The Pirate Planet by: Douglas Adams directed by: Pennant Roberts: By the Nose of the Sky Demon!

The Pirate Planet stars Tom Baker as the Doctor, Mary Tamm as Romana, and John Leeson as the Voice of K9 with Bruce Purchase as the Captain, Andrew Robertson as Mr. Fibuli, and Rosalind Lloyd as the Nurse.  It was written by Douglas Adams and directed by Pennant Roberts with Anthony Read as Script Editor and Graham Williams as Producer.  It was originally broadcast on Saturdays from 30 September to 21 October 1978 on BBC1.

 

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.