Planet Of The Dead: Ranking - 253

 Planet Of The Dead

(Easter Special, Dr 10, 11/4/2009, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Gareth Roberts and Russell T Davies, director: James Strong)  

Rank: 253

''It looks like the 200 bus failed to turn up again, wonder what planet it's ended up on this time? I would get the time-travel bus but chances are three will turn up at once again and then detour me to blooming Skaro. Oh here it is - a single universe-explorer-master please...'

Nowadays DW can be off the air for a year or more and nobody thinks twice about it, but the announcement that for 2009 we were getting four specials spread throughout the year up to Christmas rather than the usual 13 part series was met with horror by us fans who remembered the 18 month hiatus in the mid-80s that led to a full cancellation by the late 80s. Would the time off air kill our favourite show just when it was at the peak of its popularity? Would the quality drop? Thankfully not in either case, but the first of these specials - billed as the first ever Easter special, though in the olden days DW stories used to run through the Easter period most years - didn't help much in either respect. It also hinted at why we got that break when we did. Russell T Davies was preparing to hand over running the show to Steven Moffat and David Tennant was making way for Matt Smith and the whole story has the feel of one that got overlooked in the shuffle. Whisper it quietly, but don't you think it looks a bit tired? Still packed full with strong ideas and great lines but going through the motions a bit? We'd had worse episodes since the Who revival certainly, but they tended to fall apart because they were trying something bold, new different - and wrong. 'Planet' feels like lots of other episodes cobbled together. David Tennant has lost his usual bounce and is clearly missing Catherine Tate as much as his character misses Donna. The writing is as close to numbers as two of the series' most inventive and talented writers can get. This week's monster, The Tritovore, feels like a rummage through the costume box for leftovers (the Vespiform, with hints of Hath) rather than a fully fleshed out creation. Even the music and direction fall a bit flat. Meanwhile the one big new addition, one-shot companion Lady Christina De Souza turned down by the Doctor for full-time travel because she's well dodgy (so the Doctor finally learnt after Turlough not to open the Tardis doors to just anyone then?), is irritatingly smug throughout. Given how similar she is to plans for Andrew Cartmel's plans for a post-Ace companion in the 1990 series that never was, maybe we dodged a bullet there. Goodness knows what she'd have done if she'd become a full companion - nicked something off the Bowie base and called The Master a right geezer, or something like that probably.All this is a shame because the bits of this special that work really stand out. The sight of an everyday London bus in the desert sands of an alien world is prime DW, merging the ordinary and the extraordinary, even if it caused horrific problems on set when the bus got damaged in transit (causing a quick re-write about it being damaged by its journey). RTD often shines when writing for crowds of contrasting strangers and while these Humans aren't perhaps as well drawn as the ones on 'Midnight' he still possesses of sketching in a person in a handful of sentences that makes them seem like they've lived an entire life before we meet them. had this story been made years earlier when everyone was still excited and with Rose, Martha or Donna as the companion this story could still have been a real favourite. Like many an Easter present, though, it ends up feeling a bit hollow, its treats buried away under too many layers of sugar.

Positives + This story was based on Gareth Roberts' New Adventures story 'The Highest Science', which is one of the range's best. All the good bits of this story come from there, tweaked, although in the earlier version the bus is a strain, the companion is Bernice Summerfield (that Cartmel companion, whose basically an upgraded Christina) and the baddies are the Chenolians, a far more interesting group of mutant and presumably teenage alien tortoises with X-ray vision who were sadly too expensive to reproduce on screen. This episode has more problems than most, but none of them are in the book, just in the way the book had to be translated to television.

Negatives - Michelle Ryan was a big name at the time after some high profile roles in Eastenders, The Bionic Woman and the ever under-rated Merlin (she plays a witch in at least 1 of these series, possibly 2). After being in everything at once her career crashed and burned after this, much like the London bus when she left Britain to make a name for herself in Hollywood and burnt most of her bridges. It's not that she's bad (her dialogue and character are a bigger problem than her acting) but she plays Christina with very broad strokes and practically winks at the camera when she's up to something, which is out of place when everyone else is aiming for the feel of a rugged kitchen sink drama.

The Two Doctors: Ranking - 254

  The Two Doctors

(Season 22, Dr 6 with Peri and Dr 2 with Jamie, 16/2/1985-2/3/1985,  producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Peter Moffat)  

Rank: 254

''Food glorious food, tender Terranians and custard! Wait, why is that baked potato alien shooting at me?!'

This story isn't bad by any means, but it wastes a lot of the things that could have made it really special. Bob Holmes is back writing for Dr Who again at last after six years away...a story that's quite unlike his usual style. We get the return of the 2nd Doctor!...Who after spending episode 1 totally nailing the part he's only played twice in 16 years then has to spend most of the story out of character as a 'part Androgum'. He's back with Jamie...who turns savage partway through and barely says a word. Bob Holmes writes for his most famous creations The Sontarons for only the second time...under heavy protest at having to have a monster at all, so they might as well not be here too (also, how come the Androgums don't at least try to have a nibble if they like Human flesh so much? I mean, Humans don't look tasty but the Sontarons resemble baked potatoes on legs). There's a great and nuanced cast headed by John Stratton and Jacqueline Pearce (a Blake's 7 baddy stronger than any humanoid we see in Who, except perhaps Roger Delgado's Master) ...Who are given a script that all but encourages over-acting and throws subtlety out the window. We get a lot of location filming in Spain...But for all the difference it makes to the script it could have been filmed in Croydon (the original plan, to film in New Orleans, made a lot more sense, but the budget got cut and the script re-worked at the last minute). Like many a Bob Holmes story, this one is based around one of the bees in his bonnet, but his conversion to vegetarianism doesn't lend itself to a DW story as well as his pet peeves bureaucrats and tax inspectors. The idea of what would happen if Humans were seen as nothing special and just another group in the food chain by an alien species gives the Androgums a whole new clever reason for coming to Earth, but it also makes for a really gruesome little story where everyone wants to kill everyone else, most of the time in sets resembling giant kitchens with slabs of meat hanging from hooks. Even the Doctor gets in on the act, killing Shockeye with cyanide - it's hard to imagine another story where he would even think of doing that, even if it is in self defence while badly injured. I can just about imagine a 'normal' 6th Dr story in this setting, as its not that far removed from the 'video nasty' theme of 'Vengeance on Varos' which worked really well and gave Colin Baker a chance to get on his high horse a lot, the moral outrage his doctor does so well. But the 2nd Dr is completely wrong for this sort of story - a cuddlier, funnier yet underneath it all a subtler and often a more manipulative Dr - is just the wrong setting for him to come alive. This Dr quickly becomes a passenger caught up in circumstances and that's something he never was in the 1960s (or indeed till Peter Davison came along). This is one of the grimmest stories DW ever did, with the two Tardis crews eating or being eaten or being converted or badly injured, yet unlike the other grim DW stories (mostly the Eric Saward war epics) there's a lot of humour here too, with a lot of funny lines and philosophising between the action scenes that's pretty much unique to this series. Though there are lots of good moments and some great ones, I'm not convinced it works - this is the sort of story that will tell you off for eating meat, then linger on every gruesome detail of the cast about to be skinned alive and eaten, then throws in a joke to make you laugh. Definitely not one to watch over dinner in other words; you need strong stomach and a wicked sense of humour to get the most out of this one, for all the many things it gets right.

