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.

The Space Pirates Episode Five

The one where we learn Dom Issigri has been alive all along...

Now this is more like it! The huge leap in the quality of story-telling between episodes 4 and 5 is considerable, as the plot finally kicks in and the TARDIS crew finally gets (very slightly) involved! I mean, it's still pretty lightweight, but there are a good few revelations and twists that crank up the interest and turn what has been a poor runaround so far, into a mildly intriguing thriller.

As suggested last week, it seems Madeleine Issigri has been in cahoots with Caven all along, but as we learn more about her working relationship with the pirate, we realise that things have gotten rather out of hand for her liking. She first got involved with Caven to orchestrate a salvage operation, but his plans have expanded somewhat to include piracy, and now murder (or "deliberate murder" as Madeleine rather puzzlingly puts it).

The Space Pirates Episode Four

The one where we learn what's in the Doctor's pockets...

I'm finding it really difficult to come up with anything worth saying about The Space Pirates. My viewing/ listening notes are a third of what they would normally be because there's simply nothing to say! I know that worthier fans such as Jonathan Morris and Gary Gillatt have probably written perfectly intelligent and well-considered essays about The Space Pirates, but I have to admit that it's so uninspiring a serial that I'm struggling! I suppose that in itself is a critique...

It's also really hard to make out what's going on and what people are saying at times as the audio recording (made by an unidentified fan on its Australian broadcast) is very tinny, despite being restored as best it can be. But to be honest, even when you do know what's going on, it's very often not very much!

The Space Pirates Episode Three

The one where the Doctor's party teams up with Milo Clancey...

Not very much happens in this episode. Basically, the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie hitch a ride with Milo Clancey in an effort to track down the TARDIS, and that's about it. Other people have scenes and things to say, but as far as advancing the plot goes (what plot there is), it's severely lacking in incident.

I find Season 6 so frustrating. It's probably the weakest Troughton run, but it's also the one that we can see most of (seven of the 44 episodes are missing, compared to Season 5's 18 of 40 and Season 4's 33 of 43), which makes it disproportionately representative of the era. Season 5 is far more typical of what the Troughton era was like, and by this last run of stories, it feels like it's running on empty. There's an air of desperation about certain stories (The Dominators, The Krotons), and while there are pockets of inspiration (The Mind Robber), on the whole, the season just feels a bit of a mess. The quality definitely dropped, and Patrick Troughton in particular seems less engaged and happier to breeze through things just to get to the end of the episode. Season 6 is not definitive or typical Troughton, and The Space Pirates is probably the nadir.

The Space Pirates Episode Two

The one where we meet Milo Clancey, the ageing space prospector...

Oh my goodness, it's Tom Baker! It's remarkable just how uncannily like the Fourth Doctor Donald Gee (Major Warne) looked around this time, it's as if they were twin brothers! Gee would appear in Doctor Who again, in 1974's The Monster of Peladon, by which point he looked even more like Tom.

The modelwork just after the episode and credit titles shows the V41-LO gliding through space in a shot remarkably akin to what George Lucas would do in Star Wars eight years later, and actually, all of the modelwork seen in this story is so good that, had visual effects designer John Wood had as much time as Lucas's team to make the ships more detailed, it might have looked just as good as that big screen behemoth.

The Space Pirates Episode One

The one where the TARDIS crew arrives on a soon-to-explode space beacon...

The blurb on the back of the BBC Radio Collection soundtrack CD of this story states that this six-part adventure is "brimming with visions of space travel in the 21st century", and that's kind of the problem, isn't it? Visions, things you should be able to see. Because The Space Pirates was, by all accounts, a feast for the eyes, with stacks of modelwork of various spaceships in flight, as well as scenes of spacewalking and laser battles. It was a proper intergalactic adventure.

So the fact we can't see it - because the BBC decided to wipe the master tapes a mere three months after episode 6 had aired - makes it really hard to enjoy or appreciate the serial in the way intended. And so The Space Pirates is very often overlooked, underappreciated or forgotten by fans, simply because it just does not work on audio alone. Yes, we have episode 2 to give us some clue as to what people and things looked like, but there's so much still missing from our understanding of the story, due to there being no telesnaps, and very few photographs taken at the time (we don't know what Dom Issigri looked like for instance, or his headquarters).