“Moons of madness!” The Pirate Planet is great fun. This is
one of those stories that always spring to my mind when I think of Doctor Who,
thanks in large part to the over-the-top character of the Captain. Thinking of
it now, the Captain is probably the origin of my affection for blustery
authoritarians sputtering ‘Why am I surrounded by idiots?’ or in the Captain’s
own variation, “Why am I encumbered with incompetents?”
The Pirate Planet is the second installment of the Key to
Time season, and notably the first Doctor Who script penned by Douglas Adams.
Douglas Adams, Doctor Who, Tom Baker, The Key to Time—it all blends superbly.
“Imbeciles! Fools! Thrice worse than incompetent idiots!”
The Captain, piloting his pirate planet through space, has run up against the
TARDIS in attempting to materialize. “What pernicious injuries have you
inflicted on my precious engines?”
The Doctor and Romana in the TARDIS are experiencing similar
difficulties. Both objects materializing at the same moment in space and time. “Danger,
master, danger.”
Romana, fresh from the Academy, is still operating by the
book, literally, and shakes her head at the Doctor for not using the synchronic
feedback checking circuit or the multiloop stabilizer. “Oh, absolute rubbish,”
the Doctor declares as he tears the page from the instruction manual Romana has
been reading from. Romana had not studied “veteran and vintage vehicles” while
at the Academy—she preferred “something more interesting”—“the lifecycle of the
Gallifreyan flutterwing.” (“Now you’re being frivolous.”)
It’s nice that this student/teacher dynamic has not yet been
abandoned or its comic implications as the Doctor tries to knock the
by-the-book attitude out of Romana with his experience (523 years flying the
TARDIS is nothing to sneeze at after all; 523 years of successful
materializations “without a multiloop anything.”).
And I like that the Doctor’s way is not always proven to be
the right way. “Excuse me . . .” “What we’d like to know . . .” The Doctor futilely
attempts to grab the attention of passing citizens as Romana simply walks up to
one of them and begins an informative conversation. “She is prettier than you,
master,” K9 informs the Doctor by way of explanation for her success. (“Look,
good looks are no substitute for sound character.”)
One word more, Gary, about Romana. Confident in her own
intelligence but open to instruction, gorgeous and patrician, now add a
deliciously dry wit that complements the Doctor’s. The opening TARDIS scene showcases
this deadpan humor, as does the following exchange she has with a guard:
Guard (confiscating a telescope from Romana): “This is a
forbidden object.”
Romana: “Why?”
Guard: “That is a forbidden question. You are a stranger?”
Romana: “Well, yes.”
Guard: “Strangers are forbidden.”
Romana: “I did come with the Doctor.”
Guard: “Who is . . .”
Romana: “Ah, now don’t tell me. Doctors are forbidden as
well.”
It is the Captain, however, who steals the show in The
Pirate Planet.
“Vultures of death! Ghouls!” he shouts when informed that
the Mentiads are on the move. The majority of the citizens on Zanak (the pirate
planet of our title) are mindless sheep praising the Captain and each “golden
age of prosperity” he ushers in. The Mentiads, however, are a group of
telepathic outcasts protesting the “life force dying” and always on the lookout
for an addition to their ranks. But they are a rather ineffectual rabble and I’m
not really sure why the Captain bothers with them; his rants are entertaining,
though, justifying the Mentiad presence in our story.
And of course the Mentiads lead the Doctor to their new
recruit Pralix, his sister Mula, and family friend Kimus. None of these are
really noteworthy either, but they do serve to move the story along.
The story in a nutshell: the Captain moves the planet Zanak,
which is hollow, through space to surround a new planet that he then proceeds
to mine. The Mentiads agonize with each new “golden age” as they absorb the
dying life force of the victim planet. The Doctor and Romana get mixed up in
this as Romana is arrested and taken to the Captain’s bridge and the Doctor
hooks up with Mula and Kimus who are concerned about the ‘kidnapping’ of Pralix
by the Mentiad. All the while they have to figure out where the second segment
of the Key to Time is and what it is disguised as.
But that is only the hollowed out surface of the story.