Positives + The best bits by far are the all-too brief interactions between the two Doctors and two companions. Colin Baker and Patrick Troughton were old friends (Colin was once room-mates with Pat's son David) and their affection and easy chemistry lights up the screen, though their banter is spicy and icy even for a multi-Dr story. It's impressive how completely Pat Troughton revives his character and the start in black and white could easily be taken for a 1960s episode give or take the odd wrinkle. Jamie and Peri make a great double-act too and its interesting to see how despite being two very different characters from entirely different centuries they both end up resembling each other: loyal, brave, but slightly clueless. The downside is hat it takes so much of the plot before they meet and then how quickly afterwards the 2nd Dr gets converted into an Androgum, complete with orange eyebrows.

Negatives -This is such an oddly plotted story for anyone, but particularly by one of the most prolific DW writers and one-time script editor, a story that gives you horrible while you're still laughing from the previous scene and conversely something funny while you're still reeling in horror. Combining the two is what DW stand out from its peers, but its never been done quite as black and white as this before. Take Oscar, the pretentious insect collector - an obvious bit of comic relief with his penchant for quoting Shakespeare at inopportune moments and ideas above his station. He's the sort of character who always survives to the end then tells the authority figure what really happened while they don't believe a word of it. Here even he dies, a quite gruesome and gratuitous death, while still in character and coming up with pretentious quotes. The point being made is that, for all his high culture, to Shockeye he's just another piece of meat, but how are we meant to respond to that scene? Laugh or cry?

The Lazarus Experiment: Ranking - 255

    The Lazarus Experiment

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 5/5/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Stephen Greenhorn, director: Richard Clark)  

Rank: 255

''You can't go out the house looking like that. Not until you're older...What do you mean you live forever?!?'

Would you like to live forever if you had to be genetically modified to spend part of your time as a scary monster? And does a timelord, who can live foreverish barring accidents and timewars, have the right to sit in judgement? That's the thoughtful debate behind what's quite a simple plot by DW standards. It's the sort of big, sweeping topic this series always excels at by taking it out of the realms of philosophical pondering and putting a real (well, CGI in this case) face to it. Read the script and this is quite a moving story (if ever a modern Who needed a Target novelisation its this one, not flipping Eaters of Light or Robot of Sherwood). There are real problems with the way this one comes over on screen though. One is the whacking coincidence that Professor Lazarus just happens to choose as his secretary the sister of a junior doctor who happened to get stranded in a hospital that was transported to the moon only a few weeks ago and is now travelling with the only other person who has a clue what's really going on with the genetic experiment at the heart of this story (is Martha's family unlucky or what? Her 'cousin', also played by Freema Agyeman, was killed on-screen just a few episodes too). Another coincidence, of course, is that a man named Lazarus ends up being so obsessed with rising from the dead in the first place. A big problem is that the science makes even less sense than normal this week (humans don't turn into primeval monsters if you mess around with their genes, honest - in reality doing what he's doing Professor Lazarus would lose a few IQ points or more likely collapse and die). Other DWs are just as plot-lucky or scientifically bonkers though. The biggest problem is that the CGI for the Lazarus 'monster' is awful, possibly the worst special effect in 21st century Who. A final problem is that the part should be played by someone who oozes charm and sophistication and giving it to Mark Gatiss to play means he ends up playing it as an early version of Mycroft Holmes - scarily intelligent yes, but not the people person Dr Lazarus needs to be for the Jekyll 'n' Hyde effect to have full impact. Everyone assumes that Gatiss must have written the part himself to give him something juicy to play, the way he naturally did with his own series Sherlock, but this isn't one of his scripts, even though it feels like it many ways with that dark undercurrent of what human nature is capable of when pushed. If you can overlook these problems - basically anything concerning the monster - then Stephen Greenhorn's script has a lot going for it and the regulars are as brilliant as ever (even if Martha's family are extremely annoying to us, as they are to her). The problem is the monster is in this story an awful lot, so you can't really avoid it the way you can with some disappointing DW monsters.

Positives+ Martha is, for me, the great unsung companion of the revival, proving that there was life after Rose Tyler without having to carbon copy her, and Freema sells every line here, even the bad ones. Her chemistry with David Tennant is more than up to Billie Piper's and their scenes together in this story are some of their best. Never have you wanted a monster to shut up more just so they can get more screen time together.

Negatives - I'm all for having dysfunctional families on TV so we can all feel better about our own, but Martha's aren't as well drawn as say Jackie Tyler or the Nobles in the RTD era (Steven Moffat getting round the problem by making his three main companions orphans). There are too many of them for a start with mothers, brothers, sisters, dads and stepmums to get to know considering they aren't in many stories. You'd think somebody out of that lot would be proud of their trainee doctor sister but instead they pout that she's always busy nowadays (did they really not realise what lifestyles doctors have?)Then they make wisecracks about the 'man' Martha's brought home and what he might be like. have they not noticed who Martha is in twenty years? She's conscientious with a capital 'C'. her fastidious caring side isn't a trait that got created as a side effect of travelling with the Doctor, it was there before she met him, so why they assume the worst of her rather than, say, teasing her for acting out of character is anybody's guess. It's Martha's sister whose clearly the gullible sort, given the job she takes up because it paid too well to say no. Yet her busy body family don't seem to have questioned this miraculous job she got at all until Martha points it out. Also, did sister Tish really not think to mention to her Doctor sibling that she was helping to work on a ground-breaking study of genetics, even if it was just to gloat?

Last Christmas: Ranking - 256

   Last Christmas

(Christmas Special, Dr 12 with Clara, 25/12/2014, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Paul Wilmshurst)  

Rank: 256

''This episode makes all the characters feel as if they're losing their sanity' 'Well, no wonder it stars Sanity Claus then!' 'I mean, is his surname really 'Christmas'. What's Mrs Christmasses name?' Mary - as in a very Mary Chistmas to all our readers. Ho! Ho! Ho!'

