Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet (4)

A cave. A group of mysterious cultists with silly make up and saffron robes. They chant about the Life Force and talk Old Fashioned. ("The time of knowing shall be soon and fast upon that shall follow the time of vengeance.") They make telepathic contact with a young man with 1970s hair. The camera filter goes funny and they declare that they have "found another" and that he must be "harvested". We've all seen the Tomorrow People: it is clear that he is about to Break Out. The robed Telepaths come and take the young man away from his family. His grandfather fears and hates the Telepaths; but his sister and her boyfriend think that the Evil Dictator who rules the planet and has banned telepathy and freedom of thought is far worse. It turns out that the Telepaths are the last remnant of the original inhabitants of the planet; before it was conquered by the Evil Leader and his Evil Stormtroopers. The Doctor makes friends with them. Together they break into the Evil Leader's strong hold, shut down his Anti-Telepath ray, sabotage his power generator and blow up his base. The planet is now free and everyone lives happily ever after. Hooray!

This is not the plot of the Pirate Planet.

At any rate, not the whole plot, nor the interesting part of the plot, nor the part of the plot which anyone remembers. When I sat down to re-watch the serial, I was quite surprised that almost the first thing that we see are the Mentiads, standing in a circle and chanting. They seem to have come in from a different story, the Daemons, say, or Fendahl. 

Robed mystics with telepathy, telekinesis, plugged into the very essence of creation, who overthrow an evil cyborg technocrat. They could have wandered in from an entirely different franchise. They don't say "May the life-force be with you" but one fears that they might.

Now, it would be quite tempting to attribute the Mentiad sub-plot and it's rather lacklustre dialogue to script editor Anthony Read, and to say that the highly imaginative and witty piratical material came from the genius of Douglas Adams. Next season, we'll be praising script editor Douglas Adams for all the funny lines and blaming Terry Nation and David Fisher for all the boring ones. And certainly, the serio-comic Adamsian space-opera is set alongside the most generic of generic Doctor Who storylines. Cultists who stand in a circle and chant. Natives who think that being oppressed is "just the way things are"; while other natives half-heartedly say "we have been quiet for too long." They could just as well be Thals or Xenons or Two-Legs on Metabelis 3. David Warwick (Kimus) works quite hard to deliver heroic lines with a pantomime seriousness, but even a very good actor couldn't do much to salvage "Bandraginus Five, by every last breath in my body, you'll be avenged." [NOTE 1]

But what if the bifurcation of the story were intentional -- or at any rate, a happy accident? What if the corridors, the caves, the pathetic rebels and the Tomorrow Zombies are what Doctor Who looked like before 1977, and Captains and Queens and shrunken planets are what it will look like from here on in? In this corridor, the dying embers of Sydney Newman and monochrome tea-times: in this one, George Lucas and punk-rock filtered through the prophetic mind of Douglas Adams before Apple Macs even existed.  

Forward or backwards? Old Old Who or New Old Who? Can the two visions ever come into balance? At the exact centre of the story is a queen who literally wants to hold back time, abort change, and return everything to how it was in the good old days. 

In Episode One, Kimus asks the Doctor what he does for a living. "I save planets, mostly" replies the Doctor.

In the very next scene (the next line, in fact) the Captain asks Romana to define her "function". "Well, as a Time Lord I can travel about in space, and of course time" she replies. [NOTE 2]

Romana's answer is the one that the Doctor himself might have given at any time over the last fifteen years. She's actually an agent of the Time Lord Council and the White Guardian: she could very well have said "I am a student" or "I am seeking for the Key to Time." But she prefers to just say that she is a traveller. The Doctor, on the other hand, now defines himself by his function in the story. It's the same definition Tom Baker himself used: the role of the Doctor is simply that of a "benevolent alien".

"I travel in time and space". A glance back to the black and white era. A citizen of the universe; and a lady, to boot. 

"I save planets, mostly." A superhero who saves the universe on a monthly basis; one who knows the rules and can even wink at the audience. 

What the show used to be; what the show is now. 

Can the Doctor Who accommodate both visions? 

Or must the Doctor bi-generate?

There is very little world-building in classic Who. Season Sixteen may consist of six linked stories; but there is nothing but the recurrent Key to suggest that the segments are taking place in a shared universe. You might suppose that Queen Xanxia -- who in her day staged galactic wars -- would have known, or been known by the "Greater Cyrrhenic Empire" or to have interacted with "Pontonese Ships". The Ribos Operation was about a con-man trying to sell a valueless mineral mine to a mark; this one is about a villain who strip mines planets for their mineral wealth. Might Garron not have been aware of Bandraginus Five? Might the Captain not have been aware of the Mining Conglomerate? Might the precious mineral discovered lying in the street not have been Jethric? Kimus doesn't know of the existence of planets other than Zanak: when his world teleports to other locations he thinks that the patterns of the "points of light in the sky" change. By the end of the story he knows they are other suns, and that the planet itself moves. Which is very like what Binro went through in the previous story. But nothing whatsoever is made of this connection. Doctor Who, prior to the wilderness years simply never worked like that. Cameos and Easter Eggs, possibly: consistent setting and backstory, never, never, never. The Whoniverse is a fan mirage.

So it is not surprising that there is so little development in the relationship between the Doctor and Romana. Doctor Who isn't, and can't ever be a soap opera. The writers have presumably been briefed that the Doctor has a new assistant, and that she is clever, but not quite as clever as she thinks she is; that she is a recent graduate; and slightly disdainful of the Doctor. But each of them seems free to re-invent their relationship within the brief.  A few years later, Matthew Waterhouse would complain that he was playing a completely different Adric in each story. [NOTE 3]

In the Ribos Operation, there was tension between the Doctor, who has experience and street smarts, and Romana, who has up-to-date scientific expertise. She keeps being annoyingly right; but he keeps smugly saving the day. She hugs him when he saves her from the monster, but she doesn't back down over his egotism or his lack of academic status. This added up to some passable comedy drama, but it tended to reduce the Doctor to a stooge in his own show.

