The Space Pirates: Ranking - 212

 The Space Pirates

(Season 6, Dr 2 with Jamie and Zoe, 8/3/1969-12/4/199, producer: Peter Bryant, script editor: Derrick Sherwin, writer: Robert Holmes, director: Michael Hart) 

'Today's guest blog is from Milo Clancey from the future: 'New fangled rubbishy blogspot 2050, it's not like it was in my day when Elon Musk ran twitter and Nick Clegg ran meta-facebookwhatsis and tiktok was something new. They were proper social media outlets they were, not like today's mergers tikbooks and yahoofaces and instatwit no sirree. That there 90th anniversary Dr Who special didn't live up to the 60th either I can tell you. Fancy reviving Yartek the leader of the alien Voord and having him be played by a regenerated David Tennant, I ask you. All them corporations makes it mighty hard to be a freelance writer and keep hold of your opinions so it does. Now everybody's got their own sponsor for their social media outlays and here's mine: the latest solar-powered toaster cooks your bread even when it's raining, which is most of the time. It's the best thing since sliced bread, or at any rate my lunar-powered bread slicer it says here. Well that don't take the gosh darn biscuit!'  

Ranking: 212

 

 Usually ‘missing’ stories in DW, especially ones with a single complete episode in existence to give us a tantalising glimpse of what might be, have a special place within fandom. It’s the unknown you see: no matter if you’ve read the novels in paperback and hardback, can quote every word from the TV soundtrack and have studied every telesnap photo taken off the TV there will always be part of the story that comes as a complete surprise when one is lucky enough to be re-discovered more or less complete. The direction might be more ambitious, the acting subtler, the music more mysterious, the props more impressive, than anything that appeared in print or in photographs. Hopes are high for stories that are only a bit missing yet leave a lot of room for hope of perfection, especially for ‘important’ stories. ‘The Space Pirates’ ought to be such a tale. It’s the penultimate Troughton adventure and so our last goodbye that doesn’t involve being on the run from soldiers for both him and for the much loved Tardis team of Jamie and Zoe.  It’s the second story from prolific and beloved writer Robert Holmes and what’s more the first specially written for DW rather than re-hashed from another series. It’s the first time DW really does ‘space opera’, something it will really get into during the 1970s, seeing what happens in the days between Mankind landing on the moon and the Human empires of the future decaying and crumbling. Most fans, however, are disappointed in this one, not least because the one surviving episode is particularly slow and weak and the Doctor and co are barely in it. That’s enough to damn ‘Space Pirates’ as the perhaps the one missing story not many fans want to see, with less scope for hope and imagination than usual, but it is true sadly that the surviving episode two is the slowest and weakest of the six. ‘Space Pirates’ is, regrettably, a bad DW story and not the penultimate hurrah we wanted (the regulars get very little to do and only appear in the final episode on bits of film shot along with episode five and mostly they’re surviving, not saving the universe). View it as a bit of standalone scifi from the era as an episode from, say, ‘Out Of The Unknown’ with guest roles for the Doctor though and I still say it’s a good little story (if a bit overlong). A lot of fans find the continual comparisons between Wild West cowboys and space explorers grating – certainly it was done far more subtly in early Star Trek (and that’s not a sentence I’ll be writing often; it’s not really about pirates and more the Klondike goldrush in space, although there is a bit of smuggling). However I rather like it: the idea of space as a no-man’s-land full of individuals all trying to get rich is a very different view of the future compared to most DW stories which are either utopian and hopeful or where corporations and federations loom large. It is, I fear, one of the more accurate portrayals of space travel in DW, as the rich turn it into an opportunity to get richer at the expense of the poor and try to crowd them out of another market. Milo Clancey is a great character, potentially a child at the time of transmission (there isn’t an on-screen date given), but here the old hand who considers what must have seemed like the stuff of tomorrow to first-time viewers as old, safe and cosy (‘Rubbishy new-fangled solar space toasters’ is a quote I find myself using a surprising amount in real life), even if his fake American accent soon grates on your nerves – a particular problem when sound is most of what’s left or you read the novel in his accent and end up speaking like that automatically for days. It’s so very DW, taking the extraordinary of the day and making it ordinary and second nature in the future, as a comment on changing times, while never taking away from the sheer awesomeness of space travel in any form. More than perhaps any other DW story ‘The Space Pirates’ makes us think that space exploration is a natural part of mankind’s birthright and there had to be a programme like this in the DW canon somewhere; what’s most amazing is that the last episode went out nearly three full months before Apollo1 12 landed on the moon for real and made the extraordinary possible. It’s all so very real for a work of fortune-telling fiction, even if it’s a reality we sadly haven’t reached yet – and even if real means a lot of hanging around while nothing happens I kind of admire that aspect too. Another reason I suspect a lot of fans aren’t keen is that it feels more alien to modern fans than a lot of period DW, with its dramatic base invasions and cliffhangers because a lot of this story is waiting, something viewers just don’t have to learn how to do nowadays but was an intrinsic part of Tv viewing if you grew up in the 1960s. Watch any real footage of space exploration from the period and what strikes you isn’t how amazing anything is in one burst but how amazing it is that something so life-changing happens so quickly after 3,4 or more hours of waiting for it and that most of what happens is caused not by direct action but endless shots of scientists twiddling buttons and blurry indistinct shapes moving on the monitor. Shockingly a lot of the coverage of the real moon landings from three-four months after this story went out has been wiped (a crime on par with wiping DW!) but what does exist seems very like ‘The Space Pirates’ – a slow build across hours while pieces fall into place with such slow imperceptible moments between scenes you can fall asleep and miss whole episodes and still find not much has happened at all. Sometimes I rather like that, especially in context between an action-packed Ice Warrior invasion and a ten part epic that keeps upping the tempo. Yes it needs to get on with it a bit, yes it’s probably the weakest Troughton story in terms of his Doctor (though ‘The Dominators’ is far more ‘wrong’ on so many other levels and ‘The Underwater Menace’ is a special kind of crazy) and yes it’s still far from the top of my list of missing episodes I want to see returned. However I suspect that in the unlikely event ‘The Space Pirates’ is ever found it will surprise fans by becoming a bit of a fan favourite in a way that the audio, the novel or the telesnaps can’t convey - or, at any rate, up from the bottom of story listings where it usually sits nowadays.

+ So much of this story takes place on board a space-shuttle that’s blown apart, the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe trapped in a separate section to The Tardis. Extra larks (and an episode of pure padding) can be found by the Doctor accidentally sending the whole thing the wrong way and having to get it back again. Wirth so much emphasis on where we are the model shots have to get this right. Model shots vary considerably in DW, particularly in the 1960s, however the clips that survive show them to be some of the best seen in the series up to 1969, impressively futuristic (if still very 60s) and actually a lot better than the ‘models’ used in genuine space exploration documentaries of the day.

-          Milo Clancey aside, the characters in this story are a pretty wet bunch and far below Holmes’ usual standards of writing and his famous double-acts. The theme of organised them versus eccentric inventor us is so well established early on that you’re on Milo’s side from the first even with that awful accent, which leaves us nowhere to go for character development. Holmes arguably goes a little too far making the representatives of nameless, faceless, characterless corporations nameless, faceless and characterless, even if it makes his point. He’ll get a lot better at this very quickly - so quickly you can’t believe his Pertwee scripts are by the same writer.