Ho! Ho! Ho! The moment when we got the trailer for this festive special at the end of 'Death In Heaven' was quite a moment. There we were, still reeling from the horrors of watching the death of Danny Pink and the Brigadier being converted into a cyberman and then in come Nick Frost dressed as Santa Claus at the North Pole chasing alien crabs. The 'promise' made to us: this isn't a cheat, he's not an alien or a robot and we really are at the North Pole. What?!? They wouldn't would they? Speculations abounded, ranging from holograms to The master having a really bad day at the outfitters, but no: as it turned out the answer is still quite a lot of a cheat but it's also a lot more satisfying than we feared it would be at the time, in a very confusing Steven Moffat type way (spoilers) - We really are at the North Pole and everyone at the latest DW base did indeed experience Santa. Only it was the space crabs putting everyone in a deep sleep where their subconscious minds were crying out for help from someone that they trusted. Hello Santa. And indeed The Doctor, the script playing up the similarities between two benevolent and supposedly fictional characters that make life better through a form of 'magic', given that futuristic scientific breakthroughs from another world count are indecipherable from magic. Santa himself is good fun (this is easily the best Nick Frost's been in anything I've seen and he outclasses longtime friend Simon Pegg's DW turn in 'The Long Game'), though the rest of the latest DW base under siege are a pretty forgettable lot. On its own its a bit of silly harmless fun held together by a couple of decent scary bits. What hurts this tory most is where it comes in the chronology. Clara is still distraught from losing her boyfriend and clearly suffering trauma. Giving her 'dream visions' of Danny coming back robs the character of his natural end and pulls the whole mood of the episode down from what would otherwise have been a fun special, her 'dream' scenes clunkily inserted as if they belong to a whole other show. The 12th Doctor too is even grumpier than usual, with him perhaps more guilty over the results of the last episode than he wants to admit and too much of this story is him arguing with people over and over (not least with Santa over whether he can exist or not). To be honest, it's a surprise its such a big deal: mythological creatures that shouldn't exist turn up in DW all the time, including his own. The result is a Christmas special that on the plus side feels more genuinely Christmassey than most of the others, full of 'magic', sentiment and the sort of things even this show couldn't possibly get away with in the regular series. On the downside though it's all very uneven, lurching from big emotional set-pieces to corny jokes in the blink of an eye. Although that's quite Christmassy too in a way: even if you didn't start the episode on the sherry you'll soon feel like you were by the end of it all!

Positives + The dreams-within-dreams scenario has been done in DW a few times now (and arguably even better than here) but it's a really clever way of giving what could have been a very dumb and simple script a lot of layers. The Doctor and Clara both find closure by acting out what they should have said to the other and they get plenty of second chances to put things right again every time they 'wake up' and find life has all been a dream. In other words 'Last Christmas' is the most 'It's A Wonderful Life' of all DW stories and all the better for it.

Negatives - At least one of these scenes takes it too far though. The one where the Doctor visits an elderly Clara, prematurely aged by the crabs, is clearly there to mirror the scene where she helped an aging 11th Doctor in the last special, but it's an obvious dream-ruse and just too much mush, like stuffing your face with a second box of chocolates when you've just finished your first. This story was, at one stage, planned to be Clara's last story and until that last scene was a far more suitable way to go out than the one we got. The scenes of Clara and Danny saying goodbye to each other yet again also seem to go on waaaaaay too long, although the theme of Christmas being a time to remember the people who are missing is a strong one. It just doesn't belong in an episode featuring Santa and two Christmas elves. Ho! Ho! No!

 

Terminus: Ranking - 257

  Terminus

(Season 20, Dr 5 with Nysa, Tegan and Turlough, 15-23/2/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script-editor: Eric Saward, writer: Stephen Gallagher, director: Mary Ridge)  

Rank: 257

''You know, I was so excited to be at the centre of the universe that do you know what happened? me leg dropped off!' 'Pull the other one' 'I'd really rather not - I'm frightened that one might come off too!' 

This is another of those stories that makes for a pretty decent novel but kind of a ho-hum 100 minutes of television. Like all of Stephen Gallagher's other DWs (Warrior's Gate, various novels) it's a cerebral, thought-provoking piece with lots of big abstract concepts, this time focussing on illness and slavery. Unlike Warrior's Gate, though, nobody on screen seems to have the first clue that something deeper is going on. The story is set in the exact middle of the universe, which is a bit of a shaky start given that the universe is forever expanding and contracting and therefore can't have an exact middle for any length of time - as a concept though, of the universe turning 'heartless' and rotten from the core it works in the books in a way it doesn't on screen. I also love the fact that, rather than a big theme park planet, as other scifi series might do, in DW the middle of the universe is a spaceship stuck in orbit carrying leprosy sufferers. This story caused quite a stir at the time, with debates over whether space leprosy was really a good idea to use for teatime family entertainment but I think its valid - the suffering is shown sensitively without being lingered on. Like it or not, illness is a big part of the human condition and likely to exist even in the future - it makes sense it would appear in a DW story somewhere. While we don't get to know or really care for any sufferers up until (spoiler alert) Nyssa contracts it, we do see through her eyes how society mishandles it and turns a blind eye to people in pain. that's a strong basis for any scifi plot and gives Nyssa one of the more believable farewells in DW as she rallies to the patients' cause even when cured, using all the lessons of assertiveness and resilience her travels with the Doctor have taught her, alongside her wisdom and compassion. I'm still not entirely sure why getting leprosy makes her pull all her clothes off down to her underwear when no other sufferer does though (perhaps only Trakens develop fever from leprosy?), storywise at least - in production terms it was because fans kept writing in asking her to show some skin after years in elegant dresses and producer and actress thought the viewers should get what they wanted, a thought that now seems so mind-bogglingly wrong you can't believe it was only 40 years ago. 'Terminus' has some great ideas then, but the problem comes with turning those into a workable script. There's not much actually said out loud in this one. no real B-plots to keep momentum going and very little for everyone to do with Tegan and Turlough stuck in a ventilation shaft for two episodes purely to get them out the way because the script doesn't know what to do with them. The supporting cast are quite a forgettable bunch too, with the exception of Peter Benson's understated and dignified Bor. The token 'monster-who-isn't-a-monster', The Garm, is cute too - a big space dog whose much more likeable than the Karvanista who turns out to be the kindest being on the shop despite looking as if he's about to gobble everyone up. Liza Goddard is in the cast too in her only appearance five years after her divorce from Colin Baker and only a couple of stories before his first work for the series (and not as the Doctor). The end result is a story with some nice ideas and some strong scenes at the very beginning and very end but which is, for most of it, terminally dull.

Positives + A lot of other DW plots show what I want to happen with the future of the universe but this is one of the few brave enough to show it as I fear its going to be. It's basically the American health system in space: a company controls all the drugs and charges a fortune for them, not caring who lives or dies until they can pay for treatment and those who can't pay work as slaves for the rich to stay alive despite being too sick to do that work. I can't but help have this nasty feeling that someone in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet saw this story at the time of transmission and instead of being horrified went 'wow, what a good idea!'