The opening scenes of Pirate Planet have some of the same dynamic: although it is now Romana who is being petulant and sniping, and the Doctor who is relatively unfazed by it. Her crack about not understanding the TARDIS because she skipped the class on antiques (and preferred "the lifecycle of the Gallifreyan flutter-wing") is pretty childish. But there is a glint in both her's and the Doctor's eyes which suggests that they are just going through the motions.

The Doctor flies the TARDIS intuitively; Romana wants to do it by the book. The manual -- which is, rather delightfully, a huge leather Bible on a lectern -- says that you should check the "synchronic feedback circuit" and activate the "multi-loop synthesiser" before landing. The Doctor says he never bothers, offers to demonstrate a "really smooth materialisation" and (of course) crashes the ship. Romana, following the correct procedure, brings them in safely. 

Pompous people slipping on banana skins will always be funny, but if the point of your hero is that he is clever then "clever people are not as clever as they think they are" is not a card you want to play too often. (If, on the other hand your here were very, very strong, it would not be a particularly good idea to play up to the stereotype that strong people are stupid. Comic book and movie versions of Conan too often turn Bob Howard's intelligent barbarian into a brainless brick.)

As it turns out, it isn't quite the Doctor's fault. The crash happened because something else -- the planet Zanak -- was trying to materialise in the same place at the same time.

Once the Doctor and Romana are on the surface of Zanak, the relationship seems to reconfigure. The script recognises that if you have two characters, both Time Peers, both more or less immortal, and both with infinite reserves of pseudo-science and pseudo-history to draw on, what you have got is not the Doctor and his Assistant, but two versions of the Doctor. Look at the way Romana interacts with the Captain's guard in Episode Two ("Thank you; will you drive, I assume you know where you are going?") and the contempt she shows for the Captain and his Nurse ("I was never any good at antiques"). Either line could have just as easily have been delivered by the Doctor.

Now, "Two Doctors", as opposed to "the Doctor and his Beautiful Assistant" has some narrative advantages. It means that the Doctor can be learning about the Mentiads while Romana is being interviewed by the Captain; and the Doctor can be talking to the Captain while Romana and the Mentiads are trying to find another way into the hyperdrive engine room. And a bright, independent companion is a good deal less irritating -- and less sexist -- than one whose main role is to scream and ask the Doctor to explain how brilliant he is.

But equally,  "Two Doctors" create narrative problems which didn't exist before. Writers have generally resisted multi-Doctor crossovers for exactly that reason: but it's hard to write convincing dialogue for three (or five) competing egos. Robert Holmes' pitch for the Five Doctors and the Terrance Dicks script that was actually filmed, both went to some lengths to keep Pertwee, Troughton and Davison apart for most of the tale. Baker, of course, declined to be involved.

So: Episode Three of the Pirate Planet begins with a colossal expository dollop: we find out what the Captain is doing (materialising his hollow planet around other planets and stripmining them) and what this has to do with the Mentiads (killing planets releases the Life Force, which causes latent telepaths to Break Out). The Doctor and Romana both contribute to the explanations, talking over each other in a not particularly funny way.

DOCTOR: At almost the same moment it vanishes, it rematerialises in another part of the galaxy around another, slightly smaller, planet.

ROMANA: In this case, a planet called Calufrax.

DOCTOR: Yes. So your planet...

ROMANA: ....Zanak....

DOCTOR: [Glares]

ROMANA: Just helping you along, Doctor.

Adams does his best (did I mention he's quite good at dialogue?) but it quickly becomes annoying.

There are moments when the old patriarchal patronisation kicks in. The Doctor reveals very obvious plot points which the audience have already got to, and Romana exclaims "of course!" as if he is a genius. When it transpires that the Queen is behind the whole evil enterprise, and the Captain was only pretending to be a pantomime pirate, the Doctor becomes more school-teachery than Jon Pertwee ever was. "Let that be a lesson to you, my girl".  He really does call her "my girl".

At the end of the story they go back to the TARDIS together. It's a rare instance in the classic era of the TARDIS itself being used to solve a problem; and of the Ship itself being put at risk. 

And, if we are paying attention, there is a massive call back to Episode One. 

To prevent Zanak materialising around the Earth, the Doctor decides to deliberately materialise the TARDIS in the same place at the same time. If he gets it wrong, TARDIS and planet are both going to come to an explosive end. 

And sure enough, as he is going through this incredibly difficult operation we hear him say "Multi-loop stabiliser; synchronic feedback." He's doing it by the book: as Romana advised him in Episode One. In the end, the scheme is only partly successful and he has to invoke his own telepathy, the Mentiads, and a convenient spanner to damage the hyperdrive engines. So once again, they were both right: book learning and seat of the pants intuition together saves the day. And the Doctor and Romana stop scoring points off each other. "It was nice working with you" says the Doctor, when it looks as if they are going to die. "You too" replies the Doctor. The Doctor and Romana -- the Boy Doctor and the Girl Doctor -- have achieved a kind of balance.

In order to get a degree in English Literature, you have to have a good answer to the question "Why does Hamlet delay?" Why doesn't he just kill the King as soon as the Ghost has set him the quest? There are lots of possible answers: because he doubts the Ghost's veracity; because he doesn't have the opportunity; because he has studied Freud's Introductory Lectures; because he's a Calvinist; because he's not a Calvinist.

But the truthful answer is always: because if Hamlet killed Claudius in Act II Scene 1 the play would be very short.

Put more simply: Hamlet procrastinates because Hamlet is a play about procrastination. 

In Episode Three of the Pirate Planet, the Doctor tells Romana that the Captain wants to find out why they have come to Zanak.

"The reason we've come here is to find the second segment of the key" replies Romana "In case you'd forgotten". And, in fact, we had. Zanak and the Captain were quite exciting enough without worrying about the Guardian's cosmic jigsaw. Romana is about to claim that getting involved in what's happening on the planet is a distraction, but the Doctor interrupts her: "Getting involved in all this is the only way to find it."

