The Pirate Planet Part Three

The one where K-9 fights a robot parrot, and wins...

"But I don't understand," whimpers Kimus. "Exciting, isn't it?" grins the Doctor, which kind of sums Doctor Who up. I'm really enjoying Douglas Adams' script, which is full of fun and big ideas, just like his magnum opus The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I haven't always appreciated the way the slightly smug team of Tom Baker and Lalla Ward brought Adams' work to the screen in Season 17, but I can't fault the actual writing and creativity at source.

The Doctor tells the somewhat confused Mentiads that every time Zanak consumes another planet, it releases vast waves of energy, including psychic energy, which affects telepaths such as them, and awakens latent telepathic abilities in people like Pralix. The Mentiads are actually the key to defeating the Captain, and they decide to march their way back to the Bridge to have a go at him. This march lasts the entirety of part 3, with the Mentiads, Mula and Romana (in heels) trudging across muddy fields and climbing over rocks. Poor Mary Tamm gets nothing to do. Why she's not by the Doctor's side instead of Kimus I don't know. Adams has got too many characters and not enough for them to do. I mean, when it comes down to it, Mula and Kimus are not needed at all.

We find out a bit more about the pirate Captain in this episode, which at least gives the character more depth, even if Bruce Purchase is content to simply bluster his way through it. Many moons ago, the tyrannous Queen Xanxia waged war on other worlds to demonstrate the might of Zanak, to the extent that in the end, there were very few people left ("just a few miserable nomadic tribes"). Then a spaceship called the Vantarialis crashed on Zanak, and one of the few survivors was the Captain, a brilliant hyper-engineer. Though terribly injured, he underwent surgery to replace most of the left side of his body cybernetically, and went on to rule over Zanak and turn it into the vampiric space-hopping intergalactic mine it is today. But the question remains: who carried out the surgery?

It makes me wonder who the Captain was in the first place. Which race of people he was from, and what kind of person he was. Was his spaceship from one of the planets waging war with Zanak? Or was it merely a passing vessel that ran into trouble in Zanak's orbit?

The origins of the Captain as a man, before he became half robot, intrigue me, and there were apparently scenes cut from the serial which added to his background, including the fact he was the last survivor of the pirate fleets of Agran, which ransacked the western sector of the galaxy until they were wiped out in the Dordellis Wars.

Meanwhile, weedy Mr Fibuli has come up with a well-honed, perfectly considered plan which should afford the Captain the victory over the Mentiads he seeks. Mr Fibuli is not given the respect and praise he deserves, because despite the Captain's continued threats, he actually does a good job and is perfectly efficient and productive at all times! Here, he's engineered a plan whereby the refining of crystals found only on Calufrax (voolium and madranite one-five) will generate vibrations which will interfere with the Mentiads' psychic energy, rendering them powerless. So while the Captain has been stomping around shouting and droning on about sky demons, Mr Fibuli has quietly affected a plan for victory. Give the man a promotion!

The highlight of the episode is the Doctor's confrontation with the Captain in the trophy room, which is packed full of the compressed remains of all the planets Zanak has swallowed (including Calufrax, Bandraginus Five, Lowiteliom, and Granados). Tom Baker is scorchingly on target as he reacts with both wonder and horror, then anger, at the Captain's rather sick trophy room. The Doctor cannot help but acknowledge the genius behind the technology harnessing the power of these collapsed planets, but is also suitably appalled by the pointlessness of it all. "I'm gratified that you appreciate it," smirks the Captain.

The Doctor: "Appreciate it? Appreciate it?! You commit mass destruction and murder on a scale that's almost inconceivable and you ask me to appreciate it? Just because you happen to have made a brilliantly conceived toy out of the mummified remains of planets... What's it for? What are you doing? What could possibly be worth all this?"

It's possibly Tom Baker's finest moment of the Graham Williams era, and surely one of his finest of all. Tom hasn't played the Doctor with this much actorly clout for too long (the last time I remember him giving me goosebumps is probably Season 14), but here he pulls it off through sheer passion. You can hear it in every inflection of his voice, and in that moment you utterly believe how appalled and confounded the Doctor is. The scene is like a flashback to the Fourth Doctor's early highs, when Tom Baker took the show far more seriously, and thought about his delivery rather than just made it up as he went along.

The laser battle between K-9 and the Polyphase Avatron is nicely done, and certainly isn't as ineptly staged as it could have been. It's a pity the Polyphase Avatron looks like it's pooing when it fires it's laser, and it's a pity that K-9's nose laser doesn't match up with his nose because he's on the move too much, but it's a passable enough sequence, and gratifying when K-9 actually returns with the "dead" parrot, like a hunting dog with a mauled pheasant. The Polyphase Avatron is pretty rubbish all round. It doesn't even look like a parrot, it looks like a hand-held mini-vac or something. Good riddance to it.

The Captain's planet-hopping plan takes on an even more sinister edge when the Doctor and Kimus find the decrepit Queen Xanxia, who everybody assumed was long dead, suspended between time dams in a secret room. She is ancient, captured like a fly in amber in the very last few seconds of life, and it's clear that the amount of power required to sustain these time dams must come from the consumption of other worlds. It's another awesome Big Idea from Adams, and I'm intrigued about the Doctor's hint that Xanxia might be preserved in some other way, and not the senile carcass seen here (played, uncredited, by a 75-year-old Vi Delmar). I mean, it's kind of obvious where this might be heading, but for now, let's just wonder...

The end of the episode sees the Doctor forced off the end of a plank, apparently falling 1,000ft to his doom below. It's not really made clear where the Doctor is falling, as Jon Pusey just makes "beyond" a vast white nothingness. Is it literally outside, in which case why not use a painted backdrop that looks like sky, or even use CSO? Or is it a drop into some kind of vast empty void? It's not explained, and when I was younger I actually assumed the latter, because the idea of it being the real outside world was so difficult to believe due to the featureless white backdrop. Either way, the Doctor obviously won't die, but it's a nice ending all the same, a slightly more coherent precursor to Dragonfire's infamous "cliffhanger"!

First broadcast: October 14th, 1978

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Tom Baker is bang on form in his face-off against the Captain in the trophy room.
The Bad: Poor Mary Tamm gets next to nothing to do except traipse elegantly across fields and over rocks, making her way to her next plot point.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 18 - The Doctor tries the same trick of trying to distract the air car guard with his jelly babies, but again, as he doesn't offer them to anyone, it's not included in the tally.

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

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

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