Douglas Adams is a writer
whom I quite admire as a person. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is
one of my favorite books of all time for its humor, and his style of humor
sounds on the surface as utter nonsense, but often conceals a lot of the way
Adams views the world and interacts with it.
This isn’t always the case, but it is certain to be a good time when you
have him writing your story. The Pirate Planet is the first work of
Douglas Adams of note and yet it’s a Doctor Who serial. It sees the Doctor and Romana arrive on
Zanak, a planet which is ruled by the tyrannical Captain and his lackeys as it
hops around the universe, encapsulating planets and mining them for their
resources. The premise alone is Douglas
Adams down to an absolute tee and watching the story you don’t really notice
the flaws, which are small but many.
Within the plot of stopping the Captain, Adams adds in a group of psychic
rebels called the Mentiads, a despot Queen achieving immortality, and the
search for the second segment of the Key to Time. As a story it’s almost full to bursting into
a mess of storytelling, but it just barely avoids this with minimal
fallout. I say minimal as unlike many
other Doctor Who serials Adams forgets to flesh out much of the supporting cast
with only three characters fleshed out to their fullest. The Mentiads, while intended to be a gestalt,
are still pretty weak as they are your standard psychic tropes, and the actual
citizens of Zanak are just there. They
don’t do anything, but they are there for no real reason except the Captain has
to have something to do.
The actual quest for the
Key to Time starts much like The Ribos
Operation with the Key segment being important until the beginning of Part
Two where it changes from the first story where the Key was the focal point of
the Doctor’s actions. The Pirate Planet has the Doctor and
Romana be more concerned with rebelling on the planet until Part Four when the
segment of the Key becomes important again.
The Key actually pads out the story just a bit which is a bit of a
problem for the plot overall. Luckily
Tom Baker and Mary Tamm as the Doctor and Romana respectively at least make up
for the Key not being the most essential element of the story. The Doctor under Adams’s writing brings out
Tom Baker’s manic personality and it’s obvious that he’s enjoying himself with
the script. He gets some of his more
memorable lines under Adams when going up against the Captain. His explosive appreciate it monologue in
particular is a highlight as well as “paralyzingly dull, boring, and
tedious”. Mary Tamm as Romana, while
decently written for an introduction in The
Ribos Operation, actually really gives us the full breadth of her character
in The Pirate Planet. Adams plays up her greater intelligence than
the Doctor while also showing that already some of the Doctor’s resourcefulness
and quick thinking has rubbed off on her by the books original nature. She steals the Doctor’s jelly babies and
makes herself noticeable to the natives to get an idea of where they are.
The Captain played by
Bruce Purchase is a cyborg pirate, need I say more? Well I guess I’ll have to. He crashed on Zanak and was surgically put
back together. He’s fueled completely by
his own bloated egomania and greed. He
worships the Sky Demon and kills off his own crew if they disobey him. Purchase plays the role so far over the top
it has circled the structure back into the realm of a credible threat. He’s so much a pirate he makes the Doctor
walk the plank and has a parrot on his shoulder, sure it’s a cyborg parrot, but
a parrot is a parrot. Mr. Fibuli played
by Andrew Robertson is the Captain’s chief crewman and a henchman to boot. He speaks with this stutter, but isn’t afraid
to stand up to the Captain who cannot bring himself to execute Mr. Fibuli
making them have this weird relationship.
The performance makes for a great double act throughout the story even
rivalling the double acts of Robert Holmes.
The final character that gets any development is the Nurse played by
Rosalind Lloyd. The Nurse, aka the
hologram of Queen Xanxia, is a femme fatale for the story having her own greed
be a driving factor. She is ruthless and
Lloyd gives an understated performance for the early episodes where she stays
in the background until her true identity is revealed.
While I love the story to
bits, and this review hasn’t been too condemning of the flaws and at this point
it would get about 90/100. I haven’t
mentioned the direction of Pennant Roberts.
Now Roberts is really good at directing dialogue scenes. The dialogue is really well directed with the
cuts working to help along the jokes to land correctly with the script. The problem is in the location footage which
just looks bland, like they were trying to avoid anachronisms by shifting to
the left, but more so the action sequences.
He doesn’t try to mask the fact that many of them were done with
CSO. Many involve K9 voiced by John
Leeson who doesn’t help matters as he is unable to sell the badly directed
action to us. There is a scene where K9
fights the parrot by shooting it, but Roberts just has the effects people put
them on CSO and shoot a beam in an awkward looking triangle. It’s just a bad angle to be working with the
camera and should have been thought out more before shooting started.
To summarize, The Pirate Planet’s biggest problem is
the poor direction in the action sequences and a lack of characterization. The story succeeds in the acting, main
characters, pacing, and the comedy of the story which all work well to make the
story a success as the first work of one of the greatest science fiction
writers of modern times. 85/100.
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