Part Three of "The Pirate Planet" is an exposition explosion that challenges writer Douglas Adams and director Pennant Roberts to convey the various strands while disguising what will be a dialog data dump. Fine performances, particularly by Tom Baker, and Adams's dry wit help to camouflage that, especially with the heaviest lift: explaining what's up with the Mentiads.
After shielding the Doctor, Romana, and Kimus (David Warwick) from the Captain's (Bruce Purchase) guards in the mineshaft with their psychic abilities, the Mentiads, now led by Pralix (David Sibley), return to base with the three in tow to rendezvous with Pralix's sister Mula (Primi Townsend) and the Doctor's robot dog K-9. Then Romana, Kimus, and even Mula help the Doctor break it all down.
Xanak is indeed a hollow planet, a pirate planet that materializes around other planets, such as Calufrax, on which the Doctor and Romana expected to find the second segment to the Key to Time, and plunders them for their mineral wealth--millions, even billions, of inhabitants of all levels of sentience be damned. Apart from the material riches it yields that herald each new "golden age of prosperity," the planetary digestion process also releases enormous blasts of psychic energy that awaken those, such as Pralix, who have psychic abilities and alert those who are already awoken to help form an even more powerful gestalt, one that could challenge the Captain and his own formidable powers.
Ah, but the Captain and his trusty right-hand man Mr. Fibuli (Andrew Robertson) are busy synthesizing compounds from the elements found on Calufrax, their latest plunder, to use in a blocking device to defeat the Mentiads' psychic abilities. However, to fully repair their transmat system that transports them through space, they will need to plunder another world rich in "PJX1-8" (we know it as quartz), and have found one, located in the backwater of the Milky Way galaxy in a star system named Sol, the planet Terra (AKA Earth).
So, what exactly does Douglas Adams have against Earth, anyway? Those familiar with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" will recall that Adams's magnum opus opens with Earth's destruction by a Vogon constructor fleet led by a fatuous, irritable martinet not entirely unlike the Captain. Adams, a talented but lazy writer already occupied with launching and sustaining his initial radio version of "Hitchhiker's," (ahem) pirated from it to populate this "Doctor Who" story.
But at least Adams developed "The Pirate Planet" even further, because is the Captain sucking the marrow from other worlds simply for material gain? No, as the Doctor discovers when he and Kimus are captured by the Captain's guards. Beneath his bionic blowhardiness, the Captain is actually a gifted hyper-engineer who has, in a feat of brilliant astro-gravitational engineering, managed to compress the masses of his plundered planets into a display gallery that does credit to Jon Pusey's inventive production design.
But is this simply the vain, arrogant Captain's trophy case? No, as the Doctor and Kimus discover when they accidentally stumble upon Xanak's original terrible tyrant, Queen Xanxia, creepily preserved in her last moments of life as--but let's not fall off the plank now, shall we?
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