Negatives - What's happened to the Black Guardian trilogy? For those who don't know in his second appearance Valentine Dyall wants revenge on the Doctor and has saved Turlough at the point of death by getting him to kill the Doctor, brainwashing him with lies about what our favourite timelord is really like. This is Turlough's second story and he's already tried to top the Doctor repeatedly in his first. In 'terminus' though he mostly wrestles with his conscience and gets stung by the crystal the Black Guardian uses to communicate with him, but doesn't actually do anything. He might as well not be here at all.

Vampires Of Venice: Ranking - 258

 Vampires Of Venice

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 8/5/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Toby Whithouse, director: Jonny Campbell)  

Rank: 258

''So sweetie, what star sign are you? Oh, aquarium OK... fancy a stroll down the beach? Oh, in the sea I'm alright with that...You know, your teeth are like stars. They're coming out at night. Wait...That's not right....Aaaaagh!' 

Gulp! I don't know what they put in the water on this episode but there's something...fishy about just how hormonal all the characters seem to be in what's not only the most Twilight but also the most Mills and Boon of Dr Who stories (only, this being DW, the one having the hots inappropriately in a love triangle is the companion whose just had her imaginary friend come to life, the sexy girls are vampire alien fish and instead of bodice rippers they're out to, well, rip other things). Everyone is at it in this story: There's the female vampire fish from outer space trying to find human males to mate with. The chief vampire fish having the hots for the Doctor. Amy and Rory getting it together during their first trip in the Tardis, though Amy still not-so-secretly has the hots for the Doctor. For a while it looks as if the Doctor has the hots for the alien fish too. It's a fun but frivolous story this one. It doesn't have a lot to say, the plot goes as far as any plot with vampire alien fish can go and its riding the bandwagon for sexy vampires so obviously I think it got a speeding ticket, but its one of those stories that has fun doing it. Nowadays, much more so than on broadcast, its a product of its time in the same way that every mid-1960s base from the future had psychedelic light displays and the 1970s always seemed to be bright orange, with a lot of '50 Shades of Gray' in there as well as Twilight (what with creating 'Being Human' too its beginning to look as if author Toby Whithouse might have a bit of a vampire fetish, though it was Steven Moffat's request to make it 'romantic'). It seems odd in retrospect how 'normal' putting this stuff in a programme made for family viewing was, though its also refreshing to have an alien race who want to conquer humanity not for money or power or resources but sex. Though I can't help wonder why the sisters of the water don't just elope with whales or dolphins, given that they probably have more in common with them genetically than Humans (surely much more to their taste than hairy land-walking apes). There are some tasty lines, Rory gets a very funny swordfight in one of his first major scenes that nicely sets up his character (and is not unlike how his dad gets introduced a couple of series later) and the setting (filming actually took place in Croatia not Venice) is gorgeous. It's just that this quite a silly episode that doesn't have much, you know, bite. Which is ironic when you think about it.

Positives + Matt Smith is often the best thing in the stories that make up his three series as the Doctor and rarely more so than here. He somehow manages to be totally convincing as the object of so many people's affections, yet genuinely alieny oblivious to it all not to mention hilariously funny (again while being oblivious to it), endlessly enthusiastic and, when the occasion demands it, violently outraged. You so buy into the Doctor's feelings in this story that you almost forget he's ticking off a bunch of alien fish people. Almost. I also have to mention the fan-friendly moment when he gets out his library card and it still has a picture of William Hartnell's Doctor on it 'because I keep forgetting to update it!'

Negatives - The publicity overdrive for this one suggested it would be DW's most 'romantic' story. At last, how sweet I thought to myself as there's a lot of scope in this series for making saving the universe be about saving two people for an occasional story. But, erm, nope. What we got wasn't love or romance at all, it was lusty busty fish people from outer space, which is quite a different vibe altogether!

Warriors Of The Deep: Ranking - 259

   Warriors Of The Deep

(Season 21, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 5-13/1/1984, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Johnny Byrne, director: Pennant Roberts)  

Rank: 259

''In which we end up 20,000 leagues under the sea and about £20,000 under the budget the show should have got

Or 'Warriors on the Cheap' as fans call it, for all sorts of reasons. I'm probably one of the last fans to experience the joys of getting to know certain DW stories from the Target novels first, before videos or repeats became more commonplace. I only ever read maybe 75 of them (50%ish) and last read one for a story I didn't know 30 years ago, but its funny how some of these stories you read in a book stay with you longer than some stories you saw on TV a month ago. This is one of those stories. On the printed page Johnny Byrne, a writer more known for comedy-dramas like 'All Creatures Great and Small', turns in a tense, claustrophobic parable about the cold war and power blocs. This must have been incredibly chilling to read at the height of the 'real' cold war, even if this one (spoiler alert) turns out to be manipulated by the Silurians and Sea Devils to kill off humanity (unless, of course, that wasn't Ronald Reagan all the time but a DW monster in a mask. Weirder things have happened in politics after all). It's gripping stuff on the page, with the Doctor the only person who can clearly see what's going on and less people willing to listen to him than normal, while the sea base setting is dark and sinister, filled with tough credible characters desperate to survive against imaginative monsters, humanity separated from destruction by its own oceans by a flimsy metal frame that can break at any time. Seeing this story on screen not long after was such a colossal disappointment however. That eerie base was heavily lit, making it look more like an artificial studio set than ever. The new monster, The Myrka, is ridiculous - a costume that's performed by the 2 guys who always did Dobbin the Horse in Rentaghost (because they had 'experience' of costumes like this one). One of the tough no-nonsense Human captains is played by Hammer Horror's Ingrid Pitt, which wasn't how I imagined the part when I read the book, let me tell you. And the tension? It evaporates in seconds when the clearly bored cast open their mouths. All those good serious heavy ideas that could have made this one of the deepest DW stories ends up looking like a pantomime on screen, proof positive that even a great script is no good when you botch a production as badly as this. Things were so rushed, in fact, that there's an infamous moment when Tegan brushes against a wall and paint comes away on her dress because it had only just been painted and they hadn't no time for another take (I'd love to explain it away, like all good DW fans often do, but repainting walls would be an odd thing to do in a base when under siege). Everything critics usually trot out about DW having sub-par budgets, wobbly sets and wobblier acting are wrong 99% of the time, but this is the one story where they might have a point. As the show's big return, following the show's 20th anniversary in 1983 accompanied by one of the biggest publicity blitzes it ever got, lots of people tuned in for ep 1 but not many stayed for ep 4. The show's ratings won't recover for the rest of the century.

Positives+ By heck that script's good though. It was a tough read in 1989/90 when it looked as if we knew how the cold war ended. Reading/watching this in 1983, when the world really was on the brink of nuclear Armageddon, this must have been terrifying. Exactly what 1980s DW should have been doing in other words and a plot I'm surprised the show didn't do more often (not till 2013's 'Cold War' in fact, set a few months before this story went out).

