The Pirate Planet

 

Chapter The 187th, which covers a Doctor Who story that amazingly was written by Douglas Adams. Douglas flippin' Adams. That there is even one such a thing should never be taken for granted.

Plot:

On the quest to collect and assemble the Key to Time, the Doctor, accompanied by Romana and K9, attempts to land the TARDIS on the uninhabited and inhospitable planet Calufrax to find the second segment; but, something in the space-time vortex blocks his way. Romana tries a second time and meets no resistance, but the planet that she lands on is not Calufrax but Zanak. Meeting some locals, they find out that the planet is ruled by a half Cyborg Pirate Captain who lives up a mountain on the 'bridge', and is feared and loved by the general populace for bringing new ages of prosperity on a regular basis, and also for his saving them from the tyranny of the planet's previous ruler, Queen Xanxia. The Doctor and friends ally themselves with a couple of rebellious youngsters and a group of telepaths called the Mentiads. They discover that Zanak is a hollow space-jumping planet that materialises around other planets so they can be mined until they are reduced to super-compacted rocks. A new age of prosperity is the arrival at a new planet. The resultant energy release when a planet is mined, affects any psy-sensitive youth, bringing the Mentiads one by one into being. The latest planet to fall victim to Zanak is Calufrax  and the jump coincided with the Doctor's attempt to land the TARDIS.

The Captain is secretly controlled by Queen Xanxia, who is posing as his nurse. She rebuilt him when he crash-landed on Zanak many years before, and has been using him to mine the planets to provide the necessary energy to prolong her life. The real, aged Xanxia is frozen in her last moments by Time Dam technology, and the nurse version is a projection that has almost become solid. The energy needs of the Time Dams increase exponentially however, so the Queen can never achieve corporeality. The Captain has meanwhile been building a superweapon from the shrunken planets to destroy the Queen. Attempting another jump to mine Earth, the Captain and Xanxia find they are blocked by the Doctor, materialising in the same time and place as Zanak as he did earlier. The Mentiads use their psychic powers to blow up the planet's engine room just before the Doctor's TARDIS falls to pieces under the strain. The Queen kills the Captain. The Doctor adapts the Captain's plan to bring the Queen's life finally to its natural close, and then blows up the bridge. The remains of Calufrax turn out to be the second segment in disguise.

Context:

Watched an episode a day with a couple of days off across a short period in April 2021, from the Australian version of the DVD (see the First Time Round section of the blog post here for an explanation of why I own the Aussie box set). I was accompanied for the first episode by all the children (boys of 14 and 11, girl of 8) but they all had better things to do for the other three parts. The Better Half sat down with me for the final part, the first time in a good while that she's watched an old Doctor Who episode. The children watched the first episode in complete quiet, with no restlessness, usually a good sign that they are enjoying it, so it was a surprise that not one of them was interested in seeing any more. The Better Half's only comment was at the end, when the bridge is destroyed. She said "That's a rubbish model"; I think this is terribly unfair - it's a decent model and a good explosion.

First Time Round:

In 1995, BBC video started the release of the 1978/1979 season of Doctor Who. Usually, like this blog, the Doctor Who VHS range jumped around randomly month on month to give the buying public a choice of the many different eras and Doctors in the show's long history. This time, though, it released a batch of stories in chronological order of broadcast. This is because the six stories of the season have a loose overarching plot, each seeing the TARDIS team searching for another disguised segment of the Key to Time; this was an experiment by the producer of the time, Graham Williams. The season and the idea has been criticised over the years, but I rather like it. Each week, as well as the usual story, there is the additional mystery of what exactly will turn out to be the disguised segment and how long it will take the Doctor and friends to find it. The videos themselves played on this collecting theme, with the spine of each designed as a jigsaw-piece like sliver that, once all six tapes were collected, formed a picture of what could be the Key to Time itself floating over the surface of a planet, with some coloured shapes floating above it and birds and a couple of TARDISes (it's not clear what it's supposed to depict if I'm honest). So, the first two stories came out in April, the middle two in May, and the season was completed with the final two in June. Buying up and watching them all (it was the first time I'd seen any of the six stories) was enormously enjoyable. I was a few months into my first job after finishing university, working in Worthing. On the day of release, 3rd April 1995, I would have either walked into town at lunchtime or after work and bought both The Ribos Operation and The Pirate Planet in Volume One (a video and book store in central Worthing which was my chief supplier of Who stuff in those days).