It's either an admission of defeat, or Douglas Adams bragging that he has done something immensely clever. The only way in which the Doctor can find the second segment is for him to do exactly what he would have done in any case.

The Key to Time Saga is an argument about the essence of Doctor Who. The aimless wanderer now has a device which sends him to very specific times and places. The curious fellow who always gets involved is now under a divine mandate to turn up, grab the quest-objective, and leave.

Except that the Doctor's wanderings were never aimless. The Tracer has not changed the format: it has simply made explicit what has always been the case. The Doctor always ended up exactly where the Plot required him to be -- exactly where the writer decided to send him. The Plot has been made manifest; but it was never not there. Perhaps in this Season the Doctor can see it a little more clearly.  

Up to now every Doctor Who story has always begun with the question "Why doesn't the Doctor just leave?" And the answer, give or take a fluid link and a dematerialisation circuit, has always been: "Because he's the Doctor, that's why. 

But in Season Sixteen, that answer doesn't apply. Once the Doctor finds the Segment -- and he has an Anti-Plot device which infallibly points him to it -- he has no reason to stay and every reason to leave. The forces of Plot have to come up with strategies to keep him on Calufrax or Ribos . Otherwise, the Season would be very short indeed.

The First Segment was the intersection of a series of intrigues which would have carried on whether the Doctor had shown up or not. It kept him on the periphery of the action; reducing him to a supporting character on his own show. 

The Second Segment, as the Doctor directly acknowledges, is The Plot itself. For the first half of the story, the Tracer appears to be malfunctioning. It appears to have taken the Doctor to the wrong planet -- Zanak instead of Calufrax -- and it doesn't direct him to any single location. Viewers realise, a shade before the Doctor does, that it is behaving like a compass at the South Pole -- trying to point in all directions at once because everywhere is North.

The Doctor has to work out what is going on before he can put his hands on the Key and end the narrative. Once the puzzle is solved, the Plot focuses down on a single location: Calufrax ceases to be the narrative environment, and becomes an object within it, a tiny shrunken head in the Captain's trophy room. But the Doctor can't remove it until he understands the Captain's grand scheme. When everything falls into place, twenty two minutes into Episode Four, the story dutifully comes to an end.

If the Doctor had arrived on Calufrax / Zanak through the random wanderings of the TARDIS he would undoubtedly have been fascinated by the missing planet, and by the precious stones lying in the street. He would certainly have been horrified by what the Captain was doing, and he would definitely have sided with the Mentiads once he understood who they were. And there is no doubt that he would have tried to overthrow the Queen and save the Earth from being smothered. The Key to Time has negligible effect on the story we have just watched. 

People writing about the Key to Time often point to balance as a unifying theme. The meta-plot is about finding a mid-point between the Black and White Guardians; and the individual stories keep referencing the idea of balance: the unending war between heat and ice in Ribos mythology; the Captain's collection of dead planets held in perfect gravitational balance. Could we not also say that the Pirate Planet strives to find a balancing point between Plot and Anti-Plot?

Or would it be better simply to say that the Plot is in this case so huge and the Captain's power so evil, that the Doctor can't possibly ignore it, Black Guardian or no Black Guardian?

Or should we merely say that Adams made the not unsensible decision to pretty much ignore the overarching theme and wrote a damn fine space opera instead?

[NOTE 1] It is possible that Adams is consciously parodying or exaggerating some of the cliches of Doctor Who. The air-cars and the inertia corridor could be read as reaction against the preponderance of corridors. Villains honestly, no-kidding say things like "Guards, seize them!" "Die, you fool, die" "You shall die for your insolence" and "You dare to mock me." When the Doctor literally says "Take me to your leader" he must surely be doing it deliberately.

[NOTE 2] Romana definitely says "Time Lord", as opposed to "Time Lady". When they first met, she told the Doctor that she would be happy with the male sobriquet Fred. Despite her elegant dresses, gender is not, at this point, that big a deal in Time Lord society.

[NOTE 3] There is a fan tradition that "Time Lord" refers to an elite ruling class on Gallifrey, and that there are a number of artisans and technicians who are not in that illustrious caste. Romana is young by Time Lord standards but she appears to have already reached that exalted status: unless, perchance "Time Lord" is the title automatically bestowed on one on graduation. Terrance Dicks once joked that the existence of The Doctor and The Master rather implied that somewhere in space and time there must be a traveller called The Bachelor. The Doctor and Romana seem to treat "Time Lord" as synonymous with "Gallifreyan".

Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet (3)

The story is not called Planet of the Pirates.  And "The Space Pirates" was already taken.

It is implied that, before his arrival on Zanak, a space pirate is what the Captain was. The Doctor says he can see the attraction of the profession -- "the thrill, the danger, and the derring do". Historically, pirates were everything the Doctor hates: big ships that picked on little ships and stole their lunch money. Most of them survived for only a few months before being sunk or hanged. We are told that the Captain's piratical persona is a ruse: a role he has adopted in order to conceal the fact that he's actually a brilliant hyper-space scientist. It isn't hard to think of other characters who hide behind scarves and yo-yos and jelly babies to encourage people to underestimate them.

