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’.