Reaction:

The consensus view of the story structure of The Pirate Planet is that it's a bit of a mess, the work of a talented writer at the beginning of his TV career having trouble fitting all his many leftfield ideas into a coherent whole. I, on the other hand, think it's the best plot Douglas Adams ever wrote. I don't mean just for Doctor Who, either. It is clear from his later career that he never found it easy to fit his many leftfield ideas into a coherent whole. His cleverness in creating Hitch Hiker, in its many different versions in different media, was that it was an episodic structure held together by a loose web of top-drawer jokes (both cosmic and otherwise) that allowed his stories to wander however he wanted to from event to event. I don't mean to take anything away from how much intelligence and graft it took to get this right. The picaresque approach is the perfect fit for the material, and when attempting to impose a different structure to Hitch Hiker, as in in the third novel Life, The Universe and Everything where Douglas reused the plot of an early unused Doctor Who submission, it didn't work nearly so well. It also explains why it was so difficult to create a Hitch Hiker movie; films need a stricter structure than radio or novels. And so do Doctor Who stories. The other big contender for the top slot in his Doctor Who work is City of Death, but the plot structure there had already been provided by David Fisher before he had to abandon the story, and Adams was free to develop it by adding what he was best at, ideas, dialogue and jokes. Outside of Who and Hitch Hiker his fiction work is limited to two Dirk Gently novels and fragments, and one of those novels reused structures from past work (including bits of City of Death) too.

So, now that I've dismissed all the other contenders, I better justify this decision. What do I think it is that makes The Pirate Planet the best? It's only four episodes, yet it contains four or five highly original concepts and three interesting and effective plot reversals (and, to be fair, one slightly less effective plot reversal too). I'll go into more detail on all these in a moment, but just in terms of volume this is much more plot than could be expected in a classic series story (including six-parters). The usual rate for a Doctor Who story would be maybe one or two concepts and reversals, and lots of running around. Now, some people might believe it is a weakness to have so much going on, but it's fine as long as it coheres. It likely took a lot of work by the script editor and Adams to get it to this point, but The Pirate Planet definitely achieves coherence until near the end. By end, I mean the resolution; the climax of the story - the race to get to Earth first, and the Doctor using his TARDIS to block Zanak from materialising, even as it threatens to destroy his ship - is jolly exciting. It's only after that when things aren't optimal, with all the loose ends tied up a bit too abruptly. I'd rather, though, that a script or production was sometimes ambitious and tried to do more rather than always playing it safe.

Those concepts then: first of all, and not to be overlooked or taken for granted, is the idea of doing sci-fi pirates in the first place. The archetypes come straight out of a Peter Pan panto but are given a chrome, plastic and silicon chip makeover. The Captain, as played with gusto in a compelling turn by Bruce Purchase, is Long John Silver without a wooden leg but with a cybernetic arm and eye patch. Smee is spliced with a uniformed Death Star assistant henchman to become Mister Fibuli. The Captain's parrot is a robot! There's a plank and someone is forced to walk off it! Children of all ages must have loved this at the time. Second, there's the idea of a hollow planet that materialises around other planets and sucks them dry, a large-scale and original villain methodology for Doctor Who, or indeed any larger than life adventure fiction.  Bubbling under: a group of telepaths brought into being by the vast explosion of energy created when destruction happens on a planetary scale, compacted super-heavy tiny planets set in a perfect balance to be used as a weapon, and making a planet a disguised segment of the Key to Time. Little touches elsewhere like psychic interference generators and inertia inhibiting walkways are also great. It's an embarrassment of riches.

The reversals: first, the Captain is not what he seems. He is both more clever and more of a victim than he first appears, using his blustering persona to disguise his true nature and motives from his persecutor (and the audience). The moment at the end where he grieves over the dead body of Mister Fibuli, whom he'd spent the previous four episodes shouting at, is a nice character moment. Despite the billing, he's only the secondary villain of the piece. Second of the four reversals is that his meek-seeming nurse is the true End Level Boss, secretly a projection of a younger version of the aged Queen Xanxia. It's nice that the resolution of the part three cliffhanger (how can the Doctor survive walking off the plank) is where this reversal takes place, after much foreshadowing in the earlier episodes. The Doctor was using the same technology as her to project a version of himself. This means that the fourth episode stays interesting by changing focus, and the Captain and the Doctor are - sort of - on the same side. Third, the masterstroke of having the next planet that Zanak is going to surround and destroy be Earth, upping the ante for the denouement. The fourth and less effective reversal is that the Mentiads, who are feared by Zanak's populace, and look like they're evil, are actually the good guys. The script tries too hard to misdirect early on to the point where it's pretty much cheating. The Mentiads wear robes and chant in basements and talk about their having a "Vigil of Evil"; no nice group of people ever does this. Still, even that was a half decent stab. Nothing much is what it seems in The Pirate Planet and that keeps things interesting.