But we never quite get a sense of the Captain playing a role. And in any case: what role? Pirates have parrots because John Silver had a parrot: they have hooked hands because James Hook had a hooked hand. But the Captain has never read Robert Louis Stevenson or JM Barrie. He's never been anywhere near the planet earth. [NOTE 1]

The robot parrot executioner is called the Polyphase Avitron. This is a quite good joke. "Polyphase" is a kind of electrical circuit (or sounds as if it could be) and "avitron" is as good a word as any for a flying robot. Polly is, of course, a cliched name for a parrot, possibly because polly-ticians are known to repeat the same thing over and over again. Adams reportedly wanted the robot to say "Pieces of silicate" and "pretty Polyphase Avitron" but marginally wiser heads prevailed. [NOTE 2]

But do we immediately understand that the robot is meant to be parrotical? Do we even understand that the elaborate helmet that the Captain wears, with a perspex monocle over one eye, is meant to suggest an eyepatch? I recall, when it was first shown in black-and-white in the corner of my living room, my father remarking "It's all got a bit too clever, hasn't it?" Possibly it had. [NOTE 3]

At the end of Episode Three, the Captain makes the Doctor walk the plank, because of course he does. All Doctor Who stories, it will be recalled, must feature at least one execution. Spaceships do not, as a general rule, have gangplanks: the science fiction equivalent of the plank would be the airlock. There is precious little evidence of real pirates ever using that particular method of killing captives. But a quick brainstorm around the word "pirate" would yield: "parrot, hook, eyepatch, plank". Bruce Purchase mercifully resists any temptation to say "Arrr!" [NOTE 4]

If you are not paying attention, you might say that this monumental cliche is followed by an humongous cheat. The Captain is throwing the Doctor into a ravine, not into the sea. We see the Doctor fall. We hear the Doctor scream. Mrs Whitehouse presumably spent the whole of the following week thinking that the Doctor was really dead, or imagining that he was still falling. But we all know that the Doctor can't die. And he's not due to regenerate for another two and a half seasons. And Doctor Who rarely cheats: not in the way that Republic Serials used to.

What's the solution? Maybe he falls onto -- say -- the back of an extremely large passing bird?

In fact, the solution is Sherlock Holmes' solution. The Doctor has no difficulty getting out of the chasm for the simple reason that he was never in it. At the beginning of Episode Four, we hear all the baddies laughing at the Doctor. And then we realise that the Doctor is laughing with them. Last season ended with the Doctor laughing because the special effects department had supplied him with a less unwieldy K-9. Adams has made the trademark guffaw part of the actual plot.

Of course the Doctor didn't fall to his death. What fell to its death was a kind of hard-light simulacrum, of the Doctor, controlled by the real Doctor. It's referred to as a hologram, still quite a neologism in 1978. But what falls off the plank is clearly not a simple projection of a 3D image, but some kind of autonomous back-up persona, capable of independent or apparently independent action.

Last season, we couldn't quite make up our minds whether a "clone" was a biological replica grown from a single cell, a sort of autonomous 3D photocopy, or a microcosmic avatar. Indeed, if Doctor Who were remotely interested in world-building, Adams could have said that the projection-Doctor that falls to its death in Pirate planet is the Same Kind of Thing as the Doctor/Leela micro-clones in Invisible Enemy. But he doesn't.

Twists involving doppelgängers always feel a bit dishonest. Ronald Knox's decalogue specifically prohibited their use in "fair play" whodunnits. But I am inclined to forgive this particular narrative trespass. In Episode Three the Doctor was shown picking up a mysterious piece of equipment from the mysterious Queen's mysterious mausoleum. It is, of course, the hologram projector. He doesn't tell us that it is a hologram projector: but he looks at it pointedly, as if to say "This is a plot device: it is going to be important later on." If we are paying very close attention indeed, we might notice that the Doctor who walks into the Bridge and is made to walk the plank is not holding the device. (Shades of Matt Smith's jacket!) But this was 1978. No-one had video recorders. DVDs were science fiction and Douglas Adams blocked novelisations of his works. Literally no-one would have remembered those kinds of tiny details between episodes. But Adams put it there. He was writing with some sense of narrative integrity.

The device hasn't been introduced simply in order to facilitate an escape. It's part of a huge plot reveal. A minor background character -- the Captain's nurse -- is herself a hologram, and always has been. Arguably, the hologram projector wasn't thought up to extricate the Doctor from an impossible cliffhanger: the cliffhanger was introduced to reveal to the audience the existence of the projector. The very small surprise that the Doctor survived the fall is trumped by the very big surprise that the Nurse isn't what she appeared to be -- which, in fact, turns the whole narrative on its head. In Episode Three, the Captain was a greedy braggart who wanted money and jewels. By Episode Four, he is the puppet of the Nurse, who is a projection of the evil Queen, who needs mineral resources to prolong her life and (this is a bit vague) regenerate into her own hologram.

Adams is very good at these kinds of foreshadowings and revelations; set-ups and pay-offs. In Episode One, Mr Fibuli tells the Captain that "there is something rather curious" about the planet they are about to obliterate. In Episode Four the Doctor spots that Calufrax is "an artificially metricised structure consisting of a substance with a variable atomic weight": and therefore the Second Segment of the Key to Time. ("Of course!" says Romana. She says that a lot.) In Episode One, an old man mentions that, nasty as the Captain is, he is nowhere near as bad as Queen Xanxia used to be in the olden days; in Episode Four, the mostly dead Queen is revealed to have been running the whole plot from the beginning. (She reassembled the dying Captain, but has forced him to use his hyperspace expertise to freeze her in time in the moment before she dies, while somehow transferring her consciousness to the hologram.)

And, yes, some of it is contrived. There is a sense that Adams knew the kinds of things he wanted to put into the story, and has to use a bit of brute force to connect them together. But he really does try. The Mentiads -- the chanting telepaths from the opening scenes -- turn out to be the local resistance movement. How do they connect with the Captain? Because when a planet is destroyed, its life-force is released, and you would naturally expect that to trigger or enhance the power of latent telepathy. The Doctor has come to Calufrax in search of the Key to Time: but the Captain has come there because it is a source of a rare mineral which he can use to power a plot device to block the Mentiads mental powers.

Pure babble, of course. But at least some work has been done to tie the two plot threads together. And there is a certain pleasure in watching it all unroll. We perceive a narrative structure even though we might be pressed, in the cold light of day, to explain it all.

