The Curse of the Black Spot

Chapter The 234th, is just what we never knew we needed, a prequel to The Smugglers. 

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory follow a distress call to the Fancy, a becalmed 17th century pirate ship captained by Henry Avery. The crew are picked off by a siren who emerges from the sea whenever anyone gets injured or sick: the affected crew member has a black spot appear on one palm, the siren appears and uses her song to turn them drunk / horny, they go to her, and she touches them apparently zapping them to destruction. Rory suffers a slight injury, and Avery's son - found stowing away on the vessel - has typhoid. The Doctor surmises that the siren travels within water, so they bar themselves in to the driest room on the ship, the armoury; but, the Doctor's wrong - it instead can travel through any reflections, so they have to throw all of the looted (and shiny) treasure overboard, much to Avery's annoyance. The TARDIS team, Avery and his son attempt to man the sails when the wind picks up in a rain storm. A stray piece of treasure that Avery had kept is released from its hiding place, which allows the siren back, and it claims his son. Rory falls overboard, and the Doctor decides that the people taken are still alive somewhere, so they allow the siren to take the drowning Rory from the water, then each prick their fingers to be captured by the siren too. They find themselves on a spaceship occupying the same space as the Fancy, but on a different astral plane or something; this was the source of the distress call. The siren turns out to be a medical program, the spot is a tissue sample, and the song a form of anaesthetic. Avery and his crew, who are all still alive, pilot the spaceship off into the stars, implausibly, and Amy saves Rory with some CPR, implausibly.

Context:

On a Saturday morning early in July 2002, I put on the disc containing this story, from the Complete Sixth Series Blu-ray box set. I'd planned to watch alone, but - maybe because of the unusual timing, my watching stories for the blog normally done in the evening - a number of family members came in and watched long sections with me. At the most populated, the living room contained me, the Better Half and the two younger of the kids, boy of 12, girl of 10, though none of them stayed to the very end. The Better Half and boy child had a long discussion about the Doctor's smashing of all the ship's mirrors and windows being a bad idea, as it will just create more, smaller reflective surfaces not less. The Better Half was also bemused, presumably like everyone else that's every watched this story, at what happened to Lee Thingy from Press Gang. He's the second most famous of the guest cast after Hugh Bonnerville, he's foregrounded in the action leading up to a dramatic scene where he's stuck as an unwilling ally of the regulars, unable to escape; then, in the next scene, he's vanished and nobody mentions him again. Presumably there was a scene deleted as he turns up with the rest of the crew in the space infirmary at the end, but it is a bit jarring.

First Time Round:

I have a blank spot when it comes to remembering The Curse of the Black Spot; I don't have strong memories of many of my first watches of the Matt Smith stories. I would have watched this on or near to its UK BBC1 debut, at or near to the time of broadcast. As is usual on the blog in these instances, I will share another unconnected Doctor Who memory, and this one is itself about sharing. I've mentioned many times before that when I got to university in 1991 I rapidly found a cohort together with whom I could watch stories from VHS tape. Before that, though, watching Doctor Who was a solitary activity. No one in my house was a fan, so I never experienced the family viewing ritual during the classic series years. My schoolfriends in the mid-to-late 1980s who were Who fans, Dominic, Zahir, and Alan G, talked about the latest stories with me after they'd aired, and we occasionally swapped the new VHS tapes that had just started coming out, but we never got together to watch them. When the four of us did meet, we would play RPGs instead. I remember once bringing along a pirated version of a great recent film I had seen at the cinema called Back to the Future, but I couldn't drum up much interest in that, let alone us all watching Revenge of the Cybermen for what was likely the 20th time for some of us. My other close friends were not as into Doctor Who. I once - this must have been in 1990 when it came out on VHS - tried to interest my friends Andrew D, Alex and Paul in watching The Five Doctors, but they just wanted to fast-forward (fast forward!) to the action sequences, instead of watching the whole thing. We tended to watch Paul's Blakes' 7 videos instead (I was outvoted); these were the long edited compilation videos that were out at that time. Blakes' 7 got roundly mocked on these viewings. In particular, a line reading of Paul Darrow as Avon "This one is dead also" from Space Fall tickled the assembled throng (except Paul); who knows what they would have made of Darrow's much riper performance in the Doctor Who story Timelash!

