The history of Doctor Who is remarkably well-documented, and these reviews would be nowhere without the generations of scholarship that taught us all how our favourite show was made. Yet sometimes the history of a story can get in the way of appreciating what it actually is. We are told – in many cases before we’ve had a chance to watch the story – that Douglas Adams’s first draft of The Pirate Planet was insanely over-ambitious, the sort of epic, budget-busting sprawl you might expect from a man whose signature series gave a character an extra head as a throwaway gag. We are also told that Adams himself felt the comedy in his script was played too broadly, particularly by Bruce Purchase as the story’s villain. These stories have overly affected the reputation of a story that seems to me to be easily the best of Season Sixteen, as well as one of the best stories of Doctor Who‘s tough decade in between Robert Holmes leaving the script editor’s post and Andrew Cartmel arriving in it.
There are some flaws. Pennant Roberts’s direction is awfully slapdash, particularly in the story’s too-frequent shootouts, or the shot of two guards collapsing before the rocks that are supposed to knock them to the floor have even hit them. You cut the special effects some slack, of course: it’s a forty-five-year-old BBC television show trying to do things that are normally done at the blockbuster level these days. But these are failings of basic staging and editing – there’s no reason why they couldn’t be done more successfully. Other than that, the only criticism that holds water is that The Pirate Planet is not as incredible as City of Death will be, which is true but does underline the extent to which Adams is playing in a different league to nigh-on everyone else writing for Doctor Who at the moment.
There are four things that happen in The Pirate Planet that elucidate why it is, in my eyes, one of the great Doctor Who stories. Any other serial would be elevated massively by one of these; for them all to happen in the same story is astonishing. The first happens in the story’s set-up. We are presented with a mystery where the Doctor and Romana land at the right point in space, at the right time, yet somehow on the wrong planet. The question of how this is possible drives the entire plot, and dovetails into the overarching plot about finding pieces of the Key to Time with a neatness few other stories in this arc can match. (I’d say The Power of Kroll is the nearest competitor in this regard, and that story doesn’t have anywhere near as many other impressive things going for it)
The Pirate Planet excels at sneaking in clues to its mystery right where you don’t expect them, which brings us to the third brilliant thing it contains: the best cliffhanger in Doctor Who history.
Detective stories are an underrated part of Doctor Who‘s genre make-up; the Doctor himself is clearly more like Sherlock Holmes than he is Dan Dare or any space hero who preceded him. The reason why this isn’t often recognised is because a classic mystery is very hard to write in a science-fiction context. If someone turns up murdered inside a locked room in a science-fiction story, the natural assumption is that someone’s used a teleporter. Somehow, on his first go at writing for the series, Adams grasps perfectly how to set up the rules of a mystery in a show that typically has no rules. If the Doctor had piloted the TARDIS to Calufrax, we’d have naturally assumed that he’d landed in the wrong place. The fact that Romana, a character introduced as being more technologically adept than the Doctor, set the co-ordinates persuades us that this impossible situation must, in fact, have happened.
It’s a taster of how well Adams writes the Doctor and Romana throughout. He is particularly good at finding the areas at which Romana can outshine the Doctor without undercutting him completely as the series’ lead; most obviously, getting information from a passer-by in episode one by simple virtue of not being an overbearing, booming-voiced weirdo. The Doctor’s overbearing, booming-voiced weirdness gets a fair old workout in the rest of the story, most obviously in the famous scene where the Doctor tears verbal strips off the Pirate Captain for assuming he would “appreciate” the trophies he’s created from the planets he’s ransacked.
The Pirate Captain’s plan is one of the most staggeringly evil in Doctor Who history, a more subtextual but no less angry critique of imperialism than the show has previously managed, and one that works well as a satire on “creative destruction”, “managed decline”, short-selling, and a lot of other predatory economic concepts that only arose after the serial was broadcast. The scene where it’s revealed also has a terrific clue to the story’s final resolution, with the Captain’s “dream of freedom”, a strange but important line that goes unnoticed in amongst the bombast of what happens next. This is, I think, why Adams was wrong about Purchase’s performance, which is certainly very hammy and silly but ultimately works. It’s not just that I don’t know how Adams could write lines like “By the parrots of Hades!” and expect Purchase to deliver them with wry understatement. It’s also that Purchase can and does sell quieter moments like this, or his reaction to the death of his wonderful lackey Mr. Fibuli, without feeling like he’s breaking character. Indeed, the quieter moments hit harder because they come from a character who’s usually so bombastic.
The Pirate Planet excels at sneaking in clues to its mystery right where you don’t expect them, which brings us to the third brilliant thing it contains: the best cliffhanger in Doctor Who history. Episode three ends with the Doctor clearly dying on-screen, rendered in such a way that even Mary Whitehouse couldn’t complain about it this time. What Whitehouse never understood is that the audience don’t actually believe the hero to have died in a scene like this, they merely wonder how he could possibly survive, and this is the biggest head-scratcher the show has ever served us on this count. Except it isn’t: the end of the scene directly before shows us what he uses, but we’re still processing that earlier scene’s revelation that an apparently dead character is still alive, so we don’t notice. And when its function is revealed it turns out to be the final piece of the story’s mystery, which is even better.
You look back at all this and you think, who does Douglas Adams think he is? And the fourth brilliant thing supplies us with the answer. The first episode of The Pirate Planet is the story’s weakest, which is fair enough – at least it gets better from here. But it’s weak in an interesting way. The Mentiads seem like a stock race of spooky telepaths, while the family of Kimus, Mula, Pralix and Balaton are too neat a microcosm of Zanakian society. Kimus, in particular, is an absolutely bog-standard rebel of the kind who appear in a lot of late ’70s Doctor Who stories, stomping around castigating his elderly father for not fighting the government while doing nothing of any use himself. And this is why it’s such a delight when the Doctor meets him at the start of episode two and tells him as much, to his face. It’s a moment people don’t talk about, but it serves notice that The Pirate Planet is about to leave the comforting certainties of generic Doctor Who and strike out on its own path. To do this in your first story takes appropriately planet-sized ambition, but the rest of The Pirate Planet shows Adams has what it takes to deliver on such promises.
Next: The Stones of Blood (1978)