What would have happened if Jodie Whittaker or David Tennant had been thrown from the top of a mountain into a ravine? I am very much afraid that the hologram projector would have been pulled out of the Doctor's bottom, with no foreshadowing whatsoever. Or else it would have been revealed that hard-light projections are an innate property of sonic screwdrivers. Or that Time Lords have a built in ability to be in two places at the same time. Or that a second Doctor can be magicked up if his companions have beautiful happy thoughts. Or if he is hit very hard with a gigantic fairground hammer.

I would judge that to be bad storytelling. But Russell T Davies might say that the set-up is ponderous, and that since we know the Doctor can do anything there is no point in explaining how he did this one particular thing. Or that the plank-walking is a fun thing to happen in a piratical themed story, and the great thing is to move onto the next fun thing. And that no one is going to remember the projector from seven days ago in any case.

And he wouldn't definitely be wrong.

[NOTE 1] Head canon 1: Pirates, like Christmas, are a kind of archetype that exists all over the universe. Head canon 2: The story is taking place in the Far Future, when Earth literature has spread all through the universe, its origins long-forgotten. (The Captain has read Pirate stories in the original Klingon.) Head Canon 3: The human idea of piracy came from contact with space pirates in the ancient world. 

[NOTE 2] The Parrot repeats both phrases back at the Captain in Goss's extended novelisation; in the shorter version the Captain says "pretty Polyphase Avitron" in an internal monologue.

[NOTE 3] James Goss describes the Captain as much more like a zombie or cyborg than he appears in the TV show: "the remains of a very large man" "a green eyepatch flowed dangerously, metal lips sneered, and even half of his beard was iron". He also says that he smelt of cooking meat, which would have been hard to convey on TV.

[NOTE 4] Robert Louis Stevenson gave John Silver a Bristol accent, and Robert Newton exaggerated it: but in 1978 we had not quite reached the point where a pirate was defined as "a person who says Arrr". In 1986, Baker himself would perfectly embody the cliche as Captain Redbeard Rum, opposite Simon Jones (Arthur Dent) as Walter Raleigh.

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Coming this month:

I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

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Arts Diary: Back to Black

Arts Diary: Back to Black:  Everyman

Arts Diary: Doubt

Arts Diary: Doubt:  Alma Tavern

Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet (2)

[Patreon Supporters have already read all five parts of this essay, and are currently reading my deep dive into Stones of Blood. Why not join them?]

Douglas Adams is a big name. A really big name. It's hard to overestimate just how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big his name is. I mean, you may think that "the Philippine army's retreat from Rejivic" is a terrific line, but that's just peanuts to Douglas Adams. Listen.... 

[This has been done before. Ed.]

The Pirate Planet catches Adams on the cusp of his success. It was transmitted between 30 September and 21 October 1978: the novelisation of the Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy was published on October 12th. When Episode One started, Adams was the up-and-coming writer of a "cult" radio show. By the time Episode Four came to an end, he was a best selling author.

The writing of the two works are rather hopelessly intertwined. The Pirate Planet was green lit just after the pilot episode of Hitch Hiker was recorded: Adams would have been working on the final Doctor Who scripts while the radio show was being made. Watching the Pirate Planet today, it's hard to avoid the sense that Adams is referencing his more famous work. The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy is so vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big [Stop it. Ed.] that innocuous expressions, two digit numbers and bathroom accoutrements, have taken on disproportionate significance in relation to it. In Episode Two of Pirate Planet, the Captain threatens Kimus with torture, and the Doctor tells Kimus not to panic. A reference to the words printed in large friendly letters on the cover of the most wholly remarkable [I won't tell you again -- Ed] or merely the Doctor engaging in some typically flippant understatement?

"Standing around all day looking tough must be very wearing on the nerves" says the Doctor to two of the Captain's guards as they escort him along the low-inertia corridor. "Long hours, violence, no intellectual stimulation." This obviously recalls Ford Prefect's speech to the Vogon Security Guard in the Hitchhiker pilot, although it is not (as is sometimes said) a direct quote. (What Ford says is "Do you really enjoy this sort of thing? Does it give you a full satisfying life? Stomping around, shouting, pushing other people out of spaceships?") And the two contexts are very different. Ford is genuinely trying to persuade the Vogon to question his life-choices and let them go; the Doctor is just making disdainful conversation with a couple of goons.  Tom Baker delivers the lines in such an off-hand way you could easily miss them.

Certainly, Adams wasn't above planting in-jokes in his works. In Destiny of the Daleks (1979) he will show the Doctor reading a book by one Oolon Celuphid (a frequently referenced off-stage character in the Guide.) And he named the lead singer of Disaster Area after a Camden Town estate agent. But in this case I don't think he is hiding easter eggs. He isn't even recycling jokes. He's just being Douglas Adams, writing in Douglas Adams' idiom. There are bound to be verbal echoes:

Captain: The whole infrastructure of quantum physics was in retreat!

Marvin: Pausing only to reconstruct the whole infrastructure of integral mathematics in his head...

Doctor: Lying in the street exactly where I wasn't expecting to find it.

Narrator: They hung in the air in much the same way that bricks don't.

Doctor: I'll never be cruel to a particle in an accelerator again.

Arthur: I'll never be cruel to a gin and tonic again.

The shouty Captain is not so very far removed from Prostenic Vogon Jeltz ("I appear to have just wiped out half my crew") and, indeed, to the security officer on the B Ark; and the idea of the planet Earth being wiped out, in passing, because the Captain needs a supply of Quartz makes one think of hyperspatial bypasses and games of four dimensional bar-billiards.

But more nebulously, the whole thing has a very Douglassy feel to it. When the Doctor needs to get into the Captain's base he uses, not the sonic screwdriver, but a safety pin, explaining that the more sophisticated a defence system is, the more vulnerable it is to a simple form of attack. I don't know if that's actually true: does Fort Knox really suffer from burglars with masks and crowbars? But this was the era of farm boys, torpedos and exhaust ports. The Captain is finally brought down by someone literally putting a spanner in the works. (The Mentiads use telekinesis to smash the power generator with a wrench.) This could almost stand as a motif for Douglas Adams philosophy: a techno-prophet who maintained a healthy cynicism about technology. 