Negatives - The Myrka is a case of multiple departments getting it wrong at the same time and multiple people dropping the ball when someone could have easily stepped in and stopped it. The writer should have known that over-sized monsters never work in DW - there are so many precedents by 1984. The costumers and special effects teams messed up royally. Instead of hiding the finished product with close-ups or shots in darkened tunnels, the way other directors have done in the past with bad effects, Pennant Roberts shows the thing off in full light and actually lingers on it. The producer JNT could have said 'no' at any stage, but didn't. The scene where Ingrid Pitt aims a kung-fu kick at the Myrka before running off while it shuffles behind her slowly (the actresses' idea not in the script) is one of the most wretched scenes in all of DW. No wonder the Doctor says 'oh dear' as he sees it (a line in both script and book meant to convey fear, but spoken by Peter Davison with pity for how bad it looks).

The Savages: Ranking - 260

  The Savages

(Season 3, Dr 1 with Steven and Dodo, 28/5/1966-18/6/1966,  producer: Innes Lloyd, script editor: Gerry Davis, writer: Ian Stuart Black, director: Christopher Barry)  

Rank: 260

''I'm filled with the Doctor's energy...but not this Doctor's energy...Do you like my coat of clashing multicolours?...Oh and suddenly I'm the savage now am I?!?'

Of all the 312 stories of Who we've had so far this is the one I feel I know the least. It doesn't help that all the episodes are missing (there's about 75 seconds of episode 4, which is more than we have some stories mind) but even after reading the Target novelisation, hearing the TV soundtrack recorded onto reel-to-reel machines by enterprising fans and watching the rather good Loose canon reconstruction by fans using Telesnap photographs (long overdue being adopted by the BBC and being given an official release by the way) I still can't get much of a handle on this story at all. Some of the missing stories I feel I know better than the ones I've really seen with my own eyes. Some, even many, arguably seem richer in my imagination than they could possibly seem on TV. This one though: I still can't work out how it might have looked. Most of it seems to take place in long corridors, some of its in a quarry turned into a jungle and a lot of it is in a laboratory, but how those would have turned out is hard to tell from the still photographs, while the soundtrack doesn't have an abundance of dialogue either. In other words, it's hard to know where to place this story in the ranking, more than the others, so I'm happy to bump it up the list if it gets rediscovered and turns out to be a masterpiece. Something tells me it won't be though: we're near the end of William Hartnell's run, my favourite Doctor, and he sits most of the middle episodes of this one out to watch guest star Frederick Jaeger do his Hartnell impression instead while Dodo and Steven, well, scream and bicker for the most part. There's a very DW plot where (spoilers) you think the nice civilised society we run into are the good guys and the scary hairy Neanderthals who live in caves are the baddies, until it turns out to be quite the other way around and that in fact the 'posh' lot have been leeching energy off the poor. That makes it sound like a great story, but the trouble is DW had done this many many times before, even in 1966 (the very first episode was about being careful which caveman to trust, while in this very season 'Galaxy 4' gives us the exact same plot, just with beautiful women for the toffs and hideous monsters high on ammonia...don't ask...for the troglodytes. The only part that really sticks in the memory is when the Dr's energy is absorbed and Jaeger does an impersonation of Hartnell that's easily the best of the 4 times someone else got to play his Doctor. There's also the very first use of a quarry standing in for an alien planet, which does look good on the photographs I have to say. There's really not much happening elsewhere at all though and you can see the end of part 4 coming halfway through part 1. Could this be DW's emptiest four parter?

Positives+ Even three series in its become a bit of a cliche: The Tardis lands and everyone is either on the run or captured for appearing out of nowhere inside a blue box during some local/national/international crisis. The Tardis team are immediately put under suspicion and have to talk their way out of it. The great twist here is that this (un-named) planet knows of the Doctor and have been tracking the Tardis, convinced he'll show up one day because he seems to have been everywhere else. In a clever bit of scripting this of course flatters the Doctor no end and blinds him to the truth of what's going on for a couple of episodes...

Negatives - Poor Steven. While not the worst leaving scene ever (that's a tie between Mel running off with a gangster, Clara being killed by a space bird, Peri marrying Brian Blessed, Dan basically giving up and staying home because the script doesn't need him anymore and Dodo herself being brainwashed by the prototype for Microsoft Windows) he pretty much gets fired by the Doctor here, nominated to stay behind and lead the two warring factions of the planet into a new era of prosperity, even though he's shown no inclination to this role or special regard for this planet at all (they don't even know when or where they are). You sense that Steven stays not because he wants to but because Dodo has been teasing him all story about 'being a proper man' (bit rich coming from the companion who needs rescuing more than most). It seems to be the need to prove himself that makes him stay behind, but is this really the right place for him to strut his stuff? Steven is an action hero, a make do and mend out of nothing kind of guy (it's not for nothing actor Peter Purves became a Blue Peter presenter after all!) and before the Tardis came along he was stuck in isolation by the Mecchanoids, with a low opinion of humanity. Putting him amongst a bunch of dodgy scientists and rebuilding technology is in many ways the worst possible place for him. To survive this planet needs a diplomat, healer, mediator and visionary rolled into one. Steven is a doer who gets frustrated and impatient. In retrospect the really manly thing to do would be to look the Doctor and Dodo in the eye and say 'get lost - this planet's freezing!' Also I'd be pretty miffed personally if I'd missed landing in Swinging London in 1966 by one episode.

The Curse Of The Black Spot: Ranking - 261

  The Curse Of The Black Spot

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 7/5/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Stephen Thompson, director: Jeremy Webb)  

Rank: 261

In an emoji: ☠

'Ah'm the rootenest tootenest meanest pirate that ever lived Jim lad who'll think nothing of feeding you to the sharks and *sob* have you met my little boy? I love him so!...