Reaction:

This is not really a prequel to William Hartnell's 1966 story The Smugglers of course. As a plot point in The Curse of the Black Spot involves the tossing of Avery's accumulated treasure overboard, it's difficult to see how a large hoard of it came to be hidden in a crypt in England; maybe the villainous Pike from the Hartnell story was a crew member of Avery's before the events of the Black Spot, and Avery gathered two hoards over the years, one of which he hid in Cornwall, and one he kept onboard his ship. Apart, though, from creating minor issues for continuity-enamoured enthusiasts like myself, the story is fairly inoffensive to my mind. It is deliberately positioned as a self-contained genre-sampling romp, a palate-cleanser after the big two-parter series launch of The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon. It does everything you'd expect, swordfights, treasure, stowaway cabin boys, mutinous swarthy knaves, the plank. Costume, staging and music combine to perfectly evoke the genre. The use of a real ship in dock for the above deck sequences adds an extra few Duobloons worth of production value, but the sets that represent below decks (and the siren's spaceship) are pretty good too. The pirate guest cast is the epitome of the solid, UK character actor and supporting artist ensembles that one would put together for such a production (just like the similar crews of all the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, put together from similar quality stock). The regulars all get something fun to do - Karen Gillan as Amy gets to cosplay and wave a sword around, Arthur Darvill gets to do the comedy dope act that he excels at when taken over by the siren's song, and Matt Smith gets lots of scenes with the biggest guest star Hugh Bonnerville, bouncing off one another with 'Captain envy' as a theme.

Underpinning this is an interesting science fiction idea, which efficiently explains lots of the trappings of pirate curse legends. It's not a particularly original science fiction idea, of course, being one of the go-to inspirations of this era: abandoned / out of place technology seeming to be an evil monster. Writer Stephen Thompson even brings in a role for a child actor too, only unable to squeeze in any timey-wimey paradoxes to make it the hat trick of Showrunner Steven Moffat's favourites. The depiction of the siren is great, which helps enormously, with Lily Cole as a beautiful floating wraith who before you can say "that early scene in Ghostbusters" turns into a fearsome projection in attack mode. There's also a bit of humour mined from the initially ludicrous situation of the big, butch pirates frightened of getting so much as a scratch. Taken on its own by the random sampling of the blog's approach, it is much more effective than when seen in situ of an ongoing series. At the time, the obvious thing that was glaring was why the Doctor isn't following up on the many loose ends of the ongoing Silence / mysterious girl in Spacesuit plot set up in the first story of that year. There's obviously long-form serial drama sequencing reasons why this story has to be a palate-cleanser, but they're not story or character reasons. Interestingly, though, in isolation without those worries, another issue becomes more obvious: the script has a couple of sizeable holes.

I'm not talking so much about Lee Thingy from Press Gang disappearing, as - I'm assuming but pretty confidently - that that was an editing snafu, not a script problem. It doesn't exactly help matters, though. No, there are other holes. For example, all the way through the first section of the narrative, the siren is assumed by audience and characters alike to be a killer; the Doctor advises everyone on his changing theories for how best to protect themselves from being attacked by the siren, including by getting rid of all the reflective surfaces in the ship, and they look to escape. The TARDIS gone, their only escape is to wait for the winds to pick up, and when that happens - and Rory goes overboard - apropos of nothing, with no build up, the Doctor decides the siren isn't dangerous after all and they should all get zapped by her. I mean maybe the scene of his growing awareness that things are not what they seem was cut out along with Lee Thingy from Press Gang's comeuppance scene, but I doubt it - it just seems like a switch is flipped and the Doctor then knows the plot needs to move on to its next phase. Perhaps the deleted scenes also included a convincing explanation for how the 17th century crew can pilot the futuristic spaceship at the end, or how an untrained Amy can save Rory with CPR. That last script decision seems a bit irresponsible, and also unnecessary. They can (and do) get Rory into the TARDIS which presumably has lots of devices to give a plausible scientific reason for saving Rory. Instead, the script goes for an unearned emotional crescendo where Amy is the only one to save Rory because of her love for him. I don't think it quite works. The Curse of the Black Spot is a story that doesn't expect to be taken seriously, but some of these issues (there's also a flippant tone from the Doctor throughout the early sessions that grates) means that as an audience member I could barely clear that low bar.

Connectivity: 

The Mechanoids in The Chase are the prototype for the regular Steven Moffat trope mentioned above (in stories he either writes or exec produces) of technology that appears to be evil but is just following the logic of its programming, just as the medical hologram / siren is in this story. Plus, both The Curse of the Black Spot and that 1960s Dalek story feature a sailing ship's entire crew forced to abandon the ship by an alien force.

Deeper Thoughts:

Beginnings and endings, but not necessarily in that order. Blogging The Curse of the Black Spot has completed another season of Doctor Who. Jumping around randomly to select stories as I do, the completion of any season is not a predictable event; but, having been covering stories for the blog for more than seven years now it becomes inevitable that - if I keep up the same rate of posting - it will happen more and more. Counting the classic and new series years together, there are a total of 39 seasons, or series if you prefer, as well as a number of specials in the gaps between. I have now completed six of them: season 3 (first Doctor William Hartnell's third year in the role), season 8 (third Doctor Jon Pertwee's second), season 17 (fourth Doctor Tom Baker's sixth and penultimate run), season 23 (sixth Colin Baker's second and final full season, which happened to act as one long linked story), and new series 13 (thirteenth Doctor Jodie Whittaker's third and final full season, ditto). The latest completed one is new series 6 (eleventh Doctor Matt Smith's second year). There are 33 to go (and soon there will be more, as new stories are being made as I write this). There's a philosophical conception from antiquity about time that suggest humans are walking backwards into the future - able to see the past and our beginnings receding before us, but turned against what's coming next, unable to peek at it. I wonder what will be the final story I ever cover for the blog. I have no way of knowing, though it's fun to speculate. In that past I see in front of me, though, I can see times when I've done something similar to this experiment before.