I would baulk a little at describing the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy as "comedy". The BBC initially regarded it as a "drama" because comedy is by definition filmed in front of a live audience with laugh tracks. It is certainly very funny indeed: but rewatching the much-maligned TV version recently, what struck me was not the jokes (which I had heard before) or the special effects (which are not very good) but the sheer breadth of vision; the number of over-the-top idea that are lightly tossed out in each thirty minute segment. It's a story which starts with the destruction of the earth and ends up in the stone age, managing to take in artificial planets, the fall of the galactic empire, and the secret of the universe en route. But you have to already like science fiction to find it funny: mundanes were on the whole baffled by it.

After the destruction of the Earth, poor Arthur Dent winds up on a planet which constructs other planets: indeed, in one of the series' central ironies, it turns out that the Magratheans originally created the Earth. A planet which makes planets is a great SF idea: but Magrathea is itself essentially mundane. It's an expensive business providing luxury items to clients who want new planets for the most trivial of reasons. In the same way that he satirised the Internet before the Internet quite existed: so he preempted Thatcher's "loadsamoney" economy by almost a decade.

It's a kind of conceptual illusion. Look once, and you see something big and cosmic out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. (In some versions, Marvin plays Thus Sprach Zarathustra for Arthur's benefit.) Look again, and you see a shady 1980s property company. The destruction of the earth is essentially trivial: it was "demolished" rather than "destroyed", like a pretty cottage in the way of a road-widening scheme. But the earth turns out to be more significant than we realised: it was created as part of a project to discover the meaning of life. Except that the meaning of life (not to mention the universe, and for that matter, everything) turns out to be pretty silly; and the extra-dimensional beings mainly want to know the Answer so they can make witty jokes about it on chat shows. And they present themselves as white mice. Everything is simultaneously bigger and smaller than you thought: life on earth has a point, but it's a pointless point; life the universe and everything have a meaning, but its a meaningless meaning.

But it isn't quite a parody or a skit. Deep Though is definitely funnier than the Eternals, or the Monolith, or Cthulhu, or the Fendahl, or any of the other beings who have turned out to be "behind" human history all along. But Deep Thought does the space-god thing better -- more imaginatively, more evocatively -- than all the entities who have done it seriously. Nowadays, when we see Captain Kirk encountering a computer that thinks it's God, which he does about one week in three, we don't say "That's the serious thing of which the Hitch-Hiker's Guide was a parody". We say "Douglas Adams did that better."

The Pirate Planet doesn't have the same breadth of imagination as Hitch Hiker. But it inhabits the same conceptual space. One could perfectly well imagine Arthur Dent on Zanak or the Doctor on Magrathea. The Captain is absurd: but he's terrifying because he's absurd. There is something pleasing and frightening about the idea that the Earth might be wiped out in passing by a silly man cos-playing Captain Hook. And there's an underlying Dawkinsianism at play. (This was before Doug and Dick became besties.) We think we're jolly important on our planet, but from the universe's point of view, we barely register.

Hitchhiker and Pirate Planet -- and the whole aborted masterpiece of Season Seventeen -- speak to a world where the 1970s are passing, and the 1980s are struggling to be born: the moment before the internet and the home computer boom; before we put phones in our pockets and mainstreamed geekery.

Douglas Adams was big. Really big. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs, Sue Lawley couldn't help noticing his BMW and his Rolex watch. Neil Gaiman knew both Terry Pratchett and Alan Moore: but he said that Douglas Adams was the only bona fide genius he ever met. 

And he started out writing for the daft little TV show we love so much.

Serious face.

I currently have 62 Patreon followers, paying me very roughly £80 dollars per article.

Every single follow is a huge vote of confidence and massively appreciated; as, indeed, is every comment and every reader. (I am reminded of aline by favourite singer/songwriter: “It still blows my mind each time they let me play to anyone.”)

However, it remains true that I lost about five followers during March, on top of the ones I have lost since the beginning of the year, and any further drop in followers would be A Little Alarming.

I reduced the amount of hours I work on my day-job in 2022 specifically to spend more time writing; and Patreon remains my primary income stream.

I am only semi-serious when I say that I think my political writing drives people away. Certainly people have walked away (and in some cases stopped talking to me altogether) because of my shockingly right wing / shockingly left wing views. But I am sure it’s mostly because Times Are Hard and setting up monthly payments is a certain amount of hassle.

I also have to consider that I have over the last twenty years said absolutely everything I have to say on absolutely every subject, and that it is time to start looking for another hobby. I turn out to be quite good at singing sea shanties, for certain values of "singing". And obviously the Trolls said a long time ago that I had simply lost my marbles.

It’s definitely the case that if I find my Patreon followers go UP this month when I start writing about Doctor Who again, I am more likely to write about Doctor Who (or start some other Great Big Geek project). I set up a little Readers Poll for Patreon Supporters, which seems to show that the engaged followers are basically fine with me going off on one about Woke from time to time.

Coming this month:

I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

If this is even slightly interesting, do please consider clicking on the little button and pushing my follower back up to a healthy 70 or so. 

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Doctor Who Season 16: The Pirate Planet (1)

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We got as far as Billy Shears and then said "Oh, sod it, let's just do tracks."

Ringo Starr

The Pirate Planet is utterly joyous.

Flawed, of course, but joyous.

The Graham Williams era (1977-80) does not have a good reputation with fans. For many years, "Season Seventeen" was a swear-word, as foul in the '80s as "Chibnall Era" is today. And sure, Baker's later years -- Seasons 15, 16 and 17 -- can seem silly and cheap and pantomimic. They are not serious grown up children's drama, like the best of the black and white years; but nor are they as scary and edgy and beautiful as much of the Hinchcliff era.