Avast there me hearties, it's the fourth of a run of five Dr Who attempts to sort-of tell a pirate story that somehow end up being about something else entirely and though it starts off as being the most naturally piratical of any of them somehow this episode turns, by degrees, from an instalment of ‘Pirates Of The Caribbean’ to an episode of ‘Casualty’ via a step-off in an uncomfortable halfway house of ‘Eastend-arrrrs!’While it’s not as pointless as the Sea Devils tale to come and decidedly more lively than ‘The Smugglers’ or ‘The Space Pirates’, this story’s still a few dubloons short of a hoard if you catch my drift and will leave you seasick rather than going yo ho ho. Programmes about pirates tend to go in and out of fashion more than most genres but in 2011, with the fourth film in the Johnny Depp Caribbean franchise ‘On Stranger Tales’ about to be released, this sort of thing was such an inescapable part of popular culture back in 2011 that having pirates back in this series was as inevitable as having emojirobots in 2017, space rockets in 1969-1970 or The Beatles in 1965. Alas, like 3/4s of the other pirate stories in this series and indeed that fourth Caribbean film, it all starts promisingly then walks a plank and drowns midway through when the story gets becalmed. This week in the scurvy seadog corner are the casting department who seem to think that the nicely mannered Hugh Bonneville, Earl of Grantham and Paddington's adopted dad (fun fact: he was born in Paddington, London in real life. Second fun fact: he’s almost exactly the same age as the series, being all of thirteen days old when the first episode of ‘An Unearthly Child’ was transmitted) is just the right person to play Captain Henry Avery, one of the scariest human beings to ever sail any of the seven seas (he very much looks the part, growing a huge fluffy beard for the occasion, and is having great fun in the part, but his performance doesn’t exactly curdle the blood and makes him more of a natural pilates instructor than a pirate). And second is the fact the script that lumbers him with a stowaway son he almost certainly didn’t have in real life so, instead of being the sort of terror whose tales used to make landlubber children hide behind their straw mattresses in the 17th century, he’s turned into a sentimental dad struggling to get the work-life balance right just like your papa watching this at home with you. Give him abreak, eh kids? He’s had a hard day being ruthless, stealing treasure and outing people to the sword. Much as I love it when Dr Who has fun with history, that's taking liberties just a bit too far. Pirate stories are supposed to make you go 'arrrrrrrr!' not 'awwwww!' Maybe it’s revenge for the Doctor helping a bunch of similarly weak-kneed lily-livered rogues find Avery’s treasure in ‘The Smugglers’ (a story which contradicts almost everything seen here). Never mind the curse of the black spot (actually not a real pirate thing but something Robert Louis Stevenson made up to spice up his novel ‘Treasure Island’) Dr Who seems to have a pirate curse, because the only pirate story that really works is Douglas Adams’ ‘Pirate Planet’ – and that’s not really about pirates at all. 

 There is, to be fair, a great deal of treasure to be found lurking at the bottom of this tale and a great scifi twist that in the best Dr Who traditions takes what seems to be a pure historical story and throws a whole futuristic element at it, without contradicting any of the sketchy historical details we do have about this time period. New writer for the show Stephen Thompson has never written any scifi outside this tale (his scripts for showrunner Steven Moffat’s detective series ‘Sherlock’ are closer to his natural leanings) but it doesn’t show: instructed to write about pirates with ‘a twist at the end’ he sensibly takes the ending and works his way backwards, so that we get a story that makes perfect sense and yet can’t be guessed at all from where we start. Not to give too much away because it really will spoil things if you haven’t seen it but it’s hard to talk about without ruining so (spoilers to the end of the paragraph): Captain Avery’s ship ‘The Fancy’ is being stalked by a ufo whose crew all caught a cold (yes, just like ‘War Of the Worlds’) and died out, though their sick bay was still up and running and decided to start ‘fixing’ the nearest human vessel when it ran out of aliens to fix. Thanks to alien tech being better than ours, it’s still running. Typically given the luck of aliens in Dr Who, this vessel turns out to be ‘The Fancy’, the pirate ship of the fierce Captain Avery and pirates aren’t exactly known for their health and safety at work practices and are always getting hurt. So, far from being the scourge of the seven seas, they turn from being the biggest load of thus this side of Downing Street to being namby-pambies scared of even getting a paper cut in case the siren (the alien ship’s hologram doctor) comes to take them away. The first draft was even sharper: the siren assumed tattoos were a sign of disease and that’s why the pirates only slightly scratched weren’t being released to go home on recovery, something rather fudged over in the final version. It would be in character for Amy to have a tattoo too, though probably not Rory. Unless he has one of something nursy and practical. The Doctor, of course, has a tattoo himself which fans have retconned as being from some Gallifreyan shady past after Jon Pertwee’s real tattoo from his navy days was seen on his arm during the shower scene in ‘Spearhead From Space’ – and you’d be amazed at how little arm the Doctor ever shows again in all the stories since, so we can’t find out if the tattoo is still there or not. Though it’s a little too close to Moffat’s own nanogen-repairing plot twist to ‘The Empty Child’, there’s enough room in the series for two plots like this in parallel and the addition of a siren as a sort of ‘antivirus’ luring unsuspecting sailors to her hospital deck in space and turning them ‘strange’ (through anaesthetic, which makes them woozy, impressionable and a little hungover) is great: it’s a piratical angle we haven’t had in this series before and works well as the sort of folk tale that would be passed down to other sailors and picked up as legend, the twist that it’s really a sort of computer antivirus avatar such a clever and typically Dr Who trick. The siren can make herself appear in any reflection (why? Because timey wimey stuff…) which is a problem when you’re stuck in the middle of the Atlantic and even down in the bowels of the ship can be seen reflected back in the glittering gold of the ship’s treasure which Avery has stolen from the Moghuls of India (a bit of a bad move in real life because it meant he couldn’t exactly sell it without giving himself away so he really did hang on to it for years not sure what to do with it, his ship slower because of all the weight – nobody quite knows what happens to the treasure which is where Dr Who came in with the treasure hunt of ‘The Smugglers’. Even though this story seems to suggest it was a different Captain Avery who buried it after all. Oh well). That’s a morality tale to go with the best of them right there. But instead it gets drowned out by the Pirate Captain’s relationship with the son he didn’t even know he had. 

 The crux of this story depends on how invested you are in Captain Avery and his struggles to do the right thing, whether his greed or his love of his family win out. Thompson has really done his homework, having started this story by ‘borrowing’ his son’s book on pirates and finding out that while most pirates were caught and hanged nobody really knows what happened to Avery, who for a time in the 1690s was the biggest badass of them all: he just seems to have disappeared, fading away from history along with his ill gotten gains after a two year run at the top, despite there being such a massive price on his head that he would have been one of the most sought after criminals in the world in the 17th century (rumours are that he fled to South America to spend his dosh, though there’s no evidence for that, or a longstanding rumour he returned to Cornwall and became a humble innkeeper; again ‘The Smugglers’ favours this scenario by claiming that he finally made it back to shore sometime). The Dr Who truth, that he ended up piloting an alien spaceship because his son was trapped on board the alien hospital and could never leave without dying, is as plausible as any explanation given the way the Dr Whoniverse works. It would all be very clever were it not for one problem: this finale takes so long to set up that we get almost no sense of Avery as the history-books depict him. Even his men, the few of whom were ever caught scandalised English courtrooms with tales of debauchery, rape and murder, were terrified of their captain and saw him as one of the blackest knaves who ever lived. All you see in this story are a few scenes of pirates making the Doctor walk the plank, before a mutiny (which almost certainly didn’t happen) and the Captain’s discovery that his son has stowed away on board (when Avery almost certainly didn’t have any children - and if he did they wouldn’t be the age Toby is in this story or we’d know about them from naval records). Far from seeming like one of the nastiest scoundrels we’ve ever met in this series, a sort of pegleg version of Davros, with our characters in huge trouble because he’d cut off their heads in an instant, Avery becomes a cute and cuddly family man, willing to do anything to save his son. Given that Avery didn’t even know he had a son until after the Tardis arrives (and this ship must have been a long time at sea for the alien ship to have found them and the crew to die out, so how has he been living all this time? And just when was he proposing to come out of hiding?) it’s a mighty quick turnaround. 