Any completist Doctor Who fan who wasn't lucky enough to watch the series from its first episode in November 1963 has had to catch up with stories as they were repeated, or as they came out on VHS, or DVD, until bit by bit - in random order inevitably - they reach the end. So, what were the first and last stories I watched for every Doctor? Let's start with the starts. From Colin Baker's first appearance in the title role (in late 1984), it's a fairly easy and prosaic journey, as that was when I was fully on the Who bus and making every regular stop. I'd finally been born (nine whole seasons of Who went out before I even existed, wasted), had grown up to an age when I could watch the programme, discovered it, and then become a regular viewer. There were always difficulties catching any particular episode, though - even in the video age, I ended up failing to record something and missing it on occasion. I was blessed (cursed?) though that I managed to see every minute of every episode of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's debuts, The Twin Dilemma and Time and the Rani, respectively. I'm only going to count whole stories for the purposes of this exercise: I caught many glimpses of stories before I properly started watching the series, and have watched many orphaned episodes and audio-only versions of missing episodes since; that doesn't reflect the original experience, though. Paul McGann's first (and last) story was fairly easy to catch, as it was available on sell-through VHS before it was even shown on TV. And from Christopher Eccleston on, it became impossible to miss (with regular repeats and then iplayer to fall back on). So, the first stories for every Doctor since Colin were the first ones originally broadcast. That goes for the last ones too (it's one and the same for Paul McGann, of course).

As I've mentioned many times, my indoctrination into Doctor Who was a series of repeats in late 1981 called The Five Faces of Doctor Who. As such, I know that my first stories watched for the second, third and fourth Doctors were - in order - The Krotons, Carnival of Monsters and Logopolis. This is where random sampling can get interesting: the first ever Tom Baker story I watched in full was his swansong in the role. I missed the first couple of episodes of the William Hartnell repeat in the Five Faces season, so the first ever full story I saw of his was the first Hartnell VHS release, The Daleks. Every other episode of Peter Davison's first series clashed with Cub Scouts, and we didn't have a video in my house in 1982; but, thanks to the power of malingering, I managed to catch all the episodes of Davison's third story Kinda, so that was my first of his (still random, but I couldn't have chosen better - it's one of the very best and a firm favourite to this day). Endings for Doctors Three to Five took a bit of detective work, but the situation is nonetheless relatively straightforward. If not being in full colour makes no difference, then my last Pertwee was Invasion of the Dinosaurs on VHS in 2003 (with the first episode in black and white); but, if all the colour has to be there, then it was the restored The Mind of Evil on DVD ten years later. If full colour is properly restored to the first part of Dinosaurs for Blu-ray though (the DVD had a semi-successful restoration that was not seen as broadcast standard), then that will re-take the final place instead. My final Tom Baker was The Sun Makers (see the First Time Round section of its blog post for more details), and my final Peter Davison was Time-Flight (of which I missed one episode when it was first broadcast, so I caught up when the VHS release came out in summer 2000).

The first two Doctors Hartnell and Troughton are a little bit more problematical. Do animations count? If so, I may never be done as all those missing episodes and stories might get animated eventually, but nobody can know when. Besides, as mentioned above, stories experienced wholly or partially in audio form are not the stories as originally made or broadcast, even if they are accompanied by wonderful moving art; also, any of the stories might get rediscovered in their original format after having been animated. Adhering to the 'as broadcast' rule, the final Hartnell story I ever watched was The Gunfighters, when it came out on VHS in 2002. It was in a box set with two other stories, but I'd already seen both of them by that point. The final Patrick Troughton story I caught up with was The Enemy of the World, which was rediscovered and released on DVD in 2013. Before that one was known to exist, it was The Tomb of the Cybermen, when that was rediscovered and released on VHS in 1992. Before Tomb was known to exist, the final story of Troughton's I caught up on (at least that I knew existed at the time) was The Dominators in 1990. Given that the VHS range only started in the mid-1980s, to have provided every Troughton story I hadn't seen as early as 1990 just shows how few of the stories of his tenure survived in the archives back then. I am therefore grateful for the animations, and hope they continue (rumour is that their budgets have been cut and so there might be a gap before new animations are worked on, but I live in hope). It also brings back the mystery, which is what Who's all about: after the announced The Abominable Snowmen, nobody knows which of those missing stories of the first two Doctors will be animated - or possibly even rediscovered - next, let alone last. Predictions are a mug's game; I could go out on a limb and guess that the last story I ever cover for the blog would be, ooh, I dunno, The Stones of Blood, and then find that's the very next story to come up randomly. Oh.

In Summary:

Yo-ho-plot-(ho)les!