But I don't care. The Pirate Planet contains the core DNA of Doctor Who. Bundle it together with Star Wars and the Micronauts. Make a mental note that Howard the Duck and Cerebus the Aardvark were going completely over my head at roughly the same time. There was a rising vibe. The Universe is big and absurd and exciting and terrifying and small and cosy and funny all at the same time.

This is what Doctor Who is all about. This is who I am.

Yes, it has flaws. They are the flaws of the era, so we can mostly forgive them: even look on them with a kind of warm affection.

There is a certain stylistic inconsistency. The first shot is a model of an alien city. A perfectly good model; a rather primitive city, maybe an oasis in a desert; with even a slight Tatooine vibe. But there's a big Tracy Island structure lodged in the mountains which overlook the city. [NOTE 1] We don't particularly care that it's "only a model": that's what we expect planetary exteriors to look like.

When Romana and the Doctor arrive in the city, we aren't particularly surprised to discover that they are on a stage set. A perfectly good stage set. There are arches and Greek columns and a floor which is a little too obviously a studio. Groups of extras enter stage left and exit stage right and the Doctor tries to talk to them. We expect Doctor Who to follow stage-logic. If the BBC had been able to afford a hustling bustling crowded market place, the gag about everyone ignoring the Doctor but talking to Romana ("she is prettier than you") would have been harder to pull off.

When we move to the interior of the futuristic structure on the mountain-- the evil Captain's "bridge" -- we leave behind the world of am-dram and move into the world of low-budget movies. Into, in fact, the world of "BBC Sci-Fi" which is practically a genre in its own right. There are some glitches: the most advanced ship in the universe apparently uses old-fashioned rotary telephones, and Mr Fibuli, the Captain's snivelling henchman, seems to be wearing twentieth century glasses -- but it's big and futuristic and the set-designers are thinking in three dimensions. There are pyramid shaped banks of controls. There are characters in grey uniforms who hand each other important looking files; there are black-clad stormtroopers who stand stock still. A bad guy in red, who at first we only see from behind, presides over it all. [NOTE 2] There are only seven actors on the set, but it manages to look crowded. This is how spaceship interiors have always looked; this is how spaceship interiors are meant to look; this is how we expect spaceship interiors to look. We're only a couple of rels from the Liberator.

But then a group of telepathic zombie cultists -- the "Mentiads" -- leave their secret cave and advance towards the city. We see them en route, shambling through what is quite clearly a British National Park: Coity Mountain in Wales, in point of fact. A grassy hill looks like a grassy hill: but the use of a real, recognisable location creates not verisimilitude but artificiality. [NOTE 3.] When the cultists, in saffron robes, are attacked by stormtroopers, in black leather armour, we feel that what we are watching is a live action roleplaying game. A perfectly well costumed and well choreographed roleplaying game. Later, we go to the spot where the Captain is strip mining the planet for its precious minerals. The mine is meant to be automated. It is so advanced that it can suck everything out of a planet in a matter of minutes; and then shrink the planet down to the size of a conker. But what we see is clearly a late 1970s coal mine, shortly before Maggie-Maggie-Maggie closed them all down. It's Blaenavon pit, in fact, now a museum: a convenient twenty minute drive from Coity Mountain.

And yes, we can use our Imaginations. We can say that the Big Pit is standing in for the automated mine, and that Berkley Power Station is standing in for the Captain's terrifyingly advanced hyperspace engines. After all, a little band of gold-coloured cardboard can perfectly well stand in for the crown of Henry V. When we do speak of hyperspace engines, think that you do see them, and all that that entails. It's the differences in style -- the clashes -- which pull us out of the action. It's hard to parse a model, a stage set, a park and an industrial site as part of a single artistic creation -- let alone a piece of coherent world-building. I found it particularly hard to convince myself that the filmed-on-location hyperspace engines were on the other side of the filmed-in-a-studio sliding doors (which K-9 spends Episode Four entirely failing to open.) I honestly think that a painted backdrop and a sign saying "To the mine" would have done the job better.

The actual "special effects" -- miniatures and costumes and animation and what not -- are good-by-the-standards-of-the-time. The air cars, which ferry characters to and from the bridge, are full sized props. They look, in keeping with the pirate theme, like small boats. Not unlike Jon Pertwee's infamous Whomobile, in fact. Colour separation overlay (green screen) was still in its infancy and the BBC tended to overestimate what could be done with it. But the props move not displeasingly in front of photographic backgrounds; while Mary Tamm and Tom Baker mime movement and a special effects technician blows their hair with an off-stage fan.

The pirate Captain has a robot parrot. Of course he does. And as we know, the Doctor has a robot dog. The Doctor has always had a robot dog. K-9 isn't merely a companion, he's an extension of the Doctor's being, as much a fixture as the Sonic Screwdriver and the TARDIS. In the penultimate episode, K-9 kills the parrot. Of course he does. Two robots; two friends; two pets: naturally, they fight. It's no ILM effects sequence: but a bit of whizzing across blue-screen backgrounds and some optically added laser beams convey the idea of a fight. K-9's ray gun and the parrot's bombs look like something out of a video game. But a Star Wars quality dog fight (or indeed, dog-and-parrot fight) wouldn't necessarily have improved the joke. It might even have spoiled it. The suggestion of K-9 versus Polyphase Avatron is more fun than any possible implementation of it. [NOTE 4]

When the parrot executes the Captain's minions, it uses a gun sticking out of its front end; its "beak". When fighting K-9, it appears to drop bombs from its stern. Silly people have said it looks as if the bird is shitting on the dog. I think we are supposed to think that it is laying eggs. Which is not a great deal more sensible.

The BBC head of serials thought that Pirate Planet was far too silly. He wanted to cancel the story altogether, because it was dragging Doctor Who too far in the direction of comedy. Since BBC high command had issued instructions, post-Deadly Assassin, that the show should become less violent and less horrific, it is hard to see what other direction Graham Williams could have dragged it in.