So. why isn't the story more well thought of? Story structure isn't everything, and originality without budget can misfire. Like Bob Baker and Dave Martin, a pair of writers who also started working on Who early in their career, and who also had too many and too big ideas to quite fit into its format, Adams really needed million dollar budgets to do his scripts justice. The production values are wanting in places, and the location filming doesn't merge seamlessly with the studio work. Some things were out of everyone's control, like Tom Baker's scabby lip which is a bit distracting; he'd been bitten by a dog, so the injury had to be explained in the narrative as the result of his banging his face against the TARDIS controls. I suspect, though, that the main problem for people is one of tone. Adams writes some great names (Bandraginus Five, Oolian stone, Magnifactoid Eccentricolometer, Madranite 1-5) but to some they are just silly names. Adams writes great funny dialogue like "It's an economic miracle, of course it's wrong", "I save planets mostly", "My biorhythms must be at an all time low", "Newton's revenge". There's also one of my favourite dialogue exchanges in Doctor Who between the Captain broadcasting his words over a tannoy to his guards, and an interjecting Mister Fibuli: "Someone is using a counter-jamming frequency projector - find it and destroy it immediately." / "Captain, do you suppose any of the guards know what a counter-jamming frequency projector looks like?" / (Beat) / "Destroy everything!".  But, to fans that maybe take their favourite programme a smidge too seriously. there is no room for gags in Doctor Who. To them, this embarrassment of riches just seemed like an embarrassment

Connectivity: 

What is it with Doctor Who and mining operations turning out to be evil?! This is the third story in a row covered by the blog which has that theme. The Pirate Captain's remote-controllable cyborg limbs are a little like the intelligent spacesuits from Oxygen controlling their occupants too.  

Deeper Thoughts:

Targets (part 1) - plugging the gaps. Doctor Who fans, on the whole, hate gaps in their collections; alas, our favourite programme has a few built in, i.e. the missing episodes. One might think, though, that if one collected the Target books, a set of popular paperback novelisations of the classic series stories for which the existence or not of video tapes or film reels wasn't an issue, that one's book collection could at least be complete. Again, no. All the stories missing from the archives were turned into novels before the range completed, but - for one reason or another - four surviving stories weren't novelised. This has finally been rectified over the last couple of years, with the two Douglas Adams penned broadcast stories (City of Death and The Pirate Planet) and Eric Saward's two 1980s Dalek stories (Resurrection and Revelation of the Daleks) having been published, in addition to some of the stories shown from 2005 onwards too. Three of these four stories finally became available in a recent batch of paperbacks published in March this year on the Target imprint, with retro covers by Anthony Dry. Also in this batch is a novelisation of the Paul McGann TV movie (previously available as a paperback but not on the Target imprint) and three more modern stories. I've just read all seven, and will share my thoughts on them in the next couple of blog posts. As two of this set of seven were written by the same author, I decided to space them out to allow as much variety as possible. Hence, I started with the first of the two by Eric Saward. Unfortunately, it was Resurrection of the Daleks, which is my least favourite classic Who story.