Buried deep is the true core of the plot. The evil Queen Xanxia, long believed
dead, is being kept alive in the last few seconds of life by means of time
dams. The real purpose for the mining of whole planets is to obtain the
minerals required to regenerate Xanxia permanently into the temporary
projection of herself that has been until this time posing as the Captain’s
nurse. The Captain is really a puppet of Xanxia, but he has a plot of his own
and has been creating “the most brilliant piece of astro-gravitational
engineering” the Doctor has ever seen out of the crushed remains of each of
Zanak’s victim planets, and he plans on using these suspended trophies in an
attempt to break free of the Queen’s control.
It is really a complex little tale, this buried Calufrax of
a plot.
“Appreciate it? Appreciate it?” the Doctor spits in disgust
upon first encounter with the Captain’s graveyard of a trophy room. “What, you
commit mass destruction and murder on a scale that’s almost inconceivable and
you ask me to appreciate it? Just because you happen to have made a brilliantly
conceived toy out of the mummified remains of planets . . .” For all of his
clowning, the Doctor can be deadly serious. “What’s it for?” he demands. “What
could possibly be worth all this?”
“By the raging fury of the sky demon, you ask too many
questions! You have seen; you have admired. Be satisfied and ask no more!”
The Doctor, of course, is never satisfied and will never ask
no more. And so he finds his way to the Mentiad’s lair, to the Captain’s bridge,
to Xanxia’s throne room, to the Captain’s trophy room, and to the buried
surface of the consumed planet Calufrax. Calufrax is the original planet to
which the Key to Time core led the Doctor and Romana, and it is the current
planet engulfed by the pirate planet Zanak. And it also happens to be the
second segment.
“But we can’t move that,” Romana protests when the Doctor
explains that Calufrax, now reduced to its shrunken husk in the trophy room, is
the segment for which they search. “If we do, we’ll just upset the whole system
and create a gravity whirlpool.”
“Not if I do something immensely clever,” the Doctor
replies. Never satisfied; always clever. That is the Doctor.
It is a bit of a whimper of an end for the Captain and
Xanxia, though, and it all happens too quickly. The Captain tries his scheme
against the Queen (despite the Doctor’s warning that it won’t work) but the
Queen rather over dramatically pushes a convenient button to sabotage the
Captain’s cybernetic parts and then Xanxia, or rather the projection of Xanxia
as the nurse, disappears. The rest is
wrapped up in some Doctor Who wizardry that the Doctor explains, somehow using
the gravity field of a hyperspatial force field to drop the shrunken planets
into the hollow center of Zanak, with Calufrax spinning off to be picked up later
by the Doctor. As for Xanxia and the time dams—“blow them up.”
I was sorry to see the abrupt end of the Captain. This
blustery pirate with his deadly robotic Polyphase Avitron parrot (“When someone
fails me, someone dies!”), and his plank that he makes the Doctor walk, and his
cybernetic parts; this mastermind of “one of the most heinous crimes ever
committed in this galaxy” is rather touching in the end. “My soul is
imprisoned,” he laments, “bound to this ugly lump of blighted rock; beset by
zombie Mentiads and interfering Doctors.” He is as much a victim as a villain,
and his leave-taking of his right hand man, the long-suffering Mr. Fibuli, is
simple and moving.
“You don’t want to take over the universe, do you?” the
Doctor asks the Captain. “No. You wouldn’t know what to do with it, beyond
shout at it.”
No, the Captain only wants to be free. “I come in here to
dream of freedom,” he says of the trophy room. If it were not for the billions
of lost lives these trophies represent, the Captain would almost be a noble
soul.
Before taking leave of The Pirate Planet, Gary, I have to
discuss “Newton’s revenge.” It is a rather funny bit as the Doctor tampers with
the wiring of the anti-inertia corridor he and Romana have just exited. The
guards in pursuit behind them come hurtling out and slam into the wall (“conservation
of momentum is a very important law in physics”). The Doctor then goes on to claim that he
explained the concept of gravity to Newton (“dropped an apple on his head”).
One more name-dropping in a long line.
But I must take leave of this second installment to The Key
to Time.
Moons of madness, Gary; I hope you enjoyed this segment as
much as I.
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