But it is silly. Mary Tamm and Tom Baker's dialogue sometimes sounds a little too much like a music-hall cross-talk act. When K-9 dumps some expository pseudo-science, the Doctor breaks the fourth wall, looks to the audience, and says "That's what I thought." (A silly moment: but it puts the Doctor conspiratorially in league with the viewer and reminds us that despite his all knowing robot companion and his better qualified assistant, it's still his show.) There's a stupid joke about a "linear induction" corridor which "works by neutralising inertia" -- meaning that when it's switched on, no-one can move along it, and when it's switched off, everyone is shot down it at great speed. The Doctor's temporary companion, the wet rebel Kimus, demonstrates this by running on the spot, which looks merely stupid.

But there are good jokes as well. I enjoy the moment when there seems to be an anachronistic ring at Kimus's family's doorbell: and we cut to the Doctor holding a tiny Chinese handbell that he presumably found in his pocket. I like the Doctor's smart Alec dialogue: "Well, I just put one point seven nine five three seven two and two point two oh four six two eight together." And I still like the conscious eccentricity. When the Doctor needs to lure a guard away from his air-car, he lays a false trail of liquorice allsorts [NOTE 5]

But the story as a whole can't be read as comedy. The hollow teleporting planet, the cyborg space pirate with a robot parrot, the ancient queen projecting herself into her own hologram; the trophy room of shrunken planets -- these ideas may be absurd, but we don't laugh at them.

I don't even think it can be described as camp. (I'm not quite sure anything apart from the 1966-68 Batman TV show can be described as camp, which increases my respect for Batman quite considerably.) To be camp is to laugh at your own seriousness, to be so dead-pan it's funny. Tom Baker's reaction when he discovers the true nature of the Captain's schemes is deadly serious; but I don't think we are supposed to be amused by him not being amused. If anything, we are watching dead-serious actors being confronted by absurd situations and not seeing the joke. We certainly enjoy the incongruity: the whole idea of a TV show where a crazy man with a fake parrot is engaged in "one of the most heinous crime ever committed in this galaxy". But we mainly enjoy the big huge over-the-top science fictional concepts as big huge over-the-top science fiction concepts. Hollow teleporting planets. Telepaths who absorb the life force of dead populations. An ancient matriarch frozen in the last seconds of life, transferring her essence into a hard-light hologram. A collection of dwarf planets arranged in a perfect gravitational pattern. 

Pirate Planet is bringing a post-Star-Wars epic sensibility to Doctor Who: bigger than the biggest space-opera, with a tongue positioned a few millimetres north of its cheek -- but with an inconsistent, homemade feel which stops us from fully believing in it. And maybe if we did fully believe in it it would stop being so joyous. 

Silly? Comedy? Camp? Whimsical?

The word we are actually groping for had not quite been coined in 1978. Pirate Planet is Adamsian. Pertaining to the works of Douglas Adams.

Adamic is already taken, and means something entirely different.

NOTE 1

James Goss has novelised the Pirate Planet twice: once fairly faithful Target style write-up of the TV show, and another much more expansive version based on Douglas Adams original scripts. In his longer novelisation, he says that the structure in the mountains -- the Captain's 'bridge"-- is meant to look as if a spaceship has crashed into the mountain, but that doesn't come across in the miniature.

NOTE 2

James Goss thinks this is important; in both the long and the short novelisations he pointedly describes the Captain's chair and states that he isn't allowed to tell you what the Captain looks like yet.

NOTES 3

Goss implies that the Mentiads have to cross a desert to reach the city.

NOTE 4

James Goss describes the robot thus: "its eyes were bloody diamonds, its sharp plumage a spread of precious metals, its claws and beak titanium." The TV version looks like a bird-shaped copper cylinder. If it wasn't sitting rather clumsily on the Captain's shoulder you might not realise it was meant to be a parrot. 

NOTE 5 

Not jelly babies. Earlier in the episode Romana took a bag of jelly babies from the Doctor's pocket, so we may be intended to think that he has run out. Or maybe the little round coconut rolls have more visual appeal. In the novel, James Goss curiously suggests that one of the Doctor's favourite things is "Dolly Mixture" which are kind of like all-sorts only without the liquorice. Ten years later, the seventh Doctor would confront a psychotic robot made of allsorts. 

Serious face.

I currently have 62 Patreon followers, paying me very roughly £80 dollars per article.
Every single follow is a huge vote of confidence and massively appreciated; as, indeed, is every comment and every reader. (I am reminded of aline by favourite singer/songwriter: “It still blows my mind each time they let me play to anyone.”)
However, it remains true that I lost about five followers during March, on top of the ones I have lost since the beginning of the year, and any further drop in followers would be A Little Alarming.
I reduced the amount of hours I work on my day-job in 2022 specifically to spend more time writing; and Patreon remains my primary income stream.
I am only semi-serious when I say that I think my political writing drives people away. Certainly people have walked away (and in some cases stopped talking to me altogether) because of my shockingly right wing / shockingly left wing views. But I am sure it’s mostly because Times Are Hard and setting up monthly payments is a certain amount of hassle.

I also have to consider that I have over the last twenty years said absolutely everything I have to say on absolutely every subject, and that it is time to start looking for another hobby. I turn out to be quite good at singing sea shanties, for certain values of "singing". And obviously the Trolls said a long time ago that I had simply lost my marbles.

It’s definitely the case that if I find my Patreon followers go UP this month when I start writing about Doctor Who again, I am more likely to write about Doctor Who (or start some other Great Big Geek project). I set up a little Readers Poll for Patreon Supporters, which seems to show that the engaged followers are basically fine with me going off on one about Woke from time to time.
Coming this month:
I am writing my way around the 1978 Doctor Who story Stones of Blood, including a wild digression about Ley-lines, stone-circles and evangelicalism. I am hoping to do another Video Diary before too long. 

If this is even slightly interesting, do please consider clicking on the little button and pushing my follower back up to a healthy 70 or so. 

Pledge $1 an article to support this blog.

Pledge $2 an article to support this blog

Pledge $5 an article to support this blog.