Review of The Pirate Planet (#99)

DVD Release Date: 03 Mar 09
Original Air Date: 03 – 12 Jan 1983
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana I, K9
Stars: Tom Baker, Mary Tamm, John Leeson
Preceding Story: The Ribos Operation (Four, Romana I, K9)
Succeeding Story: The Stones of Blood (Four, Romana I, K9)

Somewhat unbelievably, with this month’s entry in the Everything Else series, I’ve reached the end of my Classic reviews. Every extant story from Hartnell through McGann (as well as most of the modern era, with major gaps in Tennant’s and some of Smith’s tenures) should now have its own blog entry somewhere. Not a bad showing for twelve-and-a-half years’ work, if I do say so myself.

Given how many positive things I’ve heard over the years about The Pirate Planet, I’m sure some fans will wonder how this particular story ended up being at the bottom of my metaphorical barrel. That’s a valid question, though the answer is not very exciting: it has neither very high nor very low fan rankings, is part of the Fourth Doctor’s run (of which there are the most adventures), and just… never grabbed me.

I know a lot of fans like Pirate Planet (simply?) because it’s written by Douglas Adams, and anything Adams touched has gained near-mythic importance to a certain slice of fandom. There are certainly elements here that exhibit Adams’s style. In particular, it has a thinky and complex ending, which may or may not quite make sense, but certainly takes more intense concentration to parse than I was willing (or able) to give it during this viewing.

That said, the story does have its charms—Mary Tamm’s Romana among them. That character was criminally underused during The Key to Time, and I’m gonna be salty about that forever. But she does show her competence in this story, even if she does (apparently happily?) refer to herself as the Doctor’s “assistant.” When the TARDIS crew is inevitably split up (including K9, who hasn’t yet become obviously tiresome to the production team), Romana goes about her tasks with confidence.

I suspect that part of what fans of Pirate Planet like about it so much is the over-the-top Captain and his “polyphase avitron”—a robotic parrot to his pirate. But it really is the planet itself that is the pirate, thanks to some amazing tech and some amoral antagonists. The common people get swept along unwittingly, complicit in multiple planetary genocides with only a small subset of the populace—the misunderstood and feared Mentiads—having an inkling of the horrors being perpetrated by the “benevolent” Captain.

For me, one of the charms of the story is an almost ad hoc element that made a return in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos: incredibly compressed yet gravitationally stable planets. Granted, whether or not they would really have been black holes without such ingenious gravitational engineering is up for debate—a planet with the mass of Earth would have to be compressed into a space less than 2 cm across to become a black hole, unlike these obviously larger spheres (which would, at that mass, instead at most be neutron star material)—but the concept is cool.

And in the end, I think that’s what The Pirate Planet, like much of Douglas Adams’s work, comes down to: a cool concept. If a somewhat silly setting and lots of wild ideas slapped together in a “don’t look at it too hard and it’s fine” way are up your alley, then this is probably a good selection for you. It might be just the “cracker” you’re looking for.