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).

The Seeds of Death Episode Six

The one where the Doctor confronts Ice Lord Slaar...

The ubiquitous use of the BBC foam machine in the Troughton era really reached its zenith in this episode, having been used to perhaps its advisable limit in Fury from the Deep. Here, the foam loses all sense of threat as a deadly alien fungus and simply becomes a giant playground for Patrick Troughton to play in. It's all very silly and drawn out (parts of the reprise are still being shown three minutes in!), and forms part of a greater atmosphere of slapstick  in this episode's opening minutes.

The acres of foam aside, Troughton resorts to gurning, oohing and aahing, and generally fooling around in a misplaced attempt to sell the jeopardy, while inside the weather control bureau, Frazer Hines is embroiled in a Benny Hill-style runaround playing peekaboo with an Ice Warrior, and Wendy Padbury is sliding around the corridors in an endless sprint for the front door. By the time Zoe opens the door and the foam floods into the bureau, the Doctor with it, Padbury has already succumbed to the silliness of it all and is clearly seen laughing her head off!

The Seeds of Death Episode Five

The one where Fewsham finally does something selfless...

Terry Scully really doesn't get enough recognition for his performance as Fewsham. Scully's face has a natural look of exhaustion, resignation and defeat - which means he is well cast for this part - but he also manages to say so much about his character's state of mind without speaking a word. Fewsham is finally spurred into action here, leaping rather ineffectually on the Ice Warrior in order to save Zoe, and he's thrown to the floor for his efforts. After four episodes of cowardice and complicity in order to preserve his own skin, he finally thinks and acts for somebody else.

It's hardly the actions of a hero though, and Fewsham remains one of the most complex characters in 1960s Who simply because he is a coward, and he does terrible things against the good of his own planet and people simply to survive. I mentioned my theory about Fewsham in episode 1 - that there's something going on in his head before the story even begins - and I'm even more convinced of that now. Fewsham is seen as a weak link by his colleagues (Gia Kelly thinks very little of him), and I really don't think he believes very much in himself either. He is a tragic figure from the start.

The Seeds of Death Episode Four

The one where Slaar's deadly plan starts to take shape...

Patrick Troughton was on holiday during the recording of this episode, and so supporting player Tommy Laird doubles up for the unconscious Doctor throughout. There's a moment where Fewsham rolls the prone Doctor over to transport him to a T-Mat booth and we get a brief but clear view of Laird's very unTroughton-like face, but then nobody ever doubled for Troughton very satisfactorily, whether it was Chris Jeffries (The Dominators), Gerry Grant (Sky Ray ice lolly advert) or Reece Shearsmith (An Adventure in Space and Time)!

To be honest, the Doctor isn't really missed, particularly as he has had zero impact on the plot thus far anyway. While he lies unconscious, Slaar's invasion plan takes effect as the Ice Warriors T-Mat their deadly seed pods to every major city in the northern hemisphere, which in turn explode and deprive the humans around them of oxygen. It's a shame we don't see any humans succumbing to the exploding pods on location, as that would ramp up the danger tenfold. Instead, all we get is a rapidly expanding sea of white foam on Hampstead Heath, harming no one.

The Seeds of Death Episode Three

The one where the Ice Warriors' invasion plan begins...

We're on episode 3 already and I'm still wondering why this story is called The Seeds of Death. What seeds? Thankfully, that question is addressed by the end of the episode, in that the Ice Warriors intend to use the repaired T-Mat to distribute their, well... seeds of death across the Earth, beaming the expanding balloons into every major city on the planet (as well as Izmir, it seems!). As invasion plans go, it's a pretty nifty one, allowing the aliens to weaken the human enemy globally before making planetfall. That'll teach mankind to become so reliant on T-Mat!

Back at the start of the episode, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are still trapped aboard a directionless rocket, with the ever pragmatic Zoe boosting spirits by citing their survival odds, like some fleshy C-3PO. If the trio don't die by being smashed to smithereens on the mountainous landscape of the lunar surface, she insists that they will be drawn into the Sun in five months and 10 days (ironically, five months and 10 days from the original transmission of this episode is July 18th, 1969 - two days after Apollo 11 took off from Florida on its way to the first ever manned lunar landing on the 20th). She's a bag of laughs, that Heriot girl.