 It would help if Avery acted even a little bit like the man from the history books (his nickname was ‘the King Of Pirates’ to give you a clue) but he doesn’t act like a villainous rogue, he’s just a nice man you’d like to bring home to your wife and kids (though maybe not unsupervised for too long just in case). He never even seems that shocked by the talk of aliens or ending up in a spaceship, while his response to being on the impossible-dimensioned Tardis is one of the mildest we ever get in the series. He’s a pirate, sailing the seven seas in the days when people genuinely though there were sea serpents at the edge of the sea if you went too far; he’d have been brought up around superstitious people even in his law-abiding naval days and been on the lookout for danger and terror wherever he went, primed to expect trouble at every turn. He should be permanently jumpy when a blue alien starts killing his crew and a blue box impossibly lands on his boat in the middle of the sea, not zen. We’ll never truly know what being on board a pirate ship in the 17th century was like of course, but one thing I can guarantee it wasn’t is nonchalant and that’s what we get here, from the pirates as well as their captain. Though not the first time Dr Who had meddled with history by turning people we thought we knew into their polar opposites (this show as at it as early a the third story ‘Marco Polo’ when the Mighty Kublai Khan is a nice elderly man who likes playing backgammon) this is the depiction that feels most unfair and unlikely. You suspect the real Captain Avery would have murdered the entire production team in their beds if he’d ever had the chance to watch this, son or no son (and let’s face it, while it’s ever so vaguely plausible there could have been a son, there almost certainly wasn’t). Had we spent longer watching Avery terrorising his men, had we lost that weird running around sub-plot in the middle that becalms the whole story in favour of flashback sequences seeing what the Captain was really like at his peak, had they made Toby even just a little afraid of his fearsome dad, then it could have been great. 

Alas a lot of this story is restricted by the influence of the franchise that inspired it. Every pirate story in Dr Who is inspired by something that was in vogue at the time: ‘The Smugglers’ is at one with a run of BBC adaptations of classic swashbuckling novels (it’s one part ‘Treasure Island’ to two parts ‘Kidnapped’), ‘The Space Pirates’ feels like the sort of literary scifi books of the late 1960s that liked taking eras of the past and wondering how times might repeat themselves in the future (it’s one part Isaac Asimov, two parts Arthur C Clarke), ‘The Pirate Planet’ is the 1976 Danny Kaye version of ‘Peter Pan’ with cybernetics and ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ feels like a jumble of all the vaguely piratical low budget films doing the rounds on Netflix in the late 2010s/early 2020s. ‘Black Spot’ is pure ‘Pirates Of The Carribean’, mixing actual legends of the sea with a more supernatural setting, but suffers from being made on a BBC budget (so very few extras and even most of them are killed off or mutiny within the opening minutes) and a slightly arch sense of humour where everyone is too busy quipping to bother to actually be scared of anything. Though they resist the temptation to do the obvious and make Captain Avery the sort of wisecracking sarcastic Keith Richards in a pirate hat that was Jack Sparrow, these characters do nevertheless have the same air of nothing being quite real, with the feel that everything is taking place in a sort of cross between a fictional ocean and a modern day setting where pirates are just modern people with modern values in fancy dress. Had this story happened for real the Tardis crew would have been run through the minute they landed (especially with a mysterious siren on the loose making everyone superstitious) and Amy in particular would have been in big trouble with a bunch of horny sex-starved pirates who have been at sea for months: instead she gets an opening swordfight (to get the cliché out the way early on) and then everyone admires her. Honestly in 1699 the pirates would have considered a female that could swing a sword far more outlandish than a blue alien luring them to their doom (and where does Amy learn to wield a sword or even move that well? Did all of the Doctor’s companions get a gymnastics GCSE?!) 

 You can never quite bring yourself to get invested in this script because nothing feels quite ‘real’. And yes I know, a series about a time-travelling alien isn’t the first place you go to for realism. But everything feels so false in this story it’s hard to believe in any of the jeopardy – especially as it’s Rory they try and kill off yet again (I'm starting to think the Dr's taken life insurance out just so he can keep claiming it and keep himself in jammy dodgers and fish custard.; the first draft of the script had it as Amy dying, but originally this story was intended to come in the second half of the year, in the slot ‘Night Terrors’ had between ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ and ‘The Girl Who Waited’ and it was felt putting Amy in deadly danger two stories in a row would be too similar; so they put this story third in the run, two stories away from a tale where Rory is feared dead instead). It’s a trick they’ve pulled too many times for us to seriously believe and then they milk it for all it’s worth: the closing scenes of Avery cuddling his boy while Amy performs CPR on Rory and waits desperately for him to wake up while the Murray Gold choir go full on Hallelujah chorus is one of the most schmaltzy OTT scenes in all of Who. And while this isn’t the first time the series has pulled that trick, we’re supposed to be in the middle of a story about bloodthirsty pirates so it’s more unsuitable than ever. Clever as the twist at the end is, as hard as the cast are all trying to sell it, the ending can’t help but leave you with the feeling of ‘how did we end up here?’ It doesn’t help that, like so much of series five, the genie’s out the bottle when you’ve seen this story once and know what the ending is. However brilliant the explanation behind the siren, once you know it you can’t un-know it (unless you have a really poor memory) and all that you’re left with on re-watching this story is the Tardis crew running around from a CGI genie while the Doctor keeps getting stuff wrong and all the good stuff is covered in the first few minutes when it felt like we were going to get a very different, more action-based perilous type of a story. Watching everything descend from yo ho ho to ho hum across 45minutes makes you as light-headed as Rory under alien anaesthetic (and poor Arthur Darvill really gets the short straw this time around: he spends half the story waving his arms around calling to the siren and the other half with his top off, unconscious, without any good lines this week). This story isn’t the treasure it thinks it is, it’s fool’s gold, a soap opera about a man caught between the lull of family and career masquerading as a tale about pirates. Annoyingly the script even takes out the obvious parallels between the Doctor and Avery that could have made it a much stronger metaphorical character analysis, the timelord telling him how similar they are, being outlaws against the establishment, ‘though the difference is I don’t walk out on my crew’. 