Saward's text addressed a few of the issues I had with the story (as detailed in its blog post here); some of the more brutal moments have been removed or reworked, and Saward has fleshed out some motivations with detailed characterisation. Throughout, though, there's use of an intrusive - and often flippant - authorial voice. The tendency to use a god-like view of scenes is also not as intimate or effective as would be centering scenes consistently within the POV of a character. The Daleks still don't have one coherent mission but instead have several sketchy ones. Stien's dual identities are still unreconcilable. The issue with the Doctor and Lytton never meeting is fixed by confirming that they already know of each other from some previous adventure(s), but other additions are downright odd: there's a scene with a talking cat (yes, really), an aside about Kurt Vonnegut, and several pages describing the many rooms of the TARDIS interior that smack of nothing more or less than Saward's needing to get his word count up; it reads like a teenage boy's idea of a rich person's house, full of amusements and collections, a private gallery, screening room, library, etc. I've never been convinced that Saward particularly understood the Doctor. He's an explorer, and at a push a hoarder of junk, but not a discerning collector in this way. I'm not even sure that Saward likes the Doctor, as he isn't a mercenary. The TV story's tone of relentless cynicism and hired killers is still omnipresent. Perhaps the one empathetic moment of emotion that existed in the TV script was Tegan deciding to leave the Doctor, aghast at the violence she's witnessed. This is unfortunately undercut when Saward adds a coda where Tegan maybe acquires superpowers (!); the book leaves her as she appears to be heading for some kind of sequel. But it's not one that I would care to read, alas.

Much better was Gary Russell's novelisation of the TV movie, despite his facing a similar challenge of making a somewhat illogical script work. This is a 2021 revision of the text that was published as a BBC book when the TV movie was first shown in 1996. The original text was written from the script in parallel with the shooting, so doesn't always match what ended up on screen; Russell has left things more or less as they were on that score (except for fixing some factual errors and character descriptions). The dialogue is a lot more old fashioned on the page than it ended up in performance, with the actors' input. Eric Roberts particularly sassed up the Master's speech, getting rid of the more old school version of the character as written, who keeps referring to Change Lee as 'my boy' and such. Russell makes some tweaks to make the story flow a bit better, but most of what he fixes is to make the TV movie fit better into the wider continuity of the series. References back to the 1963 to 1989 mythology that were cut in 1996 have been reinstated; the Doctor being half human is de-emphasised to the point where it can be written off as the Doctor's little joke. The prose style is not showy, and is all the better for that. There are much fewer characters in this story than in Resurrection, so it's more focussed, the story being mostly told from Grace or Chang Lee's POV. 

Best of the pre-2005 story novelisations, and linking nicely into this blog post, is James Goss's The Pirate Planet. Again, this is a new version of a book that's been previously published. A 2017 hardback of The Pirate Planet expanded out the story to match Douglas Adams's first draft scripts; these included a lot of material that had to be cut by the time the story reached the screen. This Target paperback version is instead faithful to what ended up on TV in 1978. Goss had previously novelised Adams's other broadcast Doctor Who story City of Death (which was published on the Target imprint in 2018) as well as the unmade Adams scripts for The Krikkitmen; he's well practised at emulating Adams's style. The book also benefits from being an adaptation of a good story, the best of the four 'gap pluggers' I'm writing about today, I think, gifting Goss good characters and a reasonably focussed plot with clever reversals, all of which are conveyed faithfully. Goss's improvements are mostly on the visuals - the Polyphase Avatron is much more mobile than the BBC prop featured in the TV episodes could be, and the cyborg Pirate Captain - whose costume was perfectly good on screen - is presented as a grisly full-sensory experience, the hissing and clanking of gears, the smell of his searing flesh... 

Finally, returning to Eric Saward's work, is his novelisation of the 1985 story Revelation of the Daleks. This is much better than his other effort, with the authorial asides kept to a minimum. It starts from a better place, as the TV version has much better characterisation and dialogue than Resurrection, and this comes over well on the page. The weakness of Revelation's story structure as a screen drama - that it is a collection of subplots all happening simultaneously by coincidence - doesn't matter so much in a novel, as there's less necessity for a strong plot through-line. Saward also improves things by adding another subplot (and a new guest character) to make the Doctor more instrumental in defeating the Daleks at the climax, and also sands down some of the rougher edges elsewhere. The imminent arrival of the president is more of a spur for some characters' actions, for example, which makes things more coherent. Given that the story had a literary inspiration (Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One), it's fitting that it works better as a book than a TV serial. It's also great that the classic series Target run is now complete. Well, nearly. There were three novelisations in the early 1990s (Power of the Daleks, Evil of the Daleks and an adaptation of the radio serial The Paradise of Death) that weren't published with a Target logo on their covers. Second-hand copies are now very difficult to come by. If there is to be another batch of Targets published in future, it would be good if these can be included as well as more novelisations of new series stories. Talking of those, there are three more books in this current batch to write about too, but that's for next time...

In Summary:

Not loved nearly enough given its quality; this pirate adventure has buried treasures.