Douglas Adams' metatextual tongue-in-cheek nods to the trappings of Doctor Who. Or it could just be immensely satisfying!

The Pirate Planet is one of the most imaginative stories in the Doctor Who canon, written by a mind teeming with Big Ideas and a unique outlook on life. The amount of ideas and inventions crammed into these four episodes probably outnumber those in entire seasons elsewhere. This is a colourful, rip-roaringly fun escapist story, an intellectual comic strip written by a man who had so much to give, but not enough time to give it.

First broadcast: October 21st, 1978

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Love the idea of old Queen Xanxia trying to regenerate herself cell by cell using an image projector and an exponential amount of energy. Mind-blowing stuff!
The Bad: The Doctor invented Isaac Newton? Nah, I'm not having that.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ (story average: 8 out of 10)

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 18

NEXT TIME: The Stones of Blood...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Three

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: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-pirate-planet.html

The Pirate Planet is available on BBC DVD as part of the Key to Time box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Key-Time-Re-issue/dp/B002TOKFNM