 That said, it all looks positively gorgeous on screen, easily the most convincing sightwise of all the five Who pirates stories. The money saved on extras went on the ship instead, an actual wooden vessel that was docked in Cornwall (very close to the scene of Dr Who’s first ‘proper’ location filming – i.e. not an extra pretending to be William Hartnell walking down a road – as part of ‘The Smugglers’, making this a very apt homecoming all round) with 15,000 litres of water and a wind machine doing a great job of convincing us that we really are out at sea. If anything the studio mock-ups of the inside of the boat are even more impressive: it’s very hard to get the ‘feel’ of being on board a ship in constant random motion, caught by the swell of the tide, on a static camera in a TV studio and Dr Who does better than 99% of Hollywood blockbuster films that have tried with far bigger budgets. The siren is some of the best CGI work we’ve ever had on the series, the perfect mixture of Dr Who scifi and pirate ghost tales while model Lily Cole, who took the job sweeping round the studio on a harness as it fitted round her university studies and helped pay her tuition for the year, makes the most of the little the script gives her do, staring dreamily and ethereally blue, before turning an angry red when attacked (whenever she needs to ‘cauterise’ a wound or a germ). Karen Gillan gets one of the best fight scenes in all of Dr Who: the clumsy not-quite-real storybook feel of the episode makes us think we’re going to see our clumsy uncoordinated Doctor tackle a ship full of pirates in an unlikely way just because it’s that sort of a story, but it’s absolutely right they give this storyline to Amy when the pirates have dismissed her and turned their backs on her and Karen really gets into the part: the look of pure joy on her face is the most ‘real’ thing in the episode. Had everyone put this much heart into this story at the scripting and editing stage I’d be nodding my head going ‘arrr!’ in support. 

 The result isn’t bad by any means, everyone’s trying really hard to make this work and the twist is better than many a Dr Who twist, it’s just oddly paced so that the opening action is too quick, the middle runaround is too long and the ending, while a very clever idea, feels as if its beamed in from an entirely different story. Fittingly for a tale that ends up on board a hospital ship, it feels as if it’s all been a bit sanitised for our entertainment, a place that should be full of thrills and spills and drama without even trying turned into family entertainment that won’t scare the kiddies. There’s no blood in this story because it’s on at teatime on a Saturday which is understandable, but not even any drinking, which isn’t – and a load of pirates without rum is a very rum do all round. It starts off as a story where everyone is in mortal danger before we even discover the scifi element and ends as yet another story in the Moffat era where ‘everybody lives’. Much like its ‘Caribbean’ source material it starts off Keith Richards of the 1960s, a thorn in the side of society that genuinely frightens the bejesus out of everyone, and becomes the Keith Richards of the modern day, an establishment figure who does a few turns every night for old time’s sake but whose cutlass stopped being sharp a long time ago. It’s just all too jolly, Roger. 

 If there’s one thing you need to make a proper pirate story it’s peril and the same goes for good Dr Who stories too – combining the two should make this one of the scariest stories of them all. Instead it’s a twee little romp in between the bigger stuff and treated as such. Dr Who stories always fail when they go all gooey – and all the more so when it’s meant to be an adventure about bloodthirsty pirates. Some Dr Who stories have ambition to change the world, to speak for the underdog to push characters to its limits. This one exists because Dr Who hadn’t done a pirate story for a while and the Pirates of the Carribean films are quite popular so the ratings are sure to be good (unless the new film’s a disaster which wouldn’t you know it, it was). The original request from Moffat was ‘make this the most pirate story ever – and then throw in a twist’. This story delivers on the twist with bells on and the writer deserves lots of credit for that, but the most pirate story ever? Hardly Despite the boat, despite the sirens, despite the gangplank walking and swordfight and treasure, despite Hugh Bonneville and his beard both having the time of their life, this story is one of those licensed pirate cruises at heart, the sort that’s so regimented and organised with all alcohol banned and patrons carefully screened, that all the fun’s been taken out. You can’t have a story about pirates without rough and tumble. You might as well make this a story about bank managers. There are worse Dr Who stories definitely, certainly ones with ropier effects and worse performances and most of the bottom third of this list would give their left Tetrap for a finale as clever as this one. But few Who stories have ever felt quite as far removed from their source material or feel as manufactured and manipulated as ‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’ and for that the whole lot of people who worked on this story should walk the plank. Though if this story were fed to the fishes they’d die of diabetes from all the sugar. 

 POSITIVES + The one thing that Avery does that feels in character is try to have the best of both worlds and ‘cheat’ his way out of trouble. He agrees with the Doctor to throw his loot overboard (best line of the episode ‘But this is the treasure of the Moghul of China’ ‘Oh good, for a moment there I thought it was yours!’) but keeps a crown back, thinking at least he’ll have something to tide him over in his old age. Only his son goes to grab his coat and the crown concealed within falls out and the reflection is all it takes to claim Toby’s life (or so everyone thinks at the time). Once a pirate, always a pirate…Incidentally Avery’s treasure from the Moghul of China has never been recovered to this day so might as well be at the bottom of the Atlantic for all we know; while it contradicts the tale told to us in ‘The Smugglers’ I like this version more (and its’ very odd we should have two stories centring round the same pirate: while important, you’d think there’d be room for a Dr Who story about Blackbeard, Captain Kidd or the deeply fascinating tale of female pirate Anne Bonny by now rather than a second on Avery). 

 NEGATIVES - Hang on a mo. It was only a week before we were teased with the promise of all sorts of fascinating titbits about River Song's origins in a series long arc that had us on the edge of our seats, as well as hinting that we would finally get an explanation for who the mysterious astronaut is that shoots the Doctor and why Amy's not quite herself. This week we're encouraged to forget all about that in favour of some larks on board a pirate ship that can't help but feel inconsequential by comparison. We do end up with answers to all of those points in time - as well as some more to questions we haven't even thought to ask yet - but watching this episode the first time without knowing any of that for sure really jarred, like being promised a banquet and being delivered a bread roll. This story was, as we’ve seen, switched round in the running order so that’s why we didn’t have any links to the main arc (except for one very confusing moment when Amy sees Madame Kovarian – confusing then when we didn’t know what was going on of course, the way it was intended to be, but also now we know the final plot; why did Amy’s ‘reality’ break through at just that moment? Especially if – and more spoilers here – she’s not the real Amy but a ganger). But even so, you’d think a short sentence added on the day of shooting along the lines of ‘Blimey last week was a bit weird wasn’t it? I hope there are no astronauts here and we can have a holiday! Oh good I smell sea air outside…’ like the olden days would have done it. The last scene of everyone back on board the Tardis and the Doctor only now finding out via the Tardis controls that Amy is pregnant really needed to be at the beginning, when that plot point was fresh in our minds. BEST QUOTE: ‘If something is going to kill you it’s nice they send you a note to remind you’.